DIVINE BENEVOLENCE AND OTHER STORIES

Description

These stories, written over many years, delineate a range of themes, concerns and issues varying from the personal and individual to the social, cultural and political, of fears and anxieties, of life and death and survival. A few stories attempt to delineate the nature of the state and its relationship with people; a few others view the woman in the traditional Indian society as a mother, as a wife, as a widow and her attempts to transcend her fate over which she had little control; yet others show how our deeply entrenched prejudices and traditions – like the desire for a male heir or racial prejudice – refuse to die and warp our response to issues in life. One story tries to understand the nature of man through the extended metaphor of ‘smell’. Another tries to explore the nature of our media. Yet another is about the threat posed both to human and animal life, and also the entire natural environment, by the expansionist violence that seems inherent in man.
The stories, a conglomeration of themes, employ different modes of narration such as the realistic, the pure narrative, the meditative, the satirical, the mythical-allegorical, and the surrealist.

T.C. Ghai is fiction writer, poet and translator. He retired as Associate Professor of English from a Delhi University college. He resides in Delhi.