This collection of short stories have been translated into English from the original writings in Punjabi by the writer herself, and a few others translated by Khushwant Singh and others.This collection of twelve short stories reflects all the shades and hues of the kaleidoscopic spectrum called life. Depicting the agony and ecstasy of existence, the torment of loneliness and awareness, the multi-layered complexities of our socio-political set-up with acid satire, these stories are a forceful encounter with the centre stage of of human situations. The hallmark of Ajeet’s creativity is her relentless search for truth and the integrity to get at it. It calls for commendable courage to explode popular myths and unmask the falsehood of a brazenly hypocritical society, which glorifies its hypothetical adherence to the highest ethical standards and noblest of humane values, but which in reality is mired in utter callousness and greed. So the themes of these collected short stories are as divergent as the human situations they deal with.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ajeet Cour
Ajeet Cour, a foremost Punjabi writer of contemporary India, has published twelve volumes of stories, five novels, two volumes of autobiography, a collection of biographical pen-sketches, a travelogue, and several creative transcreations of fiction and poetry. Her autobiography Khanabadosh, in which she portrayed her struggles with a gender-discriminating society as also with her own self, got Sahitya Akademi Award for the year 1986. Ajeet Cour is also the initiator of a literary movement which seeks to decipher and establish SAARC literature as a sub-stream with a distinctive South Asian Identity. To achieve this objective, she established the Academy of Fine Arts and Literature in 1975 to highlight the region’s art, culture and literature, and also to take up issues like peace, cooperation, women’s empowerment, social discrimination against Dalits, poverty, injustice, violation of human rights, etc. later, she established the Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature (FOSWAL) as a separate wing of the Academy dealing exclusively with SAARC literature. Under the banner of FOSWAL, she has been taking the lead in organizing SAARC Writer’s Conferences, seminars, exchange programmes and other modes of literary interaction for crystallizing the movement. She has also been disseminating the literature of the region by publishing books, anthologies, journals, etc. and also running a state-of-the-art website with a massive input in terms of the region’s representative writings.
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