From the introduction: "This introduction comprises two sections. The first addresses significant issues related to language, exile, and translation in a postcolonial context, that of India, as they apply to translations from a colonized language (Hindi in this collection of stories) into the colonizer’s language, English. The second section introduces Nirmal Verma and offers some readings of various emblems and motifs in this collection ...
This collection of stories arise out of the writer’s experience of many years as a brown man in a predominantly white world – an everyday encounter that is difficult to imagine from home; an experience that often causes fundamental, tectonic shifts in character and outlook. His characters remain suspended between two continents, two cultures, two different lives. All too often, migration to the West results in the realization that one’s existence in another ...