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    No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories
    Unavailable
    No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories
    Unavailable
    No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories
    Ebook223 pages3 hours

    No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories

    By Jayant Kaikini and Tejaswini Niranjana

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    For readers of Jhumpa Lahiri and Rohinton Mistry, as well as Lorrie Moore and George Saunders, here are stories on the pathos and comedy of small–town migrants struggling to build a life in the big city, with the dream world of Bollywood never far away.

    Jayant Kaikini’s gaze takes in the people in the corners of Mumbai—a bus driver who, denied vacation time, steals the bus to travel home; a slum dweller who catches cats and sells them for pharmaceutical testing; a father at his wit’s end who takes his mischievous son to a reform institution.

    In this metropolis, those who seek find epiphanies in dark movie theaters, the jostle of local trains, and even in roadside keychains and lost thermos flasks. Here, in the shade of an unfinished overpass, a factory–worker and her boyfriend browse wedding invitations bearing wealthy couples’ affectations—”no presents please”—and look once more at what they own.

    Translated from the Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana, these resonant stories, recently awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, take us to photo framers, flower markets, and Irani cafes, revealing a city trading in fantasies while its strivers, eating once a day and sleeping ten to a room, hold secret ambitions close.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateJul 28, 2020
    ISBN9781948226912
    Unavailable
    No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories
    Author

    Jayant Kaikini

    Jayant Kaikini is the recipient of many awards, including four Karnataka Sahitya Academy awards and the Atta Galatta Prize for Fiction. He is the three-time recipient of the Filmfare Award for best lyrics in Kannada. For her translations, Tejaswini Niranjana received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1989.

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    Reviews for No Presents Please

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    • 4/5
      I bought this without thinking on my last trip to Mumbai. I wanted something to bring the memory of the city and its people back to me when I went back home and this book really did it. It is a beautiful read with lots of heart. The author is very good at not just bringing you in to someone's life quickly, but to make you care deeply for them. I'm sorry to have finished it because now I can never enjoy reading it for the first time again.