

...Younger sons cannot marry where they like.”
...“Is this,” thought Elizabeth, “meant for me?”
# Permanent link to A Paean or a Lament?
“It’s blue! Or maybe green. Red, I remember, it was red!”
True story: Guy walks into the Poisoned Pen Bookstore. He’d left his book on a plane. He couldn’t remember the title. He couldn’t remember the author. He couldn’t remember what the book was about. He could remember that the cover was red. And Barbara Peters? Found it for him. If anybody knows the provenance of…

Read more “It’s blue! Or maybe green. Red, I remember, it was red!”
On six occasions, his enemies had tried shooting him; twice, they'd attempted poison (once using a samosa laced with arsenic); and during the Case of the Pundit with Twelve Toes, a hired thug had tried to force Puri's car over the edge of a hairpin bend on the road to Gulmarg.
# Permanent link to “Saala, maaderchod!”*
The most ingenious attempt had been orchestrated by a cunning murderer (a naturalist by profession) working in Assam's Kaziranga Park, who had secretly sprayed Puri's clothes with a pheromone that attracted one-horned rhinos.
The closest anyone had come (not including the three rhinos, who could move surprisingly quickly) had been a criminal hijra who had pushed a pile of bricks off the top of a building into an alley in Varanasi where Puri had been walking.