I was back. I was back in this familiar alley. I could see the book shop “Mitra book stall”. I looked up. It was evening time. The sun was setting. I stood there mesmerized, breathing in the last of the…
Category: South Asia
When the Sun Went Down
The sitting room was lit up till few moments back as the frailing sun was still able to beam down its rays but in a conspiratorial manner, the sky had started getting overcast and turned grey in a drone like…
‘My Little Dragonfly Secrets’ by Sonam Dema (Bhutan)
Do you know a secret about dragonflies? When I was a little girl, I would sometimes run away from my math classes and go to the river banks near my school for some very serious reasons. Reason one, I hated…
‘Marketing at the Sunset Boulevard’ by Muhammad Ashfaq (Pakistan)
Time and women – in combine if not collusion – had done him enough in life to add an extra decade to his face, gazing deep into his still eye-balls in the rearview-mirror he imagined, and slowly turned the newly-imported…
‘Cursed…’ by Norden Michael Lepcha (India)
She was impatiently walking to and fro in her room. Any time the phone would ring, and that would mean him. Maya was expecting her husband’s call from America. Maya was born Kalimpong. Her father was a clerk in a…
‘Looking for Sharma’ by Julie Kearney (Australia)
When the boulders appear on the horizon glowing pinkly above a fringe of coconut trees, I see they’re the same as ever, still heaped into fantastic mountains as if thrown down to earth by some playful giant. I can’t take…
‘Search for the Non-Existent’ by Yamini Vijendran (India)
As I wipe the sweat off my forehead, the lift operator looks at me quizzically, and then at the temperature indicator in the lift. It reads 20 degree centigrade, making the man quip, “What Saar! Two months only in America…
‘In the Forests of Himmapan’ by Swarnalatha Rangarajan (India)
“How can we think of leaving the village, Sirji? The gods of Jonkpur do not walk. So we have to stay where they live!” I shrug my shoulder and say nothing. The man who is talking to me does not…
‘The Memory Lane’ by Vijayender Cherupally (India)
The breeze turns more gentle. “How about going for a stroll?” I ask her. She smiles as she says, “You haven’t changed!” Change, I feel, is a complicated phenomenon, almost bordering on the incomprehensible for tardy minds like mine. So,…
‘Turbulence and Contentment’ by T-net Quiring (The Philippines)
Short story selected for the 2013 New Asian Writing Short Story Anthology Plane rides were a rare commodity for Consuelo. An old woman of sixties, she remembers her last being a domestic flight more than five years ago. The weather…
‘The Curse’ by Anand Betanabhotla (India)
The bus turned noisily round a bend in the road and rattled along a canal that fed the farms, the hamlet and the livestock. I felt myself odd among the village folk. The men smoked beedis and the women kept…
‘One Night and a Morning in Maya’s Life’ by Norden Michael Lepcha (India)
Short story selected for the 2011 New Asian Writing Short Story Anthology She stirred and moaned, enjoying the sensation after the act of love. She had eloped with Benay three days ago but these days had just passed off in…