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Winner of the 2006 Hutch Crossword Book Award for Indian Language Fiction Translation Thought-provoking, witty, inventive and stylish, but also deeply moving, Ambai’s stories are among the finest of contemporary short fiction in Tamil. This book is a translation of her third collection of short stories, Kaattil oru maan (2000). Included in this book is also a long story, ‘A movement, a folder, some tears’, which is not yet part of any collection.
Ambai’s intricate stories constantly reinvent the short story form, teasing and delighting the reader. They interweave lives, juxtapose the past and the present, the mythical and the contemporary, articulating the real experience of women and communicating their silences in words and images. A mix of narrative forms— letters, dispatches, journals, emails, memos and articles—adds variety.
The stories, located in Tamil Nadu and Mumbai, in Europe as well as the United States, touch upon themes of displacement, exile, and identity; the way people describe themselves and the communities to which they choose to belong. In ‘Journey 2’, Dinakaran defines himself narrowly as a person from Tirunelveli, who can only face the day after his bath in the river. The narrator of ‘A Rose-coloured Sari’ wonders about her individual self, in contrast to the artificial ‘Indianness’, which she sees in the Festival of India abroad.
Extract from ‘Journey 1’
She had asked Valli to arrive quite early and to pump up some water. She had to go to Tiruchi that day. She had already sent word to the person whom she was to meet there. After Valli had pumped the water and cleaned the house, she bought some idli and dosai from the aappam-stall woman at the corner of the street, ate her share, and then left.
When asked, ‘What do you want from Tiruchi, Valli?’ Valli had retorted, ‘Are you likely to bring me the prasadam from the hill-top Pillaiyaar?’
Valli knew well enough she would not go to the temple. So she too had just smiled, and said nothing. | 
