Short Story - Wrong Skills

When the benevolent old king died, the kingdom was flung into great turmoil. The feverish King, on his deathbed, in his final moment of lucidity, pronounced that which most of his subjects had hoped he would not – that after him, his son be made the rightful King. The collective gasps from everybody present in the room at the time drowned out the King’s actual last words, ones that he had meticulously prepared and rehearsed over the previous week.

That a ruler’s son would succeed his father to the throne was not the cause for concern. The problem was the son himself. It was a widely held belief that the boy was a retard. Indeed, there were whispered suggestions that he was not even the King’s own son and that the King had in fact enlisted the services of his closest minister to administer the requisite services upon the Queen.

Now, these insinuations, though vile, weren’t entirely unfounded either. It was common knowledge, that the King had, for many years remained childless, despite having changed wives and doctors numerous times, before there had finally arrived the news that the then Queen had miraculously delivered a son and that the King’s succession was, therefore, assured. The skepticism of his subjects found its roots in this miracle, and though the kingdom had rejoiced with great fervor, there had hung over the festivities a perceptible air of doubt, even mild discontent, for there was the matter of the King’s hugely popular teenaged nephew – son of his long dead brother – whom, the Kingdom had regarded as the next King with much fondness and whose life had suddenly become so utterly meaningless.

And then, over the next two decades, their hopes had slowly gathered wind again. From the outset, the young Prince had demonstrated a complete lack of appetite for learning. He fumbled when he spoke. . He couldn’t remember letters of the alphabet. He failed to remember the names of objects. He was clumsy with weapons and armour. He couldn’t ride a horse. He developed a pot belly. By the time he was fifteen, he had begun to go bald.

His only interest, it appeared, was food and it’s cooking. He spent hours in the kitchen with the royal chefs and servants. They were, of course, embarrassed by his presence and begged him to stay away so they could concentrate on their work, but he obstinately stayed on. The King was understandably dismayed by all of this. He forbade the Prince to visit the royal kitchens, to which the boy responded by locking himself up in his chambers for weeks, without food. It wasn’t until the Queen (against the wished of the King) promised to the Prince that not only would he be allowed to enter the kitchens but that she would accompany him there, that he agreed to emerge. Soon after, he became an indispensible member of the chef’s team; he showed such great aptitude for his work that in a year’s time, the chef let the Prince prepare entire meals for the palace, without supervision.

By and by, the King resigned himself to the ways of his son. He began to divert an increasing amount of attention to his nephew, who by this time, had turned into a fine young man. At dinner, the nephew regained his place next to the King and the two of them spent their time at the table speaking highly of the Prince’s cooking. The Prince was thrilled by their compliments. The Queen wept quietly inside the isolation of her chambers. The Kingdom again came to regard the nephew as their next ruler and so it was that when the King pronounced the wrong name on his deathbed, the kingdom was flung into great turmoil. The very next day, the nephew announced that he would leave the kingdom and refused to attend the crowning of the new King. He left and with him left hundreds of his most loyal men and women.

The first request the Prince made, to his appalled ministers whilst they were in consultations on the impending crowning ceremony, was that he be allowed to oversee the grand feast after the ceremony. That is impossible! They told him. They couldn’t let the King become a subject of ridicule! Now that he was no longer just a delinquent Prince but the ruler of a kingdom, there was the matter of keeping up appearances! They reasoned with him. But the Prince remained unmoved. There is only one thing I know to do well and though unworthy of Kings it may be, I believe my subjects should not be denied the best that I have to offer them. He said.

The day of the ceremony arrived. The crowd cheered and then fell silent, while the new King fumbled through his first address to them. Towards the end, some were openly jeering him and when it ended, polite applause was offered, and the kingdom entered the grand hall, venue of the grand feast, in a sombre mood.

But at some point during the feast, towards the end of the second course, they say, a remarkable thing happened. The subjects, quiet and despondent until then, suddenly started to find their voice again. There was laughter, isolated at first, but soon it had spread over the entire hall. By the time the feast ended, the hall was in an uproar. People danced on the tables in manic frenzy and when the King appeared before them, they screamed and chanted his name. The ministers were dumbfounded. They scratched their heads and looked quizzically at one another, unable to comprehend the incredible scenes being enacted before them. The King looked towards them and smiled, although later, in memory, it was to change into a smirk.

The grand success of the ceremony ushered in with it a period of magnificent joy and peace. The King allowed his ministers to decide matters of the state, ill equipped as he was to do so himself. Instead, he spent his days walking around the kingdom and mixing with his subjects. Often, he would stop at a house and offer to cook for them. The food he would cook would melt away the last remaining vestiges of cynicism from the minds of his subjects. The Kingdom prospered.

It went on for many years thus, before, the inevitable news trickled in. The nephew, together with a massive army he had built in the intervening years, was planning to attack the kingdom. The King consulted with his ministers and they suggested that the best course of action would be to send out a team of emissaries to negotiate peacefully. The severed heads, ghastly pale - the skin on the faces had flaked off from lying submerged in stagnant water for there had been a torrential downpour the previous day -, of the emissaries returned in a creaky chest.

Next, a troop of the kingdom’s finest warriors was sent out. At the end of a month, they had not returned. The ministers were at a loss. The King asked if more forces could be sent out, but the Ministers asked him to not do so, for there was no telling what had become of the ones sent earlier and that they would need as many at hand to defend their land when the enemies were upon them. One or two ministers broached the possibility of a surrender so further damage be spared, but this the King would not allow. And so they waited, fearful and desperate, for the dreaded forces to arrive.

The King spent his days increasingly confined to his chambers. He grew dejected and sad, and with him did the entire kingdom. He refused to venture out into the city, although he was urged to, in order to reinstate morale. What can I do! He cried. I can do nothing for them! I cannot save them! What can I do! Cook for them? Someone commented, wryly, that that wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Then one day, the enemies arrived. It was a staggering sight. From their vantage points on the watchtowers, the men reported that the troops stretched for miles and miles; the last of the men weren’t even within sight. There was nothing that could possibly be done, the King was told, other than die a heroic death.

A heroic death! The King gasped. A heroic death! Why, I cannot even hold a sword without cutting myself!

That is when it occurred to him. The last thing, the only thing he could do. And so, he called upon his subjects to gather in the grand hall where his first feast had been, so he could address them in this time of despair.

You have seen the enemy advancing at us! He told them. And much as I would like to calm you, to assure you that everything will be well and we will defend our lands successfully, you know that it is not true. I am not the King that can save you, my subjects! And you have known this all along. We have spent some good years together, feasting and celebrating our lives. But I cannot be the King you will now expect me to be! There is nothing I can do to save you. And so, I propose to do the only thing I know how to do. One last time. A grand feast! The greatest celebration of our times yet! Food that nobody’s ever seen before! Revelry that will resound through times to come!

The grand feast began. The sound of the merriment floated through the wind and reached the enemies. The Nephew, seated at the dinner table with his chiefs, heard it and couldn’t suppress a chuckle. Fools! He laughed. The Chiefs joined in the laughter and when it subsided, returned pensively to their dinner. They lay in their beds staring at the darkness, kept awake by the delirium of their enemies, until suddenly near sunrise, all became quiet.

When they reached the gates, wide open, they found the town deserted. A bewitching aroma lingered in the air. They stumbled around the streets cluelessly, unsure of what to expect, until they reached the grand hall of the feasts, where they encountered the extraordinary sight of thousand s of men and women, piled over one another in wild orgies, eyes open in expressions of mad joy and bliss, stone dead, poisoned by what they had eaten.

Short Story - A Life Less Regular

It was to my third mail that I finally received a response from the man who, after having disappeared for nearly twenty five years, had been found to have returned to his home one fine day. His reply was a curt mention of a date and time; I had expressed a desire to meet him and, in the second and third mails, assured him that I was not a journalist and had no intention of publishing his story. I had, of course, lied. As a symbolic gesture, however, I had agreed to not carry notepads or other recording devices and, therefore, if the story is found to carry a tone more akin to a narration than a conversation, and lacking in specific details, you know why that is.

