Ginger drafts...

“There you are. Go on now. Your father is waiting.” Mother was sweeping the floor. She rearranged the newspapers spread open on the glass table top before her, and replaced the dry flowers from the china vase with the freshly plucked ones. She recovered a lonely torn blue sock from a web of dust; it had made home the dark corner under the sofa. “I am wearing the purple trousers today” I informed as a matter of fact, and left the house to explore the paddy fields. The farmer had turned the motor pump on; it was time to frolic under the gush of the voluble hose. When we moved into the new house, I was very happy. The new house was bigger than the previous one; its six rooms were furnished with deco art and they were nothing short of opulent. The great arch in the hall with its gilt beaded chandelier was an eye candy; the violet gauze curtains ruffled in the breeze throughout the day; our reflections on the impeccable polish of the cold marble floor followed us everywhere. Around the ...

At first, I found it hard to comprehend. A teenage girl had visited my clinic. The girl’s mother, a superstitious woman had delayed consultation with a doctor, for she feared that she would leave the gods disconcerted. The teenage girl had turned into something of a celebrity in the neighbourhood; hordes of labour women rallied to my clinic from the adjoining villages. Men waited under their parked Lorries; with their brown gums chewing tobacco and their scarred fingers exchanging cigarette stubs, they holidayed before the clinic. The day had been chosen for a doctor’s consultation based on a religious scripture’s dubious conception of the village’s temple men. Two groups of women sat with their backs forming the crown of battlements on either side of the clinic; in the centre of the circular spine battlements were the bronze idols of their goddesses. The girl was wearing a crimson red pullover on top of white pyjamas; sleeves of the dress were stitched tight around her arms. A white...

I broke into a trot, negligently hoofing along the path riddled with thick undergrowth and mushy mud. Spineless shrubs drooped lazily on either ends, their heads crowned with wild flowers fidgeted between my legs as I crossed their paths. I wounded my left hind leg around the knee and was slightly bleeding. I paused and looked about me; it was so dark that shadows were clinging desperately to their hosts. Around me were the sights bees buzzing overhead; crickets chirping from their hideouts concealed in the burrows between the trees; birds flitting their wings melodiously from treetops; and antelopes flexing their long bodies on forelimbs. In the distance, there was the bewitching sound of water splashing from a height into a pond. Near the pond, I heard the sound of lapping tongues; a herd of them must be together. There was no escaping the dark; night had gobbled up everything around me. Fireflies flickered through the branches of tall trees; they were heading nowhere in particular...

A pleasant morning such as this can never go wrong. I leaned my bicycle on a roadside tree to relieve myself of the nature call. When I returned, a cat greeted me with its front paws on the bicycle’s front tyre. I squatted before him for a better look; he was a lovely kitten, the blue irises of his eyes dropped back to reveal dark vertical pupils. I proceeded to pat him on his nape, lifted him up and held by my chest. I ran my fingers around his tender ears; he flapped them fitfully to discourage me. Sitting under the shade of the broad leafed tree that revelled in a cornucopia of leaves, I befriended the kitten; counted his toes and patted his bumpy spine. I wound my palm into a cylindrical aperture and playfully lifted his tail; at this, his soft ebony furred tail slipped like a limp snake. Picking up speed racing down the incline, i felt like a laser torch beam that gouged tunnels into mountains. As I bicycled back to the laboratory, the cold winter wind wafted through the narrow ...

“I lit your streets and you called us yellow vomit” fidgeting with the microphone, sodium continued after clearing his throat. In the parliament, men and women sat behind great oak desks; labels were printed across each of them. Sodium’s was labelled table salt. Presently, he was interrupted by chlorine. She was sharing the podium with him. “Speak for yourself; we scuttle the sea bed together does not mean I will share your ignominy” sodium was taken aback a bit; his hands shivered. With the back of his hand, he mopped his brow before pulling out a crumpled sheet of paper from his trouser pockets and spreading it open before him. “I soaked your dark alleys with crimson light”. The speaker’s nervousness showed in his petered voice. He brandished his helplessness; since the first installation of the planet, he was betrothed to chlorine and never imagined a life without her. He feared the worst; a divorce with chlorine would mean annihilation – oxidation. The big breasted, cat eyed, ...

