The ravines of Chambal had a way of making every sound seem farther away than it really was. A twig breaking on the other side of a gorge could sound like a rifle being cocked beside your ear; the cry of a peacock could travel through the gullies like a warning from another world. In…
Category: Short Stories
Short Stories from India.
The Legend of Goli Kha
In the Topsia of the 1980s, before flyovers sliced through the sky and apartment towers began sprouting like ambitious weeds, there were lanes where the afternoon sun seemed to arrive hesitantly and leave even more reluctantly. The neighbourhood breathed in layers. From one end came the wood and metallic clatter of hand-pulled rickshaws and handcarts,…
Beneath the Still Water
The first thing they noticed was what was missing. Rajkumari Dasi had once possessed enough gold to make even the wealthiest women of the neighbourhood envious, yet that August morning her wrists were bare, her ears empty and her neck stripped of every ornament. The jewellery had vanished, but the dark marks around her throat…
Makhdumpur
In 1980, Makhdumpur was the sort of town that seemed to have been left halfway between two centuries. It sat in the Magadh country between Jehanabad and Gaya, though Jehanabad was still part of Gaya district then, and nobody in Makhdumpur cared much for the distinctions made by maps in distant government offices. The town…
Five Doors
The monsoon of the year 1215 smelled of wet laterite and crushed tulsi. Beneath a tamarind tree at the edge of a ruined courtyard, an old man sat listening to the rain strike the leaves. He was one hundred and twenty years old. His hands, spotted and thin as dried bel leaves, still remembered the…
Centuries Between Breaths
The jungle had spent nearly two centuries reclaiming the temple. Sea winds drifting in from the Bay of Bengal had carried salt into its stones, banyan roots had crept into tiny cracks and slowly split sculptured pillars apart, while monsoon rains had washed away staircases where pilgrims once climbed with folded hands and whispered prayers….
Last Watch on the Ridge
By sunset tomorrow, the ridge would belong either to Kumbhalgarh… or to the dead. The thought lingered in Bhairav Singh’s mind as the last glow of the sun slipped behind the jagged shoulders of the Aravalli hills. Evening gathered slowly over Kumbhalgarh, filling the valleys with deep blue shadows while the highest ridges still caught…
The Tail Lamp Never Died
The shrill whistle rose above the sleeping plains before dawn, long and melancholy, drifting over dew-soaked fields where the silhouettes of palm trees stood like silent sentries against the paling eastern sky. Beyond the station lamps, a goods train waited with the patience of a beast that knew no hurry. Forty-seven wagons stretched into the…
Queen Beneath the Water
The first thing the traveller noticed was the silence. Not the silence of emptiness, but the silence of something that had watched centuries pass. The afternoon sun blazed over the plains of Gujarat. Dust drifted across the road like faded silk. Parakeets screeched from neem trees. Somewhere beyond the fields, women sang while drawing water…
