Sixteen enthralling stories from one of India's favourite storytellers

Reviews

I had read some stories from The Kashmiri Storyteller, but this, "Time Stops...", is an older collection, and it is an absolutely delightful read. The copy I read was all dog-eared, originally published in 1989, and all of 180 pages long.

The best story, for my money, is the book's eponymous, "Time Stops At Shamli", and at 32 pages, also the longest in this collection of twenty-one stories. The very first one, "The Funeral", is a moving account of the unexpected death of a child's father - the author's. Then there is the keep-you-up-at-night "Whispering In The Dark" that is likely to make you want to sleep with the lights on for some nights. Or the wry "He Said it With Arsenic". "The Fight" brings a smile as you remember how quickly lethal enmity could be born between children, and just as quickly it could turn to friendship.

Most of the stories are less than five pages long, many are just two or three pages long; while the longest one, as I said above, is thirty-two pages.

The evocative phrases that describe more in a few words than a picture could in a thousand. A phrase lets the imagination unfettered, setting few limits to what the mind can conjure. A photo is that much restrictive.
I was very thankful of the style of narration - pithy and shorn of flowery adjectives and adverbs that mostly scream out the author's desperation. None of that here, save the few phrases that do not seem out of place, at all.( Abhinav Agarwal )