I never hear raindrops slow when they thin and scatter, when the weight of each one lightens, even as they’re still falling. I never hear a jetliner moving toward the horizon, the sound of it blending with sunlight as I see it fade into the haze or hear the footsteps of cardinals scurrying across a concrete walkway— only that I tried as hard as I could, like a silent heart on that forgetful day in yet another year since everything passed on and silence silenced things, forever vacated from my ears, forever rotating in and out of consciousness, rotating thinner across the depths of air where their sounds stay barely witnessed.
PORTENTS
There are moments suddenly interrupted: an apparition appearing as an actor centred on stage and then a spotlight is switched on when the familiar lighting reveals a texture I can feel though cannot hold. But just as suddenly, it leaves. When it happens, it’s the finer aromas that still go missing.
But I see everything soon leaves, and what I recall— even if I’m not conscious of it—is all I have left. Isn’t this the entire story? I am here with random memory switched on and off in this maddening ritual I don’t control. But what I see is how brutal the lighting can be, a ceremonial illumination of a face and hands through every version of my life,
a historic river running over the washed stones of the riverbed, the sand smoothed and flattened without aged footprints, and me again waiting with my hold on it looser than ever. Not a moment leaves without my breathlessness in it, the sounds of what we knew, the only way we can be with each other—as if we share breakfast in an empty house we’ve never occupied.
THE EMPTY HOUSE
I come back to the dream: the darkened house, the empty rooms, with only an angled streetlamp bathing the walls and floors in pale light. The telephone has long gone silent.
I know I’m walking through a dream but it doesn’t reveal more other than to say: you’re on your own regardless of rain or chill in the moist air. I don’t want to disturb what rests here but couldn’t if I wanted to. I only know the proclivities this recurring dream has reinforced, stirring and blending with the others disjointedly. So I list each day, a leaning curse like a once-glorious yacht tilting on a long stretch of beach. The ocean, streaming to shore in thin, wide-waves, pulls the sand from once settled places aligning awkwardly with the proclivities I’ve come to.
I’m toiling to enjoy my remaining time the best way I know in the circle of people I’ve chosen. If only I could forever keep them on the checkerboard of my life, the seemingly-random lateral and retreating moves and reclaim the joy I’d once known—the art of adding colour to a colourless world in the white and pale-gray of another day.
The handwriting of the empty house is the tidemark in the art of another time, where doors don’t reopen— will never reopen. It sits isolated as a place lost when time too is lost along its silenced walls— once the heart of life itself—and will no longer say what I thought they always would. The language now incompatible with the one I’d spoken—but it still startles me when I hear those off-balance words and live the challenges they inflict daily.
SR (Salvatore Richard) Inciardi was born in New York City and attended Brooklyn College and New York University. SR Inciardi’s poetry has appeared in in various online and print magazines including Green Ink Poetry, Harrow House Journal, Front Porch Review, Grey-Sparrow Journal, Borderless Journal, Written Talesamong others. He was a contributor to Green Ink Poetry for their publication on Kennings: Equinox Collections: Autumn released on Amazon in October 2024. SR Inciardi currently has two books of poetry on Amazon that speak to loss and navigating grief.
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It was just another meeting to catch up. The topic that cropped up was about downsizing. One of my friends, now in her sixties, realised that her house was filled with too many things. I do not know whether she had just heard about Marie Kondo, but that was what she had been talking about all night.
It all started when she was growing up among the members of the lower heap of the food chain. Her elders told her to value everything in life. She was taught that even a small twig has its use: to pick the teeth. The compulsion to keep and not waste began.
As life improved and she began climbing the food chain, the desire to immortalise memories of the good times trickled in. Buying mementos to mark each life’s milestone became imperative. Over time, the collection became something she would be proud of.
Then the senior years trickled in, and there she was, cooped in an empty nest without her offspring, but a bungalow full of nostalgic memories and mementoes. Caring for these objects of endearment soon became a chore. They meant nothing to others. The question of what would happen to them began to play on her mind. They would become a burden that nobody would want to carry.
Slowly, she started getting rid of her belongings, a figurine here and a saree there, leaving only a bare minimum for sustenance. In the name of philanthropy, she gave some of her belongings to the needy. To her loved ones, she gave them in the name of family heirlooms. The question is whether the others showed equal enthusiasm for owning them.
