Love and longing in urban India

"The Party" is based on the subject of Indians' unstinted admiration for those who have made it good in a foreign land

For those of a worldly bent, cities offer an opportunity to obtain a good education and then launch a determined quest for money, worldly possessions and status. For the fiction writer, the city’s denizens are not just economic agents. Rather, they are repositories of countless stories. Their ambitions, passions, crimes, even their maddening contradictions and foibles, provide a rich ore which the writer, armed with her powers of observation and imagination, can proceed to mine. This is what Shuma Raha, a journalist-turned -fiction-writer, has accomplished in this collection of short stories. 

“Smell the Coffee Beans, Please” captures the dreams and