A Group of Eastern Romances and Stories from the Persian, Tamil and Urdu

These stories travel from the bazaars of Persia to the temples of Tamilnad, carrying centuries of accumulated wonder. Compiled in 1889, this collection gathers romances and tales from Persian, Tamil, and Urdu traditions, each one threaded with magic, fate, and the quiet wisdom of ancient moral instruction. The book opens with Nassar, the son of a wealthy merchant, whose journey into the wider world throws him against forces beyond his control: chance encounters, supernatural trials, and the crushing weight of kismet. What follows is a constellation of stories where djinn and saints coexist, where heroes discover that destiny cannot be outrun, only understood. This is Eastern storytelling at its most opulent: ornate, morally urgent, and unafraid to let the fantastic and the philosophical occupy the same sentence. For readers seeking to understand how the East has always told stories about the collision between human desire and invisible forces, this collection remains a vivid gateway.