I was too young at the time; about eight years old. A political leader was assassinated and the neighbourhood rose up like a swarm of bees whose honey comb had just been poked at. From the roof of our house, we jumped over the newly cemented roof of the temple. Women huddled up into islands by the colony’s temple; like beads of a necklace, groups of housewives packed themselves together. Every now and then, a woman would leave the group and join the adjoining one. With our backs rested against the temple’s crown, we tried to make sense of what little information we had about the incident. Around us were the slanted roof tops with red brick tiles; a little further away were the thatched roofs with mud walls. In the horizon, sun was setting down; the yellow gaze withdrew into the cavity that the fireball dug into at night. Behind us, night was carpeting the tree tops, long turrets and factory chimneys; in the distance behind our cricket ground, smoke billowed and wore dark curly hair t...

Under the shade of a tree with branches cropped like a mushroom, Nirmala flipped the frail pale yellow pages of an old book. She had found it in her father’s attic that morning while rummaging for a knitting needle. Its page numbers were smudged and the pages themselves flaking so much so that she had to close it shut. ‘Perhaps another time’ she thought, spreading the sari folds neatly on her lap. It had to be the lookalike of the two peacocks’ design as she had seen on the counterpane of her friend’s; now she fitted the garment in the frame and began knitting. The afternoon sun tinselled the garment before her through the reflection of her shiny gilt pendants. Then as if seized by an imaginary hand, she rose up, collected her things and issued a steady gait towards the hall door. Unbuckled, her suede sandals swept in their wake, dry leaves and crumpled papers strewn all around the compound. Seated behind the dark mahogany table, with her legs spread under it, she arched her back on ...

It was about six in the evening. There was a long queue at the dentist next door, so I trotted along to find another one. On the main road, over the neon lights were drab under hangs of torn saris and petticoats. A dark and skinny woman was mopping the portico which supported a corroded white board; beside the blue cross, in red Arial font, the words ‘Dentist’ were written across. The clinic was in the first floor, and the rice mill owners had laid down rice bags for sampling on the stair case. The railing on the stair case was broken at the bends and hanged like tongues of scarecrows. Water from a house overflew onto the greasy stairs; soap foams puddled up and floated along to meet my feet. On the ground floor, a pregnant woman was heavily running after an infant who beat his feet on the ground to show his denial about everything under the sun. On the first floor, a plastic mug found itself under the running tap and scattered a stream of water across in my direction. In a fitful att...

I never really liked the sadistic bonding that I shared with the neutron; a charge less moron, disinterested and boring type. He abducted me when I was young and since then locked me up in this dingy house nucleus. I raise my eyes every now and then to sneak a peek at the excited electrons; with negligible mass, they spread their phantom like bodies around the house in layers. The electrons form an impenetrable fortress around the house; they are highly unpredictable and omnipresent. These electrons are a fascinating lot; around every house with an abducted proton like me, these ladies spread their angelic wings and dance in the moonlight of electromagnetic nights. Wave-like, they exist everywhere around the house; with a fogged vision, all my life, I have looked up to the messengers. But I wish to reserve the bit about messengers for later. First a brief about the colony The insipid colony that I live in has but one mysterious house. Legend has it that the master of this house, the ...

Mother tells me I can’t possibly fall in love with a red blood cell. We are the suicide bombers of our civilisation; we are summoned at the eleventh hour. Yesterday, when the host had developed a puncture on the skin around the ankle, the older ones were summoned with immediate effect. I have witnessed my siblings emerging out of the bone marrows at night; pulling the drapes of red tissues apart, they all rafted through the treacherous bends of arteries to reach the site of destruction. Once there, the fattest ones laid the foundation by resting their backs against the rupture. Exposure to air outside imploded their curved backs and stitched them flat together to make a wall; the younger ones stepped over the shoulders of the dead corpses that were now stitched together; and so on, the wall was built of corpses. We, platelets have been living a life of inevitable death; like the scales of fish we align ourselves together to die; walls are stitched out of our corpses. On the day I was...