"With her I immediately sensed that it had to do with who I was, where I'd been born, and where I'd been living these last twenty-five years. This was the first time she was meeting me... 'He's a Brahmin,' she finally said, as if I wasn't there with them."

These closely observed stories, with their gritty poetic descriptions and finely ironic twists, confront Dabydeen's Asian and Caribbean-South American identity with his experience of life in Canada, where he has lived for over three decades.