The Twain Shall Meet: short stories

The Twain Shall Meet is a collection of stories dealing with cross-cultural interaction. They are stories of love and betrayal, of sacrifice and revenge, of hope and despair, of brutality and forgiveness, enacted by a colorful cast of characters drawn from all walks of life-- professors, doctors, business executives, tribal chiefs, village astrologers, bandits, magicians, housewives, fashion models, cooks, housemaids, eccentric uncles, waiters, and octogenarian aunts.  "Chillingly aware of the towering walls of tradition and societal repression that keep closing in with every passing year," Moorthy's protagonist is usually "a shrewd observer, a social commentator, and an innocent, undemanding protagonist who excites and holds the reader's sympathy... Moorthy delves readily into forgotten rituals and traditions close to an armchair anthropologist's heart."--Ellen Snortland in The Pasadena Weekly, Los Angeles" The characters in The Twain Shall Meet are hard to forget. According to India's newspaper "The Asian Age"-- Moorthy's characters are always "down-to-earth and identifiable. Her writing entices you right from the very onset and stays long after the last page is turned." The problems facing the protagonist in The Twain Shall Meet are never the same: Is it safe to give someone a gift in Japan? Why do happily married couples check into a Tokyo love-motel? Where can you get the world's strangest coffee? What is Hongkong's cure for people who will not eat their vegetables? Where in India do you turn for help in finding the love of your life? Is there really any hope for the dead? When gangsters armed with machine guns invade your house in West Africa, what do you say to them? How difficult is it to find alternate technology in oil-rich Nigeria? Where do you look for people who have vanished without a trace? How do you establish rules of behavior for garden and household predators? "Moorthy delves readily into forgotten rituals and traditions close to an armchair anthropologist's heart."--The Pasadena Weekly, Los Angeles. Moorthy takes the reader from one end of the world to the other on a kaleidoscopic tour of people, places, and unexpected happenings. Her fiction has been described as "fast-paced and difficult to put down." The reader barely has time to catch his breath after reading one story before he's thrust head-first into another strange land, another language barrier, and another set of traditions that take him by surprise. The twists, turns, and revelations in each plot come fast and hard, and frequently land the protagonist in danger. Moorthy has been recognized for her fast pacing and the sudden concluding twist that can land like a punch in the gut.