I spent a few hours in his neighbourhood, wandering around and striking up conversations at cafés, before I went in to meet him. It was one of those quaint colonies on the fringes of a big city where the same families had spent generations and would continue to do so. I learnt that nobody quite knew where he’d been all these years and how he’d miraculously reappeared. It appeared he rarely ever ventured outdoors since his return and hardly anybody had actually seen him. They spoke of obvious physical changes; the man was in his mid twenties when he disappeared. He belonged to an affluent family. His father had run a pretty successful business, something to do with auto spare parts, until he had died in a freak accident at a golf course when he had tripped on something and the golf cart behind him had run over his face. The business has gradually decayed and shut down.

I was ushered into the drawing hall by an old maid, who asked me to wait there. There wasn’t a sofa or a chair in sight. When she left the room, I walked to the window at one end of the room and found it overlooked a garden of weeds, mushrooms and wildflowers. I stood there waiting, smelling the musty, not disagreeable, smell of disrepair. Presently, I heard a man’s voice behind me and I turned to find him standing near the door into which the maid had disappeared earlier.

He was a frail man, stooped slightly, and when he extended his hand, I found it pale and exquisite, like that of a young woman. Greetings exchanged, we stood there in an uncomfortable silence, looking at each other sheepishly and then away, for several moments, and I was beginning to wonder how to begin when the maid returned with two plastic chairs. She asked if we’d like some tea. I nodded and he asked to be brought whiskey instead. I thought briefly if I should do so too but from the maid’s audible sigh I realized it wasn’t a habit she entirely approved of and decided against it.

“What do you do? Who told you about me?” He asked. He had a raspy, whispery sort of voice – the voice of a man not used to speaking and used to a lot of cigarettes, I surmised.

“Oh, I am just a, you know, I work for this glass manufacturing company, I am in the administration department. Quite boring actually.”

He nodded. “And where did you hear of me?”

“Oh, I don’t remember. I think a friend of mine has some relatives who live in this part of town – he may have mentioned you. It was over drinks, I remember that. Later, I asked him if he could get me in touch with you. He brought me your mail address about a month back. I have no clue how he got it.” I hoped he wouldn’t delve further. He did not.

“Do you know why I agreed to see you?”

I shook my head. He continued.

“Because you made at least seven fairly obvious grammatical mistakes in the twelve lines you wrote to me. Told me you are unlikely to have read anything beyond office memos. I avoid people who have an interest in literature.”

Instinctively I turned towards the huge wall mounted bookshelf in the room and I registered for the first time as strange that it did not contain a single book. Anyway, I wasn’t sure how he expected me to react to this strange explanation and remained silent, fighting back the obvious urge to ask what those grammatical errors were.

“So, what happened?” I asked and realized immediately how utterly clumsy the question was.

He chuckled. “That’s it? That direct?”

The maid arrived with her tray in time to spare me further embarrassment.

“Well,” he said after sipping the whiskey a couple of times, “I suppose there wasn’t another way. Unless you had the patience to become friends with me – and right now you don’t know if that’s even possible – the subject wouldn’t appear in course of a normal conversation.”

He gulped down the rest of the whiskey in his glass and filled it again.

“What would you say,” he asked me,” if I say I was trapped inside books all this time?”

“What?”

“Yes, what would you say?”

“Well, I wouldn’t know what to say.”

He gulped down the contents of the second glass. Filled it again - this time, only ice cubes to go with the whiskey.

“But that is what happened.”

Over the next half hour, the man went on to narrate to me this astonishing story.

“As a kid, I used to make entries in a diary that my father had bought me, just random stories, completely lacking in even basic literary value. My father also bought me a bunch of books – some of the great classics in abridged, children’s editions – and I read them with great interest but precious little understanding. I used to try and copy the themes of those books into what I wrote myself. So after I read Treasure Island, I wrote one about a lost island with treasure in it, that sort of thing. I wrote them on pieces of stray paper which my father then meticulously arranged, stapled together and filed away. He used to think, or at least I think he used to think, that I had a talent for the written word and like most things he said then, I blindly believed him. And so, by the time I entered my teens, my sole ambition in life was to become a novelist. So I kept writing this and that and found everyone who read them had good things to say. Everyone, until I became friends with this bespectacled guy in college who had a reputation for being a great lover of literature. So obviously I asked him to comment upon some of my stories. I remember vividly his words after he’d read a few. “There isn’t a doubt that you have a way with words. But really, all of this stuff you’ve written, what use is it? It means nothing. Honestly boy, don’t take it hard, but you’ve nothing to say.” I was shattered. I didn’t leave my room for days after that. I came to loathe myself, my father, the life I lived. Was it my fault that I was born into a regular family, a life where all my needs were fulfilled and grew up like everyone else did? Why wasn’t I born in a troubled society instead? During a revolution! How cruel is it to bestow upon a man a gift for something and then give him a life in which his hopes of using it are taken away! Anyway, after a few days, that boy came to see me in my room. I told him everything. How can I have anything to write about if nothing happens in my life! I asked him. “I do not have the answer to it,” he said, “but I can bring you books. Novels. Great works. And you can read them. And you can learn from them. And who knows, maybe one day you will discover something in your life worth describing, worth sharing with everyone else. “ So he began to bring me books. All kinds. Authors I’d never heard of. In the beginning, I found reading those terribly difficult. I’d throw away a book in disgust having read barely a page. And then, one day, he brought me Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. I read it wide-eyed late into the night. And when I woke up the next morning, I found myself on a strange new bed and beside me lay Gregor Samsa as a vermin.”

I shall refrain from recounting details of my exclamations of disbelief and amazement beyond this point for they serve no purpose to the story.

“Yes, Gregor Samsa,” he continued, “I was petrified. I shrieked and jumped up from the bed. He continued to sleep undisturbed. Presently, the door opened and the story began. I realized none of the characters could see me. I was just there in the story and there was nothing I could do. Of course, I thought that I was dreaming and with the end of the story, I’d wake up and everything would be fine. But when I reached the end of the story, the strangest thing happened. I found myself suddenly transported on a boat traveling through a murky river. I didn’t know where I was until I began to listen to the conversations of the other five men on the boat and found one of them was called Marlow. Charles Marlow. And thus began Heart of Darkness. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Heart of Darkness ended and another novel began and so it went. I lived inside story after story for years, trapped and unable to get out. I saw Renaissance Europe – Michelangelo, Da Vinci, all of them and I saw the deplorable acts of sexual theatre in De Sade’s imagination. I fought against the Germans and then, in a different story, with them. One of my greatest experiences was when I lived through pretty much the history of the world at the side of Beauvoir’s immortal character of Fosca. So you see, I was trapped inside books for twenty five years. I do not expect anyone to believe it. But there it is. And then one day, I don’t know how, I woke up and found myself here. For a while I thought this too was a story. Who knows, perhaps it is. Anyway, here I am and my entire life has passed me by without my having lived it.”

Short Story - Stories of Pain and Bliss

“And then one day, “said the Novelist, “I woke up and found myself gripped by an overwhelming fear of I knew not what.”

“Yeah?” I murmured, engrossed in the frantic, haphazard movements of the ant around which I had marked an imaginary boundary with my finger.

“Are you even listening to what I am saying?”

I sighed. It had been over an hour since the man had approached my table and asked if he could join me. His eyes were red and he looked so troubled and in need of some company that I had not the heart to refuse. And so he’d occupied the chair opposite mine, introduced himself as the writer of a dozen novels, out of which I’d heard the name of one or two and hadn’t read any, and begun to narrate a story which he said was the most bizarre and insisted was that of his own life. Through the next forty minutes, he recounted, in excruciating detail, his most trivial memories of growing up and writing. Twenty minutes into it, I was convinced that there wasn’t really a story at all. Whatever it was, however, wasn’t done yet and the only reason I hadn’t walked out on him yet was the beer mug in front of me and his offer to pay for it and as many others as I liked. I squashed the ant with my left thumb and looked up at him.

