A scholar might argue that Jaspreet Singh’s childhood prepared him for a writing life steeped in magical realism. The son of a paramilitary soldier, Singh was raised in the shadow of the Himalayas in a paradoxical world of intense beauty and mysticism and persistent sectarian violence. “Kashmir was neither Pakistan, nor India,” the 35-year-old author has said, “[it] was war.”

In the 1960s the imposition of political corruption, modern warfare, and industrialization on ancient religious cultures across the globe inspired a new form of storytelling. Magical realism, first made famous in Latin America by Gabriel García Márquez and later embraced by writers such as Salman Rushdie and Ben Okri, uses irony, humour, and the supernatural to depict the enigmas of a rapidly changing reality. Singh’s first book of short stories, Seventeen Tomatoes, clearly draws on these pioneering examples of straight-faced exaggeration to describe the merry-go-round of characters and regional customs that enchanted and upset him as a child.

The 14 stories connect in some way to the past, present, and future of the two main characters, Adi and Arjun, a couple of Sikh boys growing up in an Indian army camp in Kashmir. Shifts in the narrative’s time sequence reflect a reality that is almost outside of time, a cycle rather than a progression. Singh achieves this by taking a minor figure from the previous tale and building a new tale around that character. In the end, he creates a portrait of the entire community.

Readers meet a celebrity cricket umpire, a captured Pakistani officer, a carnivalesque Missile Man, a beauty queen with shaved legs, and a pet cat who crosses the India-Pakistan border trailed by a panicked village. Thieves, perverts, and swindlers dart in and out of most of the stories, while scientists threaten to topple the magic with the spirit of inquiry and reform, challenging everything from milk-drinking religious icons to “Djinns,” those spirits said to be seen only after prolonged fasting.

Most characters in magical realist tales don’t find anything unusual about the fantastic elements in their midst – an ironic distance from the magical world-view is what makes this literary form so appealing. But Singh, a PhD in chemical engineering, can’t resist setting up a comical struggle between science and magic. Readers will have to find out for themselves which side prevails.