A civil servant narrates six stories to the patrons of a Bombay bar, tales of ghosts and soldiers, love and hate between families, and corruption in present-day India. By the author of Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Tour. Welcome to the Fisherman's Rest, a little bar off the Sasoon Dock in Bombay where Mr. Subramaniam spins his tales for a select audience. This is the setting for Vikram Chandra's collection of seven short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay , and Subramaniam is Chandra's Scheherezade. In these stories, Chandra has covered the gamut of genres: there is a ghost story, a love story, a murder mystery, and a crime story, each tale joined to the others by the voice of the elusive narrator. In "Shakti," a discussion about real estate leads to the story of a soldier who must exorcise a ghostly child from his family home. In the final story, "Shanti," a young woman's despair about the state of the country becomes a springboard for a tale of love and hope. Love and Longing in Bombay is a mesmerizing collection, filled with fully rounded characters and stories that resonate long after the book is back on the shelf. Chandra's prose is luminous, his tales satisfying. Scheherezade would be impressed. This sequence of five long stories by the author of the audacious Red Earth and Pouring Rain (LJ 4/1/95) expands imaginatively from the modest bar of the Fisherman's Rest, where the aging, wise Subramaniam regales his listeners with tales of the deeply human in a troubled, vibrant city. Both sophisticated and squalid, Bombay provides an appropriately colorful setting for provocative stories of jealousy, loss, secrets, and love. Quietly reeling from the disintegration of his marriage, a detective becomes more than routinely involved in a murder mystery. A social climber takes on the most prominent family in town, with surprising results. In the most enigmatic and affecting of the stories, a young computer programmer discovers the low-tech bug in a client's system and a few strange secrets of a disappeared lover during one intense, uncontrolled week. An intriguing sequence for cosmopolitan readers; for medium to large fiction collections.?Janet Ingraham, Worthington P.L., Ohio Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. The art of storytelling is so precious to Chandra, a gifted storyteller with a penchant for the story-within-a-story device, that it became a matter of life and death in his debut novel, Red Earth, Pouring Rain (1995), and here, in this gleaming set of stories, it keeps his anonymous hero sane. A young man suffering the anguish of lost love accompanies a friend to a seaside bar where he falls under the spell of an inconspicuous but utterly mesmerizing older man named Subramaniam. Each night, Subramaniam tells a story that distracts and comforts Chandra's unhappy protagonist and enchants his readers. In "Dharma," a ghost story, an old soldier confronts his past. "Shakti" is a tale of fierce rivalry between two shrewd and ambitious high-society women; and "Kama" is a compellingly complex murder mystery. Each sumptuous and suspenseful tale is strikingly different from the others even as they all reflect the intricacies of Indian culture and Chandra's profound sensitivity to the vagaries of the heart and the implacability of circumstances. Donna Seaman Five ingeniously linked long stories by the young Indian-born author whose impressive fictional debut was the magical-realist Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995). These stories, which are uniformly full-bodied and richly detailed, are told by a convivial yet enigmatic civil servant, Subramaniam, to his attentive cronies in a bar called the Fisherman's Rest. Each recounts a quest of some kind, and all are distinguished by unusually detailed and persuasive characterizations. ``Dharma'' tells of a stoical combat veteran who experiences ``phantom pain'' in his amputated leg and consequently a ghostly visitation that brings equally painful memories of his childhood. ``Shakti'' is an amusing tale of rivalry between two socially ambitious women that is resolved by an unexpected alliance. In ``Kama,'' the investigation of an apparently open-and- shut robbery and murder uncovers a morass of sexual and political misdoing and the complicated personal life of Sartaj, the police detective who learns as much about himself as about the killer he pursues. ``Artha'' and ``Shanti,'' respectively, describe a gay computer programmer's dangerous search for information about his disappeared lover, and a twin bereft of his brother and in love with a beautiful married woman who travels ceaselessly looking for the truth about her long-lost husband, a soldier reported missing in action. ``Love and longing'' indeed are thus, in various ways, the motive forces behind these pieces--and in the last, the tale- teller Subramaniam is himself an important presence, and we realize how the preceding stories have also expressed aspects of his own loves and longings. A brilliant work