About the Book: No Presents Please
No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories is not about what Mumbai is, but what it
enables. Here is a city where two young people decide to elope and then start
nursingdreams of different futures, where film posters start talking to each
other, where epiphanies are found in keychains and thermos-flasks. From Irani
cafes to chawls, old cinema houses to reform homes, Jayant Kaikini seeks out and
illuminates moments of existential anxiety and of tenderness. In these sixteen
stories, gaps in the curtains of the ordinary open up to possibilities that
might not have existed, but for this city where the surreal