तमाम तरह की पनीली वनस्पतियों से भरा पोखर सफ़ाई करने वाले उन जमादार लोगों की जान था। वहाँ वे नहाते, हाथ-पैर, कपड़े धोते और अपने गाय-बछड़ों को नहलाते। गरमी के मौसम में मोहल्ले के लड़के दिन-भर फुटबॉल खेलकर थक जाते और उस पोखर में तैरकर अपनी तपिश और थकन मिटाते। बारिश आती तो बच्चे और [...]

प्रार्थना मेरी प्रिय जेनी, मैं इस समय वास्तविकता के संसार से अलग खड़ा हूँ, सोच रहा हूँ तुमसे बात किये कितना लंबा अरसा बीत चुका है. मुझे वे शब्द याद हैं जो तुमने कहे थे, जब हम आखिरी बार जुदा हो रहे थे उससे ऐन पहले, “अप्पा, तुम मुझसे मिलने आओगे, आओगे न?” हम नहीं [...]

(a) After the long summer vacations, I returned a week late to a university made calm and lush by the recent monsoons. The hostel boundaries of trees and creepers had come closer in a tight embrace; the narrow pathway that led through the garden to the temple had disappeared. From the tree branches, heavy with [...]

The cliff behind Martha threw a network of shadows over her and drew in the blue sky with an angular, irregular line. The sun pushed the flickering sea up around the bathers in the bay, whom Martha was watching from her chair, which was pushed half way in under a rocky protrusion. Lines of white [...]

He is sitting on the edge of the beach. Today is the last day of his life. He is going to commit suicide. Your guess is right, he is a poet. You are of course aware that great men never die of illness. They usually choose to kill themselves. But even if he isn’t such [...]

The hotel stood in a desolate side-alley as grey as the morning just behind the station. It would have been quicker to walk but he was dog-tired, aching in every joint after travelling by train all night. He paid off the driver and studied the façade – four storeys rendered and painted some indefinable dirty [...]

Even at an early age, when he was only a nine-year-old Colombian boy, Artemio Sandoval decided that when he grew up he would be a writer. The child Artemio had just written another story about Roy Jackson: his own fictitious cowboy who rode through wild landscapes while he shot at Indians and bandits. In “The [...]

1. I am searching for a good place to cry. It is not at all easy to find such a place. I have ridden around in a bus for several hours, now I’m sitting on a rickety bench, all the way out on the coast. There are no ferries here. Only a barge that hauls [...]

I am not a story writer. Nor do I have the talent for it. A story writer should naturally be an art connoisseur, and I am not even an art novice. But I have come across a ‘plot’ for gifted story writers, and hope they can erect an impressive structure on this ‘plot’. There is [...]

“Don’t say that a hundred thousand Hindus and a hundred thousand Muslims died. Say two hundred thousand people died. Muslims might have thought that by killing a hundred thousand Hindus, the Hindu faith would be wiped out. But it’s alive and will continue to live. Similarly, after killing a hundred thousand Muslims, Hindus might have [...]