"Wow.

I did not come to Kanishk Tharoor’s collection of stories with a lot of expectation. I had read Amitav Ghosh’s essay on Tharoor’s writing a while ago, and had seen a couple of reviews. Nothing conveyed to me the magic that are these stories and therefore I moved on to other things before coming to this on a whim on a flight.

I then proceeded to be astounded.

These are strange, sad stories, set in worlds I both understand and don't. Tharoor echoes this in the last line of an interview I read after I’d finished the book. �..readers everywhere,� he says, “will feel equally familiar with and, in a good way, estranged from the worlds of my fiction.� He’s spot-on, that’s exactly what I felt. But what I also felt was that, after a long time, I was reading literature that carried this much beauty on the level of the sentence.

Tharoor’s sentences are heavy, laden with words that when alone seem innocuous enough, until they perform some sorcery and become something more. Elephant at Sea, the opening salvo, has a line that is so sudden, so unexpected, and so funny that I laughed out loud, and went on for a while. I won’t give it away, that doesn’t seem right. You have to read it for yourself.

My favourites were Tale of the Teahouse, the gorgeously sad The Loss of Muzzafar and the magical sequences in Letters Home. My only personal disappointment was that I read this on my Kindle, and I felt that the device did not do justice to the stories: The beautiful Aleph hardcover will have to be acquired, and these stories will have to be reread."