"A Strange and Sublime Address" describes a typical Sunday in Calcutta, as experienced by a 10-year-old boy named Sandeep who is visiting his working-class Bengali relatives while on holiday from Bombay. Sandeep's view is not just that of a child, but that of the outsider. An only child of a wealthy businessman, he watches the otherwise prosaic elements of his poorer, traditionally minded Calcutta relatives' lives with awe, the tiniest details of domestic life holding him rapt.

"Afternoon Raag" interweaves the cultures of Bombay, Calcutta, and England -- past and present -- as it follows an Indian student through his experiences at Oxford and his returns to his small Indian village. Chaudhuri takes a microscopic look at a universal stage in adult life, and considers it from a variety of angles. This character experiences the phenomena of growing up, moving away, understanding change, all within the scenario of cultural difference. And Chaudhuri manages to address huge, universal concepts of humanity by shrinking them down into their details.

In "Freedom Song, " the title novella, Chaudhuri lovingly describes family and community life in Calcutta in a mosaic of sights, sounds and impressions. Through the different eyes of several different characters -- young and old -- he looks at the collisions and compromises that occur between differentgenerations, and paints an unforgettable picture of a city in decline in a time of transition.