Nepal, Oct. 10 -- In Sara Rai's 'Other Skies, Other Stories', language is both atmosphere and home. It is atmosphere in that it is a mode of attention, the medium through which her characters register what the seam-split business of living usually leaves no room to notice. And it is home, in that language is where they must live, though it is a house that rarely satisfies its tenants.

A man sits down to write his family's genealogy and produces only a longer account of the dead. The narrator of "Catching Butterflies", an entire story woven around a man mistaking butterflies for autumn leaves scattered about the ground, lifts his pen to write the moment the butterfly flies off his shoulder. Badri, an old school friend of the narrator in t...