Walls of Delhi
- Gurgaon: Hachette Book Publishing, 2012
- 224 p. ; 19 cm.
A sweeper discovers a cache of black money and escapes to see the Taj Mahal with his underage mistress. An untouchable races to reclaim his life stolen by an upper-caste identity thief. A slum baby's head gets bigger and bigger as he gets smarter and smarter, while his family tries to find a cure. In The Walls of Delhi, gifted storyteller Uday Prakash tells three stinging and comic tales of living and surviving in today's globalized India. Prakash is one of India's most original and audacious writers, and the India that he presents in his fiction is much different from what one generally finds in English-language writing by South Asian writers. Prakash portrays the realities about caste and class, and there is a charming and compelling authenticity in his stories that is sometimes absent from other fiction about South Asia. This writing sits at the center of a modernist aesthetic, as well as being highly political without a bit of didacticism or other heavy-handedness. These stories are tremendously popular in India, having been translated into several Indian languages.