No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories

Very few writers have caught the absurdities, pathos and comic turmoil that drive life in an Indian city today with the vibrancy of Jayant Kaikini. Girish Karnad Jayant Kaikini s compassionate gaze takes in the people in the corners of the city, the young woman yearning for love, the certified virgin who must be married off again, the older woman and her medicines. Tejaswini Niranjana s translations bring the rhythms of Kannada into English with admirable efficiency. This is a Bombay book, a Mumbai book, a Momoi book, a Mhamai book, and it is not to be missed. Jerry Pinto No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories is not about what Mumbai is, but what it enables. Here is a city where two young people decide to elope and then start nursing dreams of different futures, where film posters start talking to each other, where epiphanies are found in keychains and thermos-flasks. From Irani cafés to chawls, old cinema houses to reform homes, Jayant Kaikini seeks out and illuminates moments of existential anxiety and of tenderness. In these sixteen stories, gaps in the curtains of the ordinary open up to possibilities that might not have existed, but for this city where the surreal meets the everyday.