Love and Longing in Bombay: Stories

Tony Shaw

A young man suffering the anguish of lost love accompanies a friend to a seaside bar where he falls under the spell of an . . . older man named Subramaniam. Each night, Subramaniam tells a story that distracts and comforts Chandra's unhappy protagonist. . . . In 'Dharma,' a ghost story, an old soldier confronts his past. 'Shakti' is a tale of fierce rivalry between two shrewd and ambitious high-society women; and 'Kama' is a . . . murder mystery. —Booklist

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Five interconnecting stories set in modern Bombay provide the framework of this immensely absorbing book by the author of Red Earth and Pouring Rain. The narrator, Ranjit Sharma, a young software company employee, is drawn into the orbit of wise, retired civil servant Shiv Subramaniam, who serves as a kind of Scheherazade, telling stories that encompass many levels of human experience and subtly reveal the social and cultural levels of teeming Bombay. For four successive nights, Subramaniam holds court at the Fisherman's Rest bar; the last night Sharma comes to Subramaniam's home, where he learns something surprising about the old man himself. Each time, Subramaniam chooses storytelling to elude direct talk about a vexing question; the stories illustrate his answers. In 'Dharma,' a military man who had amputated his own leg without anesthesia, finds his family home haunted by the ghost of a boy who reminds him of a childhood tragedy. 'Shakti' slyly paints the vivid portraits of two ambitious society women and their wary alliance. The central story, 'Kama,' is a bleak descent into the heart of darkness of Bombay corruption. 'Artha,' a more conceptual story within a story within a story, is about a young computer specialist whose contempt for Art as a language changes when his male lover disappears. Finally, 'Shanti' is a tender account of Subramaniam's significant encounter with a woman who, like him, had lost illusions about life while surviving WWII. Impeccably controlled, intelligent, sensuous and sometimes grim, Chandra's timeless and timely book is remarkably life-affirming, considering the dark areas of the heart he explores.

Library Journal

This sequence of five long stories by the author of the audacious Red Earth and Pouring Rain expands imaginatively from the modest bar of the Fisherman's Rest, where the aging, wise Subramaniam regales his listeners with tales of the deeply human in a troubled, vibrant city. Both sophisticated and squalid, Bombay provides an appropriately colorful setting for provocative stories of jealousy, loss, secrets, and love. Quietly reeling from the disintegration of his marriage, a detective becomes more than routinely involved in a murder mystery. A social climber takes on the most prominent family in town, with surprising results. In the most enigmatic and affecting of the stories, a young computer programmer discovers the low-tech bug in a client's system and a few strange secrets of a disappeared lover during one intense, uncontrolled week. -- Janet Ingraham, Worthington Public Library, Ohio

Library Journal

This sequence of five long stories by the author of the audacious Red Earth and Pouring Rain expands imaginatively from the modest bar of the Fisherman's Rest, where the aging, wise Subramaniam regales his listeners with tales of the deeply human in a troubled, vibrant city. Both sophisticated and squalid, Bombay provides an appropriately colorful setting for provocative stories of jealousy, loss, secrets, and love. Quietly reeling from the disintegration of his marriage, a detective becomes more than routinely involved in a murder mystery. A social climber takes on the most prominent family in town, with surprising results. In the most enigmatic and affecting of the stories, a young computer programmer discovers the low-tech bug in a client's system and a few strange secrets of a disappeared lover during one intense, uncontrolled week. -- Janet Ingraham, Worthington Public Library, Ohio

Shashi Tharoor

The author marries his storytelling prowess to a profound understanding of India's ageless and ever changing society. -- New York Times Book Review

Tony Shaw

A young man suffering the anguish of lost love accompanies a friend to a seaside bar where he falls under the spell of an . . . older man named Subramaniam. Each night, Subramaniam tells a story that distracts and comforts Chandra's unhappy protagonist. . . . In 'Dharma,' a ghost story, an old soldier confronts his past. 'Shakti' is a tale of fierce rivalry between two shrewd and ambitious high-society women; and 'Kama' is a . . . murder mystery. -- Booklist

John Weir

Displays as light satirical touch as if it were Edith Wharton let loose on Malabar Hill, the Great Neck of Bombay….The effect of Chandra's pointed and hypnotic prose is of moving through a hurried crowd slowly enough to see the yearning in everyone's face.
—(John Weir Newsday

John Sutherland

Chandra's gift is the elaborate, pleasurable narrative line, sort of fiction you could stay up and read all night.
—Seattle Times

Chitra Divakurni

Exquisite….At the heart of each story is a mystery that keeps you reading.
—San Francisco Chronicle

Farrukh Dhondi

Breathtaking….When Midnight's Children first appeared on the scene, it became necessary to reevaluate stories from and about India. Vikram Chandra's collection—his second book—it is time to take stock again.
—(Farrukh Dhondi The Observer (London)

Kirkus Reviews

Five ingeniously linked long stories by the young Indian-born author whose impressive fictional debut was the magical-realist Red Earth and Pouring Rain. These stories, which are uniformly full-bodied and richly detailed, are told by a convivial yet enigmatic civil servant, Subramaniam, to his attentive cronies in a bar called the Fisherman's Rest. Each recounts a quest of some kind, and all are distinguished by unusually detailed and persuasive characterizations. 'Dharma' tells of a stoical combat veteran who experiences 'phantom pain' in his amputated leg and consequently a ghostly visitation that brings equally painful memories of his childhood. 'Shakti' is an amusing tale of rivalry between two socially ambitious women that is resolved by an unexpected alliance. In 'Kama,' the investigation of an apparently open-and-shut robbery and murder uncovers a morass of sexual and political misdoing and the complicated personal life of Sartaj, the police detective who learns as much about himself as about the killer he pursues. 'Artha' and 'Shanti,' respectively, describe a gay computer programmer's dangerous search for information about his disappeared lover, and a twin bereft of his brother and in love with a beautiful married woman who travels ceaselessly looking for the truth about her long-lost husband, a soldier reported missing in action. 'Love and longing' indeed are thus, in various ways, the motive forces behind these pieces—and in the last, the tale-teller Subramaniam is himself an important presence, and we realize how the preceding stories have also expressed aspects of his own loves and longings. A brilliant work, equally effective in its radiant separate parts andas a pleasingly complex and highly original construction.