At heart, all of us are freaks. Those who we consider outwardly freaks possibly are the ones who are simpler to understand, whereas what lies in the heart of the common man can be confounding," says Pune-based Aparna Upadhyaya Sanyal, as she explains the title of her book, Circus Folk and Village Freaks (Vishwakarma Publications). A book of narrative poems, it revolves around the stories of people from a circus and a village that exist side by side, somewhere in India.

drawings that appear in the book