In these short stories, the author holds the reader in thrall from the opening sentence leading him through convoluted corridors and depositing him on the threshold of some unforeseen mystery. The slow, deliberate accretion of details leaves the reader impatient for the inevitable climax, which provides both a sense of relief as also of disbelief. Drawing successfully upon his own experiences in the bizarre and often grotesque world of bureaucracy as much as from the solid everyday world of middle class India, the dominant impressionDas has tried to leave you with , is one of bemused irony. One meets here the pompous officer, the ingratiating peon, the obsequious section officer, the rustic youth who has moved to the city, the middle class professional who has migrated oversea and the strong emancipated woman who wears her feminism on her sleeve. A certain suavity, which is in sharp contrast to the provincial even parochial tone of much writing in regional languages, marks these stories. The art of understatement is part of the deliberate craftsmanship that has been assiduously adopted. The Pukka Sahib from which the collection gets its title represents the essential human condition. In my beginning is my end. In the Indian ethos, progress is circular rather than linear. Perhaps this is what the short stories, which seem to deny the possibility of progression, are all about.
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