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Demigod 2007-06-09 01:02:03 He was close to the edge. As close as a man can get when he is separated from a free fall that will last a hundred and twenty-seven stories by seven inches of flawless glass.
The view was spectacular.
He saw landmarks he did and didn’t recognize, church steeples, smokestacks, the rooftops of other, tall-but-not-quite-tall-enough buildings and he imagined all the tiny lives being lived in the streets and homes below his vantage point.
He felt good. A nearly sour deal had suddenly turned sweet and he felt like celebrating. He decided that he would do it among his people.
He descended to the restaurant on the third floor of the building. The beauty of his profession was that it allowed him to be known without being recognized. He would never be seen on a television program hiring and firing employees. He didn’t need to ride in hot air balloons for people to know his name or understand that he was a man who took huge risks and won.
There were a few photographs in the public domain but
Bad Girl 2007-06-15 01:00:17 It’s really not a nice thing to do, to piss people off. So it was a good thing for William that he was not a nice man. Even if he had been, it was not in his nature to do nice things. If there was one person he was more predisposed to do bad things to than anyone else, it was Jennifer. Not because she had wronged him in any way that couldn’t be made right but because she had dared to wrong him at all.
The thing about bad men is, they fall in love too. Sometimes with good women, who take the shit they dish out and pretend that they are not all bad because of the great sex they once had or the nice dress they once bought them. Once in a while, a bad man falls in love with a bad woman and that’s when the shit and the fan have a meeting. In a crowded room filled with rich people wearing expensive clothes.
They met under very common circumstances. She was excited because her team was winning a basketball game. He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her bouncing breasts every singl Read more:Bad Girl
Exclusive 2007-06-13 19:55:44 He couldn’t believe what he was reading and yet, there they were, the words, strung together and possessing a malevolent life.
Every single day that dawns upon this planet, that I am here to witness I wonder about my place in this world and all the others who live here with me. I saw a diseased man as I drove my car last night and I wondered how he could stand to be so unclean. What is it about everybody and their attempting to cling on to lives that ceased to have meaning so long ago? Are bullets that hard to find? Is it so hard to acquire a prescription for sleeping pills? And why do so many people get it wrong when they slash their wrists? These and other questions like this vex me. I wish I had an answer for the fears that threaten to consume me with every passing day.
Only this was not a solitary necklace in the jewellery box. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of entries like this one in an online blog that should have been available for anyone who cared to input the correct Read more:Exclusive
Suggestive Content 2007-06-13 00:51:40 “You don’t go in hard, you try and go in deep,” that’s what the hockey tem coach would say. Especially after another one of their matches had gone south because the captain led his men into an all out charge and left the goalkeeper all alone to defend against any sneaky opponents who got past.
It’s what the guys said to each other while bragging about penis size across the length and breadth of the college campus.
They were the early years of the new century and a new millennium; sex was in again.
Every time one of the guys quoted the coach, who was more of a legend on campus than he was on the playing field, a girl nearby giggled. To listen to the way they carried on was to assume that everyone in that South Mumbai college was a raving slut. It was impossible to conduct a serious conversation without somebody falling over clutching their sides because somebody had said something that they perceived as suggestive.
“Follow through is important.” Ha ha ha.
“She’s alway Read more:Content
Fit The Crime 2007-06-12 00:31:30 He was standing over her awaiting the moment she returned to the land of the conscious. His enemies had made it known through messengers that it was not right. His friends were too scared to say anything. He was that kind of man, so intimidating with his presence that others forgot how to speak, how to form simple sentences that might have spared them great physical and emotional pain. Most people thought he preferred it that way.
Most people were right.
She had been drugged so that she would go easily into the night with her escorts. They had picked her up at a nightclub where there was always likely to be a drunken hero in the crowds. He didn’t want to draw attention by having to hurt anybody that didn’t need to be hurt. His enduring defense of himself and his actions had always been that he never brought pain to anyone who didn’t deserve it.
People would have asked if his own wife deserved to be hurt and he would have answered yes.
