Since she published her sensational debut novel, Paro: Dreams of Passion, in 1984, Namita Gokhale has produced fiction that follows no easy rules, unafraid to look life in the eye and speak with equal honesty about its seductions and sorrows, its grace and absurdity. Tender and ruthless, funny and shattering by turns—and always compelling—her fiction has as its themes the big questions of human existence: love, lust, death and fate. As in these fifteen stories, arranged in two sections—‘Love and Other Derangements’ and ‘The Mirror of the Mahabharata’—about women and men who swim or sink in the ceaseless river of life.

Two lonely people connect briefly during the Covid pandemic. A woman finds companionship with an unusual young man the same age as her absent sons. A one-night stand in Rishikesh ends in a surprise not once, but twice. Kunti and Gandhari, queens in the evening of their lives, try to cope with their private griefs after the slaughters of the Kurukshetra war. A swan relates the story of the doomed lovers Nala and Damayanti. After one man drowns and another is saved, a stone reflects on the inner lives of men and stones.

Rewarding and often startling, these are memorable stories by one of India’s most daring and talented writers.