Rudyard Kipling, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1907, has long been considered an important and vibrant, even controversial, storyteller and poet. The Wish House and Other Stories is a collection of Kipling’s finest works, including the stories “In the House of Suddhoo,” “The Disturber of Traffic,” and “The Eye of Allah,” the poems “The Runners,” “The Return of the Children,” and “The Last Ode,” and his famous story about Afghanistan, “The Man Who Would Be King.” Each piece was selected by poet and scholar Craig Raine, who writes in his Preface, “We need to think about Kipling. He is our greatest short-story writer, but one whose achievement is more complex and surprising than even his admirers recognize.”

Freedom Fighter This short story is a fictional depiction of how young freedom fighters in Malawi exalted Hastings Banda, an older and more experienced man, almost into a messianic position in order to gain the peoples support. The story shows how Banda (the character Khumbo Bomani in the story) began to believe in his own legend and to exercise absolute power, despotically curtailing the very freedoms the independence movement had fought to establish. Meeting at Mount Mlanje David Mitchell is the Attorney General in Nyasaland. Urbane and sophisticated, yet full of sensibilities and ideas, he appeals strongly to District Commissioner Kevin OBriens wife Mary, and he wants to appeal to her. He convinces the idealistic Mary that the British presence in Nyasaland is benign and that any perceived superiority to the natives is a mere pose on the part of the British. The Collector Anil Patel is a modern man, Trinidadian by birth and Indian by heritage. He and his wife Dhara agree to have a modern marriage in that they only want one child and they both want the freedom to pursue their careers. The General Born of Chinese parents in Jamaica, young David Lee is sent to China to connect with his village and his Chinese heritage. However, while he is there he is swept up into the war between Chiang Kaisheks Kuomintang and the Red Army. The ideals of Communism appeal to him, and he joins up with Mao on the Long March. Waiting for the End John Evans from St. Kitts-Nevis finds navigating white society difficult. He travels in sophisticated circles because of his Ph.D., but he knows that there are still many barriers in black-white relations, the foremost being sexual. He is careful and circumspect.

The stories in this anthology, some of them appearing for the first time in English translation, seek to give a larger view of Yashpal as a short-story writer as well as provide a taste of his forthright approach to the questions of his times. Whether exploring the theme of the complicity of the ruled with the rulers, or the unquestioning supplication of human beings to a deity or faith, or social reform and social protest, the stories are coloured by the author's deep concern for the India he fought for and dreamt of. In a world weary of territorial strife, religious rancour and social iniquities, the stories are perhaps more relevant today than when they were written almost fifty years back.

These stories have been translated from the author's award-winning Oriya collection, where characters are implicated in relationships they neither control nor fully understand.