Indian English Literature, like any other literature, has had its share of both talented and eminent precursors and successors. Of the latter, prominent among the better known ones is Shiv K Kumar, whose short stories can best be described as being products of a genius raconteur. This paper attempts at exploringstructurally as well as technicallyselect short stories from his second volume of short fiction titled, To Nun with Love and Other Stories, which has not witnessed significant research. The stories are chosen with a specific purposeto bewitch the readers with the uncanny harmony of human anatomy, where every single organ comes to life in isolation. Rare and engaging descriptions reveal his passion for the human psyche; mortal feelings of love, loss and betrayal; fantasies of ordinary men and women; and the much-neglected genre of the short story. The mere titles of the storiesthose that have been discussed in this paperattract the readers' immediate attention. This paper begins with a briefing on the development of the prose narrative, and examines, through a close analysis of the various characteristics of the short fiction, how Kumar structures these stories around the predefined notions of the genre and yet creates a uniqueness that is typical of him.

The development of the prose narrative, which appropriates the present concept of the short story, began in the early nineteenth century. This was in order to satisfy the need for short fiction by the existing magazines and periodicals. The early practitioners of this genre were Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe in America; Sir Walter Scott and Mary Shelley in England; Honore de Balzac in France; and Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Pushkin and Ivan Turgenev in Russia. However, the art of short fiction achieved its crest in the hands of O Henry, Anton Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, Ernest Hemingway and William Somerset Maugham.

In India, however, the writing of English prose began with Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore. Many good Indo-Anglian novels and several short stories have aptly demonstrated the feasibility of Indians writing fiction in English. While K S Venkatramani and Shanker Ram can be called the early pioneers in the field, Shiv K Kumar is among the newer practitioners. The genre has, by and large, remained a product of novel workshop in Indian English literature from its very beginning. This trend is evident in the recent writings also. Apart from novelists, there are also a few poets who have tried their hand at this art form.

Shiv K Kumar, novelist, poet, playwright, translator and critic, is a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award for his collection of poems, Trapfalls in the Sky, and the Padma Bhushan for his contribution to literature.

Khushwant Singh had once said that a short story must have unity, a distinct beginning, middle and end, a ring of truth, a message to convey, and a sting in its tail. The short stories of Shiv K Kumar perfectly fit this categorical definition of this art form. The twenty-five stories in Kumar's Beyond Love and Other Stories show a considerable variety of settings and characters. Short, sleek and readable, his stories are, however, thin in content. To Nun with Love and Other Stories, his second volume of short stories, published in 2002, is the focus of this paper.

English Studies Journal, Indian English Literature, Human Anatomy, Interreligious Marriage, Social Backgrounds, Macrocosmic Society, Human Psychology, Human Emotions, Presentational Precision, Psychological Rendezvous, Autobiographical Elements, Spiritual Elements.