(It all began here. Read the previous part here.) Unknown to Amar, his onerous passage through a Naga backyard was reported by the night-prowlers to the head of the tribesmen. A freshly baptised Christian who had foreclosed the skull-houses of his…
Author: umashankar
I am just a watcher then. Sometimes I watch life, sometimes I watch death; many times I watch in between...
Planet of Gibbons
(It all began here. Read the previous part here.) Part of Vernon’s right foot was gone with the roof of the aircraft. His boot was missing and so were his toes. A limp mass of red and white was dangling…
Chattanooga Choo Choo
(The story begins here) Mark pulled level at three hundred feet. He had flown enough around to know no hollong tree grew up that size, giants that they were. Buffeting was nasty so close to land and it was going…
Come Home to Fog (A Novella)
Prologue Fat Man had followed the Little Boy. The war was over for those who lived. Those who didn’t, they were still on battlefronts, crouching in bunkers or planes, or breathing water on the seabed. It was an endless night…
Diamonds in the Detritus
I remember how in my childhood time was like a river of molasses where I’d twiddle my thumbs like a noonday fly waiting for my father to return with the promised goodies. Waiting for the monthly issues of comics was…
Writing is So Long
As a student of Logic in my younger years, the first two examples of absolutely positive and negative statements I stumbled upon were, (1) Man is mortal. (2) No man is perfect. So utterly true are these sentences and so…
Exit Motherboard
One fine afternoon a fortnight ago my desktop Titan slipped into a deep sleep, ignoring all attempts to power it on. Having mulled over the lull, the wilting grey lump in my balding skull concluded a malfunction in the circuitry…
Beyond I, Robot
It was in the early Nineties that I started reading Isaac Asimov. Goaded by lingering childhood urges, I picked up I, Robot, a collection of stories about evolution of robotics, sometimes supervised by Dr Susan Calvin, a phenomenal Robopsychologist, never…
Fungus on the Filter
The opposite of time is memories. Memories, a span with no beginning, no end, no periods, only nebulous swaths of consciousness. Memories don’t tumble terminally like the sand in an hourglass. Or tick away with the finality of the arms…
End of Dusk
The evening is still, the birds silent, the wind dead like a tramp, flopped on a footpath. The sky is dressed in dust and dusk. His lungs cannot pull in half the air they used to soak till the last…
The Cuckoo’s Calling -A Review
“The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them.” ‘J. K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith’, proclaims a round, black sticker on the volume of The Cuckoo’s Calling,…
The Blind Man’s Garden –A Review
Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden is a dark story of a devout Muslim, proud and penitent of the lost glory of Islam, set against the turbulent aftermath of 9/11 massacre. Afghanistan is smoldering in the grisly conflict between Al…
One Grain Amongst the Storm 