Description
Six fast-paced, gripping short stories, and a short novella, each with a ‘Final Cut’ — a surprising, unexpected and intriguing twist in the last paragraphs.In ‘Hodson’s Gold’, a quest for the legacy of one of the most colourful characters of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 leads, via a poem in code and a coded poem, straight to a thoroughly startling address in Delhi.Two boys grow up, ‘together’ after a fashion, in the 1990’s and 2000’s in Bishnupur, West Bengal, and Kolkata, in ‘Friends’, and their growing up years trigger an international sensation when revealed.Shooting for an improbable 4th Pulitzer Prize, a three-time winner arrives in Kolkata’s Red Light district to discover, even more improbably, that ‘It Happens Only in India’.After setting up a roaringly successful business, and after thirty-seven years, ‘Will Reena?’ — readers are asked, in the only short novella in the collection.It turns out, in ‘The Last Supper’, that the human models for a painting done over two hundred years ago in Kolkata were keepers of wholly unexpected secrets.On a ‘Buddha Purnima’ day 2,000 years ago, the holiest day in the Buddhist calendar, a miracle occurs in Sarnath near Varanasi that should, by rights, have been recorded long ago in an immensely ‘better’ book than this.And finally, in the story that lends its name to this book, magic, religion and celebrities combine in the Kolkata of 2011, to lead to a very different ‘Final Cut’.
