No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories

BY Jayant Kaikini / TRanslated from Kannada BY Tejaswini Niranjana

Winner, 2019 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature

Winner, 2021 National Prize for Translation in Prose

No Presents Please is a vivid evocation of city life, exploring the sub-locales and spatial identities of Mumbai and the struggles of small-town migrants. Jayant Kaikini’s gaze takes in the people living on the margins – a bus driver who, when denied annual leave, steals the bus to travel home; a slum dweller who catches cats and sells them for pharmaceutical testing; a father at his wit’s end who takes his mischievous son to a reform institution.

From Irani cafés to chawls, old cinema halls to local trains, the author seeks out and illuminates moments and feelings of existential anxiety, pathos and tenderness. In these sixteen prize-winning stories, cracks in the curtains of the ordinary open up to possibilities that might not have existed, but for this city, which surprises with its epiphanies, fantasies and ambitions.

Read excerpts on Lit Hub and Words Without Borders.

contributors’ details

Jayant Kaikini is a Kannada poet, short story writer, columnist, and playwright, as well as an award-winning lyricist and script and dialogue writer for Kannada films. He won his first Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award at the age of nineteen in 1974 and has since won the award three times, in addition to winning various other awards in India, including the first Kusumagraj Rashtriya Bhasha Sahitya Puraskar. No Presents Please, his volume of selected stories translated by Tejaswini Niranjana, is the first book in translation to have won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

Tejaswini Niranjana won the Central Sahitya Akademi Award for best translation of M. K. Indira’s Phaniyamma (1989) and the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award for her translation of Niranjana’s Mrityunjaya (1996). She has also translated Pablo Neruda’s poetry and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into Kannada. Her translations into English include Vaidehi’s Gulabi Talkies (2006). She grew up in Bangalore and has studied and worked in Mumbai. She is currently professor of cultural studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong.

PRAISE

‘Kaikini’s talent lies in his ability to simultaneously capture the humdrum routine of his characters’ lives and plumb the depths of their desires. (…) These stories poignantly express the characters’ feelings of triumph amid the limitations of circumstance.‘ – Publishers Weekly

‘[Kaikini’s] style and themes will have a familiar ring for Western audiences; there are echoes of Jhumpa Lahiri and George Saunders. But his vision of a bustling city, his sense of its drama and magical moments, is his own. A welcome introduction of a commanding writer to a wider audience.‘ – Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

‘No Presents Please won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, as well as the Atta-Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize, and with good reason. (…) Highly recommend.’ – Lit Hub

‘Kaikini’s Mumbai is a majestic microcosm of humanity, and his stories are concerned with quivering, beautiful examples of how stranger sociality can be meaningful.‘ – scroll.in

‘His acute, imaginative observations as an outsider illuminate seemingly dull, downtrodden lives with fantastic flair. (…) We are left breathless with either anxiety or the desire for a happy ending. Kaikini is the master of cliff-hangers, nearly all his stories have puzzling conclusions.‘ – Canberra Times

‘The variety on offer in No Presents Please is extraordinary. (...) This book, like the city in which it’s set, is humming with the lives and loves and losses of ordinary, fascinating, terrible, wonderful people.‘ – Books and Bao

‘Like no other Indian writer, Jayant Kaikini brilliantly reveals the foundations of Mumbai concealed under its high-rises. Kaikini perceptively captures details from the inner lives of people who have become a part of Mumbai, a microcosm of India. Even the most ordinary happenings in these stories have traces of history in them, with little gestures evoking deep memories. The joys in routine chores from everyday lives, the unfading aspirations of innocent lives even in the face of the macabre — Kaikini unravels all of this with a subtle lightness. He captures the transformation Indian cities are undergoing, but not without recognising the tussle between the worldviews of the village and the city.’ – Vivek Shanbhag, author of Ghachar Ghochar

‘This, then, is a fitting tribute paid to the city through fiction: the microcosms of settings and relationships that allow the characters, and thereby the readers, especially the city dwellers (Mumbaikars as they are called) to be born again, or assume a new life. Kaikini’s stories capture Mumbai as the scattered-omnipresent influence it holds on individuals living here.‘ – Soni Wadhwa, Asian Review of Books

‘These short stories seem at first glance like simple tales of simple people struggling in a big city, but they are enormously powerful in a Raymond Carver sort of way.‘ – Sydney Morning Herald

MORE INFORMATION

• Publication date: 10 September 2020

• Extent: 292 pp

• Format: B-format paperback (198mm × 127mm)

• ISBNs: 978-1-911284-48-2 (print) / 978-1-911284-47-5 (ebook)

• Rights held: UK