“You woke up gripped by a strange fear. Yeah, I am listening.”

He looked pleased.

“Yes, a very strange fear. In fact, I am not even sure if it actually was fear. More like anxiety, probably. Only, it wasn’t vague and less immediate as anxieties usually are. My heart beat violently and I could feel drops of perspiration emerge from behind each ear and trace their paths through my cheeks. When you are a writer, you tend to remember that sort of detail, I suppose.”

He paused as the waiter refilled our mugs. My eyes wandered to the other tables. On an adjacent table, another man, affluent of appearance, sat alone. His glass of whiskey looked untouched; the ashtray on his table was choked with cigarette butts. Perhaps sensing my gaze, he turned towards me and I realized how incredibly feeble the lights were, for I couldn’t make out his features. He fumbled inside his coat and found another cigarette. He struck a match, holding it between his thumb and middle finger, and it illuminated briefly, a wistful smile and the stump where his index finger had been. The Novelist was speaking again.

“At first I didn’t know what to do. I paced my apartment purposelessly. Everything looked in order. The girl I had spent the night with was gone; it was past noon. I went downstairs and read a newspaper at the café on the other side of the street. I spoke to two women on the next table. I don’t remember the conversation but it was genial. But when I returned to the apartment, that oppressing feat still remained. Anyway, I sat down to work on my novel, thinking it would take my mind off whatever it was that bothered me. I found the words come surprisingly easy to me, as I started to write. In no time, I had three paragraphs penned. I was thrilled. I made myself a coffee and returned to the table. As I glanced through what I’d written that morning, I had this odd feeling of having read it before. I re-read it a few times. Yes, definitely, I’d read it before. In fact, it occurred to me that I had actually written something like this before and unintentionally, I was repeating myself.”

I noted that the man at the other table had now turned towards us and was intently listening to the Novelist speak.

“So,” the Novelist continued, “I pulled out one of my earlier novels from the shelf – the one in which I thought I would find the paragraphs in question. I flipped through the pages and eventually found it.”

His voice had turned into an agitated hoarse whisper and his eyes shone. I surmised we were finally getting somewhere with the story.

“And guess what I found! Those same sentences, word for word, not a single punctuation out of place! The exact same thing! I couldn’t believe my eyes! ‘How is it possible’, I said to myself, ‘How can it be exactly the same!’ I read some of the earlier paragraphs from the book. And it began to dawn upon me. I went back to my unfinished manuscript. Sure enough! Those paragraphs were all there too! I was rewriting a book I’d already written! Word for word!”

The Novelist began to sob. I glanced at the man at the other table. I still couldn’t see his face in the darkness but I had a feeling he was smiling. Frankly, I wanted to burst into laughter too, so outrageous was the story.

“But…that has to be, I don’t know, how can that be true?” I asked.

“But it is! It is!” he wailed, “And it doesn’t end there. You know what I found after that? I opened one book after the other. And they were all the same! All the same! All those books I’d written, all of them, with their different covers and different names, they were all the same!”

At that moment, I couldn’t control it any longer and burst into laughter.

“Come on man! Surely, you don’t expect me to believe this!”

He looked at me with wide disbelieving eyes.

“Shut up, you dumb fuck!” he exploded, “Do you have any idea what it feels like? What it feels like to discover that everything you’ve written is the same thing? You laugh at me in my face, you moron! I went to every bookstore in the city that day! Every fucking bookstore! And I read every last damned copy of my books available in the city! And they were all the same!”

He became silent, breathing in and out in great gasps. I continued to stare at him, unable to find anything appropriate to say.

“I knew you wouldn’t believe it,” he said after a while, “so I brought these with me.”

He brought out a bunch of books from his bag, which I hadn’t noticed thus far, and placed them on the table. I instinctively noticed that they weren’t the same size. There were some that were far thicker than the rest. I picked one up. It was one of his. I opened it to the first chapter and read two paragraphs. Then I picked another.

It was true. They were all exactly the same book.

I found the Novelist staring straight at me. I realized, with a shock, that my own eyes had welled up.

“I am sorry,” was all I could manage. He remained silent.

“So what did you do after that? You abandoned the unfinished manuscript? Changed it?”

“No,” he said, his voice calm now, “I can’t.”

“Can’t?”

“Yes. Can’t. Each time I begin to write – a fresh chapter, another paragraph, anything at all, I find I cannot write anything other than what I have already written. I just cannot. I am doomed to writing the same story till I die. So I’ve stopped writing.”

“Well,” said someone and I looked up to find the man at the other table standing next to us. He was smoking another cigarette. “that is a most interesting story. I wish I could write it. But as you will soon see, I too cannot. Perhaps the young gentleman here will.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. He drew his chair from the other table and sat down at ours.

“You see, I am in the middle of, let me see, a somewhat similar situation.”

“What rubbish!” said the Novelist, “similar situation?”

“Yes, well, not exactly the same, mind you. Similar.”

“Uh-huh?”

“I am a novelist too, you see. But I only published one novel.”

“And that makes you similar how?”

“Let me finish,” the man said impatiently, “I said I only published only one novel. On the other hand, I have written close to fifty.”

The Novelist and I looked at each other, the exasperation clear on our faces.

“I wrote the first one,” he continued, “and at the end of it I realized how complete it was! How truly perfect! I couldn’t ever hope to write anything like it again. And why would I want to? So after it was published, I decided to not attempt anything else ever again. I wrote the same story again. Oh, the utter exhilaration of reliving one’s finest achievement! Every punctuation, every word! Mesmerizing! I didn’t waste a minute before starting to write it, a third time. And thus it has been, for more years than I care to remember now. So you see, our stories aren’t very different.”

We pondered this until the bar closed that night.

Short Story - The Story That Can't Be Told

I walk into the railway station still cursing the traffic under my breath. The clock on the wall with a white dial and square black numbers and hands shows a time well after midnight. The platforms appear deserted except for the odd porter hurrying along, smelling of dried sweat on decayed leather. I hear the sound of running water on utensil, sometimes flat and sometimes gradually dampening, punctuated by a harsh clamour of the most recently washed joining the rest of the pile. It mixes with the occasional lonely hoot of a locomotive on its way to the shed. I ask a passing porter and he informs me that the last train of the night has already passed.

I find an empty bench in an unlit corner. A dog lies on its side next to it; it’s left ear flaps lazily when I place my suitcase on the bench. I stretch my legs out in front and tug my tee a few times near the belly so it lies loosely and creased, camouflaging the paunch. The weather is balmy. A faint breeze rises and falls. In the distance, infinite lines of semaphore signals trace the path of railway tracks.

There is no open tea stall in sight. I close my eyes and try to sleep. Perhaps, I do. I am not sure. When I open my eyes again, everything is the same. I decide to stroll on the platform in the hope of finding an errant hawker still peddling stale readymade tea from a steel cylinder. Even if I do not, I say to myself, it will let time pass more unobtrusively.

To my right, the platform ends sooner. So I walk in that direction first. I consider briefly, if I should carry the suitcase, but decide against it. It is dark under the bench and it is unlikely that, even if someone were to pass by it, the suitcase will be noticed. The glimmer of lights from the platform on the track beside me, move with me. I walk for a while, gazing intently and continuously at them, until it makes me a little dizzy. Have you ever felt a bizarre restless desire, without reason, to jump onto the tracks just when a train is about to pass? Just to see what happens? Happens to me all the time. I have to turn away and look elsewhere until it passes. Presently, the platform ends and I turn back.

It is not until I am almost at the other end of the platform, that I notice it. Through a fissure in the parapet wall that lines one side of the platform to mark the perimeters of the railway station, I see a line of square white lights. The light disappears by the time I register it. I step back and forth a few times, until I locate it again. I move closer to the wall. The lights reveal themselves to be from windows of a train compartment. On each side of it, I see the ends of adjacent compartments. Through the windows, I spot human outlines. It is a train! The porter was wrong! There still is a train tonight! I rush back to my bench and pick up the suitcase. The dog, I notice, has slipped away.

