MY INTEL WAS spot on. The shivalayam on the edge of the village was deserted. A little black cat had perched on the compound wall and watched me change. It mewed suspiciously when I’d put on the fake whiskers and beard. I said ‘shoo’ a couple of times, but the …
‘RICE? RICE? RICE?’ Some of the people shook their heads. Some covered their plantain leaves with their left hands. Others looked up with embarrassment at the slouched figure of Mihir – the boy Rama Shastri had tasked with serving the guests this morning – and said yes. When Mihir reached …
MANDIRAMMA BANDA IS EITHER the first or the last thing you will see in Palem, depending on which way you approach the village. It is a rather grotesque, odd-shaped rock about five feet high that leans back against the main trunk of a banyan tree, pushed off to one corner …
VIDVAAN SHED HIS first tear of the night when he plucked the wings off the body of his alter. There were four in number, featherless, sticky and transparent like those of a dragonfly, attached to each of the puffy little arms. When Vidvaan pulled out the first one, red liquid …
I SLIP THROUGH the shuttered glass window like a moonbeam. The room I enter is unfamiliar, but that does not mean a thing. Memory is a luxury I no longer have. This is my first time in here, I tell myself, watching the single bed with the unrumpled white sheets, …
‘THAT FELLOW OMPRAKASH has been filling the boy’s mind with rubbish,’ said Vishwas, my husband of thirteen years, regional officer at Palem’s Grameena Vikas Bank. It was a warm Wednesday night, and we were seated around the oval dining table we’d bought with the previous month’s Holi bonus. At eight …
RAMA SHASTRI FINISHED his morning worship of the sun, and came into the front room of his house coated in sweat. He was a thin, almost sickened man with a triangular face, a full head of porcupine-like black hair, and gaunt cheekbones. He was not an unhealthy man by any …
1921. I AM ARTHUR COTTON. People in these parts call me Cotton dora. Twenty two years after my death, the villagers of Palem decided that it was time to commemorate my work in this way: by erecting a seven-foot bronze statue of me on top of a five-foot stone pedestal. …
THE ELEVEN A.M. bus to Dhavaleshwaram had only two passengers in it: a young couple who had chosen one corner of the last seat. As he got on at the Palem stop and made for his usual place in the middle row, by the right-hand-side window, Vilas Rao found himself …
TWO THINGS HAPPENED on the eleventh day after my mother’s passing. One: Vinay wanted Amma’s watering can for himself. Two: a man came to visit me; a man I’d never seen before; a man who had one of those vaguely familiar faces that made you uncomfortable; a man who introduced …