traders and accountants, and its gradual decay. The novel, which is set in the ancestral mansion (kothi) of the family in Varanasi (Benaras), is told from the perspectives of its members, among them the orphan Meena, who comes to the mansion as a companion to the family's daughter as a teenager. Meena and the eldest son of the house, Vikram, secretly fall in love with each other. Vikram, who holds a University degree but has no job, engages as social activist and fights for the rights of the poor. However, when the question of marriage arises, he agrees to marry a woman chosen by his parents instead of taking side for his true love (but presumably low-caste) Meena – which turns out a fatal decision. Style of writing Rai's short stories depict the everyday lives and perceptions of individuals in contemporary India. They are mainly set in North Indian cities such as Delhi, Varanasi (Benares) or Allahabad. Her characters come from various social, economic and religious backgrounds. "On the brink" (kagār par), for example, is told from the perspective of a middle aged gay artist in Delhi who falls in love with a young migrant worker. "Babu Devidins new world" (Bābū Devidīn kī nayī duniyā) depicts the daily struggles of a hypochondriac pensioner, and "Criminal on the run" (mujrim farār) is a narration about a rapist who manages to escape after murdering a young woman but eventually loses his mind in the solitude of his hiding-place. According to the author, this story is based on the real case of the Shakti Mills gang rape that happened in 2013. The author is especially interested in how the clashes and conflicts of modern India surface in the daily life of her protagonists. Many topics of her stories are universal – the struggles of getting old in a quickly transforming world, the search for identity in turbulent times, and the experience of being socially excluded in terms of belonging to a ‘different’ class, gender, religion, or socio-economical background. The Hindi scholar Thomas de Bruijn states that „Rai’s work shows the evocative power of a literary idiom in which the heritage of many premodernities are accumulated. Its dialogic nature, refusing to be fixed to a single, monologic identity, makes it a perfect idiom for expressing the conundrum of modernity in a contemporary Indian context." In order to narrate each story from a subjective perspective,