Of the long line of ticket counters, only one is open at this hour. A pleasant young girl smiles sleepily from behind the grilled window. I ask her for tickets and she explains to me that there are no more trains for the rest of the night. “But you are making a mistake!” I tell her, “there is another train! I have seen it just now!” She looks bemused. “No Sir,” she explains again, “there is no train.” “What rubbish!” I scream, “are you stupid? I have seen it myself, I said!” Her forehead creases. “What train, Sir,” she asks, “where have you seen it?”

I tell her. She looks at me strangely. “You want tickets for that train?” she asks. I am thoroughly exasperated by now. “Yes yes,” I say, “that very train! Is there a problem?” “No, just that…”she starts to say and then pauses. “Wait”, she says, “I will consult the station master.”

I throw my hands up but she does not see it, for she is gone by then. I wait impatiently. She returns, and I can say this confidently since I’ve been watching the clock all the while, seven minutes later. “Has the Station Master agreed to offer me a ticket?” I ask her testily. She busies herself with typing whatever it is that she needs to type for a ticket to be produced. After she hands it to me and I glance at it to confirm the requisite details, I ask her if she will tell me how to get to the train. “I saw it through a crack in the wall. I didn’t have time to find a route.” I tell her. She offers me directions. As I am about to leave, she says, “There’s another train in just less than three hours Sir. Are you sure you don’t want to wait for that one?” I don’t even bother to answer. I look back once and see her smiling sadly at me.

The train is scantily populated, as befits the time. I walk past a few compartments before entering one. It appears empty. I pick a seat and stuff my suitcase under it. Then I pace the entire compartment a couple of times. It is indeed empty. The train begins to move.

I drift off to sleep. I do not know if I dream, since I never remember them when I wake up. But when I do, I find another man sitting opposite me. He is a middle aged man, quite unremarkable, except for his strange choice of attire. He wears a woolen overcoat, under which, I catch glimpses of a sweater. A muffler is coiled around his neck and he holds one glove in the other gloved hand. When he realized I am awake, he smiles feebly and greets me.

“Are you alright?” I ask him, “it isn’t that cold, is it?”

“No,” he says, “I always put these on when I travel at night.”

I nod disinterestedly. Outside, a full moon shines brightly. I wonder why it has escaped my notice so far. It seems to be a cloudless night, although it is difficult to say, since the lights inside the compartment reflect off the glass and obscure the view. The other man has dozed off. I get up and walk to the toilet. When I come out, I find one of the doors to the compartment unlatched. It creaks softly. I open it wide and stare outside. A full wind blows into my face and I shut my eyes for a few seconds. The train, I sense, is moving at great speed.

The view outside is surreal. The train is blazing its way through a bridge. The sky is indeed clear, and bathed in moonlight. The moon is a perfect circle, and occasionally, small wisps of cloud flow across it. When they do, they look like paper burnt at the edges. I look for stars, expecting to find whole clusters of them, but find only one, that shines brilliantly a little to the left of the moon. I am not sure if it is, in fact, a star. It could be - probably is - Venus. Below, everything is pitch-black. I wonder what this bridge crosses over. The train is still over it – bridge of great length. Almost as if it were crossing an ocean. But that couldn’t be – there wasn’t an ocean on this route. I made a mental note to check what it could be when I reached my destination in the morning.

I lean out of the train and count the compartments. There are twelve. The light of the moon, strangely, does not touch the land. Everything lies in darkness. Just the train with its luminescent windows. I wonder what this scene must look like from a vantage point outside the train. A stark moon. One shining planet. And the train as a streak of white light suspended in the darkness.

I see a face appear at the door of the next compartment. It belongs to an old woman. She wears a scarf that hides her hair. The scarf flutters in the wind. I smile at her. She smiles back. I resume staring at the moon.

Through the corner of my eye, I detect movement. I turn and find that the lady has taken her scarf off and her hair, long and grey, blow eerily behind her. She is staring at me. I don’t know what you say. So I smile again. She whispers something, but I can’t hear her. The wind carries her voice in the opposite direction. Then she jumps.

I am so shocked, I become paralyzed. It is perhaps that I even stopped breathing momentarily, for when I regain my composure, I find my chest heaving, drawing in great gusts of air. I keep staring at the door, where the lady was until a few minutes ago, almost hoping that I hallucinated and that she will appear again. Or maybe, if I hallucinated, there wasn’t a lady at all. Another face peeps out. It is not the old lady. It is a young woman, extremely pretty, and she smiles at me before I can. I smile and then remember about the old woman and start to tell her what I have seen. She shakes her head and waves her hand before I am through the first sentence. Then she jumps.

And now I notice the macabre spectacle. On each side, at every door, I see faces. They appear, stay there mutely for a few seconds and jump. A dozen bodies together, almost in unison. Their faces are replaced by others’ and then they jump. Thus it continues. I am so struck by horror, I cannot take my eyes of it. I realize I do not even see what I see. Indeed, my vision appears from that vantage point of my imagination, and I see from there, in addition to the moon, Venus and the train, bodies, their backs lit by the train lights, in free fall. Then they disappear.

Someone places a hand on my shoulder. I turn to find the man who was sitting next to me. “No! No!” I scream, “don’t push me!” He shakes his head and pulls me in, instead. He drags me to my seat. From inside his overcoat, he produces a flask. The brandy flows warmly into my stomach. The sound of the train comes back to me. It is still on the bridge and still at great speed.

“What train is this? What is happening? Did you see what is happening outside? Did you see!” I sputter

“Yes, I know.” He says.

I gulp down more brandy.

“You shouldn’t have forced yourself on this train.” His voice is deep and rich.

“What train is this? What train is this! Oh my God!”

“It is the train of suicides,” He says, “on every full moon.” He continues to speak for a few more minutes.

“What? The Government! What rubbish!” It seems my voice returns to me, “that is just bullshit! Such a thing could never exist!”

“But it does.”

“No, it doesn’t! If it did, everybody would know!”

He smiles wanly. “Well, everybody does.”

“And…and, who are you then? Why are you here?”

“Oh,” he says and places a hand firmly on my shoulder, “I am here to make sure nobody has a change of heart.”

Short Story - The Stories of Borges

The first Borges I read was when a friend sent me an electronic version, doubtless not paid for, of Death and the Compass. Such an impression did it have upon me, that I hurried to a bookstore the same evening in search of more. They told me they did not stock Borges and had not done so in twenty years. I returned home dejected but determined to find it elsewhere the next day.

In those days, I lived in Ahmedabad, a city of somewhat meager literary ambition. Over the course of the next few days, I found out just how meager its ambitions really were, for nowhere in the entire city could be found even a scrap of paper with the name Borges on it. Indeed, it appeared as if my lips were the first from which anyone had heard that name escape. The closest someone came, was when one bookstore owner, with eyes lit up, scurried to the musty innards of his store and returned with a copy of A Clockwork Orange by Burgess.

There were, of course, versions of his work available online. My friend sent me a few more. But I believed, and still believe, reading from an odorless computer screen can never substitute the romance of a creased copy in hand. Can you imagine sitting at an idyllic café, without work, and lazily stare into a computer for hours? I can. It looks absurd.

Anyway, I read one or two more of what my friend sent. It only strengthened my conviction that a printed copy must be found. I could’ve ordered a copy online from Amazon, but at that stage, I was a student and dependent wholly on the pocket money that my parents doled out, and that money was lesser than even the cost of shipping Amazon quoted. So I waited till it was time to visit Kolkata again, a few months later.

My luck turned, as I’d expected it would, almost the minute I entered Kolkata's renowned College Street. This was after all the place where, once earlier, I’d found a copy of the Communist Manifesto’s original 1848 publication. The first store I asked at, the storekeeper shrugged ruefully and said they’d just sold their last copy yesterday. There must be other stores, I asked. Yes, there must be, he answered and pointed towards the dark alley that wove further in. There are a million stores in there. Lanes and by-lanes. Labyrinths, he added and winked. I smiled and moved on.

