The sun grappled with the clouds all day long. Tired, it went to the bed a bit early than the usual days. By the evening, the clouds had enshrouded the sky, convincing Shama that it'd rain, but it didn't. From her room on the seventh floor of a nine-floor apartment, Shama sees lights everywhere --... Continue Reading →
Of Men And Their Ways – Continued…
He always woke up before the sun shone, and it had been that way for as long as he can recall now. His wife, when she was alive, used to bicker with him for his early morning alarms. "In the morning the sound of your alarms going off, and during the day your mother with... Continue Reading →
Of Men And Their Ways…
At dawn, when all the boys with whom he used to play cricket in the ground are still asleep, Balu is woken up by his senile father. The sixth child in his father's brigade, as the old man used to call his children together, Balu was the youngest. His two elder sisters were married and... Continue Reading →
Of Making Babies and Driving Trains…
The coaches in the Indian passenger trains, despite all the discomfort they offer to its passengers, provide them with the facility to stop the train at their will. An act of reparation for something wrong that the train or the railway management has nothing to do with, for a predicament that has been created by... Continue Reading →
Of Scaffold and the first steps…
Ramesh balanced himself on the scaffold - a temporary arrangement of sticks and ropes built around the naked and ugly building that he was to paint and transform into a beautiful house. The same building that he and a few others like him had worked on persistently and had erected in over a year. And... Continue Reading →
Of Shehnai and Love…
His earliest memories of a Shehnai and its sound were from a mandap -- a platform raised temporarily for marriages and around which couples vow togetherness, their families surrounding them in all the directions, rejoicing in these avowals. He was 7 years old then and was seated on his mother's lap, deaf to what the... Continue Reading →
Of School and Spitoon…
This story, amidst other things, centres on the hopelessness of the entire process of growing up, and all the disappointment it brings along. As a child, I had always wanted to rid myself of the ritual called examinations. I achieved it at a high price - my childhood.
Congeniality of the living; company of the dead…
"We, in our final analysis, have to survive on our own. Seek congeniality in those who are living; for company, turn to the dead." These sheer simple words yet utterly profound, naive as a universal truth yet a conundrum like a complex code, kept reverberating in his ears. What did his brother mean by them?... Continue Reading →
Happy Father’s Day!
Of the numerous memories that inundate me right now as I type this piece, all of which, I must say, being as vivid as they were when they first happened, what I miss the most are perhaps the piggybacks I used to have on my father's back, and the swings using the bed-sheets that he... Continue Reading →
Yearning for redemption
Yezad embarked on a journey that would certainly make his future bright. But, just like in the course of every journey one leaves many places behind, Yezad was leaving behind something that would haunt him for the rest of his life...
An Indian Daughter’s Father
Much talked about and most debated topic. I've tried to put it through the perception of a father.
This is my imagination of what all a father of a girl goes through these days. Albeit I am hopeful that things will change for good and pretty fast because we have now started to act.