Ginger drafts...

My round belly fell on two rows of anklets that were chiselled fine to produce a charming floral pattern; my broad foot spread around me like a fish fin; I had no toes to speak of. Over the tapering belly thickly varnished in green, was a lovely bend of the neck that billowed out evenly like the wrinkled gathering of folds on an old lady’s skin; on the crown were the lintels of the roof. I and my pillar partner carried overhead, the roof under which a lovely lady was born the afternoon of 1968 February the 5th. The story that I am about to narrate begins in my royal past and ends here; I am felled now. Of the seven siblings that lived in the house at the time, the youngest, Janaki, was affected the most by the news. She was about thirty then, her two children were jewels themselves; Janaki was a woman associated with social appetite, thoroughly enjoyable conversationalist and reverential figure in the family. Before me, two sticks were laid out in a cross; edges burnt to indicate a d...

I was born at about 8 PM on April the fourth, in the pleasant summer of 1994; the night was calm and the four walls of my birth place imposed a thick blank darkness about me right from the birth. My mother’s umbilical cords wound around a thin cylinder; I was the 24th to be inseminated by the index finger of a nineteen year old pimpled primate. Before me, the others were put to sleep in sets of clearly delineated columns; around the cylinder, they all crooned about in good health. Our embryonic development was constrained between two rows of perforated umbilical cords. I distinctly remember, at the time of my birth, a great blinding flash of light pierced through me; it lasted for less than a second, but it was the most harrowing time I have had. You might be wondering why our mother ‘Kodak’ was so utterly circumspect; to understand this, I must, with your permission, take you down the path of evolution. In the olden days, a specialised primate ‘photographer’ peered through the well ...

“Arif, this is Javeria. I am writing to you from year 2032. Have you heard from the others?” it was from an unknown sender with no subject line. His mail box peered at Arif with the curled up intensity of a small child; it had found a chest drawer that morphed and conjured a myriad of new objects. Just as the child with a boxful of picaresque items extended her unfolded palm exhibiting one object after another; the mailbox did too with the click of a button. Arif was presently pursuing his higher studies in Hyderabad; running an observing eye over Google News on his Dell laptop, he reread the mail. Google header read 18th August 2010, mail header sported an abbreviated 772032 for 7th July 2032. His android phone buzzed and wheeled on the black table cloth to paddle a Vaseline tube before the ventriloquism began. Two minutes later, nipping the pale brown cushion ends between his thumb and index finger, Arif explained to Javeria “A dubious mail is sitting on my mail box…” she was in a h...

With my feet glued, I crawl on the walls of your kitchen. I make my home, your dark attics riddled with old furniture, used cartons of grocery, and torn clothes bundled into a heap by the corner. I spend my mornings ruminating with my sticky forepaws rested before me; through the rubble surrounding the obscure corners, I snivel my way uplifted with the heavy warm air. At nights I step out with trepidation, lest I bugger off the moths that beat their heads against the glowing hundred watt bulbs. Sometimes I wait for the right moment, with the toes of my paws curled, to pounce on the big fly, the size of my mouth; other times I dash off casually into them with the sticky tongue wagging about before me. Rainy season is a feast; the bulbs and tube lights reeling with senseless moths thrusting their heads into the glass seals. In times of quietude, when I am not out hunting, I let the thought cross my mind - perhaps the moths’ affinity with tungsten is not as innocent as it appears. Scram...

“Look! The sparks” Shashank rapidly ran his exposed palm over the pillow’s surface. There was a power outage; in the dark, with great merriment, he demonstrated to his sister, the principle of static electricity. Upon excitation, the pillow gained positive energy by losing electrons and the brother who excited them accumulated significant amount of negative charge, which he would later discharge. He gathered all the family members and urged his sister, Avanti to feel for his hand in the dark; seconds later, the sister, dumbfounded, stood after being chosen the object for discharging a ‘static shock’. This clever little game played by the siblings amused their parents, and at times of power outage, hitherto glued to either homework or TV, all the members of the family were now brought together. Shashank was about twelve and Avanti about eight years old at the time. Years later, at the sister’s wedding, parents entreated their children to perform the game that they so affectionately di...

In this land of square edges, people wear black square helmets with lines in contrasting colour drawn right at the top. With tapering stiff cloaks fattening at the bottom, we rest on this flat piece of charcoal Black Island. We stand tall, our bodies solid and inflexible, but the knees are lithe and give away. However, we are genetically designed to spring back up, stand tall and take the incessant knocking on our helmeted heads. Our life time varies; we hear news of islands, our contemporaries, wearing out with the frontline soldiers’ knees worn out of perpetual thrashing to their feet only to spring back and be knocked again. With a population of close to a hundred people, our island boasts a frontline soldier squad of 26. This squad is relentlessly battered; under a roar of stuttering knocks on the head, they are the ones who find their knees buckle before the rest of the population’s. More often than not, it is the ones who are guarding the left front, ones with ‘a’, ‘s’, ‘e’, or...

