“Yet the stories themselves brought the smell of the alleyways, the damp air of the old houses and the smell of sadness from the city’s friendless people into the book, so that as you opened it you felt a strange air, the hot exhalations of the deceased, the smell of the lives they had left behind.”

“Yet the stories themselves brought the smell of the alleyways, the damp air of the old houses and the smell of sadness from the city’s friendless people into the book, so that as you opened it you felt a strange air, the hot exhalations of the deceased, the smell of the lives they had left behind.”

— Bakhtiyar Ali