Nude before God

Ram Krishna is an artist who paints nudes. Incensed by his wife’s possible infidelity, and despite his own conjugal insecurities, he engages in an adulterous liaison. Immediately, Karma strikes: his wife’s purported lover pushes him to his death into a flooding river. Unclad of corporal existence, he hovers above earth and discovers that—apart from his parents, dog, and a few friends—no one misses him. Dejected, he encounters Yama, the Lord of Death, and begins a conversation that extinguishes his own airs and affectations, and makes him see that he may have been wrong about life . . . and his wife.

Armed with a wry sense of humour, Shiv K. Kumar lays bare the questions of humanity’s inescapable end, plying us with a story of the afterlife that gives us new reasons to live and laugh.