Contents: Introduction. Notes on contributors. 1. Spanish Omelette/Shweta Rao. 2. That evening it rained/Durjoy Ghosh. 3. Romance in the rains/Sunil Sharma. 4. A question has destroyed you/Meena Kandasamy. 5. The way to go/Sanjukta Dasgupta. 6. Thankamani/Murali Sivaramakrishnan. 7. A true feminist/N.D. Dani. 8. I know not where is the song/Krishna Barua. 9. Rolling back by 42 years/Anand Mahajan. 10.The dolls family/Aju Mukhopadhyay. 11. Double dealing/Anita Singh. 12. Ganga/Durjoy Ghosh. 13. Mathews the real Christian/K.V. Dominic. 14. Prabhat stove (For Professor S. Asnami)/Anurag Sharma. 15. Muse Struck/Koyel Chakrabarty. 16. I care for you/Simmi Gurwara. 17. Change of heart/Basavaraj Naikar. 18. The prostitute/Nikesh Murali. 19. Presiding officers diary/Jaydeep Sarangi. 20. Vaastu/Chandrashekhar Sastry. 21. We live as we have/Kiran Bala. 22. Scarecrow/Sunil Sharma.

Urban India is the overarching theme of the present collection of short stories, The Editors Choice: Contemporary Short Stories in Indian English. This vast, gigantic and very energetic country, on the threshold of great change, is presented by some of the best creative minds in the starkest of truth.

This collection of short stories opens up a country in all its beauty and variety, without airbrushing any wrinkles or warts. Here, you will come to discover an unknown India in the stories written especially for the anthology editors: some of the writers are already known: some are new and some are on their way to getting known by the critical establishment and wider reading public.

The anthology is a curious mix. New styles mixed up with old narrative modes introduce an intertwining sense of the historical continuities and innovative ruptures. Narrative writing recounts a personal experience or tells a story based on a real event or on an imagined event. All details come together in an integrated way to create some central theme or impression and, in the case of fiction, are created to entertain the reader.