Sixteen stories from award-winning contemporary Odia writers A jobless graduate returns home one day and smothers his faultless wife to death; a ten year old girl is sold off by her parents to an eighty year old man; a newlywed woman discovers that her husband was married to a tree before she arrived; a tribal poet creates a script for his dialect while in jail; a young girl falls hopelessly in love with her boyfriend's father. These are stories of human struggle and of the moral dilemmas people and societies are faced with. Marked by the singular yearning of man to rise above his conditions, they are set in a disturbed landscape both abject in its deprivations and intriguing in its beliefs.