Sheik Meets Shakespeare

Would Caliban have been more at home in the mangrove forests of the Sunderbans than on the island in The Tempest? Or was Puck a "pakhi" before he morphed into a fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream?

The first few pages of Kalyan Ray's debut novel Eastwords give a glimpse of an enticing land and a fascinating narrative. Here, Shakespeare pops up on Indian shores and hobnobs with our own Sheikh Piru, straight from the pages of Parashura's Ulot Puran.

Eastwords is a novel that the professor of English literature in Morris College of the US has written between semesters and bundles of answer scripts.