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

Delhi is not only the capital city of India but also, arguably, the space that best represents the bewildering confusion of a country at cross-purposes with its past and future, where thousands of different groups of people try every moment to negotiate survival, well-being, success, identity, relationships, and, most of all, shortcuts to wealth. Naturally, one individual's accomplishment is often another's ruination. The Walls of Delhi, a collection of three stories by Uday Prakash, captures this gestalt with scenarios that would be completely unreal if they weren't so plausible in the maelstrom that is modern urban India. In one story, a sweeper finds a stash of money hidden away by someone trying to evade taxes, using it to take his distinctly underage lover to Agra for a glimpse of the fabled Taj Mahal. In a second story, a Dalit—a member of