In
The Village Clock
, Arshud Mahmood takes us inside a remotely beautiful world, a rural village in India under British colonial rule. How distant the empire seems! In one story, a young government clerk forsakes his desk job for a less remunerative one that allows him to be outdoors. In another, on her wedding day, a bride's family insults the family of the groom by presenting a marriage contract that suggests a lack of faith in the groom's devotion, and another bride is chosen and married that afternoon. Figures like Lord Mountbatten and King George V, referred to in passing, seem slightly grotesque figures of fun, reminders of a tumultuous modern world that threatens the horizon without ever quite arriving.