The stories in "Love and Longing in Bombay" are linked by a single narrator, an elusive civil servant, who recounts an extraordinary sequence of tales to those seated around him in a smoky Bombay bar. Each of these stories belongs to a distinct genre: in 'Shakti, ' a love story, two feuding families are united by forbidden passion; in 'Dharma, ' a ghost story, a soldier forced to save his life by amputating his own leg returns home to find that his house is haunted by the spirit of a small child; and in 'Kama, ' a mystery, a detective takes on a murder case and finds himself traveling deep into the farthest reaches of carnality and deceit.