Book Description

A mysterious fortune teller on a train across a timescape helps simplify the mysteries of life. Green leopards, flying whales, marshmallow wars & a quirky origin story of everything from gender equality to global warming. A cynical poet & an affluent socialite spend an evening together & empty each other’s hearts of all the unused melancholy in them. An incoherent girl helps simplify the life of the most sorted boy of her class. A reluctant purchase of a jar of peanut butter leads to a serendipitous discovery of a dead author. A fiction writer’s characters rise in revolt & refuse to obey his pen. A deserted town that has only unmanned flower stalls left in it. Two men from different generations cling on to each other with their last grip on a vanishing bloodline. Two hyper-competitive professionals become friends for life under the unlikeliest of circumstances. A voyeur and an exhibitionist discover one another, each unaware of the other’s version of reality. Two star-crossed lovers whose orbits keep colliding & drifting away from each other. A man misses his regular commute & walks into an alternate existence in a strange land. A queer old man shows up & intrudes young Kafka just as he is about to propose to his girlfriend. A man falls back in love with his wife the day after their divorce. An age ends & another begins when three destinies come together during a brief intermission for one violent collision before disintegrating forever, taking all the music with them. These are only a few of the routes by which Ayon Banerjee takes you on a roller-coaster ride of plots that cut through genres & weaves together an unputdownable collection of stories which seamlessly drift from the classical to modern style of telling short stories that narrate missed journeys & accidental destinations, archived conversations & clandestine confessions, love & loss, destiny & time.