Among the most uncompromising of modern Hindi prose writers, Swadesh Deepak’s unsettling stories have a profound ability to offer a searing critique of society, of bureaucracy, but also to upend the usual masculine stereotypes found in much literature of our time.

The little boy in ‘Hunger’ who scrounges for leftovers by the station is pleasantly confused by the godown guards’ generosity one day when his sister tags along. The Prime Minister’s imminent visit to their small town, in ‘No News of Untoward Events’, is too disruptive for the residents to cause much excitement. In ‘Name a Tree, Any Tree’, the headstrong Maya Bakhshi can’t make sense of her family’s kindness towards Major Ajay Singh, until she does, and the ground slips beneath her feet. Sunila, in ‘Horsemen’, falls in love with the unnervingly quiet Sukant, who runs mad whenever it snows. There’s an unspoken tension between Naveen and Nimmi in ‘Dead End’, but the generous hosts at the hotel they’ve come to during this unusual time of the year could never guess why. And in ‘The Child God’, the Pandit and his family find out just how depraved they can be.

‘Hindi literature, Swadesh Deepak maintained, had to be forced out of its comfort zone,’ writes Jerry Pinto in his Introduction. ‘The reader here is treated no less savagely.’ The stories in this volume will challenge and shake readers and hold them in their grip for a very long time.