A former Bombay journalist, Veena Gokhale has penned her first collection of 12 short stories set almost entirely in India. While her stories impart a genuine taste and flavour of India familiar to Indophiles, there is a definite departure from tradition in this collection, giving the reader a sense that considerable change is in the [...]

Some stories are told countless times, like threads woven into the fabric of a culture. At first they are retold because they have such imaginative power that people want to be engaged by them. After a while, they acquire a ritual power and people want to be bound by the threads – to their places in the world, to each other, to certainty. Eventually, it requires an enormous act of imagination to haul a story out of the deep grooves of ritual and back into the riskier realm of human emotion. Leave it to Colm Tóibín to unearth for reconsideration the tale of Mary, mother of Jesus.