Narrated in a voice that is both lived and contemporary, each component piece typically has at least one female character that forms the spine of the story but the number of such characters varies and men, too, find their way into the mix. The reader can thus meet the blind courtesan who learns to see after being wooed by the sun, the gauche house maiden torn by the loneliness of her pet fish, the Englishman who is intrigued by an invisible female presence in his home and finds a diary and the twelve-year-old who gets a greeting from her dead cousin on her birthday. There is young Chet and the story of how she finds out if she will really do anything to make her dying granddad take an interest in life and how, when older, as a housewife, she falls in love with the spirit of a poet in an old house, the work of whom is under translation by her accomplished, filmmaker husband. Chet returns again as Bigfoot running an experiment in Chitragupta’s factory in a delightful fable that explains how it is that only the female of the mosquito species sucks blood. And, in the age of machinery, an intelligent computer marries a visitor from outer space who is a sentient ball. But not before she passes a test to prove her innocent love for beauty and truthfulness. Indeed, though different in content, each story celebrates in its own way the hopes of a world that is free, fair and funny, notwithstanding its immanent ironies and bitterness, despite heartbreak and loss, because, in the end, perhaps, it is beauty that becomes its own inspiration. Enjoy.