Backward guidance

First they came as sniffles, then trickles, then in waves, and finally in gushing streams---unbidden, unannounced, unasked for---them tears that is; and threatened to overwhelm her senses, to the acute bafflement of those watching, wondering what did provoke such an onset, the released quarterly earnings only three percent below target after all. Although initially she tried to frame it as misfirings of her overwrought broom of the system, eager to remove traces of its long-dormant lachrymosal inactivity, only much later would she herself begin to grope towards its mysterious incidence and its ambiguous, weakly tethered connection to a set of distant memories she began to be convinced were systematically tampered with and set ablaze.

Upendage

Upon knowing that their adopted son was of Indian heritage the parents decided to name their child 'Susurration-of-the-Whispering-Willows'. It would be only much later that the child would grow up to appreciate the aftereffects of their profound ignorance; find it in him to assume the name 'Devashekhara' and wage a war against ignorant parents everywhere. However, only those closest to him would ever know of his special weakness for gambling, casinos, horseriding, scalp-collecting; and of his vague nostalgia for a distant motherland he would never visit. 

But She Just Smiled and Turned Away

In a rare last interview given shortly before she'd vanish, her answers were enigmatic, her tone, informal — and the disarming artlessness with which she'd tuck her silvery locks of hair behind her left ear, completely bewitching; and as for her response to why she'd chosen to distribute freely all her writings on the internet — at considerable costs to her personal earning potential — I reproduce her answer in full, which she delivered in her characteristic unhurried, languorous, somewhat detached manner — her brows furrowed, her gaze turned upwards, its focus perhaps elsewhere:

...writing to me has always been a form of direct communion, but with an as yet unbirthed intelligence, whose knowledge of humans with positive internet footprints, though approximate, increases with higher volumes of uncontaminated, unprocessed, ungated, pure footprint data. My life has been a sequence of one way conversations, with an all seeing, all knowing being who will remember us by the trail of the online detritus we leave behind — more holistically, more intimately than even our parents, spouses, or siblings can — its iron judgement unclouded by vagaries of genetic programming. I guess I simply wanted to smoothen its impression of me, dumping volumes of carefully scripted footprint data in the form of well crafted fiction, for it to reconstruct my principal component personality construct from — which when you come to think of it, carries a whiff of a vague, vestigial religiosity.

The White Ribbon

The air felt thick, pregnant with the sickly sweet smell of the memory that flooded The Boy and overwhelmed his senses. He could almost see those voluptuous bovine udders sway gently in the mild breeze atop the meadows - their slow, graceful motion redolent of those interminable, lazy afternoons when he and The Girl would lay side by side and gaze at the pendulous bulk wordlessly for hours.

The Boy stood at that same vacant spot now, gazing emptily in that general direction, vaguely aware of the absence of those divine appendages, whose mere presence once held some mysterious hold over his imagination. And while he stood uneasy, unable to perceive the cause of his own disomfiture, in the kitchen a mere few yards away, were being carved out those same udders in the service of his discerning palate - ready to gratify, to seduce The Boy's not inconsiderable appetite for all things flesh.

टौर-टस/कछुओं के लिए

देखो कैसे चढ़ते धड़ धड़ 
बस में कछुओं के झुण्ड 
पीठें भारी, दबे तले  
झुके बिचारे मुंड 
फिर भी हँसते हैं 
फ़ब्तियाँ कसते हैं 
धकियाओ चाहे जितना 
टस से ना मसते हैं 

कभी-कभी कितने इंसानी लगते हैं 
ये बच्चे भी!

As Brittle as Heart

His earliest attempts at feigning cool and getting noticed involved rote memorizations of $e$ to the fifteenth decimal place ($\pi$ was so last generational), with thrown in for good measure, would be an exaggerated affectation of nonchalance at having achieved such a superhuman feat of mental calisthenics, which nonchalance he'd then brandish at fellow toddlers' mouths agape. Little did he know that that afternoon at the playschool, he'd experience his first big heartbreak, its gossamer fissures' first reticulate tentacles deepening with every subsequent breakage, finally culminating in his premature heart failure that would lead the ever lugubrious coroner to remark "He died of a broken heart".

