Panchlight and Other Stories

Contents: Translator's introduction. 1. The wrestler's drum. 2. The hurt. 3. Panchlight. 4. The messenger. 5. The estrangement. 6. Old story, new moral. 7. The Queen of hearts. 8. The testimony. 9. The party's ghost. 10. Splendour. Glossary. 

"Set in Bihar, that vast hinterland of India, the diversity of the stories in this collection represents the work of Phanishwar Nath Renu (1921-77), one of Hindi's foremost writers. 
Renu's world is rural Bihar--a world of poverty, ignorance, helplessness, superstition and exploitation. The characters in his stories are the landless, the disenfranchised and the marginalised. He writes of passions spent, hurts resolved, dreams unfulfilled, in the context of a changing world and a crumbling social order. But his work is anything but bleak. Its universality and the energy comes from Renu's ability to rise above the human condition and look deep within, into the human heart.

Rakhshanda Jalil's translation brings to the reader, a writer and storyteller in supreme control of his craft."