60 India – Bapsi Sidwa  – The Crow Eaters - Score 7.17

Crow Eaters are people who talk a lot. They eat the normal things which all Parsee eat.

The protagonist of the story is Faredoon Junglewalla, a Parsee who has led his small family from a village in Central India to Lahore, now in Pakistan, but not when the story starts. The Parsee people migrated from Persia to India, fleeing from the conquering Arab hordes who entered Persia. At the time of the story there are about 120,000 Parsees in the world.

At the end of Chapter Ten Faredoon seems to have attempted arson and the murder of his mother-in-law. The arson worked, but not the murder.

I will leave you hanging for the rest of this episodic story. All I will say is it is one of the funniest stories I have read in a considerable time, and I don’t want to spoil it for you. I gave it a score of eight.