Ginger drafts...

Noughties have been a delight. My life began; I might be tempted to say-just as any other city’s did. But the fact is that my life began when angry gentlemen threw spades at each other. In sixteenth century, my rulers at Golconda founded me. Musi, my artery ran through me fresh and clear embellishing me for years. When plague besieged me portentously, my rulers wove one of the most beautiful monuments in India-Charminar, adorned me with the crown. But before the incumbent rulers at Golconda could flourish in the shadows of the great crown and meadows of the fecund land, Nizams defeated them in a battle. What was to come next, I would not have contemplated at that time, but looking back, I realise that the Nizams watered those shrubs of culture that sporadically rose in the rule of my previous rulers. What was to be quoted by Dr. Ambedkar after my inclusion in the united India - as home to all the riches and culture, so good to take upon the capital city status for a united India - grew...

The library was completely deserted; there was word that all the antique pieces of literature dating as back as 2010 were available in it. I walked inside; most of the books were sealed inside vacuum chambers, chronologically arranged from the present year 2499 to as far back as year 2001. Times were changing; a niche market for the literature of 21st century was forming slowly expanding its frills from the dungeons of failed writers. Writers of the present day lamented persuasively of a society that no longer respected its artists. The movement began somewhere in India. My thesis on the origins of the movement took me to the place. Great Britain as they referred to, was now merely London. Ireland and Scotland fought for a share in England for over two centuries; fuelled with the pestilential forces of Americas on Ireland’s front; capricious, malevolent and bullish forces of Russia on Scotland front, the war destroyed the great island into rubble. Ashen and unresponsive, the land laid ...

Double slit experiment consists of a measured release of one photon through a giant thick impervious sheet with two slits drilled into it. The photon has to pass through one of the two slits and hit the screen on the other side of the impervious sheet leaving its mark. The paradox here is that instead of leaving a single mark, the single photon left an interference pattern. How could that be? How could a single photon make an interference pattern-it either passes through one slit or another, either which way, it should only leave a single mark on the screen. But the single photon was leaving an interference pattern. The phenomenon baffled scientists for over half a century. Sazia began by trying to find out which one of the two slits the photon was passing through. But the moment, she found out which one, the interference pattern was no longer there, the photon merely left a single mark on the screen. She tried a multitude of different techniques in widely varying settings and still fa...

I recently bought a pepper grinding machine, installed it in the shop. My wife, she was deeply committed to the traditional values of the tribe. I worked in the shop, this exposed me to the outer world and I soon realised that the tribe was dying. Very few of us were left, the direct descendants of the original clan. The pepper machine was her idea. The ritual needed females to dip a wet cloth in pure pepper, dab it on the eye lids and wait for the pepper to seep into the eyes. Once inside the eyes, pepper stimulated the burnt ends of neurons that are unique to the clan. Overpowering burning sensation would render the female in a shocked state momentarily; once recovered from it though, she must force open her eye lids with age old forceps that are usually passed on from one generation to the next. The priceless forceps hold the eye lids firmly as tears roll into circles in the female’s eyes. The male has to feed her and take care of her while she swallows the terribly excruciating pai...

A Truck driver's wife pursues her inveterate responsibilities with ceaseless emergency, everyday she wakes up pretty early and walks a good couple of kilometres through the labyrinth of dilapidated households in her neighbourhood to bring water. Then, she cooks for her children an undernourished meal, not a breakfast for she cannot afford three meals a day. She readies them up for school, walks them to the school herself, for she cannot afford to pay for an auto rickshaw. And, her motherly inclination deters her from letting the kids all by themselves, for the mad street dogs might eat them up into pieces, or they might fall into one of those bore wells dug up by the government and left open, or the street peddlers might kidnap and sell them. She then leaves for work, in construction sites carrying weights that would out rightly be denied as physically impossible for a woman in a more progressive nation. She would then leave to clean utensils or clean floors in a couple of househol...

Chapter 1 The city of Hyderabad displays uniquely blended culture that bosoms the traditional cultural habits at the heart of it, and is constantly adorning the modernistic rituals. Hyderabad is a treasure hunt; every single lane in the city smells differently, the families living in those lanes epitomize the lane to the extent that the lane and the families become indistinguishable to a visitor. It is hard to tell if the lane acquired its air, authority and ownership of uniqueness from the families or if the families from the lane. As one attempts to dig deeper, one uncovers a chronological progression of uniqueness, the niche quality that the lane acquires over a period of time. It is not so much as the communion (of lane and families) progresses as time passes, but more of refining the uniqueness and displaying it outside. For any potential visitor, the communion bethinks it their responsibility to grant acquaintance to the visitor. And, this has to happen before the communion begin...

We lived in a house that swayed with wind. When we moved initially into the new home, all the neighbours were taken by surprise. The house was pinioned by one end of the diagonal firmly in the ground. And, it swayed; at first it was barely perceptible. But as the days went by, the sway grew increasingly clearer. I was fourteen and I sold dreams; father was an architect, he made it a point to live in the house he designed himself; mother a gardener, she would break into interior monologues to entertain the flowers in the garden, ‘pink roses ay! There is a beautiful lass with vast shoulders and firm pony, neatly drawn tight and you, all the pink roses would be perched up on that pony one after another to visit places’. Both the twin sisters planned for their married lives, they planned to marry twin brothers. One night, there was a knock on the door, it was late and everyone was wide asleep. I gently rubbed the sleep off my heavy eyes and opened the door. There was nobody outside; heavy ...

