India, Oct. 11 -- The 13 stories on love, loss and kindness in this collection are set in places as far apart as Amsterdam, UAE and Kerala. Whispering of fragile emotions, they include a tale of a schoolboy's kindness to a blind old man, a portrait of a middle-aged dreamer lost in a fantasy world, another about betrayal, and even one about a serpent's wrath. The short story that truly stands out is Houri, which explores the precarity of the lives of migrant workers in the Middle-East through the experience of a driver in a home that observes strict purdah. The everyday characters in these evocative pieces don't indulge in histrionics even when they are dying of cancer or buried under the rubble of a collapsed wall, but their stories leave behind a persistent weight of being....