In Upcountry Tales, Tully turns to fiction — for the second time, after The Heart of India — to weave nostalgia-inducing tales of an India before the economic liberalisation of the 1990s. These are short stories about “not prominent people” and much of the action is set in Purvanchal, to which region Tully traces a strand of his own family history.
There is, for instance, Budh Ram, a Dalit farm labourer whose audacious dream of building a temple to Sant Ravi Das inflames upper-caste sentiments, to counter which he mobilises his villagers; Prem Lal, an upright cop who refuses to buckle under pressure to close an investigation into the murder of the philandering Thakur; farmer Tirathpal Yadav, who refuses to trade in his bullocks for mechanised farming, despite the entreaties of his pragmatic wife…