'There are weekends when all you have is your stamp collection. For some it is their stamp book, for some their CD collection, for others, their pets. For Maya it was her lamps.' Two bored young men on a rainy evening shoot at Maya's lamps one by one even as her neighbors upstairs spray paint 'It's All Your Fault' on a giant hoarding and take the entire city on a collective guilt trip. In 'TV is good' an angry television comes looking for revenge against its couch-potato master who dared turn it off. And in 'An Office Story' a pernicious office memo takes on a life of its own, growing into a hefty carton and travelling abroad with its evil message. In the nine stories in Crowded Rooms, Prem Nath etches urban existence in fine detail—a world of towering high-rises, claustrophobic rooms, haunted highways and impersonal office cabins. And even as his characters deal with the boredom and displacement of modern life, they find new ways of engaging with the world they live in—some real, some dream-like but always fresh. Vividly imagined, witty and warm, Crowded Rooms marks the debut of an important new voice in Indian short fiction.
