Trickster City : Writings from the Belly of the Metropolis

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 Trickster City is an extraordinary composite of writings on Delhi by a group of young people who have, over several years, sustained among themselves and with others around them, a relationship of conversing about the city.This collection chronicles the loss of home and livelihood through urban eviction; encounters with the agencies of the state; love stories gone awry; the fragility of relationships; and the sustained effort to build life in anticipation of beauty and pleasure. The writers draw from experiences, events and biographies, part fictive, part documentary, to inscribe an image of the city that is rarely available. There is a yearning in their writings for the expression of the poetic and allegorical alongside the harshness of everyday existence. Trickster is an aphoristic and playful meander in search of a new language that expresses the profound uncertainties and delicately realised joys of urban life. Praise for Trickster City 'Trickster City is the gentle, compassionate anti-dote to the mass of mail-fisted representations of the ‘under-class’ that has become so popular these days. The writers that make up this collection are almost amazing in their restraint, their ability to distil that perfect moment that conjures up the times they live in. Story after story evokes the ways in which people keep love alive while a kind of terror, the terror of being poor in a cruel city, lurks offstage, just a midnight knock away.If you put your ear to this book you will be able to hear people breathing, if you touch it, you will be able to feel their fragile, but furious pulse. If you read this book, you will be greatly rewarded.'—Arundhati Roy'Trickster City is a groundbreaking collection of writings about the South Asian city, its authors so free in their intelligence and imagination that they put conventional, pious analysis to shame—and demonstrate, ultimately, that even the most pressing material circumstances can never constrain the kind of intelligence that lives in them.'—Rana Dasgupta'This book is a reflection of the experiences, ideas and aspirations of the underbelly of the metropolis. These writings have precision of thought and an optimistic determination; they look at the future with hope, courage and patience. The portrayal of modest experience is matter of fact and the insights have a wisdom that only experience can bring.'—Krishna Sobti'The thumbnail sketches, vignettes, stories and testimonies here invoke an urban landscape that is only partly outside us. The chaos, uncertainties and contradictions are us, as we negotiate the city as an overwhelming, inescapable inner reality in twenty-first century India. The Trickster City may well be a lovable but impossible part of our selves.'—Ashis Nandy