In the following excerpt, Bailey notes that Mistry has managed to "epitomize the important difference necessary to render fiction individual" and "distinctive."

...The other stories dealing with the ambiguities of emigration follow Kersi from his childhood disillusionments with the Firozsha Baag residents through his move to Toronto, the dynamic of the collection moving the action progressively away from Bombay to Canada. By the closing story, "Swimming Lessons," Firozsha Baag has been replaced by the grim "Don Mills, Ontario, Canada" apartment building where Kersi lives among strangers, watching alien snowflakes fall and indulging himself in sexual fantasies about the women taking swimming lessons with him at an indoor high school pool. The exotic, densely-consonated Indian words which lent such strangeness to the early stories have given way to the "gutang-khutang" sound the building's elevator makes, and Bombay exists only as a truncated echo in Kersi's parents' letters, which...