(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 […]

What can I say about the girl in the green dress but that it was just the way she wore it and to me she was a cross between Lucille Ball and Snoopy. Or maybe it was Julia Roberts and a host of great Spanish poets. The first time I saw her wear the green […]

We had been on the terrace a quarter of an hour, silently sipping our cold drinks, when my cousin Vinil muttered, ‘Look.’ ‘Look where?’ I said. There was plenty to look at. It was 8 pm on Diwali; the streets were exploding with fireworks. Showers of sparks flew up from the driveways on every side […]