She had shamed him in public by making a spec
Action! 2007-06-18 02:51:24 She had tears streaming down her cheeks and puffs of cigarette smoke streaming out her nostrils. Her eyes were averted and she was every inch the affronted artist. He was sitting ramrod straight in a chair that provided a decent amount of back support but he needed his body language to convey neither his sense of urgency nor his exhaustion with her drama. It was a tableau actress and director would recreate several times during the course of shooting the film.
It was his first film and he wanted to do everything in his power to ensure that it was a worthy effort. He was a card carrying member of the school of thought that a director needed to believe in his project one hundred percent before he agreed to attach his name to it. With that belief under his arm he had waited twelve years to find the film he wanted to direct.
It was a simple enough tale on the surface, a story about a woman and the effects of the men who love her upon her life. The lead character was a real woman, with real Read more:Action
The Favour 2007-06-17 01:34:45 The door to the store opened at a time no one was expecting customers. The heat in the street threatened to melt the plastic off the bench at the bus stop and metallic surfaces were hot enough to cook on. The proprietor and his wife were sitting in the back fanning themselves with the morning’s newspaper while an ineffective cooler tried to circulate the hot air. It didn’t appear that anybody sane was willing to risk sunstroke just to pop into the corner store. Across the city, people without air-conditioning were wilting in the early afternoon heat. When the proprietor and his wife came out front they were wearing the furrowed brows of the mildly irritated.
The irritation was replaced with concern when they laid eyes on their customer.
She was as inappropriately dressed for the heat as the forty-year-old moms who thought it was cool to shop in the same stores as their sixteen-year-old daughters. The proprietor wondered for a fleeting moment whether the PVC chafed. She was wearing Read more:Favour
Interview 2007-06-16 01:25:56 She moved the microphone and wondered for the thousandth time that day, why she was doing this. From her brief tenure on the college campus she had learnt that it was difficult to distinguish between the students beyond a point. It was easier to just pin them to a type card and typecast them. The girl with the microphone made mental notes of how many nerds she scored in a row or she tried to remember what the second guy in a string of macho ‘movie stars’ looked like. She never succeeded.
It was a job and even though she was on a college campus she found herself longing for the time she had spent in an old age home. The people in the twilight of their lives had the invigorating stories and opinions. The ass-munches with the too much testosterone that they wore as a badge they called attitude…not so much. They were just exhausting.
She finally understood why her producer had insisted that she interview a hundred student per college, at the very least. It was like talking to the man
Chain 2007-06-21 22:30:31 She took one final drag and flicked the cigarette into the street. It was not even half-smoked and the flaming end popped right off and landed in the upturned cuff of a teenager’s jeans.
She was too busy arguing with her boyfriend to notice. She thought he was paying more attention to her best friend than he was to her. He claimed he was being nice but she told him she knew what guys wanted when they were ‘just being nice’. He shoved her, said, “fuck you I don’t need this,” and walked away. Just then the fiery tobacco burned right through the fabric and sizzled into her ankle. For a moment she couldn’t think of anything other than the hurt she felt as she watched her boyfriend walk away. The next moment she screamed in pain from the burning cigarette ember scorching her skin. She crumpled to the ground and an older woman, who was passing by, stopped.
She was an ‘older woman’ in the sense that she was several years older than the teenager. She placed fingers on the gir Read more:Chain
Kidnapped 2007-06-20 01:16:07 It was the hum that woke her. The hum of a tube light that pierced through her grogginess to remind her that she didn’t allow tube lights in her room. She didn’t care if they saved energy or if they were good for the environment. All she knew was white light made her sick and reminded her of hospitals. It was nothing but dimmer-controlled yellow light in her room. She liked to set the mood and very rarely would her mood require the lights to be turned all the way up. She loved to declare to her friends, “brightness is the enemy; a girl can only really have fun in the shadows.”
So what the hell was a tube light doing humming in her bedroom?
