Steps in Darkness

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0882531204 ISBN 13: 9780882531205

Publisher: Ind-Us, 1972

Beero lives through a succession of days and events. His father gambles, his mother screams and gets hit by her husband, his sister flirts rather desperately. Beero searches for love and kindness in his strife-torn family. The spare delicacy of Vaid s prose illustrates a child s joy of play in fragile balance with the violence and poverty of his circumstances.

About the Author:

A major Hindi writer known for his iconoclastic and innovative work, Krishna Baldev Vaid was born in 1927 in Dinga, now in Pakistan. He survived the horrifying carnage that accompanied the partition of the Indian subcontinent, and regards his involuntary transplantation to the Indian side of the border as his most traumatic existential experience.

Vaid was educated at Punjab and Harvard universities, and has taught at Indian and American universities. He has published novels, novellas, short stories, plays, diaries, literary criticism and translations; and his work has been translated and published in English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Japanese, and several Indian languages.

Review:

An extraordinary novel. Its ingredients deceptively simple, its point of view delicately subtle --The Saturday Review