out of the blue and into the black

  Rob got up to check the status of the suction port. Jeff was watching a last century 2D movie on his tablet, something about intergalactic wars with funny looking aliens. He was amused by the primitive, and completely off-the-mark, vision of how the twenty-firsters imagined beings from other star systems looked. The cabin was almost silent, except for the muted whirrs, dings and vibrations from the command and control system of the mining ship - Theseus XIV. Rob and Jeff worked for the MittAdan Corporation, mining delirium from asteroids. Delirium was an essential ingredient of the neural implants, everyone used to connect to Oasis Mk243. Oasis was the hyper real, virtual space for all kinds of human activities - trade, services, retail, research, education, leisure, love and hate. Delirium was named after Philippe DeLeri who discovered the element, and not out of a sense of irony. Rob came back to his seat and sighed. "1 down, bloody 11 more to go" he said, referring to hi...

  Leo was lying on a gurney in the Government Veterinarian Hospital. He was too weak to stand up, and could barely move his tail. He hated the cold, metal feel of the gurney. He wanted to be home, playing fetch with Joy, his best friend. Leo was adopted by Sam, Joy's father, when he found a tiny pup shivering in the rain. Sam, then 17, swaddled the pup in an old blanket, fed him milk with a dropper, and held him close when he wouldn’t stop whimpering. Now Leo was 14 years old and had a weak heart. He fainted last evening in the middle of running around with Joy. Sam brought him to the hospital. The vet gave the bad news to Sam - Leo was dying. He might be dead in a day, most probably will not survive the next week. Sam came to see Leo, trying hard to brave. Leo tried to wave his tail, and managed a very slow, little movement.  Leo just wanted to run around with Joy, getting the old tennis ball back to Joy and see his face light up with a smile. In the haze of his s...

Priya has been working from home for the last 4 months, and now her laptop’s battery was dead.. on a Monday...with the big client presentation coming up on Friday. She was determined to navigate the serpentine channels of the laptop company’s customer care and order a battery for her laptop. It is a simple spare for her appliance...how hard can it be. She did not count on the effort that companies put in to make the lives of their customers increasingly difficult.  She started by calling the customer care number, and fought on. She felt like she was fighting through rings of trolls in a scene from the Lord of the Rings. She tried every trick, dangling the carrot of good reviews on Facebook, threats, pretending to be from the IT department of a big customer of the company, and begging, and groveling and appealing to the conscience of the customer care guys. Nothing worked... She had already spent a couple of hours on the phone; her hands and the phone sticky with sweat. She fel...

January for me was the season of exams and gajar ka halwa and my birthday. This year it is different- no schools, carom and cricket all day long and no gajar ka halwa. Some people have demolished a mosque in Ayodhya and there are riots in my city. We can see lines of smoke on the horizon most days. Black and grey, going up into the sky- not straight- but crude. My birthday is next Wednesday, but I don’t think Ma will do a party this year. Every year Ma bakes a cake, Baba gets samosas and chips from the Agrawal stores and I get gifts- pencil boxes and water color sets and coloring books. There is a curfew, so no school. Also no veggies and fish for us. I am bored of the rajma and dal every day lunch and dinner, but shops were closed. We play cricket on our roof, most of the day. And rest of the day, carom, in Anshul’s place.  We also try and collect rocks, bats, iron rods- whatever we can find that can be used as weapons to defend our home when mobs of those guys attack our colony. ...

I am sitting in a cab, holding a scarf to my face. I have a broken tooth, and my mouth is bleeding. There are a few dark red drops of blood on my white shirt. And there is a very pretty lady sitting next to me. This is not how I imagined my first date with her. I had noticed her on the first day of college. She seemed different and aloof. Lost in her own thoughts. It took me two months to finally ask her out. I planned the date carefully. Reserved a table in a nice restaurant, borrowed a sport coat from my roommate, bought flowers. The hostess told us that our table would be ready in 15 minutes. We ordered two glasses of wine while we waited for our table to be ready, and walked to the balcony overlooking the city. She kept her phone on the balustrade. I saw the phone slide down towards the drop. I jumped to catch before it could fall, slipped and hit my mouth on the edge of the balustrade. So here we are. On the way to the dentist. I am in pain, and in love.