Eavesdropping

A Collection of Short Stories and Poems

Eavesdropping is a credible anthology of stories of the many faces of India: mystical, ancient, traditional, and mysterious. You will see and hear characters in their native idiom in some stories. Accidents Child is about how floods in India result yearly in human tragedy, but also in human compassion. The Indian Soldier and Pakistani Fruit Seller peeps into the avoidable partition of the Indian subcontinent and the conflicts arising out of separating neighbours, living in a climate of respect for each others religions, by a politically contrived surgical operation into two counties. The Quest is an apocryphal search for an ancient figurine. Ramaswamy, the Watch Maker is about a humble street-side watch repairer sitting unobtrusively in urban India. There are humourous vignettes that poke fun at Indian marriage and the fragile, but nevertheless enduring, relationships it provides between man and wife. The stories thus encompass the spectrum of India, from about the 1940s to very recent days. The poems in the book have a metaphysical basisthe soul of India from time immemorial. They reflect the deep currents of thought that have influenced the author.