Prashant's Solace

It has been twenty-four years since she’d last seen it, but the place looked exactly the same. To her, maybe. Time moved in contexts as waves, Ruhi decided. Each wave displaces the previous one. Yet, there are some people who live in the flux of things. Her two maternal uncles occupied the first and the third house on the front lane of Dwarka Nagar or the Gateway (to Heaven) City. The cemetery masking it from the road lent its name to the colony. Gateway to Heaven hid many such families behind its walls. The two houses were single-room dwellings, housing multiple members, as did the others in the colony. Ruhi could see through the front door, out through the back one, into the lane behind, and on a bright day, she could even wave and talk to someone on the third lane through the second lane house.  In deference to architectural decorum let us refer to these houses as rooms. Grandparents, two Uncles, one of whom was married bearing her a cousin and temporary residents like her ...

Ansh looked out of his window seat. He could see the gathering grey war clouds. Somewhere behind those clouds were enemy planes, lingering drones waiting to engage him or evade him. On the other side of the aisle, a middle-aged lady was reciting her nauseous prayers. Out from her side of the window, were snowy clouds carrying civilian planes bound for homes everywhere in his country. He thought of floating out of the flight, over the western sky and seeing everything usual. The desert and the farms, the tense communal situation across the panorama, the bright IPL match lights glowing in one of the cities. More often than not, his thoughts placed him elsewhere from his location. From a cosy ambience, 31,000 ft. above the border of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, he drifted to 2010, in a shadowy basement in Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar. As he walked in the narrow corridor, he could hear Ajay Sir’s voice, making him the late arrival. Usually, Sir was never on time and they all waited for...