Beating its wings about truculently, a bee, swathed in gold, landed on the broad lotus leaves. A lonely young man, leaning his head into the ground, pelted a stone into the water; it brushed the surface of the water twice and dropped to the floor. Now the pond grew deep wrinkles of crimson gold shine that undulated from the centre to the exteriors. On the lotus palms, massive droplets of water, disturbed by the rapidity with which the pond’s surface aged, amorphously splat and coalesced with no order. Water rose up in waves, cheeked the rocks of the sidewall housing the pond and receded spasmodically Clawing the bed of porous pollen grains with the assemblage of bright pink petals witnessing, the bee dug its stinger into the flower’s ovaries. Gagged by the mesmerising scent of the flower, he drank guilelessly, volubly, heart fully, and retreated. Once in air, the flight amused him; he buzzed and wheezed about; the whiff of cold morning air had stung him; over the bank and under the t...

It was the morning after my wedding. The dark peachy coloured blinds on my windows were still drawn; the maid with pigtails had retreated after laying down the morning’s breakfast on the thickly lacquered table. Stepping down from the cot, silk thread from my morning dishabille was stuck in the headrest’s broad eagle wings; it threatened to steal away my modesty. Gathering the folds around my knees, I restored propriety before slipping my feet into the glint slippers. The flower vase in the patio shone its tinselled mouthful of white roses that caught sun voluminously. In the garden that night, sitting alone, with the full moon perched in the pool water before me, I recalled the incident and the man who had turned me into a woman. The day before my wedding, a painter had been called. I met him in the courtyard; he was seated on a backless piano chair. Neatly perched on the easel was the drawing board, and from behind it, with tapered quills, greeted a man with sagebrush moustache. Th...

Standing on the alternating rows of black and white marbles that connected the two buildings, Renu glanced at her watch. It was about nine in the morning. Sunlight obliquely (for the source was hiding beneath the veneer of enormous glass façade of one of the buildings) settled in the form of a parallelogram with the tip bowing obsequiously at her feet. Her white cotton pyjamas too slight and the heavily embroidered shoulder straps with no arms allowed the nipping cold to bother her. A shiver emanated from the dip of spine on the back and rapidly traversed her person, leaving in its wake goose bumps and a flushed nose. Beneath the reddened cheeks, a trickle, a sound, escaped her wide parted lips. Goose bumps ripened around her elbows, current carpeted the skin of her arms, broke at the shores of her wrists and receded, silently. The helmeted toy soldiers, sensing the back current of the broken wave, sank back into the sea of her skin. The blitzkrieg was over. Through the great glass d...

The house I live in, has windows with burgundy sashes that open to miles of green downs and farther up the horizon, one could see the meadows sprinkled with black dots in the mornings and ghostly whites at night that occurred in pairs. I like pleats in my skirts; flouncing and pirouetting, as the swell of the silk settles with a swoop, on the quilt mattress of my giant bed, I see the whorl of a flower forming around my haunches. Then as if the waves on shore recede with a silence that stings the ear, the satin fabric discordantly chugs with a flimsy gait and settles around my loins. Its many lapping pleats stained with velvet flowers and green branches tussle with one another as I launch myself into an imperfect gait. Years before, one night, a young man lifted the iron girdle and knocked on the heavy wooden doors of my castle. Strands of hair flashed to the right of his brow; his eyes gleaming with curiosity. Puckered between his supple lips, he held a pipe and broached the subject...

Ovens of Auschwitz “When the SS began the mass killing of Jews(by shooting them in great numbers), it turned out to be messy, disoriented and demoralising”. Stood on the edge, before the dark, charred and ash burnt pits full of corpses, in rows and rows, the footage shows us, between the foul cries of the wounded and the soft release of shot guns, discomfiting horror of the second world war. Some with striped pyjamas, some with bare torsos, stood their turn not valiantly nor dejectedly, merely confounded by the moment. That such a thing was possible, each one wondered “did the west knew what was happening?”. One British officer of high command, in his interview notes “we knew it. but we could not comprehend it. we just could not come to establish between ourselves that the killings were actually being carried out”. But if the Nazi doctrine clearly proclaimed the superiority of Aryan race, and felt the need to cleanse it off Jews, why, one would ask, were the Germans merely asking t...