Book excerpt: Author-artist Manjula Padmanabhan returns with ten stories: five new, five old, some dark, some funny, all edgy. A vampire visits New Delhi, a space traveler returns to her ancestral home, a character from an ancient epic is transported into the future... To each story Padmanabhan brings an unexpected twist, a touch of satire, a whiff of cynicism, a delicious undercurrent of dark humour. Drawing on her earlier, highly acclaimed anthology, Hot Death Cold Soup, and adding new stories to it, Padmanabhan presents a potent and sometimes disturbing collection that will leave readers asking for more. Published by Zubaan.