In these five haunting stories Vikram Chandra paints a remarkable picture of Bombay its ghosts, its passions, its feuds, its mysteries while exploring timeless questions of the human spirit. The stories are linked by a single narrator, an elusive civil servant, who, on each of five evenings, recounts an extraordinary tale to those seated around him in a smoky Bombay bar. In Shakti , two feuding business families are united by a forbidden passion; in Dharma , a soldier forced to save his life through a terrible act of self-mutilation returns to his home in Bombay to find it haunted by the spirit of a small boy; in Karma , a police inspector takes on a murder case and finds himself drawn further into spiralling layers of corruption and deceit.