"It's not that I don't care. Don't you understand? Of course, I do. It's just, there are things in my life that I care about too, things that I need to care about, and I simply can't leave everything behind and let my life revolve around you, no matter how much I want to. You…
On Sundays We Go to Church
I leave the church, and I wander for a time through the chaos and the fire. The world that I knew, that I remember, is gone, like years had passed while I was still within, where time remains still, while the world moves ever onward, onto a hazy red rapture, always steady, never slowing, eating…
An Existence in Crisis
It is quiet. Too quiet. I shout, but I only hear the echoes of my own voice answering me. This has happened before, many times, too many to count, and they all ended not with agony or death—how else would I be here? But this time, something feels different, something smells off. I pace around,…
An End of the World: Part IV and Epilogue
Part Four The days were bleeding into each other. I never once saw the sun or the moon, and although I looked towards the western horizon at every dawn, I never saw the stars again. The sky was a constant blanket of red and black, changing shades depending on the hour of the day. I…
An End of the World: Part III
Part Three Seahorses. I did not know the first thing about seahorses except they are an aquatic animal and that they are funny-looking. I was only familiar with them through school text books and nature channels on TV, but I had neither a like nor a dislike for them. They were not a part of…
An End of the World: Part II
Part Two I was dreaming. In my dream I was back in school. That boy in my class, that puny boy, had been calling me names, kicking my seat, stealing my pens. I wanted to react, I wanted to tell him to stop it, I wanted to tell on him, but I couldn’t. I didn’t…
An End of the World (in Four Parts and an Epilogue)
Note: I began writing this as a short story. It was one of those stories that somehow took a life of its own and grew beyond what I had originally intended. Even though I normally begin writing without knowing how my stories will end or how I'll get there, or how long it would take…
What Would It Be Like
What would it be like to die? I wonder if it might be similar to being born, to coming to life. Nobody truly knows what it feels like to breathe air for the first time, to cry, to hear, to have a soul. Do we have souls? When do our souls enter our body? Upon…
Romancing the Woods
A Dark Fable in XII Parts I Growing up where we did, we have all heard the fable of the beast in the woods. Mothers chide their naughty children with dark forbidding tales of the she-monster that comes to prowl the village nooks and listen for the cries of wilful urchins. The she-monster, they’d say,…
On the Question of Prayers
‘I’ve been learning to pray again,’ I said, breaking the silence that was beginning to stretch. We were sitting on the terrace of her apartment building, the spring-heralding breeze caressing the slow darkness of the adolescent night, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, the view—a glimmering Delhi skyline. ‘That’s good,’ my friend said. She did not…
Gutter Galley 