Fairy tales often begin with: Once upon a time, and end with happily ever after. But then, like so many others, I too oscillated between belief and disbelief as I grew into my adulthood. When the auto driver in Chennai gave back the exact change, and the meter did not...
“Here.” Raju pressed the slightly damp, soiled 100-rupee note into his mother’s palm, his eyes taking in her happiness at the unexpected bonanza. Guiltily, he looked away, not quite meeting her eyes, and wondered how he would explain this additional expense to his...
I was forty when I decided to end my marriage. Needless to say, everyone was shocked and wondered at my audacity in ending a twenty-plus-year-old marriage. But the fact was my marriage was a sham, a farce right from the beginning. I started disliking my husband a few...
“What? How could he just walk away after thirty years of marriage?”… Without his wallet or belongings? Mayuri sat surrounded by people, noises, and voices, yet nothing reached her. It was the fifth day since her world turned upside down. Did they fight? Was the...
“Just stop this and get working!” The static air buzzed next to her ear! Caught in the Act, Shilpa’s heart leapt up to be enmeshed somewhere near her oesophagus. Her heart pounding, she guiltily closed her tab on Kunal’s Instagram page. The familiar flush started at...
“It’s remarkable that none of us know more about her daughter…absolutely no idea where she stays, her number …nothing…. zilch!” Lakshmi was upset and rightly so that one of the residents of her ‘home’ was suffering from a stroke which led to coma and none of...
I am situated at strategic crossroads yet common people 'see' me only when the GPS instructs them to take a turn at my location. And sometimes not even then. I am otherwise remembered on 14th April when I am spruced up and bird droppings are washed off me in...
He helped himself to the size-eleven shoes left outside the kitchen door of the farm house. He had just enough time to vault over the fence earning himself a deep scratch in his forearms before the dog managed to make a meal of his limbs. “I am getting soft!”...
It was the deaths that shook the neighbourhood. The cheer cast by the delayed onset of the southwest monsoon and the overnight downpour was overcast by the deaths in this otherwise serene community. The rain notwithstanding, the crowd assembled in sizable pockets...