A collection of five stories about quests driven by love and longing, as told by civil servant Subraminiam to his cronies at the Fisherman's Rest bar in modern-day Bombay.
Anuradha Patwardhan, a young woman blessed with legendary beauty, leaves her family home to meet her future husband, carrying with her a gift for song that spell-binds any man she meets.
Hugo, in retirement in a Bombay flat with memories and stray cats, befriends a German boy who becomes the instrument of the fate Hugo has fled fortify years.
Amber and Jeremy are summoned by the Secret World Adventure Team to travel to India in order to help find a very special creature stolen from a snake charmer.
A memoir in which Thrity Umrigar looks back on her childhood and adolescence in Bombay, discussing the paradoxes in her life, and the parallels between her coming-of-age, and the changes that occurred in her home country at the time.
Eleven-year-old Gopal and his family leave their rural Indian village to live with his uncle in Mumbai, but when they arrive his father goes missing and Gopal ends up locked in a sweatshop from which there is no escape.
Trained in the classical idiom but teaching popular modern songs to wealthy clients whose lifestyle he covets, voice teacher Shyam Lal accepts sixteen-year-old Nirmalya as a student of Indian classical music.
Armaiti, Laleh, Kavita, and Nishta, friends who met during the 1970s at university in Bombay, reunite later in life when Armaiti discovers that she is gravely ill.
