Tales From Sabz Baug

Book Code: 1111025237924

Anuradha Kalhan

ABOUT THE BOOK

These stories are about people I met in Pune or dreamed I met. People I knew or imagined I knew and whose lives I glimpsed or thought I peeped into over the years I visited the place.

Pune caught my attention because it was so unlike the cosmopolitan metropolis Mumbai, where I had spent almost all my adult life. Pune was growing into a big city over the years I frequented it, but it never arrived at that cosmopolitan point. Only in the area around the old army cantonment, called Camp, did one ever see a Christmas tree, buy a Ramzan iftar treat or realize that Eid was around the corner. Only there have I overheard passersby speak to each other in English, hardly ever in the official national language, Hindi.

For the rest it remained largely a city where students and people who had arrived from the hinterlands of Maharashtra for education or work, stayed on and had done so over generations. The language of intercourse remained Marathi even in sophisticated looking gyms that came up less than a decade ago. People also warmed up to you only if you spoke Marathi. There was something quaint, something quite charming about all of that, much as I believed I belonged to good old, mixed-up Bombay.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

These stories were written during the long COVID-19 imposed stillness. That was the only time I allowed myself the immense pleasure of fiction writing.I have taught and researched Economics for thirty years in Mumbai, written two books,'Work in a Metro' and 'A Brief History of Poverty Alleviation in Neoliberal Times' which could broadly be described as in the realm of the same subject. A third one, Tipping Point is a brief political history of modern India, which is under publication. This is the first and I hope, not my last foray into fiction.

CONTENTS

1. I am That 11
2. Catalexis 25
3. ANAMNESIS 47
4. Abidance 55
5. Asteria 65
6. Patsy and Fadnavis 81
7. The Socialist 91
8. Disenadora 97
9. The Way It Was 107
10. Capriccio 119