Time here is slow as a coral, thickening in its thickets each year an inch wide; time, reduced to basics, sundown, star-set; as the sea ebbs and surges, and the winds ride on, islands invent their own counsel: slow down your blood- beat to the rhythms of the tide. Keki N. Daruwalla Daruwalla has written an entire volume of stories on islands. The stories extend to looking at people as islands spread across this world. The first story Island Sermon involves a nameless narrator who is visiting India to see a hermit and has certain fixed notions about what constitutes a good story. The swami reveals self-destructive tendencies and suffers from dementia...