I finally found success in the fourth store, tucked away in the remotest corner of College Street, where the smell of books had, over the years, permeated the walls and the rusted iron shutters. The owner, a wizened old man, nodded when he heard the name and then bent down and disappeared under the counter. I waited patiently, the sound of shuffling and scratching provided evidence that the man was still under the counter and had not disappeared into the pages of a book like in some Borgesian fantasy. Presently he rose again, with a book in each hand, which he then slammed against one another to rid them of the gathered dust, which rose in dirty wisps starkly illuminated in the forlorn ray of light that trickled in through a termite hole in one of the boarded windows. Labyrinths, read the cover of one and The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory, read the other. They were Penguin Classic publications, both, which were fine in themselves, but since my hopes were raised considerably higher by this time, I enquired if perhaps an older, more exotic publication of the same works could be found. The man shook his head sadly and just as I was about to leave, he said that he once did have a copy of the original Viking Penguin publication of Collected Fictions, in which the stories of Shakespeare’s Memory first appeared. Unsure of what my reaction to this piece of information should be, I merely shrugged. “A man bought it from me three years ago,” he continued. “My bad luck” I said, intending it as a final word in, what I at that point considered a futile conversation.

“Terrible luck, in fact,” he said, “you know what he found in that book?”

I waited for him to continue since I gathered this was a rhetoric question and one that he couldn’t possibly expect me to know the answer to.

He pondered over something for nearly a minute before speaking again.

“But before that, tell me, have you read any of the stories from Shakespeare’s Memory?”

I told him I had not.

“Will you please read the one called Blue Tigers right now? It is important for the story I have to narrate.”

I looked at him quizzically, gauging if he intended all this as some sort of inexplicable joke. He looked earnestly back at me. I opened the book in question and studied the Table of Contents. Blue Tigers, it informed me, was only 12 pages long. I looked at the watch and shrugged.

“Alright,” I said, “I will read it if you will offer me a place to sit.”

He disappeared under the counter again and returned with a metal folding chair that creaked open.

I read. When I’d finished, I looked up to find the man staring intently at me.

“It’s a wonderful story. And perhaps his only one set in India?” I said.

“Yes, yes, it’s a great story!” he said impatiently, “but now I must continue my story.”

I asked if he could offer me a cup of tea to go with his narration. He responded with the usual exuberance of a Bengali on the subject of tea, shouting into the interiors of the store to an, as yet, invisible assistant to prepare two cups. It arrived almost immediately, accompanied by a plate of crumbling dog biscuits and a packet of cigarettes. He lit one and asked me if I’d like one. In those days, I did not smoke.

Then he narrated his story:

It is about that copy of the original publication of Collected Stories I mentioned earlier. A man, of considerable means I later learnt, bought it from me about three years ago. When I handed the copy over to him, he flipped casually through it, like most people do when they buy a book. As the pages fluttered past the grasp of his left thumb and into right thumb’s, something fell out and down to the floor. He picked it up and we studied it. It was a small, almost completely round stone, blue in colour. It is strange that such a thing should not cause a noticeable bump while inside the book, but evidently it had not. As we examined it, it fell to the floor again. The man bent down to pick it up again and when he straightened again, I saw his eyes were flashing. I asked him if something was the matter. He simply held up his open palm. In it, I saw incredulously, were now three stones instead of one. He dropped them again, this time intentionally. This time, his palm rose from behind the counter before he did. In it were now so many stones, all the same size, that I couldn’t at once count how many. Blue Tigers, I whispered in a quivering voice and he nodded gravely. The magical stones blue stones that multiply at will! He said. He pulled out a wallet from his trouser pocket and extracted five hundred rupee notes from it. He handed them to me, without word. I accepted. Then he walked out.

The man stopped and sipped once more from his cup.

“What an extraordinary story!” I said, still skeptical, “and this man, he never returned, did he?”

“He did return. Two years later.” The man said, “One day, I found the same man standing near the entrance of this store again. He was the same man, but for one remarkable change. Running down his cheek and through to his neck was a deep angry scar.”

“Form of the Sword now?” I said half jokingly.

“Ah, you have read it,” the man said, ignoring the sarcasm, “that is good.”

“Sure is,” I said, “or I might’ve had to sit here and read it now.”

The man continued.

I asked him what had happened to him. And this is the story he narrated to me:

That day, after we found those stones in the book, I went back home in a daze. I had, of course, decided by then that I would pursue this for as long as it took. So, I read that story, Blue Tigers, again, to check if there is any indication in it of which village on the foothills of the Himalayas, it was set in. There’s isn’t. But the descriptions sounded fairly close to either the Garhwal or the Kumaon region and so, I set out as soon as I could, for Dehradun. From there I went to Rudraprayag, choosing it above others for my fascination with it ever since I read Corbett’s story of the man-eating leopard. Anyway, from Rudraprayag, I travelled through the hills into every village that the locals named, and everywhere I went, I asked if they had ever heard of the existence of such mystical blue stones as were in my pocket. For seven months, I travelled and found not a single soul who could help me. At the end of those seven months, I returned to Dehradun, severely ill and dejected. While I recuperated, I pondered about what could be done next. I re-read Blue Tigers. It got me no further. I decided I would drop the stones into a river and return to Kolkata. That evening, in a long time, I found myself relaxed and in an agreeable mood. I had a few drinks at the bar and returned to my hotel late at night and that is when I remembered Corbett again. Wasn’t there a story in which he describes mysterious lights up a mountain in the dark? Almost exactly the kind of superstition the villagers of Borges’s village harboured? I spent the night unable to sleep. The next day, I searched the city frantically for a bookstore that stocked the works of Corbett. I found one fairly easily; Corbett is still a popular fellow in that part of the country, evidently. Had I been adept at the internet, I might’ve saved myself the trouble of reading through his books again, but since I was not, I had to do it the hard way. I read whatever I could sitting at the store, and brought the rest back to the hotel with me. Eventually, I found what I was looking for, in The Talla Desh Man-eater story, in The Temple Tigers collection. Corbett mentions sighting mysterious lights going up a hillside at night and the villagers’ singular reactions to them.

The next day, I travelled to Almora and from there to Talla Desh. Throughout the journey, I could barely sit still with excitement. If indeed it was true that it was the same village that the two men describe, how incredible would that be!

I was right! The first person I showed the blue stones to in Talla Desh, looked at me wide-eyed and refused to answer my questions. The same thing happened with half a dozen other people. By and by, I found a saintly man who, though distressed at the sight of the stones, agreed to speak to me. He told me the name of the village I sought and how I could get there. When I reached there, it was of course summer, and the hillsides looked very different from what one would’ve visualized them through Borges’s words. I did not waste any time there and showed them the stones. Remarkably, none of them shrank away like the people of Talla Desh. They looked at me and smiled and their eyes became sad. I explained to them the sequence of events that had led me here. They nodded gravely but said nothing. That evening, there was a knock on my door and I found an old, grizzled lady standing outside. I invited her in. The first words she spoke were a name. Vincent Moon, she said. Vincent Moon? I asked, disbelievingly. She repeated the name. “But how can that be?” I asked, “Vincent Moon isn’t a real person! He’s just…he’s just…” She did not let me finish, “Vincent Moon” she said again, this time more vehemently. Then she traced a line down her throat and said “Scar. Vincent Moon. Scar.” For the rest of the night, she had my full attention. This was her story:

Many years ago, a man called Vincent Moon had come to their village. He had a large scar running down his face, which the villagers deeply distrusted. He had asked to be taken to the top of the mountain, where the blue stones were. Everybody had refused. He spent a year with them, trying to convince them to partake in his adventure, until one night, he had sneaked up there, alone, and returned with a handful of those stones. Within a month he had gone crazy and another month later they had found his battered body in the undergrowth at the bottom of the mountain. He had climbed up again and evidently jumped. They had sold off all his stuff to pawnshops and wherever else they could; he also had various books with him. They had never found the stones.

