Keki Daruwalla begins by leading one gently through the paces. Whether it is a schoolteacher who learns that birth and death can be strikingly similar in their arrival, or a jogger in East Anglia whose Olympian dreams are cruelly at odds with reality, there is a comfortable familiarity to the characters, the twist in the tale not entirely unpredictable.
Pleasant stories for a lazy Sunday afternoon. Except that there is a Trojan horse in their midst. He makes his appearance in the fourth story in the collection, talking of a Greece one no longer knows, of Sabur, his master, and his love for Ilione, his Helen of Troy, and his own ultimate abandonment in the wilderness. There is a change in the depth and timbre of the stories from here on.
In the title story, Baijnath Tripathi succeeds in conning Cynthia Craig into buying a house in Ranikhet of which he is merely a tenant and moves on to happy mantridom in Lucknow, leaving the house-owner, Englishwoman Freny Batlibhoy and their friend, the good professor Danjishaw, to exchange stories by the fireside, each outdoing the other.
In the stories that follow the Ranikhet quintet, Daruwalla moves easily and with a sense of humour as sharp as his sense of history, from the travails of a poor police inspector caught between governor and minister in a big city, to 16th century Portugal and the efforts of Brother de Cruz and his fellow missionaries to convert the natives of the islands of Asia to the true faith. Perhaps Daruwalla's skills as a poet help him succeed where other short story writers fail.
One only wishes his editor had shared his elegance of style. An "over-doze of antibiotics" on one page is followed by someone wanting to "dose off" on another; eating "venision" and talking of Royal "Daulton" china are only a few of the many inconsistencies that come between the reader and these eminently readable stories.