Jayant Kaikini

Leafing through the pages of Jayant Kaikini's book, No Presents Please (HarperCollins India), is like journeying through Mumbai. From landmarks like the Royal Opera House and Churchgate, to unnamed nooks and crannies in Andheri, or a highway in Ghatkopar, the writer takes us nearly everywhere. The hyper-local focus that brings alive disparate areas and lives breathes in a whiff of Mumbai air into each of these short stories. An unspoken relationship between a torch boy and a cinema-goer in Malhar Theatre, a taxi driver and his two passengers on the day of the 2006 deluge or a wedding set in a chawl - these nuggets are unmistakably Mumbai. And, in each story, translated by Tejaswini Niranjana, the locality itself becomes a character, so much so, that the story seems hard to imagine anywhere else.