Synopsis This volume is a collection of twelve short stories selected from about forty stories published in six collections in Malayalam. These stories involve encounters between characters in the realms of ideas and peculiar contexts of life and history. These stories involve encounters between characters in the realms of ideas and peculiar contexts of life and history. The characters, as is characteristic of Anand’s writing, walk into these pages from mythology, religion and history, as well as from familiar sites of strife and struggle in contemporary India, ranging from biology to medical science, religion to love, power equations to legal muddles, and from trade union struggles to channel wars. Though originally written in Malayalam, these stories belong to man in, general, to the suffering and angst he faces, irrespective of the periods and areas he lives in.