And in Banares Flows the Ganga

This collection of fifteen short stories is the author’s third volume of short fiction, a form which she regards as lending itself to exciting exploration into the realm of ordinary, everyday experience. She employs a variety of themes such as marriage, love, disappointment, dreams of liberation, etc., to show a complex web of human relationships at work. The traditional form of the short story encompassed a neat plot with a surprise ending or a climax which left the reader with a sense of shock of the unexpected. Today’s short story, however, has undergone a protean change in its episodic form and open ending. In the place of a neat plot what we have is a sense of the fragmentariness of movements. It is this fragmentariness of modern life and the absence of any sense of a holistic world view that these fifteen stories try to imply. The short story can indeed be seen as a Lyric in its evocation of mood and atmosphere. Most of the stories here do no more than try to capture certain effects of light and space. There is, for instance, a story entitled Her Story written self-reflexively, the narrator facing the problem of how to write her story. America as the promised land, leading to the brain drain of third world countries, is another common theme in some stories. In a world as complex as ours one hesitates to make any profound statements about life. But yes, at the same time one is given brief yet startling glimpses into the hidden lives of ordinary people.