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Paradise & Other Stories
by Khushwant Singh
Description:
In this collection of stories, India’s best-known writer addresses some perinent questions: Why do we believe in miracles? Can a horoscope guarantee the perfect wife? Is the Kamasutra a useful manual for newlyweds?
About The Author
Khushwant Singh (born Khushal Singh, 2 February 1915 20 March 2014) was an Indian novelist, lawyer, journalist and politician. Born and raised in Hadali, Punjab (now in Pakistan), he studied law at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, and King’s College London. After working as a lawyer in Lahore Court for eight years, he joined the Indian Foreign Service upon the Independence of India from British Empire in 1947. He was appointed journalist in the All India Radio in 1951, and then moved to the Department of Mass Communications of UNESCO at Paris in 1956. These last two careers encouraged him to pursue a literary career. As a writer, he was best known for his trenchant secularism, humour, sarcasm and an abiding love of poetry. His comparisons of social and behavioural characteristics of Westerners and Indians are laced with acid wit. He served as the editor of several literary and news magazines, as well as two newspapers, through the 1970s and 1980s. Between 1980-1986 he served as Member of Parliament in Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Parliament of India.
Skryf Review
The book begins with a prologue about the false beliefs raised by astrological predictions and goes on to rollick through the answers to various questions that have obviously been preoccupying Khushwant Singh: Why do we believe in miracles? Can a horoscope guarantee the perfect wife? Is the Kamasutra a useful manual for newlyweds? Sex, scotch and scholarship float through the stories – his protagonists are ordinary everyday people who find the things that they believe in letting them down again and again. The Kamasutra fails the Hindi scholar as a sex manual. The purity of the Indian ashram escapes the American woman seeking refuge.At the heart of the book is a preoccupation with Indian hypocrisies – Singh has always maintained that as a race Indians are sexually repressed. Sex, of the untie-the-pyjama-string-and-let’s-get-down-to-it variety is central to every story, beginning with the Pahari miniature on the cover. Acts of coition, if you like, involving the hungry woman and the relatively inexperienced male. In “Wanted: A Son,” he writes of a young woman who goes to a guru to pray for a son and ends up sleeping with the guru and so gives birth to a son. A great blessing, say all her in-laws.Singh also writes about a nation’s unique relationship with a god whose blessings are supposed to be responsible for the benefits of everything from adultery to bribery.