This is the story she told me. I surmised one of those books was the Collected Stories and a stray blue stone had somehow made its way into it. The complete truth, nobody would ever know. Vincent Moon? From Form of the Sword? A friend of Borges’s? A character of Borges’s imagination somehow magically come alive? And he had evidently arrived having read Blue Tigers. So Borges had written the story before that. How could that be? Was it that Moon had come in the same quest that I had? Perhaps Moon had found the blue stone in the book before he had arrived, just as I had! Was there a whole universe of Borges’s characters that actually existed in some unknown dimension?

At this point, the old bookstore owner said, the man had finished his story. The tea cups were empty by now; at their bottoms, globs of soppy wet biscuits remained. I was still skeptical, but it was a darn good story. In those days, I had only begun to think of myself as a writer, and I found it important to appreciate the exquisiteness of the yarn either the old bookstore owner or that other man with the scar on his face had woven.

“But,” I said, “what about the scar he carried? Where did that come from?”

“I asked him. But he wouldn’t tell me. “It’s a secret I will never tell anybody” He said”

I walked out of College Street some time later, my head full of wondrous imaginations. Ever since I’d decided to start writing seriously, I’d always sought ways of acknowledging the inspiration I’d derived from the authors I’d read and admired. So far, I’d been largely unsuccessful, offering shoddy and direct references that meant nothing. And now there was this story. But it needed an end. Or at least, some semblance of an end. I walked past a bar and realized I was drenched in sweat. I decided to go in for some beer.

The place was almost empty, except for the bartender, a shabby waiter and a man on a barstool hunched over a glass of whiskey. The place smelt faintly of vomit. I made my way to a barstool and ordered a beer. The other man sat to my left. He turned his head towards me and glanced disinterestedly, and resumed looking into his glass. I wished him afternoon. He turned again, this time completely and smiled. An old, dry scar ran down the left side of his face and throat and disappeared into his shirt collar. The beer arrived. After two sips, I whispered to myself to check if my voice had returned. Then I addressed him again.

“Excuse me, Sir. Can I speak to you for a minute?”

“Yes?” He said, in a rich baritone.

Haltingly, I recounted my encounter with the old bookstore owner. He listened gravely, occasionally furrowing his brows and shaking his head, as if to say this was not exactly how it had happened. When I finished, he turned to the bartender and ordered another glass.

“Yes, it was I” he said.

“Oh”

“So, you thought that old man was making it up, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes, sort of”

“Do you think I am made all of it up?”

“I…I am not sure. I don’t know.”

He smiled. We stared silently at each other for a while. Then he spoke again.

“You know, I did reach Talla Desh. After that, well, who knows?”

I remained silent.

“It is a fitting tribute, but, don’t you think?”

“To Borges?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose so.”

The bartender reappeared and filled my mug. I had so many questions in my head, I didn't know what to say to the man. Presently, he spoke himself.

“I know you want to ask me more. But you are not sure how, is it not? Well, tell you what, I will tell you the story of the scar myself. Perhaps it is true, perhaps it is not. After the point up to which you’ve heard the story, and whether or not that itself is true is a matter of conjecture, but let us play along for now – after that point, I realized there wasn’t much else I could do. The stones had taken up too much of my time, and I was afraid I would lose my sanity too. So I returned to Delhi. I put the stones in a bag and gave it away to a beggar. But I needed a story – you see, I had ambitions of becoming a writer then. And I wondered how I would end it. Of course, I could’ve ended it anywhere, for such a story is hardly expected to have a conventional end anyway. But I wanted to give it one. As an experiment, you see. A ridiculous tale with a conventional end. So I worked out the rest of the story in my head. I travel to Argentina and look for Vincent Moon. He is dead, yes, but if he has indeed existed, he must’ve left some traces. A family or a business. Something. In Argentina, I somehow – I never did manage to flesh this out, or maybe I don't want to tell you – stumble upon a mythical town, inaccessible to all, where Borges still lives with all his characters. Moon is there too. And Borges tell mes that it was in fact he who is writing this story and that it is I who am a part of his imagination. I refuse to believe it and want to return. He tells me that the only way out is if I allow myself to become a character in one of his other stories, in which case, he can end my story there and I become redundant and he has no further need of me. I choose Moon. Magically, a scar appears on my face. And I return" He paused.

"So?"I asked.

"So? Well, if this was to be the story, I would actually need the scar, I thought. And so I made myself this.” He ran his index finger over it.

The silence hung between us. We finished our drinks. I paid my bill and began to leave. Then I turned and asked him, “And why did you not write the story then?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I just couldn’t. As you can see, this still wasn't a conventional end. I couldn't come up with one. Maybe I am not a writer, after all.”

Short Story - The Ferris Wheel

But for the gigantic Ferris wheel that towered over it, the town was utterly unremarkable. A handful of brick houses, painted white and with grilled square windows, lay scattered about, perimetered by short thick boundary walls that kept the stray dogs away. A solitary road, covered in dust with disuse, passed through the town and continued on, on either side, in a straight line across the unending, barren plains. No vehicle had been seen on this road for many years; the wizened elders of the town spoke wistfully of a time when each day, in the early morning light, a long line of trucks, came and went, and the kids ran behind them for as long as they could, and sometimes came back with lozenges that the drivers had offered them. Not even a mailman came now, for everyone the townsfolk knew lived in the town, and there was no need for a letter to be written or received.

Nobody remembered how the Ferris wheel had come to be there. It had been there for as far back as the oldest memories would go. It belonged to the family that had a different last name than everyone else’s and had been passed on from generation to generation like an heirloom. In the evenings, the wheel was lit up with a million yellow-red bulbs, and the entire town made its way to it for a ride. They waited patiently for their turn to arrive, indeed often allowed the kids to break line and run up ahead of them in the queue; after sundown, when the children were no longer allowed on it, the elders rode the wheel and stared into the moonlit distances with tears in their eyes. There were no tickets; the family was recompensed with free food and a place to live.

The family, two middle aged men, their wives and the old invalid patriarch, lived in a cottage right next to the wheel. Throughout the day, the two men toiled on the wheel, cleaning and oiling and fixing, while the wives cooked their meals and looked after the patriarch. The patriarch, whom the rest of the village had rarely seen since the incident, remained in bed throughout, moaning occasionally whenever a sharp spasm shot through his wasted muscles and bones. On some evenings, when the weather was pleasant and the patriarch was in a good mood, the two men, his adopted sons, carried his cot outside so he could see his beloved Ferris wheel. On such days, the queue below the wheel appeared shorter than usual and nobody rode after sundown. They had, several times, asked the family to not bring the patriarch so near the wheel again, but his two sons had remained defiant. There was one time when the entire town threatened to never ride the wheel again and stop offering them food. For ten days, they did not; the brothers still spent the day working at the wheel but in the evening when nobody arrived, they took turns to ride the wheel themselves with their wives, while their father lay on the cot below, watching them. The lack of food, it appeared, did not bother them. On the eleventh day, the kids returned with their mothers, and a couple of days later, so did the fathers.

Though there were various versions of the story of what happened to the patriarch all those years ago, they varied only in the minor details. The story went thus:

The patriarch was six years old when it happened. In those days, he was like any other kid his age, oblivious and happy. It was his father who worked the wheel then. The boy hadn’t ever been on the wheel till then, of course, for kids below the age of six weren’t allowed on it. On his sixth birthday, like had been the tradition in the family for many generations, he was bathed with rose-scented water, and odes of the family’s unknown, mysterious religion were sung. His father then spent the rest of the day with him, explaining to him the many intricacies of the wheel and that he was now as much the owner of it as his father. When the hour came, they placed him in one of the gondolas, to the sounds of conch shells blown into.

