Colored Red


Short Stories

This was in my Gmail Drafts. I have reproduced it faithfully without editing. I remember writing this story after my friend’s life.  July 14, 2010, is the date. I don’t know how this friend is doing since she mysteriously decided to vanish from my life a few years ago. Some of this is fiction, but […]

May 12, 2017

Those That Grow Best


Short Stories

It was a shy afternoon in Koramangala, then one of Bangalore’s ‘emerging’ areas, when I first met Saanvi. I never considered myself gangly, having acquired corners in all the right and wrong places from an early age, but Saanvi was. With her short hair and long limbs, she towered over me. I was never sure […]

February 15, 2017

The Theft


Short Stories

It was a day just like any other. Except that it wasn’t. My father is in his corner, in the hall as we like to call it. That’s how I knew it. The hall. The verandah. The bedroom. The kitchen. Now, we have fancier names. Living room. Gazebo. I sip the coffee, hot despite the […]

January 16, 2017

Soul Surrender


Short Stories

I started writing this blog post last Sunday, on the 9th of October. I stopped at a point where I had written, “blood was seeping into the ground.” I stopped because at that point, I came to know that my friend’s brother died in a road accident. When I went in the evening to meet […]

October 14, 2016

Words Without Time


Short Stories

Tick tock, tick tock. The clock struck its own rhythm. She hated it. It seemed relentless. There was no end to it, was there? Tick tock, tick tock. Every second. Then, every 2 hours, that ridiculous cuckoo would come out. The noise was getting on her nerves. She glanced at her watch, which unlike the […]

September 11, 2016

This is the night


Short Stories

The wind howls. It tears at you, at your shirt, whipping its greedy fangs into its sleeves. But you don’t care. You are on the bike, the road is empty, a devoid blackness of infinity stretching away into you, away from you, drawing you, lulling, hypnotizing, seducing. And you turn your palms, a little dew […]

February 2, 2016

The Box


Short Stories

Frances looked at the little box in her hand. She wasn’t sure how she came to be holding it in her hand. Around her, boys hooted and kids shrieked. Teachers scurried about looking vaguely harried and wonderfully busy. At 5, life can seem strange. At 50, it doesn’t seem to change. But that she would […]

January 1, 2016

The Gift


Short Stories

  Just a slight drizzle outside. Unseasonal. But then nothing was part of the season anymore. I peered inside the darkened windows of the bookshop. My own reflection peered back at me. From the outside, Patel’s Books, seemed almost like the relic of a pub. It stood well back from the street, almost as if […]

December 28, 2015

The Night The Circus Came to Town


Short Stories

It was the night the circus came to town. The days when cable TV as a word didn’t exist in our dictionary. Maharaja’s Circus, it was called. No malls. Cinemas, yes. But we would wait for the once-a-year show to reach our town. The night the circus came to town is one I would remember […]

December 21, 2015