Half A Rupee

Gulzar is best known as one of India's most celebrated poets and lyricists. Here he works in another form he handles just as well: the short prose narrative. This e-single offers a single story by him, a small taste of his storytelling outside verse and song.

The story comes from Half a Rupee: Stories, a collection of twenty-five tales appearing in English for the first time. The collection covers a wide range of settings and moods. Some pieces draw on the lives of well-known personalities, while others are set in Kashmir, in the countryside, in a sprawling modern city, or along the Line of Control. Love and betrayal feature in some, and others are fables about courage and conviction.

The single story gives readers a quick way into Gulzar's distinctive voice as a prose writer, and a reason to pick up the full collection afterward.