Ghachar Ghochar

by Vivek Shanbhag

It’s natural to ask, I suppose, why the six of us should live together. As natural as it is for families to pretend that they desire what is thrust upon them as an inevitability. It’s one of their strengths.

Chikkappa started the business, now our source of sustenance, and as a result he’s regarded above everyone else at home. His meals, his preferences, his conveniences, are of supreme importance to us

The woman had not abused us. She had not come here to pick a fight. We were thrown off balance by her love for one of us, and so we tore into her with such vengeance that she collapsed to the ground, sobbing.

Our only fear now is that he might lose his mind with age and become ruinously entangled in some philanthropic enterprise. So we try to keep him in a good mood, making sure he doesn’t lose his taste for food or develop other ascetic tendencies. We

If we noticed that they’d laid siege to a snack, we might trap them in a circle drawn with water and take away whatever they were eating. Then watch them scurry about in confusion before wiping them off with a wet cloth.

The house we’d lived in until then looked shockingly bare. Dust and the detritus of moving were everywhere. With all their contents gone, the rooms looked even smaller and strangely lifeless. Where the floor had been covered by something, there was dirt along the edges.

Malati had always been unstable – a pile of gunpowder waiting to go off.

In retrospect, many of the new objects had no place in our daily lives. Our relationship with the things we accumulated around us became casual; we began treating them carelessly.

man in our society is supposed to fulfil his wife’s financial needs, true, but who knew he was expected to earn the money through his own toil?