(Trans. Kathryn G. Hansen.) Got this collection because I'd read that Renu's story "Smells of a Primeval Night" was a source for Amitav Ghosh's wonderful novel The Calcutta Chromosome, according to Ghosh himself. Actually this is the first Hindi fiction I've ever read, except for a couple of stories in Amit Chaudhuri's Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature. "Smells" is a pretty incidental source for Ghosh's novel, as compared to Tagore's "Hungry Stones" which functions as something like a hypotext. But I enjoyed all these stories of post-Independence village life in Bihar, seen from the perspective of itinerant men on the margins (cart-divers, servants, musicians, debtors, etc.). There's a good amount of variety, tonally and narratively. I gather from the translator's introduction that Renu introduces quite a bit of regional "dialect" into the Hindi, but she doesn't try to reproduce that in English. She does remark that, in this Indian edition addressed to non-Hindi-speaking readers in India, she has left more kinship terms untranslated (but kept the glossary, which I certainly needed).