Somewhere between the winter fields of Bengal and the frozen lakes of Boston, a little piece of winter learnt to travel. The first thing Tushar learnt about ice was that it had a sound. It was not the crack of a branch beneath a foot or the brittle snap of a dried leaf, but a…
Tag: historical fiction
Staircase to the Sky
The first time Haran saw the place where the tower was to stand, the land lay beneath a pitiless sun, the red earth cracked into a thousand small maps. Beyond the village, sal trees climbed low hills, their leaves whispering in the hot wind, while cattle nosed at dry grass beside a pond reduced to…
Seven Thousand Gallons
Somewhere between the place where a thing is made and the place where it is needed, its value can change beyond recognition. Calcutta, November 1796. The Hooghly smelt of wet earth, fish, tar and rotting timber, its brown waters shouldering past the ghats beneath a sky heavy with rain. Boatmen called to one another across…
The Oldest Covenant
The rain had begun before sunset, first as a thin patter on the high windows of the hospital and then as a furious drumming that seemed to shake the old building at its foundations. By nightfall, Poona was swallowed by water and darkness. The gutters overflowed. The neem trees bent beneath the wind. Somewhere beyond…
The Last Breath
The child had stopped breathing before the sun reached its highest place. Yet his mother continued to warm a little brass bowl of water beside the hearth, fearing the fever might return. Outside, the settlement baked beneath an obdurate summer sky. The mud walls of the houses had turned the colour of old turmeric, the…
When She Chose to Live
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…
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…
