Ginger drafts...

Chapter 1 Pressing the white glowing button that had ‘light speed’ written on its head, Jyothi shrugged in disbelief. The dashboard was attached to a giant monochrome screen where presently a red tab blinked ominously. If the readings were to be believed, she was travelling at light speed. She unbuckled her seat belt. The tight brown straps loosened around her shoulders; as they rolled over the abrasive arm rests, sound of flaying followed by that of flesh tearing apart. She approached the glass façade that overlooked the cantilevered nose of the space ship. Around her, the horizon was mottled with glazing stars, big and small. It can’t be. Jyothi whisked out the manual and sifting through the pages, found the page on light speed. She ran her manicured finger over the lines; with the book resting on her left hand closed before her bosom, she skirted around the ship’s vitals. She found nothing wrong in the settings. But how can it be. If the ship was indeed travelling at light speed,

Chapter 1 Renu was about eight years old when she was first introduced to the calculator. It was the summer holidays when she found it in the dusty corner of her bedroom cupboard. Her palms were so small at the time that she had to stretch them both to hold it. The calculator wore a pale white frame; time had erased all the numbers on the rubber buttons. She carried it to her father who nonchalantly nested it in the burrow of his left palm and punched on it methodically with his index finger. Just as a woodpecker pecking at a dead bark looks away in befuddlement, after flipping the calculator upside down, beating it against his palm, her father lifted his head to meet Renu’s eyes. He was about to tell her that it had lived its useful life. But her dark eyes had worn an expectant gaze, so he replaced the dead pencil cells with new ones and repeated the beating about. Ten minutes later, he drew the child closer, rested the calculator before her chin and pointed to the rectangular bloc

“Put some more coils on that tendril will you?” said grandmother as I lazily yawned and stretched across the emptiness around me. “You will snap and will have invested your time in nothing,” she had not finished censuring me. I could tell from the way she brandished her loose drooping head before jilting back into a stiff posture. “The bark of a live tree always grows wide as it ages. Chances are that it leans away in the beginning and stays that way.” Yes, that made sense. More coils on the tendril allowed for an unlikely expansion or an unforeseen leaning of the source’s stem. Coils in our stems allowed us to pre-empt the natural and unnatural mood swings of our supports. We, vines, have never been liked by our peers. The tall trees hated it, for we had it easy growing. Traditionally, all we did was to fish around with a loose head blindly, until our sticky nose met a strong stem. And then, we grew coils and more coils. Just as an old witch preserves her age in the wrinkles of her

You see, the egg cell is shrouded by three layers of follicular cells and to eat away into this fortress requires the teeth of at least a dozen sperms. The overarching strategy is for a soldier to be able to switch roles effortlessly. One moment, a sperm is suicidal; and the next moment, it is not. Every soldier has to wrestle and tear away the follicular cells that hide comely in the crater shaped lunar lining of the yolk. Then, one sperm that ultimately crouches through the creases of the target’s walls has to immediately suspend its suicidal tendencies and garb the cloak of a primogenitor. Therefore, we, sperms, share a symbiotic relationship with each other. Only one sperm eventually fertilises the egg cell; but for that to happen, an army of thousands is mobilised. We snuggle our bulbous heads along the epithelial walls of female reproductive tract. Pensively, we wriggle with our feeble tails ticking like the minute hand of a wall clock. It is time. I can always tell when it is

At first I thought I was going deaf. I was having trouble registering everything from car horns to human speech. Then there was the news of the old going deaf all over the world. Soon, it came to the point where all of us were deaf. We had to rely on lip movements and gestures; people took to drawing symbols in air, tapping one on the shoulder for a ‘yes’ and two for a ‘no’…. we were adapting. Initially, we had withdrawn ourselves into self-denial, but now we had come out of it. Intriguing display of clever and roguish ways of adapting lit up our hopes of survival. Then came the days of introspection; some theorised that this was just the beginning of what they called an ‘apocalypse’. Scientists had at last, after repeated failures, come up with an explanation. Sound, a mechanical wave, was no longer transmitted through the medium of its source. They explained that the pressure oscillations were being absorbed by an alien medium. Research was in progress to find out more about the al

In the days of my childhood, I had cultivated the habit of carrying my dream from one night to the next. I would lie asleep hanging tightly to the loose thread of dream every night. Night after night, like a seamstress, I went about stitching my thoughts into the fabric of dreamscape. Over a period of time, I had mastered the art of remembering the dreams. With a trained mind, I slipped the loose thread of dream from the preceding night into the eye of my mind’s needle and went about stitching. Behind my house, where the ground sloped to meet a marsh, there was a community hall. The hall was constructed amid much fanfare and left alone later. Languishing in its shadows was a hand pump on a round platform; one had to step over three steps to reach it. The hall was constructed on the bend of an ancient canal; legend has it that it supplied fresh water to the indigenous people of the place about three centuries earlier. Presently though, it was home to thick undergrowth of grasses, rush

Chapter 1 When I woke up two summers later, the pond had dried up. I was the only one alive. I had faint memory of my fins jutting out limbs in their place; the tapered glistening tail had given form to thighs and shins; the comb shaped vertical rim of the tail broke into toes on both my feet. My gills had closed themselves; skin on the hollows reformed and the breasts were fuller with no gaping holes beneath them. Only, they were not firm anymore; my breasts sagged and wore wrinkled skin. How long have I been inside the pond? Here my old memory failed me. I traipsed impatiently towards the lonely farmhouse in my view. It seemed deserted; a litter of skull and bones greeted me at the entrance. The place looked like it had not been inhabited in the last fifty years. Cobwebs swaddled the place that smelt of bats’ urine and mice had drilled holes under the basement. I had to break a windowpane to gain access into the house. Nothing inside the house was left alone by the invaders; metal

One day I found a book; someone’s diary. It was in the attic behind the wrecked pieces of a carom board. I proceeded to dust the book; a rexin binding had kept it fairly intact through the ages. With the spine of the book rested on the writing desk; I flipped it open, right in the middle, to reveal two thick yellow pages. To the right, a bump ran through the pages; it welled and swelled with every turn of the page until the shores of rexin put a pause to it. Now, I flipped the pages from back to front; the bump subsided as my finger released one zigzag mouthed paper after another. Half way through the flipping, the bump wore the appearance of a furrow and on the shore of the rexin, I noticed a sharp indentation. It was as though someone had dug his elbow into the book’s cover; by the look of it, I declared the book a mysterious one. It was the story of a small village; a bizarre virus had infected the people of the village. The virus infected their brains and turned them nostalgic. T