Welcome to the Fisherman's Rest, a little bar off the Sasoon Dock in Bombay where Mr. Subramaniam spins his tales for a select audience. This is the setting for Vikram Chandra's collection of seven short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, and Subramaniam is Chandra's Scheherezade. In these stories, Chandra has covered the gamut of genres: there is a ghost story, a love story, a murder mystery, and a crime story, each tale joined to the others by the voice of the elusive narrator. In "Shakti," a discussion about real estate leads to the story of a soldier who must exorcise a ghostly child from his family home. In the final story, "Shanti," a young woman's despair about the state of the country becomes a springboard for a tale of love and hope. Love and Longing in Bombay is a mesmerizing collection, filled with fully rounded characters and stories that resonate long after the book is back on the shelf. Chandra's prose is luminous, his tales satisfying. Scheherezade would be impressed.


From Library Journal
This sequence of five long stories by the author of the audacious Red Earth and Pouring Rain (LJ 4/1/95) expands imaginatively from the modest bar of the Fisherman's Rest, where the aging, wise Subramaniam regales his listeners with tales of the deeply human in a troubled, vibrant city. Both sophisticated and squalid, Bombay provides an appropriately colorful setting for provocative stories of jealousy, loss, secrets, and love. Quietly reeling from the disintegration of his marriage, a detective becomes more than routinely involved in a murder mystery. A social climber takes on the most prominent family in town, with surprising results. In the most enigmatic and affecting of the stories, a young computer programmer discovers the low-tech bug in a client's system and a few strange secrets of a disappeared lover during one intense, uncontrolled week. An intriguing sequence for cosmopolitan readers; for medium to large fiction collections.?Janet Ingraham, Worthington P.L., OhioCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Shashi Tharoor
Of the many unintended consequences of empire, none may be more remarkable--or beneficial to world literature--than the emergence over the last decade and a half of a new generation of Indians writing in English.... Just over a year ago, Vikram Chandra joined this generation of authors with his astonishing Red Earth and Pouring Rain, a first novel narrated by a monkey poet and replete with history and myth, nationalist fervor and yuppie Americana. In this new collection of stories, he leaves behind the warrior horsemen, the European adventurers and the anticolonial rage of the earlier book.... Love and Longing in Bombay stands out as a considerable accomplishment, one in which the author marries his storytelling prowess to a profound understanding of India's ageless and ever-changing society.


From Booklist
The art of storytelling is so precious to Chandra, a gifted storyteller with a penchant for the story-within-a-story device, that it became a matter of life and death in his debut novel, Red Earth, Pouring Rain (1995), and here, in this gleaming set of stories, it keeps his anonymous hero sane. A young man suffering the anguish of lost love accompanies a friend to a seaside bar where he falls under the spell of an inconspicuous but utterly mesmerizing older man named Subramaniam. Each night, Subramaniam tells a story that distracts and comforts Chandra's unhappy protagonist and enchants his readers. In "Dharma," a ghost story, an old soldier confronts his past. "Shakti" is a tale of fierce rivalry between two shrewd and ambitious high-society women; and "Kama" is a compellingly complex murder mystery. Each sumptuous and suspenseful tale is strikingly different from the others even as they all reflect the intricacies of Indian culture and Chandra's profound sensitivity to the vagaries of the heart and the implacability of circumstances. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
Five ingeniously linked long stories by the young Indian-born author whose impressive fictional debut was the magical-realist Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995). 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. ``Dharma'' tells of a stoical combat veteran who experiences ``phantom pain'' in his amputated leg and consequently a ghostly visitation that brings equally painful memories of his childhood. ``Shakti'' is an amusing tale of rivalry between two socially ambitious women that is resolved by an unexpected alliance. In ``Kama,'' the investigation of an apparently open-and- shut robbery and murder uncovers a morass of sexual and political misdoing and the complicated personal life of Sartaj, the police detective who learns as much about himself as about the killer he pursues. ``Artha'' and ``Shanti,'' respectively, describe a gay computer programmer's dangerous search for information about his disappeared lover, and a twin bereft of his brother and in love with a beautiful married woman who travels ceaselessly looking for the truth about her long-lost husband, a soldier reported missing in action. ``Love and longing'' indeed are thus, in various ways, the motive forces behind these pieces--and in the last, the tale- teller Subramaniam is himself an important presence, and we realize how the preceding stories have also expressed aspects of his own loves and longings. A brilliant work, equally effective in its radiant separate parts and as a pleasingly complex and highly original construction. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The stories in Love and Longing in Bombay are linked by a single narrator, an elusive civil servant, who recounts an extraordinary sequence of tales to those seated around him in a smoky Bombay bar. Each of these stories belongs to a distinct genre: in 'Shakti,' a love story, two feuding families are united by forbidden passion; in 'Dharma,' a ghost story, a soldier forced to save his life by amputating his own leg returns home to find that his house is haunted by the spirit of a small child; and in 'Kama,' a mystery, a detective takes on a murder case and finds himself traveling deep into the farthest reaches of carnality and deceit.

