All lives are finally the stories we tell about them, says the incandescent Zahra Irani, somewhere in the beginning of Chandrahas Choudhury’s quirky and well-crafted novel, Clouds. As the novel plays out, primarily in Mumbai and partly in Bhubaneswar, ploughing through the personal and political, myth and the mundane, primordial and the peripheral, there is a happy collision. Of lives and the stories they tell.