But then, something strange started to happen. The moment he entered the gondola, the wheel began to move by itself. It moved slowly at first, and the father tried to stop it with his hands, for he thought it was merely a stray gust of wind that had caused the movement. But it didn’t stall. It continued to move and pick up speed. By the time the gondola was halfway up, the wheel had begun to rotate as fast as anyone had ever seen it. The boy began to cry. The people, gathered below, who had stood staring up until then, unable to comprehend what they were witnessing, eventually snapped back into action. They shut the power supply and when somebody suggested that putting an obstacle in its way might help, they found a long sturdy ladder and dragged it to the wheel, so its sides brushed against the wheel’s. The wheel did not stop. Each time the gondola with the boy in it came down to its lowest point, they caught glimpses of him trapped inside, staring back at them.

For two hours the wheel rotated thus, and would not stop. And then they saw the grilled gate of the gondola swing open and the next second, the boy jumped. In a few minutes, the wheel came to a standstill. The boy lay in a pool of blood, miraculously alive but robbed of the use of his legs forever.

That the boy, now the patriarch, had the devil in him was unanimously agreed upon.

He moved around on crutches for a few years. He even tried convincing his father that he could still help with the wheel. His father refused to let him touch the wheel, but agreed that he could collect the bread and other food that the people brought for them. He did it for one day, forcing himself to not look at the wheel, for whenever he did, he could see kids like him on it, and it made him cry. The next day, nobody turned up. It emerged that the town would have nothing to do with the wheel if the boy was to be present near it, in plain sight. That evening, he told his father that he would stay indoors. He went to bed later in the night and never got out of it since.

By and by his father died. The town became worried that, with him, the Ferris wheel and their evenings riding it would die too. But then, one morning, they found two teenage boys cleaning the wheel. When asked who they were, they said they were adopted sons of the patriarch. The Ferris wheel survived.

It had been twenty years since.

One day, the town woke up to torrential rains. They looked out of their windows in amazement, for it hadn’t rained in three years. They poked their hands tentatively out; the raindrops were exploded in their palms in small, frosty bursts. The sky had turned an unnatural grey and in the distance, lightning spread like fissures on parched soil. The clouds hung so low, they seemed to touch the top of the Ferris wheel.

The rain fell for a month and nobody ventured outside their homes. Then, all at once, it stopped raining one morning. The clouds turned paler, and a red glow seeped into them from the horizons. Immediately, everyone rushed to the Ferris wheel. They found the two brothers sitting on the soggy soil and staring at the wheel. It wouldn't start, they said. The motor had remained submerged in water for too long. They'd drained the water out and tried everything they could, but it wouldn't start. The town hung around the wheel for the rest of the day, staring suspiciously at its parts and offering suggestions. Nothing worked. The wheel stayed resolutely still.

The next morning, the Patriarch woke up to an unnatural stillness - a stillness that seemed to him like it pervaded the world and not just his cottage. And there was a smell – a damp pungent smell, which made his nostrils itch. It was a smell he had smelled in his most terrible dreams, in which he had visions of the Ferris wheel on fire or disintegrating into the ground. He did not move for a long time, waiting for a common sound, a whiff of the usual arid breeze that would pierce the stillness. None came. The crutches, unused for decades, stood by the bedside. He looked at them and sighed. He felt nervous but not agitated. Perhaps, he had seen this in one of his dreams.

He walked out to a crimson sky, with patches of fire, out of which bellowed out black smoke. On both sides, the barren plains were obscured by huge columns of smoke escaping the earth, the same colour as the smoke in the sky. The town was burnt to ashes. All that remained was his cottage and the Ferris wheel.

He smiled. The ends of the crutches dug into the black soil as he made his way to the wheel. When he reached the wheel, he turned and looked back at the devastation. Then he helped himself into a gondola. The wheel began to turn.

A Good Two Years

In addition to the whiskey and vodka, there was also wine to mark the occasion. The open spaces of a shapeless grassy lawn behind the hostel buildings was chosen, for it was estimated that the crowd would far exceed the average and could not, therefore, be contained in the cramped confines of the Community Centre. It was March. Winter had melted away slowly and its meager existence was now evident only in the agreeable chill of the evening breeze.

The day had been spent running frantically around campus, returning books, handing over keys and signing documents. Outside each hostel room, a pile of papers, notepads, plastic waste and bottles of alcohol lay in a heap; the doors to the rooms, all open, since inside could be found only packed cartons that were ready to be shipped and unwieldy to be stolen, swung in the strong wind of that morning, and crashed into the heap periodically, toppling the highest objects from their perch. Loud music blared from some of the rooms; Ozzy Osbourne’s “Mama, I’m coming home’ appeared to be greatly in favour. Kaushik wondered if someone would play Altaf Raja’s ‘Tum to thehre pardesi’ to counter this unnecessary western predilection. In the end, nobody did. Now that would have been something.

As always, Kaushik was one of the first to reach the lawn. He spotted a few small groups scattered around but did not find anyone he wished to be in the company of. He walked around for a while, familiarizing himself with the dimensions of the scene, seeking unobtrusive corners that could be utilized later in the evening when he was in need of a few moments of relative aloofness or a place to puke. He was determined to avoid the alcohol counters at least until one good friend turned up.

A DJ, well known evidently, had been paid for and brought from Delhi, for the night. His wares, when he began to peddle them, did not appear very different from what they’d been hearing all through their time on campus. It did not matter, however, for before long they were all too drunk to notice. After a few glasses of whiskey, Kaushik, having found another willing friend, tasted the wine. White. He wasn’t aware what kind and, after two tentative sips, decided not to bother finding out. Near the middle of the evening, as always, the whiskey would run out and sometime thereafter, the vodka, while the wine would remain almost untouched.

The ladies, it appeared, had collectively decided to wear gowns for the occasion. They came, in swinging, shining, bunches of reds, blacks and blues, their bare arms folded bewitchingly below the breasts. The conversations in the lawns stopped momentarily and the music became suddenly audible again. Kaushik chuckled inadvertently, too conspicuously, for the guy next to him looked towards him and smiled. “Yeah man. We’re such miserable losers.” He said.

Raakesh was nowhere to be found. Kaushik strolled around the lawn, the whiskey glass never empty, looking for him. He ran into the same people all the time, and each time, they hugged and said, “Man, it has been a good two years here, has it not?” Sometimes, he found himself in the middle of a group indulged in wild dance and they forced him to match steps for a few minutes. He did, and when he was confident they weren’t looking, slipped away quietly and resumed looking for Raakesh. Ritika had appeared in a ravishing red gown and he ensured he was always aware where she was so he could steal glances every once in a while. He never, however, passed too close to her, afraid she might notice.

He gave up after nearly an hour. Raakesh had, evidently, not turned up. He would come to know later, when he would chat online with Raakesh the next time, that he’d been smoking pot and drinking all afternoon and had passed out well before the farewell celebrations had begun. They would chat often in subsequent years but never meet. But since Raakesh did not turn up on that last day, Kaushik would never recall the last time they did meet - an occasion that had not registered as one of enough consequence to assign to memory, for he couldn’t have known it would be the last.

Kaushik spent the remainder of the evening drifting from one group to another. He danced with them in short, outrageous bursts, and then when he felt too tired, broke away and walked about. When the whiskey ran out, he turned to vodka and then, ruefully, to wine. Once in a while, he stumbled into a sloshed bunch engaged in animated, tearful, conversation. It reminded him of Dhule. These were men and women, who would, a couple of months down the line, walk into fancy organizations, discuss serious corporate issues with solemn countenances and earn abundantly, in some cases, obscenely. But right now, they were just people who had had too much to drink.

Well after 3 AM, when most of the congregation had been reduced to a mass of human beings sprawled on the grass, with their arms held up, lazily swaying to the still preposterously loud music, he heard Ritika’s voice behind him. “Hey, Kaushik,” she said.

