Archive by Author

A Polar Bear Remembers

‘There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.’ ~ A Study in Scarlet Read the preceding part ‘The Man from Baker Street‘ here. The story begins here in ‘Tell Me, Cleopatra!‘ ‘Yes, I am mad about books. And for a bookworm like me, it is sacrilege not to have heard […]

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The Man from Baker Street

(The story begins in ‘Tell me, Cleopatra!’ Read it here. ) I was about to begin hating ‘dodger blue’ cars for years to come but I didn’t know it then. It was morning still and we were swarming the porches of Tagore Block. The air was crisp, tinged with smoke from the bonfires of fallen […]

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Tell Me, Cleopatra!

She was not a friend, nor a classmate, nor a social sibling –the veil under which some people fraternised in the college. We were graduating in the same year and we both had English Literature and she was in the other section further down the hallway. Although the timings for the classes were the same […]

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The Song of Jar Jar Binks

I can smell the diction Taliban just beyond my window. I can hear the rat-a-tat of their words, its robotic monotony, flapping like dodo. Peeking out the pane, I see skyscrapers raised on cacophony of flakes and wafers; buzz and fuzz of tones, grating of sandpapers. Melody died, fell afoul of the tone deaf tribe, […]

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Sam Was Sad

It was a sultry summer morning when I first met Sam twenty five years ago. My roommate was groveling for an omelet, sprawled in his bed. He had been missing his turn at cooking breakfast for the fourth day in a row. ‘I swear I’ll take over tomorrow.’ I hate the promise of tomorrows. Ask […]

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To Kill a Dying Monk -II

The concluding part of the Dying Monk series. Read the first part here. Murali recovered his canvas shoes from a hollow in the trunk and slipped to the ground on his toes. Moving quickly, he broke into a half-crouching run through the mustard fields till he reached the abandoned tube-well shed. Looking up at the […]

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To Kill a Dying Monk

Murali lay still on a festoon of boughs of the twin mango trees at the edge of the orchard. The pair of owls that had tried their best to scare him off with a medley of boos had fallen silent. A half moon hung in the midnight sky shedding a faint light on the somnolent […]

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A Mélange of Monologues

I was young when my family pulled out of a city to the backwaters of the country. Of the many heartbreaks I weathered, the loss of my small book club was the most debilitating. The civilisation I was uprooted from seemed oceans away. Children of the jungle had heard neither of Enid nor Blyton; Tintin […]

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Flames and Ashes

It is a Sunday morning and folks are huddled up in sheets.  The protesting whine of autos whisking the unwilling souls to their workplaces has been lulled for the interregnum. The birds are a riot of notes and I am trying to savour the unique melody of each in isolation. Some warblings are perennial and […]

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The Monk in the Rain

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with March, the onset of summers since early days. The weather in that small patch is just perfect, neither hot nor cold and rarely wet. The air is fragrant with flowers bursting on mango trees. Gusts of wind sweep the fallen leaves aimlessly amidst the rhythmic calls of koels. Fields […]

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