The second <i >Civil Lines</i> in one year surely calls for celebrations.
And it is this loss of a universe that preoccupies all the eight writers in this volume, whether it is something that the characters bring upon themselves by say, shifting to a metro (Amit Chaudhuri’s The Old Masters and Prelude to an Autobiography) or the West (Amitava Kumar’s Shastriji) or ‘back home’ which is no home (Mina Kumar’s Reading). But home, one discovers, is not a place but a metaphor for man’s eternal yearning to belong somewhere, anywhere.