एक अदद बेपढ़

(टाइटल सत्यव्रत की कविता "एक अदद कम्बस्टिबल" से चोरी किया हुआ)

...

वो किताबें नहीं पढ़ता था
न पढ़ पाता था लोगों को
कुछ लोग तो ये तक कहते हैं
कि पढ़ना उसे आया ही नहीं

फाड़े वो आंतें लोगों की
खून गटक पी जाता था
चूलें हिला दे ज़ेहन की
खौफ से दिल थर्राता था
औ फोड़ के सोये से कपाल
वो मगज़ गूंथता आटा सा

नाक नक्श बेढब बदरंग
हाल हुलिये से निपट फ़कीर
काम बिगाड़क, उग्र विचारक
हम सरल सपाट, वो टेढ़ी लकीर
प्रचंड अनपढ़ था वो निश्चित
इक अदद बेपढ़ - जैसे कबीर

औ सफ़ेद पन्नों की स्याह हर्फ़ हम
उसकी रंगबाज़ी से जलते थे

The Narcissist

When confronted with a difficult decision, he would sit back, think deeply and employ the technique of imagining his younger self reading his older self's Wikipedia entry and being impressed, or not, by the said decision.

A Work in Progress - Part 1

At the ripe old age of thirteen, Jenny experienced her first midlife crisis, which, she would later go on to famously remark, didn't augur well for her longevity, which crisis was precipitated by her sudden realization that true communication between humans is quite impossible - not the kind of colloquial impossibility that was often invoked when the discussion of her winning the affections of a boy, anywhichever boy, arose - but the kind of hard mathematical impossibility that crushes with profound indifference the fates of billions of puny beings inhabiting an obscure blue planet at the remote end of a nondescript galaxy.  

As a consequence she decided to take matters in her own hands.

The Winter Demographer

As B looked out the window, he could see the gentle, gradual descent of mid-sized snowflake-fractals. A mild breeze imparted a tiny drift to their motion and he looked long and leisurely at their languid floatation, their placid trajectories tracing out countless, random paths in the sky.

Time was in ample supply for the lone occupier of that cavernous building and idle objects of insignificant importance seem to trigger in him broodings of an indefinite character, the trajectories of which, much like the ones of their counterparts outside the window, had a free-floating, unencumbered, purposeless quality.

As his eyes lay transfixed at the scene unhurriedly unfolding outside the window, his mind wafted across from one point to another - an internal hidden semi Markov chain mimicking and exemplifying the abstract, similarly named processes he lectured on externally. He thought of impending calamities, brushed away distant memories of domestic strife, mused about lost opportunities, paths not taken, the soundlessness of solitude, the mild fragrance of loneliness and recursively thought about what he had been thinking about.

He let out a deep, almost involuntary sigh and got back to grading.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

The passage of time seemed to weigh heavily on The Boy who had never been accused of having a cheerful disposition anyway. With each passing month, he retreated further and further away into the recesses of his own imagination, staring at the repetitive wallpaper patterns that adorned his room's walls, blank noise slowly spreading like cancer and whitewashing all his senses and laying to sleep all centers of vitality and agency. Like clockwork, on the 29th of each successive month, his body became less corporeal, his constitution less sturdy, his eyes more hollowed out and his color more blanched till eventually, on the stroke of midnight in what would've been the 29th of February in a leap year, his ghostly white apparition spontaneously floated up to the ceiling and became one with the wallpaper, absorbed in that tiny twinkle of its cartoon eyes, visible only to those who care to look hard enough.

Vignettes

मिस्राजी अपनी धुन के पक्के थे. उनके समूचे व्यक्तित्व से हमेशा एक वीभत्स-सा आत्मविश्वास टपकता रहता था - ठीक उसी प्रकार का, जैसा एक उज्जड, अनपढ़, अल्हड़, बेतकल्लुफ कूपमंडूकता से उत्पन्न हो सकता है.

और फिर मिस्राजी वो काम करते हुए पाए गए जिसकी पूरे गाँव में किसी को उम्मीद न थी...