A Red-necked Green Bird

Thirteen stories, mixing myth and legend with contemporary life, look at love in its many forms, parental, bodily, platonic, romantic and divine, and at ageing, solitude and choice. In the title story, Vasanthan and Mythili clash over Thenmozhi, the deaf girl they adopted, and when he walks out to live as a recluse in the mountains, mother and daughter go looking for him. A widow at ease with technology fends off her children's push towards a matchmaking site; a woman in her seventies, looking out over the hills from her hotel room, recalls her marriage and her distant son; an elderly carer in a Mumbai being torn down for new towers frets over her mother-in-law's future. Other stories feature a cyborg, a man who comes out of a pond changed into a woman, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and short travel pieces.

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About the book

Form

Short stories

Genres

Family, Love (assigned by AI)

Set in

India

First published

2019 by Kalachuvadu

Author's age

75 when first published

ISBN

9788195057115 (Simon & Schuster India, India)