Broomrider’s Book of the Dead purports to be “A book in no genre based on found fragments from the notebooks of Anna Albuquar a.k.a. Anna Plum.”

By happenstance the first reader of this book comes upon some poems. A tourist, he would like to believe he is in Bombay for work alone. Not pleasure, he is quite sure until chance brings him to Kamala or Chamilla in the hotel lobby. Chamilla brings him to Nariman point and then to her one room chawl dwelling so he can take some interesting pictures of one room chawl dwelling with the toilet downstairs. He looks like the adventurous sort to Kamala but he refrains from drinking water she offers him from the large earthen pot which looks peculiarly green on the outside, algae green. She buys him peanuts at the corner and a bottle of mineral water, Bisleri to be very sure. “Oh thank you,” he says with a polite smile Kamala hates, for the nineteenth time.

Mukta Sambrani was born and raised in India where she taught English and worked as a freelance journalist. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Her first book of poems, The Woman in this room isn’t lonely was published by Writer’s Workshop, Calcutta in 1997. More recently, her work has appeared in Verse,Em Literary, Cipactli, Fourteen Hills, Hyphen Magazine, Laundry Pen, The Scribbler, Poetry Chain and anthologies such as Bloodaxe book of contemporary Indian poets, 60 Indian poets, We Speak in Changing Languages, The Dance of the Peacock, Suvarnarekha and others. She is the recipient of 2003 Audre Lorde’ creative writing award and an honorable mention for the Starcherone prize. Mukta lives in Oakland California, where she is a school administrator.