ISBN: 9789382473657    Publisher: Leadstart Year of publishing: 2013     Format:  Paperback No of Pages: 302        Language: English

Six fast-paced, gripping short stories, and a short novella, each with a Final Cut -- a surprising, unexpected and intriguing twist in the last paragraphs.In Hodson s Gold , a quest for the legacy of one of the most colourful characters of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 leads, via a poem in code and a coded poem, straight to a thoroughly startling address in Delhi.Two boys grow up, together after a fashion, in the 1990 s and 2000 s in Bishnupur, West Bengal, and Kolkata, in Friends , and their growing up years trigger an international sensation when revealed.Shooting for an improbable 4th Pulitzer Prize, a three-time winner arrives in Kolkata s Red Light district to discover, even more improbably, that It Happens Only in India .After setting up a roaringly successful business, and after thirty-seven years, Will Reena? -- readers are asked, in the only short novella in the collection.It turns out, in The Last Supper , that the human models for a painting done over two hundred years ago in Kolkata were keepers of wholly unexpected secrets.On a Buddha Purnima day 2,000 years ago, the holiest day in the Buddhist calendar, a miracle occurs in Sarnath near Varanasi that should, by rights, have been recorded long ago in an immensely better book than this.And finally, in the story that lends its name to this book, magic, religion and celebrities combine in the Kolkata of 2011, to lead to a very different Final Cut .
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Uday Gupt has been a career banker for over 20 years and, after two decades of managing business lending to India, the Middle East, Asia, North Africa and Asia Minor, he currently works for one of the largest banks in the Middle East in Abu Dhabi. He visits India -- where the stories of this collection are set -- several times every year.He has been a regular contributor of opinion pieces on economic issues to newspapers and publications. This is his first collection of fiction.Uday grew up in Delhi, where he attended institutions that have produced some of the best talent on the Indian writing scene, St. Columba s School, St. Stephen s College and the Delhi School of Economics, and then finished his education from IIM, Ahmedabad.He lives in Dubai with his wife and two children.
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