Pavement Prayers

Kalia confessed to murder last night amid a hushed silence that lasted only a short while before he went into detailed account of the events that led to it . . .

Thus begins one of the prayers in this book.

This is a book of prayers that tell a story. But, of course, all prayers - all personal prayers - tell stories. Prayer is, in many ways, the spiritualization of incident, and in every fervent prayer one can find a short story of an epic sticking to it. The Mumbai pavement is wonderfully rich in story. For every twenty-or-so-steps that you take over it, your feet could be shuffling through chapters, or, perhaps, volumes of intricate plot, moving human drama and the most thrilling narrative. This book is those twenty-or-so-steps of narrative and plot, the story of a pavement dweller and his patch of pavement told in the most intimate form of narration: his personal prayer.