"For the last eighteen hundred years Indian arts have been seen in terms of strictly classified emotional effects known as the nine rasas. The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense celebrates, for the very first time, what Sukumar Ray called the 'spirit of whimsy', or the tenth rasa, through the topsy-turvey, irreverent, melodic genre of nonsense literature."
The two pieces featured in this collection are Grandmother's Tales (verse) and Ghost Office (prose). It is indeed a big day for a writer when the world officially recognizes his work as nonsense....
GRANDMOTHER'S TALES:
....From mountains and seas, and the shivery silence of inky-black dunes,
Today we remember her face like a bird, and the glow of her nose in the dark,
Her swingy arms and chirp, and the feathers she scattered about in the park....
a taste...
GHOST OFFICE:
....and I wrote that it would have much more interesting ingredients in it and I took this letter to post at our local village post-office which is situated in the middle of a stream in a small compound surrounded by trees bursting with grey mangoes and pink jackfruit and vines of jasmine oozing out of the earth like night-worms, and all this basking happily in the milky moonlight, but I heard strange sounds coming from inside the locked building and remember being rather scared......
The main reason I am proud of this book is that most of the new illustrations, including the cover illustrations and the title design, as also the one for my Grandmother's Tales, have been done by my elder son, Vinayak.
