A story told by a dog, Fletcher, who is intelligent enough to examine and assess the relationships his mistress, Colette forges, he survives disasters and displays a keen sense of loyalty, self-recrimination, goes through traumatic upheavals. The friendship between Ted Grant and Wilson, the hotel in Costa Rica becomes a stage when another human bondage, bonding is put under the scalpel by the writer. Kathleen, as a young student, grapples with her identity as she tries hard to find acceptance in her school.

She resents her grandmother who is from Pakistan and slowly turns around to accept ground realities when her grandmom vanishes. The end of the story with “everyone’s connected to everyone,”.... “We just need to figure out how,” is one of the clues to understanding what Baldwin has undertaken.

There is the larger world, the global network which forms the stage for all the stories to play out. Socio-political phenomena tug the strings of action. Cultures diffuse, meet, separate violently, disappear, resurface, there are connects and disconnects that are layered subtly in the prose. There is a world within each story, which plays out a plethora of human emotions. Fear, mistrust, loyalty, estrangement, separation, love, faith, breach of faith, loneliness, subjugation, hatred-ordinary emotions, which we face everyday but are exalted by the author. We need to re-examine how we handle each of these emotions with a casual callousness as we go about our daily lives. But here Baldwin raises them to another level, takes them seriously and makes us face them almost brutally. The humour is steely grey, makes the reader smile, half-chuckle, but the smile is twisted.

The voice is incisive, disturbing, complex and the craft of writing a short story is mastered. There is a fluidity of motion, liquid, melting, in the prose and yet there is a matter-of-fact tone. Emotions are heightened but nowhere does it read as maudlin. It is true - “you know you just take a word, add it to another, and you never know where you end up.”