Great Indian Children’s Stories, edited by award-winning writer Stephen Alter, collects nine delightful short stories for older children by some of India’s foremost writers. The handpicked stories in this anthology include classics such as Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘The Kabuliwallah’, revolving around an unlikely friendship between a little Bengali girl and an Afghan man; Munshi Premchand’s ‘Idgah’, the heart-warming story of the gift a young boy gives to his grandmother on Eid; Mahasweta Devi’s ‘The Why-Why Girl’, the true story of a young girl from the Shabar community with an indomitable spirit; Ruskin Bond’s ‘The Blue Umbrella’, a tale of jealousy and understanding set in the pristine Garhwal hills; Khushwant Singh’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’, a poignant story about a young boy and his beloved grandmother; and Shashi Tharoor’s ‘The Boutique’, a sensitive account of an adolescent boy’s rite of passage to adulthood.
