Mango Chutney: An Anthology of Tasteful Short Fiction. Read Online Free Page A

Mango Chutney: An Anthology of Tasteful Short Fiction.
Book: Mango Chutney: An Anthology of Tasteful Short Fiction. Read Online Free
Author: Gabbar Singh, Anuj Gosalia, Sakshi Nanda, Rohit Gore
Pages:
Go to
found itself sprawled on the stone floor
after drinking and loving the night away. A playground for young love,
it was.
    Mr. Malhotra was a man who had walked his early youth desperate to
find a vocation that met his inner flight. He had an impeccable rhythm to
the things he did. A masterly eye, a trained hand. Unfortunately, in small
town Mussoorie, these skills were of little merit. The letters he wrote in
the bank, as part of his job, were so carefully crafted that the bank even-
tually had to let him go. Even a leisurely place like Mussoorie couldn’t
afford an employee who spent four of his eight hours writing one letter.
What work never evoked, love did. And the mansion became an emissary
of his loving.
    Mrs. Malhotra had been gone thirteen years now. On a perfectly innocu
-
ousMonday evening, the chandelier above their dining creaked, pulled a
part of the ceiling with it and draped her fragile body in shards of glass.
And just like that, a marriage of twenty years came crashing down.
    Sometimes, life takes away the cadence of a heartbeat. Everything feels
the same and yet, nothing is.
Mr. Malhotra moved to Delhi after the accident. A friend was kind to
offer employment with the government to help him file his life away. But
Mussoorie’s mountains had been as forgiving as they were harsh. So, he
packed his life in three suitcases and walked up the winding Himalayan
slopes to his large but broken mansion. To build home again.
    Anusha, his youngest niece, had been the light in his fireplace. All of
nineteen years, she was spending her winter holidays with him. She loved
the mountains and the tall, musty ceilings of his mansion and the walls
lined with dusty books. Her camera had found a magic his eyes never
could.
    Tonight, the gramophone played Pakeezah . The fireplace cast looming
shadows of the two. A moon the size of two suns peeked in from the
large French windows in the south. It was an evening so cold it crawled
underneath the skin and ate on their bones.
    Anusha leaned in to hold Mr. Malhotra’s trembling hands. The half-baked
fire now emanated a consoling warmth. Maybe it was the brandy, or the
haunting song, or the melancholy of the mansion but her touch moved
something old and lost inside him.
    His eyes longed to hold her and weep into her bosom, but propriety held
him back. She rubbed her gentle palms against the back of his hand, try-
ing to keep him warm. The glow of the fireplace danced a slow rhythmic
waltz in the living room. Desires laced with ancient memories walked out
of the heart’s closet.
By the fireplace on that winter’s night, warmth took over.

4.
My Grandfather Shirt
Shikhandi 1
    Skin is contagious. Approximately 38 degrees Celsius and a humidity of
77% should make you envy a one-year-old’s attire. Ruffle through pages
of antiquated photographs where sepia-tinted women bedecked in noble
and other metals have the fortune of not wearing a blouse. Their cotton
and silk sarees crumple in their soft, brown folds, trained to drink sweat
off the human skin. How they carefully chose their blues, reds and yel-
lows! Those bikini-clad people who have the luxury of being on the other
side of a television screen take the same degree of envy. You wish to roll
your sleeves up to the sky and let Skin infect you. Skin. Bare. Breathing.
    In an era, a couple of hundred years ago, British foreign direct invest
-
ment was the norm here. It was then that a certain Morality boarded
ships, travelled on pickled food for months, and reached the warm coasts
of India. It unloaded from its trunks vaccines for Skin. Churned out by
kind-hearted machinery back home, these vaccines arrived in fashion cut,
sewed and sleeved to modesty. Morality was prompt in joining the other
officials in their mid-noon siestas, tucked away from the daily sun and
their summerly escapades to nearby hills for refrigeration.
    And these vaccines seem to havesurvived to this day. If you walk through
Go to

Readers choose

L. E. Modesitt Jr.

Kay Marshall Strom

S.M. Reine

Ariella Papa

Joanna Wylde

Dianna Crawford, Sally Laity

Madison Collins

Emma Pass

Margaret Way