THiRST

And the feather of thought swayed with the lightness of the wind. They say, you have to be the wings of the bird to fly; to travel and unravel, to stay and drift, to be and be forgotten, to be seen and imagined, to be the truth and a lie. The lights got dim, and…

THE EXiLE

And she kept her disguise aside and came out when the sun went out. She isn’t alone; she dances along with a horde of equally beautiful women around her sharing a common disguise. They have the beauty of a cool breeze in hot weather; you never get enough of them. They stay disguised as plants…

THE WALK

And on the seventieth floor of the skyscraper was a room numbered 7T57 that is where I had come to. As I put the key and pushed in the door of the room, it opened out to a garden, well, that was what it looked like. There were chairs and tables of polished wood and…

HOMECOMiNG

And as I walk, crushing the dead fragile leaves, under my feet, I stop after a few brisk steps. It was and is never easy to jump out of a small window and track the faded footsteps on dry grass, but that exactly is how I will find my way back home. I have travelled…

THE SOMNAMBULiST iCE-CREAM SELLER WALKS BESiDES A STEAM ENGiNE POWERED TRAiN

And as he walks he puts a hand on his cap covered head, out of sheer habit, lest the smoke from the steam engine throw the cap off from its ground. The cap is striped like that of a school boy’s. It is indeed out of sheer habit that the ice-cream seller puts his hand…

THE WRiTER

And the wind doesn’t stop, doesn’t stay, and doesn’t wait. It has to travel like the thirsty traveler that it is; it has to go on and on, and meet people and places. Challenge the mountains and change courses of rivers. The wind has seen it all, and knows what is next. The wind is…

BEHiND THE VEiL

“And today is no different”, she said. Like a mathematical assumption, let the girl be X. Let her be X because I really do not know her name, or what she liked herself to be addressed in. She sat there on the lonely bench, holding a copy of The Liar’s Weave by Tashan Mehta. Intrigued…

FELL iN LOVE

And this life has always been a mystery, to you, to me and to Kashiv. He doesn’t usually go out and when he does he spends the whole day in one place, staring at the sky, mountains and the forest.  He shares a kinship to everything around him flowers, light and pebbles. He likes being…

ON THE OTHER SiDE OF SMOKE

And master Mehmut, the well-digger, in Orhan Pamuk’s The Red Haired Woman, was inside the well because of an accident that made him stay there inside for a few hours until someone rescued him; Mr. Okada in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle went inside the dry well to think, to think in peace and…

THE CONVERSATiONS

And as we sat there looking at each other but never quite seeing, I asked what had been in my mind for centuries. I have always believed, and I have believed what I read, that questions are always more important than answers; so in this tête-a-tête I had an upper hand, I was stronger. It…