Better World Books. Uploaded by Tracey. Gutierres on August 3, Internet Archive's 25th Anniversary Logo. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up Log in. To learn more, view our Privacy Policy. Log In Sign Up. Download Free PDF. Vikram Chandra. Work Biography Connect. In a waterfront bar in Bombay, an enigmatic civil servant tells stories to a group of friends.
In "Dharma," an old soldier returns home to find that his house is haunted by the spirit of a small child; in "Shakti," two great ladies engage in ruthless drawing-room warfare; in "Kama," a policeman investigating a murder journeys into the mysteries of his own heart His work, comprising five short stories set in Mumbai, has beaten The God of Small Things , the Booker Prize-winning novel by Arundhati Roy, which was judged runner up in the same category.
Five ingeniously linked long stories by the young Indian-born author whose impressive fictional debut was the magical-realist Red Earth and Pouring Rain These stories, which are uniformly full-bodied and richly detailed, are told by a convivial yet enigmatic civil servant, Subramaniam, to his attentive cronies in a bar called the Fisherman's Rest.
Each recounts a quest of some kind, and all are distinguished by unusually detailed and persuasive characterizations.
A brilliant work, equally effective in its radiant separate parts and as a pleasingly complex and highly original construction. Vikram Chandra born in India is an Indian-American writer.
Chandra was born in New Delhi in. This document was uploaded by user and they confirmed that they have the permission to share it. If you are author or own the copyright of this book, please report to us by using this DMCA report form.
Report DMCA. Kanuga Retd. Harish Chandra; Shanti Chandra; Brig. Sudhir Arora Retd. When I started going there, he had been retired for six years from the Ministry of Defence, after a run of forty-one years that had left him a joint-secretary. I was young, and I had just started working at a software company which had its air-conditioned and very streamlined head offices just off the Fountain, and I must confess the first time I heard him speak it was to chastise me.
He had been introduced to me at a table on the balcony, sitting with three other older men, and my friend Ramani, who had taken me there, told me that they had been coming there for as long as they had worked and longer. Subramaniam had white hair, he was thin, and in the falling dusk he looked very small to me, the kind of man who would while away the endless boredom of his life in a bar off Sasoon Dock, and so I shaped him up in my mind, and weighed him and dropped him.
I should have noticed then that the waiters brought his drinks to him without being asked, and that the others talked around his silence but always with their faces turned towards him, but I was holding forth on the miserable state of computers in Bombay. There were old trophy fish, half a century old at least, strung along the walls, and on the door to the bathroom there was a picture of a hill stream cut from a magazine, British by the look of it. When the wind came in from the sea it fluttered old flowered curtains and a calendar, and I was restless already, but I owed at least a drink to the courtesy of my friend Ramani, who understood my loneliness in Bombay and was maybe trying to mix me in with the right circle.
So I watched a navy ship, a frigate maybe, wheel into the sun, sipped my drink despite everything, I noticed, a perfect gin sling , and listened to them talk. Ramani had been to Bandra that day, and he was telling them about a bungalow on the seafront. It was one of those old three-storied houses with balconies that ran all the way around, set in the middle of a garden filled with palms and fish ponds.
It sat stubbornly in the middle of towering apartment buildings, and it had been empty as far back as anyone could remember, and so of course the story that explained this waste of golden real estate was one of ghosts and screams in the night.
Bad place. The cases drag on for years and years in courts, and the houses lie vacant because no one will let anyone else live in them. I went on, and I was particularly witty and sharp, I thought. I vanquished every argument with efficiency and dispatch. After a while my glass was empty and I stopped to look for the bearer. In the pause the waves gathered against the rocks below, and then Subramaniam spoke. He had a small whispery voice, a departmental voice, I thought, it was full of intrigues and secrets and nuances.
I still had my body turned around in the seat, but the rest of them turned to him expectantly. On the day that Major General Jago Antia turned fifty, his missing leg began to ache.
He had been told by the doctors about phantom pain, but the leg had been gone for twenty years without a twinge, and so when he felt a twisting ache two inches under his plastic knee, he stumbled not out of agony but surprise. It was only a little stumble, but the officers who surrounded him turned away out of sympathy, because he was Jago Antia, and he never stumbled. The younger lieutenants flushed with emotion, because they knew for certain that Jago Antia was invincible, and this little lapse, and the way he recovered himself, how he came back to his ramrod straightness, this reminded them of the metallic density of his discipline, which you could see in his grey eyes.
He was famous for his stare, for the cold blackness of his anger, for his tactical skill and his ability to read ground, his whole career from the gold medal at Kharakvasla to the combat and medals in Leh and NEFA.
He was famous for all this, but the leg was the centre of the legend, and there was something terrible about it, about the story, and so it was never talked about. He drove himself across jungle terrain and shamed men twenty years younger, and it was as if the leg had never been lost.
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