Synopsis This collection of Bangla short stories in English translation is an endeavour to present in a single volume a representative picture of Bengal of the recent past and of today, and to introduce the readers to some significant features of the life of its people, its society and culture. While sharing the motif of home as the running thread, each story in this volume however has a different dimension also. One can find a story or two that are politically more overt, or a piece that deals primarily with matters of the heart, or yet another which may sound strangely haunting in its account of a troubled voyage from innocence to knowledge, or those that examine with devastating irony the social mores and individual hypocrisy in Bengali society. It is expected that the stories will strike a chord particularly among those readers who are coming from a different linguistic and cultural background-both in India and abroad.