If you should de­cide to read these twelve stories of transit, bring your dictionary along. You will come across words like kyphosis, arcuate, bice and cochleate. No harm in that. No harm in being forced to learn the exact words for “an ab­normal curve to the vertebral col­umn” and “curved into the shape of a bow” and “dark-coloured” and “shaped like a shell”. No harm when the stories themselves hold you. No harm if you’re thrown out of a moving story of a girl who has been mutilated by her family, whose clitoris has been torn from her without her consent, who sud­denly realises what she is missing when she is in an anatomy class. Who cares? Not Miss Swamina­than who does not seem to under­stand the first rule of storytelling: the writer’s joy in finding the right word must never be subsumed to the demands of the story. These words, and there are more, might work in stories more wordy. But Swaminathan has good stories to tell and seems to have convinced herself and her editors that they fit. Perhaps this is something to do with this new thing about using all the resources of the lan­guage. Whatever. And don’t read ‘8 June 2004,’ a somewhat vapid introduction which does noth­ing to set the tone for the other twelve stories.