This rare, enchanting collections of short stories from Bangladesh is a long and hard, but very compassionate, look at all that constitutes the life of a nation that came into existence after a long and bloody war of liberation.

 The eighteen short stories, or Takes, presented here are vignettes of life as lived out by citizens of the metro city of Dhaka. Life is caught on the move, principally in the metro s teeming streets, with its choked traffic, armies of urchins and beggars and, of course, the upwardly mobile, middle-class representatives.

 It is through their aspirations, and the big or small impediments that they face, that we glimpse a larger picture of the making of a nation and of the formation of the character of its people. With all their follies and in their desperation, their heroism and cowardice, sophistication and the lack of it, we easily identify with the citizens of Dhaka as folks experiencing the same slog as us.