A love poem in Engglishhh, a new language that has numerology as its guiding principle, a mascot clown who yearns to explore a city of animate beings, a purveyor-director of porn who bamboozles his hesitant leading lady with highfalutin oratory, a building watchman who counts the seconds to death – Altaf Tyrewala has an uncanny ability to write the streets and mindscapes of Mumbai, the city he first captured in prose as nobody else had in No God in Sight, and more recently in verse, in Ministry of Hurt Sentiments. His words are sharp with irony and each story is slashed through with deftly satirical insights into the ways of men and the worlds they inhabit.

Altaf Tyrewala is the author of the critically acclaimed books No God in Sight and Ministry of Hurt Sentiments. He is also the editor of the crime-fiction collection Mumbai Noir. His works have been published and anthologized around the world. He was awarded the 2011 DAAD Artist-in-Berlin literature grant. He lives in Mumbai with his family and works in the e-learning industry.