It was at a wedding party that I met the whimsical woman Salma. She had put on a pink dress, the hem of her dress billowed as she broke into lollop. The satin material clung to her body; an ornamental belt tightly clasped her waist with a knot in the back. Her thin frame appeared befitting in the dress as she extended her arms through the velvety hems on the side arms much as a tree spreads its branches away from the trunk. The hair tightly drawn back into pony that rested on her bare back perhaps tingled her, for she pulled it above the usual height and now it rested on the nape of her neck. There was an orchestra, the band played quiet and soothing music. Guests were pouring in, Salma was a talkative woman, she kept them all engaged. There was certain calm in the air, the evening sky gorgeously reddened as the guests took their seats before the stage. Salma nipped the contours of her dress and stood like a doll with a special frock adorned on it. The camera men couldn’t take their ey...

Kiran was only eight years old when the incident occurred. He was walking home tired and hungry, sweeping the tar road with his eighty rupees worth new shoes as he walked on completely exhausted. His school bag, he hung it up his head and lunch box was suspended to his right shoulder. The year was 1984; India had just won the world cup. Kids were playing cricket in every street and by lane of the city. The cycle repair man was pulling the air filled tube through a bucket of water to check for the air leaks, the tall man Kiran’s neighbour stood by the repair man’s side counting the leaks himself, lest he be cheated. ‘If I can reach the end of the incline before the limping man nearing it from the other side of the road, I will get first rank in class this summer’ Kiran challenged himself. He reached the incline that would ease his harrowing walk from the school to home; he descended down the incline with measured relief and took a left turn at the end of it. He left the limping man behi...

My first job as a journalist turned out to be something of an intriguing nature. My boss, a sturdy man in his late thirties summoned me in his office. I was nervous; word was that the first job is always the toughest. And boss’s reputation was not comforting either; he was assiduous, maintained strictly formal tone, unfettered by the political dictates, sort of quirky. His hair tightly drawn back, shirt tucked in with fanatical perfection, shoes glistening, and applied mild perfume. He skimmed through my profile, reached out to his spectacles, paused in the motion of removing them and was intently reading out my profile. From what I heard, that gesticulation meant danger. He shifted his glance between the file and my face; I was consumed with fear and trepidation. Finally he removed his spectacles and enquired if I would be kind enough to accompany him to a party that night. I put on my red dress silhouetted with pink satin and let my hair loose, loosely curled some over my ears to ind...

I am a pretty girl in her twenties. Recently, I have learnt some awfully perplexing things surrounding my life. I am intrigued by the extent to which love, friendship and marriage have intertwined in leading towards my conception. When I was growing up as a child, I was subjected to extreme attention. People in the neighbourhood would lovingly refer to me as ‘the little pretty thing’; mother’s relatives, when they were there at our house, teased me of hardships that my futuristic lover would have to put in to protect me. Father worked for the radio. He composed music, wrote dialogues for shows. His work kept him at home most of the time, his friends and people form the radio company, when they visited our place, always bought me chocolates. They greeted father with the usual ‘how lucky you are to have such a pretty daughter’. Everywhere I go, shopping with mother or the neighbourhood café with father, I immediately became the subject of attention, it became something of a habit for me ...

I enjoyed working late in the office. It was strangely fascinating, the whole floor would be empty, save for some PCs humming; the house keeping staff sweeping the floor somewhere in a corner. One last employee in the floor beneath leaves behind him, a fine metallic clink of the car keys that he tosses up on the way; the sound playfully ricochets through the stair case and finds me typing all lonely on my keyboard. The solitude that the huge building offered with its robust walls and large empty spaces was flirtatious. I would stay up all night staring into the monitor and the house keeping staff would sometimes turn off all the lights overhead. It was those moments that I was maddeningly obsessed with; I would heroically raise my hands above the cubicle and wave. ‘I, the saviour of the world; I, the primal force; I am still awake’ ah! Those moments, I loved them so much. Through the course of the night, I would walk into the cafeteria and make some coffee for myself. Every single time...

Apartments in winters come alive. I realised this when I was eight. The place has neither the dampness of rainy season nor the troubling lightness of air and everything around you. I enjoyed the time I spent in the lift in my apartment; it was a room, only it belonged to no one. We all shared the space sometimes alone, sometimes together, yet the room belonged to no one. It was late in the night; I pulled my hands out of the warm side pockets of my jacket and risked the exposure of cold winter air. I pressed the button and was waiting for the lift to descend, tapping my foot against the brown tiled wall. On its way down, the lift paused briefly at one of the floors, and I heard the sound of a woman (must be in her thirties) in great urgency, she banged the lift’s door shut and left, only to realise a moment later that the door was not properly lodged into the sockets. She tried vainly to force the door into the socket, after a couple of attempts (while I was rubbing my palms and pressi...