Sharath Komarraju's Blog, page 54

Sunday Story 11: Achala

I SLIP THROUGH the shuttered glass window like a moonbeam. The room I enter is unfamiliar, but that does not mean a thing. Memory is a luxury I no longer have. This is my first time in here, I tell myself, watching the single bed with the unrumpled white sheets, the pillow cover with pictures of cats on it, a tall bookshelf of grainy, unvarnished teak displaying leather-bound books with titles I cannot read... yes, this is a new house, a house I’ve never been inside before – but who can say for ...

Sunday Story 10: To Pot

‘THAT FELLOW OMPRAKASH has been filling the boy’s mind with rubbish,’ said Vishwas, my husband of thirteen years, regional officer at Palem’s Grameena Vikas Bank. It was a warm Wednesday night, and we were seated around the oval dining table we’d bought with the previous month’s Holi bonus. At eight p.m. the power would be cut across the Dhavaleshwaram Mandal for two hours; so we’d adjusted our dinner time to half past seven. Only one house in Palem – east or west – had the money (or maybe it wa...

Sunday Story 9: Sarama

RAMA SHASTRI FINISHED his morning worship of the sun, and came into the front room of his house coated in sweat. He was a thin, almost sickened man with a triangular face, a full head of porcupine-like black hair, and gaunt cheekbones. He was not an unhealthy man by any means, but the ritual of sandhyavandanam – performed on an empty stomach, right after a bath – gave him a mild headache. On hot mornings such as this, with summer creeping up on Palem this year early in the month of March (Rama S...

Sunday Story 8: The Fullness of Time

1921. I AM ARTHUR COTTON. People in these parts call me Cotton dora. Twenty two years after my death, the villagers of Palem decided that it was time to commemorate my work in this way: by erecting a seven-foot bronze statue of me on top of a five-foot stone pedestal.

I look nothing like the real Arthur Cotton, of course. After the resolution was passed under the banyan tree at the shivalayam, and after the sarpanch, Veerasimha Naidu, secured the funds necessary for my forging from the collector ...

Sunday Story 7: White Jasmine

THE ELEVEN A.M. bus to Dhavaleshwaram had only two passengers in it: a young couple who had chosen one corner of the last seat. As he got on at the Palem stop and made for his usual place in the middle row, by the right-hand-side window, Vilas Rao found himself feeling a touch of lightness for the lovebirds at the back. The Vilas Rao of six months ago would have riled and raged inside his mind at them; he would have wondered about the direction the nation was going; he would have convinced himse...

Sunday Story 6: Plus One

TWO THINGS HAPPENED on the eleventh day after my mother’s passing. One: Vinay wanted Amma’s watering can for himself. Two: a man came to visit me; a man I’d never seen before; a man who had one of those vaguely familiar faces that made you uncomfortable; a man who introduced himself as someone who once ‘knew your mother’.

The first was not a surprise. Mother did not have life insurance. (She never yielded to my sales talk.) No jewellery. Her only other possessions of note – besides her four saris...

Sunday Story 5: Show Maker

HEAD CONSTABLE MANIKANTHAM whistled while he put on his red-and-blue-striped hat. He stood in front of the mirror hooked to his window sill, and lightly grazed his stubble with the fingertips of his right hand. No need to shave this morning, he said to himself. Tomorrow, Monday, was payday, though all the unofficial collections were distributed yesterday, as was tradition in Sub Inspector Maheshwar Rao’s two-town police station in Dhavaleshwaram.

On the last Saturday of every month, at seven p.m....

Sunday Story 4: Hero

‘REKHA, WILL YOU take this up?’ Ravi asks me. And I immediately say yes. For the smallest of moments I offer a private apology to Monali, whose story this is and whose byline it deserves to appear under. But it has been a month since she has handed in her leave of absence, and Shekhar Babu’s birthday is fast approaching. ‘It is all there,’ says Ravi. ‘You just need to go down to the place, get some local flavour, talk to the people about old memories – that sort of thing.’

So it is that I find my...

Free Fiction Sunday #010 – To Pot

‘THAT FELLOW OMPRAKASH has been filling the boy’s mind with rubbish,’ said Vishwas, my husband of thirteen years, regional officer at Palem’s Grameena Vikas Bank. It was a warm Wednesday night, and we were seated around the oval dining table we’d bought with the previous month’s Holi bonus. At eight p.m. the power would be […]

Free Fiction Sunday #009 – Sarama

Rama Shastri finished his morning worship of the sun, and came into the front room of his house coated in sweat. He was a thin, almost sickened man with a triangular face, a full head of porcupine-like black hair, and gaunt cheekbones. He was not an unhealthy man by any means, but the ritual of […]