What happens when a primordial city with its stake of myth, folklore and tradition confronts an aggressively expanding modernity? Varanasi is a place where antiquity holds a mirror to modern India to reveal its real essence and longstanding values that refuse to wither with changing time. Birdsongs of Love & Despair includes eleven short stories that delve deep into the ethos that has made Varanasi so unique. And here they speak in the voices of common people coming from different spheres of life–the gardener, the maid, the retired person, the dead grandmother or a toy seller. These are voices belonging to the margin, to the anxious souls, who with their love and tender thoughts, do not know how to resist the invasion of looming loss the modern times have brought in