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Ferments O Child of the twentieth CenturyBrought up on junkKnowMother’s milk was the norm once.O traveller of the internetKnow information travelled then tooO laptop-hugging walking encyclopediaKnow your seniors were as smartSometimes smarter tooO devourerOf instant infotainmentKnow some history too. The Conjuror in the Sun 19th century Spain was a mosaic of smuggling, sects, and scandals. The…

The Milch Cow of Dharmapura In the dusty town of Dharmapura, where the Yamuna flowed slow and indifferent beyond the mustard fields, two men stood taller than the rest. One was rarely seen, the other impossible to miss. Bopa Rai was the wealthiest man for five hundred kilometres in any direction. His family had traded in grain, cotton, and ancient secrets for fifty-one unbroken generations. Yet…

For a man I never met, whose name I never learned. I. It was a whisper, the way she said it — not flat reporting, not loud declamation. A man had died of IVDA, leaving two young kids, a wife, an early death. His heart burst. He was only forty. I heard it and took it as a sharing — not only of a salacious story, but of death, of untimely death. It was a proper setting for thought. Did the…

Panchkula. The market. The balcony. The debt that was never about the beggar. ✦ The Curse of the Full Sack Bopa was ten — perhaps eleven — the age when pride begins to sprout, like the first coarse hairs on a boy’s chin. It was summer, dry and searing, the kind of heat that turns every sound brittle. He was outside his house, squatting in the dust, drawing lines with a broken twig, when a…

Vāk The River Before the River On the banks of the Sarasvatī. Before memory. Before time had learned to count itself. — ★ — I. Ka The Ādityas, the Vasus, the Rudras, Varuṇa, Mitra, Aryaman, Bhaga, Tvaṣṭṛ, Pūṣan, Vivasvat, Savitṛ, Indra, Viṣṇu, Dhātṛ, Aṃśa, Anumati, Dhiṣaṇā, Soma, Bṛhaspati, Sūrya, Svasti, Uṣas, Āyu, Sarasvatī. Thirty-three in all. But each had many names — and some gods…

A Tale of Three Encounters Narinder Jarial ✦ Apoptosis — a fall, like a leaf. Not into an abyss, but back into the ground that made it. — N. Jarial The debt remains. The face changes. — The Beggar of Bathinda ✦ Part I — The Curse of the Full Sack Bopa was ten — perhaps eleven — the age when pride begins to sprout, like the first coarse hairs on a boy’s chin. It was summer, dry and…

Medical College, Gwalior. The bad trip. Some years before everything else. The Man in Bed Seven The man in bed seven had been at GCS 3 to 4 for three days. On the Glasgow Coma Scale, 3 is the floor. Eyes do not open. No verbal response. Motor response at its most primitive — the body present and the person who inhabited the body elsewhere, or nowhere, or somewhere without an address. For…

Dalhousie, Himachal Pradesh. Winter. Before Siachen, or just after. The years when everything was still possible. He had come down from Siachen knowing two kinds of snow. The first kind was the Siachen kind — not the snow of postcards and hill station memories but something else entirely, something the glacier produced in its own image. It came horizontally. It came with the wind behind it,…

Somnath The Port of Prabhas Patan, Gujarat January 1026 CE “The fame of the temple of Somnath had spread to all countries of the world. — Al-Biruni, 11th century CE” The Town Before The Arabian Sea came to Somnath the way it came to everything on that coast — without asking permission, at its own hours, answering to the moon and no one else. At high tide it covered the lowest steps of the…

A Man Was Lost to the Glacier Siala Post, Siachen Glacier. 18,600 feet. 1992. Vinod Dora was the kind of officer you remember not because he saved your life — though he may have done that too — but because he taught you things no classroom ever would. Once, on a patrol above Siala, while an HMG position below us was firing in our direction, he had watched the tracer rounds arc overhead with the…

A Man Was Lost to the Glacier Siala Post, Siachen Glacier. 18,600 feet. 1992. Vinod Dora was the kind of officer you remember not because he saved your life — though he may have done that too — but because he taught you things no classroom ever would. Once, on a patrol above Siala, while an HMG position below us was firing in our direction, he had watched the tracer rounds arc overhead with the…

https://indiawris.gov.in/wiki/doku.php?id=mahakali This source explores the intriguing Kali Nadi myth and its cultural significance. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/earthquake-hazards/science/continental-collision Examining geological processes can often intersect with stories like the Kali Nadi myth. Gaurihaat, Doli, and the Runaway Bride of the Kali Nadi On the border of India and Nepal, in…

# Shadows of the Householder Part I: The Happy Family Gathering Pawan and Shruti, for wind and memory for force and forgetting, grew up in the same house, yet differently. Very careful of their privacy, Shruti was sloppy and would do things like leave her clothes lying all around. Pawan would pile them up rapidly in some scattered disorder. Their mother checked each pocket, looked between their…

Myself to Myself: When the Hanged Man Met the Ascetic I know that I hung on a windy tree nine long nights, wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin, myself to myself, on that tree of which no man knows from where its roots run. This is a story of the Crossroads Between Worlds, a place where the roots of Yggdrasil delve so deep they touch the heat of the cosmic cremation grounds. Here, time is…