Red Earth and Pouring Rain - A kinda review

This really sucks, sucks BIG time. I am not able to post the entire thing in one go and so I had to break it in three parts but this is hopefully the last in the series and it is a Book Review kind of blog.

Back to the title of the post, the book “Red Earth and Pouring Rain" is a celebration of the art of story telling. It has multiple stories interweaved among themselves; multiple people telling their stories and stories within other stories. A monkey, two teachers and Abhay (whoz just returned from his studies in US) are narrating their stories to ward off Yama, the God of death who has come to take the monkey's soul. Yes, it is an implausible premise but leads to some rather good stories. The stories vary from the high school American romance to the experiences of a desi to the story of a Rajput princess to Ramayana to the story of English subjugation of India and to the life of a porn actress. Abhay's stories were my favorite though they dealt with the experiences of a desi in US; a subject that has been done to death and lends itself to a lot of stereotyping. But I liked them because I could relate to them in some way and maybe because they were set in the present time. Dr. Sarthey's story was dark, morbid and good while Tom's(Abhay's American friend) was like one of those "Wonder Year" kind of shows; a not-so-rich geeky/nerdy guy falls for the rich and beautiful temptress and it leads to the inevitable heartbreak and then self-realization but it was a good read nevertheless. I think I need to read the book again because I read it in a hurry, anxious to know where the story leads to and I actually did not stop and savor the reading experience but I would recommend this book to anyone who likes stories.