New Delhi, July 24 -- There's a moment in the beginning of the titular story in Geetanjali Shree's collection Once Elephants Lived Here (translated into English by Daisy Rockwell) where the narrator breaks the fourth wall to describe their storytelling method. "I know this is no way to tell a story, to tell the ending so soon, but for one thing, I haven't come around to this business of clear divisions. I find it more attractive when there's no clear shape; no sequential steps, like first this, next this, and next that, then the end." Like Vladimir Nabokov beginning his masterpiece Pale Fire (1962) with a (fictional) foreword about the eponymous book-within-the-book, this passage is Shree using both fiction and metafiction to make a provo...