Patna and Delhi are twin cities. Separated by 700 miles. The stories in this collection reflect the socio-cultural ramifications of such a geographical anomaly, on a generation whose dreams are often cleaved in half between the cramped Mezzanine bedsitters in Kingsway camp and the dilapidated mansions of Kadam Kuan, Patna. These are with a few exception, stories of youth, love and loneliness and the attendant joy, alienation and heart break which comes along as a package deal. A veritable Pandora’s box of a collection where one never knows what one is going to find next: Two gallants go for a volkar Schlondorff movie and on their way back get some reality instruction; a high school teacher with the right stuff, hooked on Ghalib tries to emulate his hero; elsewhere another high school teacher, this time with the wrong stuff gets his comeuppance; two adolescents, troubled and withdrawn take the first tentative steps towards love; a young women on her twenty-fourth birthday discovers there is not much difference between her daschund and her boyfriend; a young man finds salvation in omelettes; another in Martin Scorsese; an abandoned short story writer with a blocked soul; a retired Don of literature who starts reading Byron again; a security guard with a lit fuse snaking upto his mind and more. In the end a realization dawns that like Godard’s Patrick every boy is called Ritwik. Since the short story wirter is a subaltern of the literary world, all the stories in this darkly comic and often whimsical collection thrive on a steady diet of subversion and dry wit. Required reading for the bibliophile, the cinephile and the paedophile alike.
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