The stories in Love and Longing in Bombay are linked by a single narrator, an elusive civil servant, who recounts an extraordinary sequence of tales to those seated around him in a smoky Bombay bar. Each of these stories belongs to a distinct genre: in 'Shakti,' a love story, two feuding families are united by forbidden passion; in 'Dharma,' a ghost story, a soldier forced to save his life by amputating his own leg returns home to find that his house is haunted by the spirit of a small child; and in 'Kama,' a mystery, a detective takes on a murder case and finds himself traveling deep into the farthest reaches of carnality and deceit.