Tall Tales by a Small Dog

'Every dog is a storyteller, but dogs do not write... So, once they find out you are awriter, they will want to tell you their stories, ask you to put them down...'In my tongue they say you can never straighten a dog's tail. How much more difficult tostraighten a dog's tales, then? And so I set them down for you in these pages... Only, bewarned: these are the tales of a small dog, recorded. And all dogs are storytellers, and allstorytellers are liars. Believe what you will of them, but believe at your own peril.'Kallu, a mongrel of modest proportions who roams the streets of Gorakhpur,has some stories to tell of his town. But dogs cannot be trusted to speak thetruth, so the narrator of this collection-a web as complicated as the mess ofcables and electric wires suspended over the galis of Gorakhpur-tries to siftfact from fantasy.But what is fact and what fantasy when a jailer escapes his own executionand comes back home riding an elephant, claiming to have been pardoned byQueenVictoria?When the star pickpocket of Gorakhpur is bested by aWhitetourist?When a young man falls in love with a street dog and uses him as aweapon, and a gangster decides to wear an assassin's bullet round his neck?When one Gorakhpuri boy walks all the way to China and comes face toface with Deng Xiaoping, and another is propelled to America by a smuttymagazine?Over a decade after his international bestseller The Storyteller's Tale, and theaward-winning Jimmy, the Terrorist, one of India's most distinctive authorsreturns to fiction with a funny, quirky, unputdownable chain of stories aboutthe heroes, villains and oddballs of Gorakhpur, the legendary small town-asfamous as it is notorious-in the heart of India.