The Walls of Delhi: Three Novellas [Paperback]

A street sweeper discovers a cache of black market money and escapes to see the Taj Mahal with his underage mistress; an Untouchable races to reclaim his life that’s been stolen by an upper-caste identity thief; a slum baby’s head gets bigger and bigger as he gets smarter and smarter, while his family tries to find a cure. One of India’s most original and audacious writers, Uday Prakash, weaves three tales of living and surviving in today’s globalized India. In his stories, Prakash portrays realities about caste and class with an authenticity absent in most English-language fiction about South Asia. Sharply political but free of heavy handedness. The narrative is hypnotic, not only in its ability to reveal socio-political situations and extreme poverty, but in the way it interweaves the stories with legends and then offers candid statements referencing world events that make the truth of the message of poverty and corruption very real. —Maya Fleischman,Foreword Reviews

You finish each piece and it’s like a slap in the face of realization at what’s just occurred, and you can’t even feel the full sting until the next day or the next week when your mind has had some time to fully digest everything that’s happened. These stories have sticking power. —Corduroy Books

“The stories in this collection should be read not only because they are coming from an extremely important voice in Hindi literature, but also because they are not just stories but a profound mapping of our times’ civilisational crisIs resulting from the blend of an awfully oppressive social order and brutal imperialism.”—The New Indian Express

Three...stingingly comic tales [with an] appealing mix of social realism and pungent sarcasm. Uday Prakash uses a kind of wry documentary style, combining incisive humour with gentle pathos, interspersed with occasional poelC-