She sucked in a lungful of air ready to start yelling at her parents for doing another thing without asking her. They were constantly attempting to curtail her freedoms and she was not taking it anymore. This was no way for a girl to wake up. With a tube light in her room! What would they think of next? Shop in the bargain bin to save some mo Read more:Kidnapped
Uprising 2007-06-20 01:13:15 They asked to be let in; which made them different form the rest of the troops patrolling other parts of the city. There hadn’t been any fighting or violence of any sort within forty miles of the South-West. It was the place where the agreeable population lived. Nobody was more inclined to fall in line with government decrees than the people who lived in the South-West. In the gated communities named Silver Haven or Paradise Island or Sunshine Cove, armed soldiers were unlikely to find the kind of trouble they were battling in other corners of the city. This is why, when they needed to check on someone from the South-West, they requested permission to step onto the grounds.
The name on the front gate simply said Chin and there was no telling how many people were actually in the Chin household at the time the patrol showed up. They rang the doorbell and waited. A female voice crackled over the intercom, “Yes?”
The soldier who had pushed the button on the doorbell leaned forward to Read more:Uprising
Buck Stars 2007-06-19 00:18:19 They found themselves at the same coffee shop at around the same time four days in a row, Monday through Thursday. By Wednesday she had a favourite table and by Thursday he had one of his own, just coincidentally situated at an angle that allowed him to sneak periodic glances in her direction. They had registered each other on the very first day and by Wednesday they were playing a semi-clandestine game of peek-a-boo. Both of them were well-dressed and both of them were accessing the Internet from 15-inch MacBook Pros. But then so were so many other people who looked like students or design professionals on a coffee break. Somehow they managed to have eyes only for each other, but never at the same time.
On Friday he wasn’t around and she was surprised at herself for being disappointed. She opened up the literary website she sometimes visited and was well into the story about the ‘bad girl’ when she heard a male voice say, “Excuse me…”
It was him. She wondered whether he ha
Domestic Terrorism 2007-06-24 20:15:12 The melee quickly spiraled into a fracas and all that was known was that someone had called someone else an objectionable name. By the time the noses had been bloodied and a couple of limbs broken, by the time the cops had got in there and done their own damage, nobody knew what really started this latest minor disturbance. There was little to do save for blaming law enforcement for everything that was wrong with the city. The scene had been enacted in the city of Mumbai but it could so easily have been a major metropolis in any part of the world. That is the thought Karan took with him on his train ride home. It is the idea that he grappled with on the bus journey that followed. When he finally unlaced his shoes in the single room apartment he called home he was so upset about the state of the world he didn’t have an appetite anymore.
He confessed to Abraham, his friend and confidante, the following afternoon at lunch that he was sick of it all. Life, as they knew it, was far worse Read more:Domestic
, Terrorism
Hercule: Chapter 1 2007-06-24 00:18:24 Hercule Washington was not someone you wanted to fuck with. This is not to say that he wasn’t receptive to a good natured ribbing or that he cared too much about having his good name dragged through the mud. Far from it. Seventeen years and eleven months ago Deena Washington had named her newborn after the star of the mysteries she had read through her final trimester while she was confined to bed and advised rest, fluids and all the nourishment she could get for herself and her baby. Deena thought that she would honour the time she had spent in the company of the diminutive Belgian detective by giving her son his name. In truth she had given him a life-long curse to bear. If the soon-to-be-a-man Mr. Washington had a nickel for every time someone had hinted that he didn’t know how to spell his own name because he’d forgotten the ‘s’ at the end he would have been able to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool with all that metal. Actually it was unlikely that a few million people Read more:Chapter
Unavailable 2007-06-22 21:54:35 The sound of the whiskey filling the glass was as seductive as a siren call and several men looked over. The initial curiosity was always to see what was being drunk by someone else. When they saw that it was a woman drinking one of the finest single malts in the house their curiosity took on an entirely different shade.
She was a lot of woman in the best possible way. Curves so dangerous a fellow could get whiplash navigating them and a smile so lethal the average male was well-advised to travel with a shot of adrenaline in his coat pocket, or at the very least, smelling salts.
Her name was Ilsa, after the character in the movie but she was no ingénue nor did she play at being one. She liked her position in the world, as a woman of power, and she was not averse to using said power to get what she desired. She was no spring chicken so she had the mandatory disappointed suitors, ex-lovers who felt jilted and even a man she left at the altar in her past.
