BOOKS

By Pico Iyer

EVENINGS AT MONGINI'S AND OTHER STORIES by Russell Lucas

Summit; 262 pages; $18.95

Did you hear the one about the half-Armenian woman in Bombay, with a weakness for baklava, who was introduced by her lover, the procuress, to a gigolo from the Seychelles known as Raper George? When her husband -- a 7-ft., entirely bald Azerbaijani all-in wrestler with gold-capped teeth -- heard about how his wife was spending her lazy afternoons, he hurried over to the small hotel where she was finding her pleasure and . . .

If you didn't happen to catch that tale, but would like to, you are probably the kind of reader who would savor the unlikely hybrids and saucy aromas of Russell Lucas' Bombay streets. A London bank manager for many of his 61 years, the Anglo-Indian Lucas makes his literary debut with a collection of 10 stories as tightly constructed as bejeweled Indian snuffboxes, all odd springs and curious kinks. Nearly every one is pungent with the "damp hessian, methylated spirits and freshly planed deal" of Bombay in the '40s, and colorful families "big in rawolfia serpentina and chinchona bark"; the protagonists are mystics, madmen and hermaphrodites. And nearly all describe episodes of heat and lust, watched through homemade cracks by randy teenage boys. Inside the cunning boxes lie spicy sweetmeats.

Beneath the surface exoticism, Lucas still betrays quite a few rough edges. Would any British memsahib, in 1936, refer to an Indian stranger as "cute" ? Or any native of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., talk of "open((ing)) your schmucky gob"? Does the world really need another lecherous British officer dithering, "I say, Lorna, I'm terribly keen on you"? At times, with their perfumed dissolutes and frustrated shrinks, the stories read like crude distillations of the Anglo-Indo-American vignettes of screenwriter-novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, or even like bite-size appetizers for the full-course feast of a Salman Rushdie novel.

If Lucas has yet to show real subtlety or depth, he does, in a couple of instances, come upon a pathos deeper than mere appetite, and reveal, beneath the plump lubriciousness, regrets and surprising pleasures. Characters find themselves reproved by expectation, exiles on all fronts. At their best, his stories have the everyday magic of tall tales overheard at the local tea stall. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the neighbor who runs away with the Irish fireman's wife in one yarn -- to an ashram in Pondicherry, no less -- goes by the name of Scheherazade.