Dec 4
By Indra Bahadur Rai
The sunshine was really good, warming every nook and cranny. The moment you dropped to the lower terrace, the heat began to stifle you. Perhaps the wind was blowing uphill through the ravines today, the way the leaves of the broom, cardamom and arum were bobbing up and down.
By Sumana Roy
Night is rhetoric and a health drink. Night is question as the day is answer. Night is about abandon and abundance. Night is home and hotel. Night is thumb and toe. Never long enough, night is also surplus.
By Anubha Yadav
Blind Neeraj walked amidst them saying hello and hi as if he could see them all. I decided to follow Blind Neeraj. I closed my eyes for some reason. I knew Blind Neeraj was there ahead of me. I could hear his stick dotting the bus floor. I wondered if others in the bus could see me now.
By Sucharita Dutta-Asane
Your role was fixed where the three were concerned – you would spend a lifetime escorting eloping couples, living your fantasies through them. As soon as the car left, you looked around and found a bench in front of a café, your belly aching with suppressed laughter.
By Koushik Dutta
But nights were when he secretly won. He was a dreamer. When he stood on the balcony way past midnight, the tiny red tip of his cigarette glimmering intermittently like a red firefly, he was ruling his empire. We didn’t understand. Till this night I never guessed that he could be a king.
By Aparna Nandakumar
You never noticed, did you, that everyone here is young? As you hold on tightly to your loneliness, the ludicrous thought crosses your mind that immortality must feel something like this. You let out a soft chuckle, then bite it off quickly, apologetically.
By Subimal Misra
While the meat cooks he kneads flour into dough
His two muscular arms move up and down
All ten fingers seize the watered flour, and that babu-white flour paste
Slips so easily through the crevices between his fingers …
By Arundhati Ghosh
Afterwards we open the doors of the jeep and push the front seats back, converting them into a bench. Then we lie down next to each other. In almost total darkness my fingers search out the creases on Anwar’s face. This is exactly how I have wanted to be blind. Moving my kameez aside, I place Anwar’s muscular hand with the blue veins rising on my stomach.
By Anindita Das
I thanked the Almighty for providing us with food and a warm bed to sleep. And, I also thanked the other God, God Gregory. Unlike the time-tested haloed image of God – always a vision in pristine white or even the ten-handed Indian Goddess, who in her garishly colourful sartorial assortment, is a vision in smooth alabaster, God Gregory was the God etched in black, carved out from bitumen, much like the darkness of that eventful night.
By Mrugank Indurkar
Maria is 34 and she has no breasts. She is wearing a black gown and wayfarers on her eyes. She picks up some stones and begins throwing one stone after another and keeps staring at the water where the stones have been falling. The stones remain on the water’s surface. And then they sink, creating an echo in the air that would remain in Maria’s heart forever.
By Abhimanyu Singh
For half an hour or so, we listened to the constant flickering of matchsticks and other sounds coming out from his room. Our insides retched at the emetic bait. Knowing that Manik was doing it in the next room was the worst affliction we could suffer at that moment, considering that he did not really seem to wish to share any.
By Sunil Sharma
As the night advances, sleep still not an immediate possibility, I watch the street below. I maintain the vigil. And, in the deafening solitude, I hear somebody walking on tiptoe. It is Hegel. Yes, the venerable Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. And he is smiling.
By Gopa Nayak
She could not help but nourish the thoughts that if Buddhism was so enriched today it was because of the love and sacrifice that she had instilled into a human being who had shared everything with her, albeit for a while. Those thoughts had finally brought respite to her soul relieving her from all the anguish of a deserted woman.
Café Dissensus 