SYNOPSIS

Chandra's collection of interconnected stories begins in an out-of-the-way bar in Bombay, as an enigmatic civil servant, Mr. Subramaniam, recounts an extraordinary sequence of tales to those seated around him. Each of the tales is rich in character and atmosphere and falls into a distinct genre: "Dharma" is a ghost story in which a soldier recuperating from a leg amputation discovers that his house is haunted by the spirit of a young child; "Kama" follows a detective as he investigates a murder and discovers a web of sexual and political misdoings; and in the love story, "Shanti," a twin brother is consumed by his love for a married woman.

FROM THE CRITICS

Tony Shaw

A young man suffering the anguish of lost love accompanies a friend to a seaside bar where he falls under the spell of an . . . older man named Subramaniam. Each night, Subramaniam tells a story that distracts and comforts Chandra's unhappy protagonist. . . . In 'Dharma,' a ghost story, an old soldier confronts his past. 'Shakti' is a tale of fierce rivalry between two shrewd and ambitious high-society women; and 'Kama' is a . . . murder mystery. —Booklist

Publishers Weekly

Five interconnecting stories set in modern Bombay provide the framework of this immensely absorbing book by the author of Red Earth and Pouring Rain. The narrator, Ranjit Sharma, a young software company employee, is drawn into the orbit of wise, retired civil servant Shiv Subramaniam, who serves as a kind of Scheherazade, telling stories that encompass many levels of human experience and subtly reveal the social and cultural levels of teeming Bombay. For four successive nights, Subramaniam holds court at the Fisherman's Rest bar; the last night Sharma comes to Subramaniam's home, where he learns something surprising about the old man himself. Each time, Subramaniam chooses storytelling to elude direct talk about a vexing question; the stories illustrate his answers. In 'Dharma,' a military man who had amputated his own leg without anesthesia, finds his family home haunted by the ghost of a boy who reminds him of a childhood tragedy. 'Shakti' slyly paints the vivid portraits of two ambitious society women and their wary alliance. The central story, 'Kama,' is a bleak descent into the heart of darkness of Bombay corruption. 'Artha,' a more conceptual story within a story within a story, is about a young computer specialist whose contempt for Art as a language changes when his male lover disappears. Finally, 'Shanti' is a tender account of Subramaniam's significant encounter with a woman who, like him, had lost illusions about life while surviving WWII. Impeccably controlled, intelligent, sensuous and sometimes grim, Chandra's timeless and timely book is remarkably life-affirming, considering the dark areas of the heart he explores.

Library Journal

This sequence of five long stories by the author of the audacious Red Earth and Pouring Rain expands imaginatively from the modest bar of the Fisherman's Rest, where the aging, wise Subramaniam regales his listeners with tales of the deeply human in a troubled, vibrant city. Both sophisticated and squalid, Bombay provides an appropriately colorful setting for provocative stories of jealousy, loss, secrets, and love. Quietly reeling from the disintegration of his marriage, a detective becomes more than routinely involved in a murder mystery. A social climber takes on the most prominent family in town, with surprising results. In the most enigmatic and affecting of the stories, a young computer programmer discovers the low-tech bug in a client's system and a few strange secrets of a disappeared lover during one intense, uncontrolled week. -- Janet Ingraham, Worthington Public Library, Ohio

Library Journal

This sequence of five long stories by the author of the audacious Red Earth and Pouring Rain expands imaginatively from the modest bar of the Fisherman's Rest, where the aging, wise Subramaniam regales his listeners with tales of the deeply human in a troubled, vibrant city. Both sophisticated and squalid, Bombay provides an appropriately colorful setting for provocative stories of jealousy, loss, secrets, and love. Quietly reeling from the disintegration of his marriage, a detective becomes more than routinely involved in a murder mystery. A social climber takes on the most prominent family in town, with surprising results. In the most enigmatic and affecting of the stories, a young computer programmer discovers the low-tech bug in a client's system and a few strange secrets of a disappeared lover during one intense, uncontrolled week. -- Janet Ingraham, Worthington Public Library, Ohio

Shashi Tharoor