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 , Rai frequently applies the narrative device of the " stream-of-consciousness " . This focus on individual perspectives in her writing draws a connection to the '' Nayi Kahani '' movement of the 1950s and 60s . Rai 's interest in depicting the nuances of human feelings and interactions not only establishes a literary affinity to the '' Nayi Kahani '' in Hindi literature , but also to other modern and contemporary writers such as Anton Chekhov , Marcel Proust and Alice Munro
Shakti Mills gang rape
Shakti Mills gang rape
Sara Rai