She wasn’t looking for company
Thought Portfolio 2007-06-28 21:34:57 It was a rainy morning and traffic was heavier than usual. Cars were chasing other cars with horns blaring, like recently jilted women chasing their ex-lovers down the street demanding further explanation for why they were no longer couples. His attempts at crossing the road had been repeatedly thwarted. For no good reason whatsoever the question, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” kept running through his head on eternal repeat.
Where the hell is a red light when you need one?
He stepped out into the street again and a blaring horn greeted the move. Tires screeched like a violin’s bow grabbed out of the unsuspecting hand of a rapturous virtuoso and he froze, as if somewhere nearby an instamatic camera was about to go off and he needed to capture that pose for eternity.
Though significantly slower than it could have been, the car hadn’t managed to stop on a dime so when it hit him he went down like a lonely pin seeking relief from the speeding bowling ball curving towards it Read more:Portfolio
Bare All 2007-06-27 21:15:25 Bare All, that’s what the ad exhorted its readers to do. That and a telephone number was all that was provided by way of enticement.
So in terms of conventional wisdom, it should have been an ad that was ignored. He was not the type to place much value in conventional wisdom, so he went ahead and called the number. After three rings a recorded message said, “The next session begins at twenty hundred hours on Friday the 29th. If this is your first time you need to know that the clothing rule is non-negotiable. In twenty seconds you will be given an address. It will be repeated once. Please do not call back to verify our address because this phone number has been logged and it will be cross-referenced against all other numbers connected to the registered occupants of that address. Calls from untraceable phones will not be considered. Callbacks will result in cancellation of the invitation. Please be on time. The address is…”
He scrambled for a pen and wrote on his palm. When the
Encounters 2007-06-26 21:23:19 Like most families returning from their first trip abroad, they wandered around the airport trying to figure out how to get outside without being slapped with huge duties. He was becoming increasingly exasperated with his parents’ behaviour. Maybe it was the ceaseless stream of questions in stereo…
“Do you have all the bags?”
“Did you take all the ketchup sachets?”
“Where are the forks and spoons?”
Maybe it was the knowledge that they didn’t buy anything the customs officers would be remotely interested in. All he knew was that he was ready to spend a year isolated from anybody related to him by blood.
He looked around and became slack-jawed at the realisation that the plane seemed to have brought them more than just a few thousand miles because all around him, the world looked like it had regressed a couple of decades. To a time where the bottom two feet of all walls of the airport were painted a quintessentially government-approved shade of green and all entrance Read more:Encounters
Blind Date 2007-06-25 22:42:07 She was early, and seated. He only found out because the maître d’ asked if he’d like a table right away and he said that he was meeting someone. The man in the impeccable suit informed him that there already was someone waiting and she had left a name. He was surprised enough to check his watch, “I don’t think so, I’m early. What was the name?”
“A Ms. Angela Corman sir.”
“Shit.”
“Pardon sir?”
“I’m sorry, yes I suppose that’s her. What time do you have?”
His posture unchanged, the man with the regal nose check his wristwatch and said, “It’s precisely one minute to eight Sir.”
They had planned to meet, ‘around eight.’
“Which way is it?”
“Follow me sir.”
He tried to visualise words of apology or explanation on the vast black expanse of the maître d’s jacket but the walk was a short one and when the man stepped aside to show him his date, he was drawing a blank. He just stood there as she took a sip of water and when she realis Read more:Blind
, Blind Date
Succession 2007-07-01 22:00:52 To so few does the thought even occur – is this all I was meant for? And fewer still seek a different answer than a resounding affirmative. So an uneasy slumber comes and we sleepwalk through the daytime of our lives, as the world gently turns to shelter us from the sun’s unforgiving glare.
But what of those that dare to try and plot for themselves a different course? Would not it make sense that those people at least be honoured for trying? One would think so, especially if one were part of the tribe that tried. Fortunately for all and unfortunately for some, no medals are given for attempts made and trophies were never granted to those who turned up on the appointed day and fought an admirable battle. To the winners go the spoils and so it should be and if those who lose think they deserve the same opportunities as enjoyed by the winners, it is the loser’s responsibility to come forth and win.
Mortimer Felch suffered no such concerns.