He was still standing, with a whiskey glass full of wine, staring intently at the stars in the sky which looked to him like they were all merging into each other in what he fantasized was a celestial orgy. He turned slowly, deliberately, for his body had lost its appetite for rapid movement much earlier in the evening. One of the sodium lamps traced a defused white path just below her waist.

“Hi” Kaushik said, “Up early?”

She smiled and embraced him. “Man, it has been a good two years here, has it not?” She said.

“Yeah, well,” he mumbled in response.

He let one arm hang limply by his side, for he was not sure what to do with it, while with the other he still held the whiskey glass. He breathed deeply, searching for a smell that he could remember for the rest of his life, and write about, but found nothing.

Stromboli

Stromboli was never part of the plan. They had intended to spend two days in Florence and then travel to Rome where they’d already booked beds at a youth hostel. From there, they’d return to India three days later. However, before Florence was Venice, in the itinerary, and when they reached Venice, it took them less than two hours to realize that they couldn’t possibly stay there for the two days they’d expected to. It was far too expensive and there were too many people around, many of them wearing ‘I love NY’ tees. And so they fled Venice just after lunchtime on the same day and thus found themselves in possession of two additional days. They picked the Aeolian Islands to spend those two days in.

When they reached Milazzo, from where they were to take a ferry to one of the islands, they still weren’t sure which one they would go to. The best islands also seemed the farthest from the Sicilian coast and since they had to be back in Milazzo in time to catch a train late that night, travelling too far was risky. Eventually, they chose Lipari, the largest and one of the closest.

The ferry ride was their first encounter with the deep, sparkling blue waters of the Sicilian coast. A man and his wife sat next to Kaushik on the ferry and they asked him if he was Sri Lankan. When he told them he was Indian, they appeared to become even more interested. “My wife and I weesh tu traavel tu Eendia!” he exclaimed, “whaat ees the best time tu viseet?” Kaushik considered if it would be appropriate to respond in the same accent but decided against it, since he figured it could offend them. “Between November and February”, he told them and returned to the book he was reading. A few months later, when he went to an Italian restaurant in Mumbai with Ritankar and Ashish, and the owner, an elderly Italian, came to their table to speak to them, Kaushik looked on while Ashish conducted the entire conversation in that accent. Evidently, the elderly Italian did not take offence.

Lipari did not even look like a volcanic island. From a distance, it looked large and low, the hills on it resembling tabletop mountains rather than the volcanic peaks they’d imagined. By the time, the ferry rolled into the pier, slipping deftly between two other ferries, Ritankar had already announced that they’d have to find another island. “This is just ugly, dude,” he said, “I can’t spend too much time here.”

Fifteen minutes and a cup, each, of espresso later, they set out finding ferries to Stromboli. Ritankar was keener on Panarea, one of the smallest islands in the bunch, and one that the Lonely Planet declared as the least crowded, but Kaushik argued that the sight of live flowing lava was an experience worth more than a lonely isolated island.

And now they were stuck in Stromboli. They’d reached the island just after noon. The weather had already begun to worsen then. The first thing they’d done was check for ferries back to Milazzo. There was one at four, they were told. They bought tickets for it. Four in the afternoon arrived but the ferry did not. Somebody said there’d be another one at five. That didn’t arrive either, although the rain did. The lady at the counter announced, ruefully, that the weather was too tricky to sail in the open sea and there wouldn’t be another ferry till the next morning. She offered them tickets for the first ferry the next day, which they duly bought.

There was also the problem of cash. They didn’t have enough to pay a hotel bill for one night. They asked around for an ATM. There was only one on the entire island. It had run out of cash. It wouldn’t be refilled until the first ferry arrived the next morning with the requisite wads of notes on it.

Ritankar, Kaushik realized, had become unusually quiet, occasionally, shaking his head and muttering under his breath.

“What’s the matter dude?”

“Nothing”

“Oh come on, you’re still cross that we chose Stromboli and not Panarea?”

“I don’t know what your fixation with a live Volcano is”

“It’s a pointless argument, man. I am sorry I got you here. But if it makes you feel any better, we’d probably have gotten stuck at Panarea too!”

Ritankar nodded. “Well, we’ve got to find someplace for the night, now”

They walked together in silence through the narrow, winding alleyways that rose and fell gracefully, offering tantalizing glimpses of the ocean, which, incredibly, retained its blue under the gloomy sky. The volcanic peak loomed above them; smoke and haze rose from its peak and mixed with the dark clouds above. On both sides of them, houses were built in closely knit clusters, into the mountainside, and they were all, extraordinarily, painted white. “They must paint it once every month.” Kaushik commented. Through the gaps between the houses, they could see the black sands of the beach.

“I must say,” Kaushik said, “the place does look gorgeous.”

“I think it is very artificial. These white coloured, shapeless houses.”

“But that’s the point Ritankar! They are so incongruous, so out of place here, its surreal, like in a dream”

Ritankar muttered something under his breath which Kaushik did not understand and chose not to ask him to repeat.

They found a house where the owner agreed to offer them a spare room for the night. They explained to him they did not have cash and could only pay by card. He shook his head a few times as if to deny and when they shrugged and began to lift their backpacks again, he asked them to wait. He returned, a few minutes later, and led them to the adjacent grocery store, which is where their card was swiped. “But, what did you put in the bill?” Kaushik asked. “Oh, nothing,” the man said, dismissively, “some food. I use it for dinner tonight.”

“Now that we’re here,” Ritankar said, “why don’t we ask about that guided tour to the top of the peak in the night?”

“Yes, I’ve been thinking about that too.”

They found that the tour had been cancelled for the day. “Wind tu much. Not good,” they were told.

The rain had stopped. There were fleeting, shifting specks of blue in the sky. They found a café by the sea, playing pleasant Italian pop they did not recognize. They entered and ordered beer. The woman at the cash counter was a blonde, middle aged but attractive. There were prominent creases on both ends of her lips, which seemed to pull the edges of the lips down with them a little. It reminded Kaushik of Jeanne Moreau. The crowd bulged towards evening and thinned out barely an hour later. Kaushik and Ritankar shifted to whiskey after a while, for there was a chill in the air, and sat through all this. They spoke little. The music continued to be warm but not intrusive.

“It isn’t such a bad place, after all” Ritankar said at one point. Kaushik did not comment.

The next morning, they woke up to a stark blue sky, except above the peak, which, as it always did, remained partly shrouded in the ashen smoke and haze. They hurried down to the pier and found the ferry hadn’t yet arrived. There wasn’t any money left for breakfast. That’d have to wait until they were back in Milazzo. They waited, with growing impatience, for an hour before walking to the ticket counter to ask what the problem was. The forecast was for rough weather till afternoon, it turned out, and therefore, services would resume only after that.

“But it is fucking glorious weather!” Ritankar said, “I could walk on water to Milazzo in this!”

They spent the day sitting in the sun, on the black sand. Occasionally, the mountain grumbled, and they looked up anxiously. They hadn’t noticed it the previous day, mistaking it for thunder. The locals appeared unflustered. They too grew used to it after a while. Once, near noon, Ritankar asked Kaushik if he had any small change left, while he fumbled inside his own pockets. Their combined wealth came to seven Euros and a bit more. “Let’s go buy something, whatever’s available for this much.” Ritankar suggested. They could either have a Panini each, or a beer each. They chose beer.

At four, the ferry arrived. That evening, they took the train from Milazzo to Rome. They shared the couchette with an old woman and a middle aged, balding man. The man pointed to the copy of On the Road on Kaushik’s lap and said, “I wrote that book twenty years ago.” They stared at him incredulously and he realized something was wrong. “Oh,” he corrected, “I mean I read it. My English is not so good.”

They spent three wonderful days in Rome, soaking in the staggering grandeur, but in their hearts they knew their best experiences of the trip were behind them. The joy they’d found in those first days in Montmartre, in the Cinque Terre and in those hours at Montefioralle, even Rome could not match.

It was only later, when they’d narrated their stories a dozen times after their return to India, that they realized Stromboli had been equally special.