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Vikram Chandra. Love and Longing in Bombay. Boston. Little, Brown. 1997. 268 pages. $22.95. ISBN 0-316-13307-8.
Vikram Chandra's first novel, Red Earth and Pouring
Rain, drew rave notices. Now he comes out with a collection of stories which he calls Love and Longing in Bombay. Some of these stories were published in the Paris Review and the New Yorker.
Chandra has a method of telling his stories. Subramaniam, a retired civil servant, spends the remaining evenings of his life in an old-fashioned bar in Bombay drinking beer and telling stories as the occasion arises. This is a clever device, because who else, other than a civil servant, is better qualified to know Bombay, a sea of humanity with its undercurrents of crime and perversions? The stories have titles such as "Artha," "Shakti," "Kama," "Dharma," and "Shanti." These...