Undaunted by the greatest responsibil
Mentor 2007-06-30 23:33:26 “It’s difficult, I won’t deny it. Killing is hard but you know what? Making a killing is harder. Trust me, I’ve tried. Tried and nearly died. Twice. Third time is not going to be the charm.” He waved his lit cigarette at the skies during that last bit about ‘third time’ and ‘charm’. His name was Michel Srivastav and he was as weird as his name. His full name was Michelangelo Laszlo Srivastav. Why? Because his father was blown away by the Sistine Chapel and because he was a huge fan of the movie Casablanca. It was an incredibly touristy thing to do and Michel hated his father for it. Or so he said.
My name is not important.
We used to call him Sri because that’s what he insisted we call him. It didn’t matter to him that ‘Sri’ was how a famous Bollywood actress from the eighties was known to fans and journalists. If anybody mentioned it, he said, “So fucking what? Being called a girl’s name is no different from being named Michelangelo. Do I look like a muta Read more:Mentor
Generations 2007-06-29 21:17:46 My grandfather used to say, the dead should take their secrets with them. I might have been the only one who heard him while everyone else, including my mother, his daughter, dismissed his words as the ramblings of a senile man. It’s true my grandfather was old, it’s also true that he had once roamed the city streets for over an hour on a rainy day without any pants on but that didn’t mean that all his words were meant to be ignored.
At least I didn’t think so.
He didn’t believe in much, my grandfather but he did believe that a man’s underarms should be shaved. I have no idea why. He would often go days without saying anything to anyone and then suddenly because he had caught sight of my teenage growth spurt manifested as underarm hair he would instruct my mother to tell me to shave. Even though I was standing right there.
To say that my grandfather was indirect was to say that the Earth orbited the sun, as if you’d only just found out.
So granddad said a few other things Read more:Generations
Post Modern Realities 2007-07-05 22:51:54 Very early on in the redevelopment of the town after the dawning of the Post Modern
era the town elders had gathered together to decide the way forward for themselves and all the people that had placed themselves in their care.
One of the earliest decisions made at the time was that if they were going to survive for any appreciable period of time it was going to be by re-examining the laws that had governed them before. This meant the abolishment of laws that were merely a veil to disguise increased profitability for individuals who operated unlawful enterprises in plain sight. That had been the reality of the world in the days leading up to the Post Modern era. A variety of enterprises grew and mushroomed because of the satellite enterprises that grew under the umbrella of the parent endeavour. This included, but was not limited to, bribery, strong arm operations, the drug trade, gang wars, weapons’ smuggling and political unrest. One of the professions that operated as a key connec
Casting 2007-07-05 03:08:10 For the first time in their lives Vivek and Assad were working towards something they believed in. If anyone had seen it that way for them they would have quickly retreated to their separate corners and claimed that they didn’t really care. They were too committed to their own self-images of disaffected youth to allow others to see that certain things mattered. As far as anyone knew, the only thing they had shown any interest in was their filmmaking attempts.
When he was about fifteen Assad had ‘seen the seams’ so to speak in a movie so depressingly bad that he had forgotten its name. He had been picking at the seams ever since and it occurred to him that editing made a movie. He compared the final product on as many similar-sounding films as he could and he found that more often than not, it was in the editing and sound design that a film rose above the mediocre. So it puzzled him on the several occasions that he read that an actor’s performance had saved the film.
When he met Read more:Casting
Wife Strife 2007-07-04 00:48:58 Harish Makhija was an unhappy man. His unhappiness had become the source of great wealth for him but that didn’t change his state of mind. With each passing day he was getting increasingly dissatisfied with remaining unhappy while taking the money. He didn’t know how and he didn’t know when but he was determined to go to the source and make some changes. There was no way his going to continue being okay with his wife screwing another man.
It had all started like most of these things do, with his being inattentive to the needs of the woman he had been married to for fifteen years. It actually didn’t take him fifteen years to lose interest, more like three, but that didn’t change the fact that it never occurred to him that the woman whose bills he had been paying for a decade and a half might have needs he was not fulfilling in some way.
