Arun Paria
Parashuraman, OLA- S566, is a strange man.
When he goes to bed at the Parvati Chawl, his yellow-black autorickshaw rests beside a corporation vat, and his dead mother comes to sleep beside him.
“Har, har,’ snickers Langda Raju, his paramour, lifting a ‘Blue Riband’, pointing a poison finger at him, ‘Bonkers, Pashu. Your amma is still alive!” Parashuraman’s eyes gleam.
He knows, he knows. It is an impossible problem.
The ghosts
of my desire
whisper
from the craters
of the nightly dreams.
Their voices
are echoing —
Deepali Sane, XII A, 14, loves prism.
In the lab, the assistant Kumthekar Kaka issues her two prisms instead of the usual student quota of one. Placing them on a white paper, one after the other, she goes to the window to fetch the light.
Frivolous rays are netted, and then they scatter. She counts: “7, 13, 29, 67, 91, 4, 48 …”
When the rays emerge from the second prism, white and whole again, she silently multiplies in her head. When the teacher arrives to check the ray diagram, ‘3089276736’ is written in her notebook.
A terrible repetition —
Dark water
on one side,
disappointment
on another.
No sun.
No compass to the north.
Darpan Sen, CMO, UTEX Communications, Inc., can see himself.
Climbing up the staircase of his Baner apartment during a power cut – from the parking lot to the fourth floor – he sees himself floating like a balloon in the air. A man who resembles himself stares at him from the bathroom mirror. Darpan Sen stares back. At night, while making love, his buttocks rise and fall – he watches their movements with disinterest.
The marriage counsellor is in disbelief. She asks, “As if you are in a movie?”
“More like I am in a taxi,’ he replies. ‘It goes wherever I ask it to go. Even when I don’t wish to go there.”
Even when emptiness:
A different brass cup.
Full of remembrances —
It does not tell
how it began.
How it will end.