“Leave India in God’s hands, in modern parlance, to anarchy; and that anarchy may lead to internecine warfare for a time, or to unrestricted dacoities. From these a true India will arise in place of the false one we see.”…
Author: umashankar
I am just a watcher then. Sometimes I watch life, sometimes I watch death; many times I watch in between...
A Sliver of Platinum
I have paused for a siesta on the promenade, Faakir, Hush up the gathering commotion, that I live still.. ~Sudarshan Faakir I guess it is a pale shadow of the original. I have always had this problem with translations. But…
Breeze on the Grass
“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamouring to become visible." ~Vladimir Nabakov My dear readers, we have been together these past years. I have known…
A Far Cry from Mr Darcy
The concluding part of 'Never Forget a Ruby' As I stood stiff under a jet stream of water, the set of four faces kept throbbing in my head, they all saying something to my eyes squeezed shut. Hemant, Robin, Sonia,…
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 'Never Forget a Ruby' ‘Yes, I am…
The Man from Baker Street
(The story begins in 'Never Forget a Ruby' 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…
Never Forget a Ruby
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…
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, rattle of Kalashnikov. Peeking out the pane, I see skyscrapers raised on cacophony of flakes and wafers; buzz and…
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 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…
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…
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 of year is just perfect, neither hot nor cold and rarely wet. The air is fragrant with panicles bursting on…
One Grain Amongst the Storm 