His first clue that something was amiss came from the realization that his previously not-quite slim wife had bought herself a gym membership
Gig 2007-07-03 01:19:11 All the lights were on but it was as if no one was home. The furniture looked lonely and unused and there was every indication that no one had sat in a chair or used the dining table in long enough for a thick layer of dust to cover every available surface. And still the lights were on in the old house with the beautiful checkerboard of red and white tiles on the floor. The walls were unremarkable and unadorned. Breeze blew in through a broken window and whistled as if a forgotten spirit, once resident in the house, had stopped by for a quick visit. Very few people wandered in but those who did, did so through a door that didn’t look like it could swing shut. To find out where everyone was supposed to be headed, one had to follow the footprints left in the dusty floor.
Her name was Heather and she had been in India for nearly three months, most of which she had spent shuttling between Mumbai and Goa. She had agreed to accompany a friend to India when heartbreak and the possibility of
Crazier Love 2007-07-09 22:04:14 They exchanged glances. Nobody blinked. She realised how ridiculous it all was so she threw her arms up and said, “This is not working!”
He went after her, grabbed her arm and turned her around, got her to face him even though she wouldn’t look into his eyes, “Come on, what did we decide?”
She knew the answer, it was a simple question but she didn’t want to say the words. Didn’t want to confirm that she had heard him. As long as she could hold off, make it appear that she didn’t have a word to say about the whole thing, she could pretend that it was not happening.
His grip on her arm was insistent though and she sighed, “There is no shame in protecting our own.”
He had gripped both her arms just above the elbows and was searching her downcast eyes, “You can do this okay? We can do this.”
A friend of theirs, a fellow named Allwyn who walked around with a guitar strapped to himself at all times, even when he was naked, had a song about them. It wasn’t very tunef
The Pitch 2007-07-08 20:39:24 Six eyes were staring directly at him and it was difficult for him to judge if any of them were friendly eyes. It was an uncomfortable position for him to be in. The worst of it was that they weren’t even seated before him in a straight line. Each of them had taken up position in seemingly strategic parts of the room that made him have to work to make eye contact with everyone save the man who sat directly across from. So he smiled and said, “I haven’t really pitched anything before. Except a tent, in my pants…”
Nothing.
No reaction at all.
The woman blinked but that was it.
He raised his eyebrows to the sheet of paper in his lap and thought, Wow! To the people in the room he said, “Shall I begin?”
The man across the table from him nodded and he said, “Okay, this story is called Akela and it’s about one guy standing up to seemingly insurmountable odds and winning. It’s the type of movie where a winner forgets he’s a winner for so long that everybody else thinks of Read more:Pitch
Pick Up Lies 2007-07-08 00:05:35 It was not the happiest place in the world but it would do. The waiters and other sundry staff ran to take up positions on the high walls as the first notes of that hoary old musical chestnut filtered through the giant speakers. When they first adopted the shapes that dominate the chorus of YMCA, patrons from all over the multi-tiered space turned around and clapped along to the kitschy anthem. He scanned the space, leaned towards his date and said, “When did tits come back?”
She shook her head and smiled, “I don’t think they ever went away.”
“Okay so when did tits come to India?”
She shrugged and went back to clapping for the restaurant staff.
He didn’t know it for sure but he felt like the date was not going well. He was not surprised because he hadn’t ever been well matched by his friends. They thought he needed a nice girl with an independent streak to make him happy and provide some structure in his life. He knew this because on separate occasions Tuhin or Sasha
Mission 2007-07-07 01:51:57 They were walking down the street. In and of itself, that was no major event. They had walked down hundreds of streets before. The only reason this was different was because they had purpose. They did a lot of things together and it often bothered Saumya to think that there might never be a space for herself in his life in the way there was for his best friend. She was probably alone in feeling that way because nobody else was in love with Mohnish.
She liked Rohit and on most days she wished him well but she also worried that he would someday get the love of her life into more trouble than he could handle.
As they hurried towards their destination Rohit asked questions, “What about John?”
“Good body, does action okay but I don’t think he can act.”
“The girls love him.”
“Still doesn’t mean he can act.”
“What about Saif?”
“I guess the girls like him too.”
“No I meant, what do you think of him as an actor?”
“Does comedy well, not so sure about action. And Read more:Mission
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