'Every dog is a storyteller, but dogs do not write... So, once they find out you are a
writer, they will want to tell you their stories, ask you to put them down...
'In my tongue they say you can never straighten a dog's tail. How much more difficult to
straighten a dog's tales, then? And so I set them down for you in these pages... Only, be
warned: these are the tales of a small dog, recorded. And all dogs are storytellers, and all
storytellers are liars. Believe what you will of them, but believe at your own peril.'
Kallu, a mongrel of modest proportions who roams the streets of Gorakhpur,
has some stories to tell of his town. But dogs cannot be trusted to speak the
truth, so the narrator of this collection-a web as complicated as the mess of
cables and electric wires suspended over the galis of Gorakhpur-tries to sift
fact from fantasy.
But what is fact and what fantasy when a jailer escapes his own execution
and comes back home riding an elephant, claiming to have been pardoned by
QueenVictoria?When the star pickpocket of Gorakhpur is bested by aWhite
tourist?When a young man falls in love with a street dog and uses him as a
weapon, and a gangster decides to wear an assassin's bullet round his neck?
When one Gorakhpuri boy walks all the way to China and comes face to
face with Deng Xiaoping, and another is propelled to America by a smutty
magazine?
Over a decade after his international bestseller The Storyteller's Tale, and the
award-winning Jimmy, the Terrorist, one of India's most distinctive authors
returns to fiction with a funny, quirky, unputdownable chain of stories about
the heroes, villains and oddballs of Gorakhpur, the legendary small town-as
famous as it is notorious-in the heart of India.