Her case also reminded me of another elderly couple who would proudly show off all their awards and a precious collection of items from around the world, as they had been stationed in various parts of the world under the umbrella of the Commonwealth. Every nook of their living room held a story from their many years of wedded bliss; a token from Somalia, a gift from Delhi, a piece from Borneo, and so on.
The next time I saw her, she was a widowed wife of 80-plus with the memory of a 60+ years of married life and a house-load full of, by that time, what she viewed as a load of junk. The mementoes were just too difficult to keep up with, and she had forgotten why and where she and her husband got them in the first place. She too was trying to dispose of them with the help of her daughter through a jumble sale, who was more than glad to do it in the hope of getting more living space.
Then there was another recent situation that set me off into overdrive. One of my old friends passed away suddenly. Lying in a coffin in a complete state of bliss, my friend was without a care in the world. Outside his house compound were his three prized superbikes, which attracted more attention than the rest of his family members. Now they stood unwanted. My friend’s wife could not wait to dispose of them to the first bidder. At least my friend, being a Chinese person, would have an effigy of a motorbike made, or even a sample of his previous VW Beetle collection, for the last journey before he was cremated.
Now, after watching the latest Hollywood interpretation of Homer’s epic poem Odyssey and reaching out to educate myself on Iliad and the lessons from them, one thing is clear. The purpose of these poems is not merely to showcase the valiant battles that the great warriors of the Greek generals won nor are they about the trophies and spoils they took back or the fantastical journeys they sailed. It is all about the experience and emotion associated with those moments. The warriors live on in the memory of their feats, nothing more. Everything else decays; so do relationships. The only remaining proof of their existence, it seems, is memory and the intergenerational recital of the epics through oral traditions.
So, for us in the 21st century, we do not have to compose poems to remember our lives by. We have the luxury of being able to store them in the clouds, guarded by angels, and probably will meet the same end after our demise. This seems more prudent than cluttering our borrowed spaces with an unnecessary carbon footprint that could burden future generations and be labelled as hoarding.
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Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.
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The rains have abated Moments light up The shadows of hills Cast a flicker of hope The rains lighten burden And somewhere a light flickers The rains weave dreams In small hamlets or puddles
These rains come in moments When the hills lie sleeping But rains arouse fire in hills
In dry catacombs, a mystery Which is always impermeable
We get up in mornings Recollecting last night’s torrent
In this town of reverberating hills
Echoes which resound of past And a longing of silences
Ananya S Guha lives in Shillong where he was born and brought up. He has been writing and publishing poetry for over forty years.
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The title of Romila Thapar’s memoirs is deceptive and deceptively simple. It is not ‘just being’ but that being Romila Thapar is also a story of becoming, of mapping out borders and boundaries of what a woman from a liberal, progressive and well to do family could achieve in newly independent India. Her achievements are many and varied and her persona redoubtable. There is tremendous breadth of scholarship and Thapar’s is undoubtedly a remarkable journey which details the trajectory of her growing up years-family, background, physical and social location.
As a historian, Thapar is acutely aware and interested in the way memory works and it is this abiding interest which is perhaps reflected in her use of the following lines: “Times present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past”, lines from “Four Quartets” by TS Eliot.
This encapsulation of time reminds us of a common feature of autobiography — memoirs and autobiographies measure the gap between two temporal loci — the time of a past event and the time of its narration. In this case, the beginning of the story goes back nine decades. Prof Thapar regales us with stories of growing up in pre-Independence India. Born in Lucknow, she grew up in the North Western Frontier Provinces, moving from place to place as her father was a doctor in the Army.
In a way, the seeds of autonomy and independent thinking were sown very early in her life in myriad ways. She was influenced by her maternal grandmother and her mother. The latter was a graduate in the India of the 1920s, creditable for a woman since it was at a time when women’s education received mixed responses. She was competent in reading and writing three languages — Hindi, Urdu and English. Thapar narrates that “my maternal grandmother had insisted on two conditions before the marriage: that my mother never be asked to observe purdah– take the veil — when there were men around: and that she never be asked to cook meals for the family. These conditions were met.”
One finds it surprising even from the vantage point of the present time where entrenched patriarchal attitudes completely normalise the double burden carried by women and mythify cooking not only as part of women’s household duties and responsibilities, but as an act of maternal care and a labour of love. Many such instances stand out which provide a glimpse of a progressive, educated and liberal family, among whom are to be found many intellectuals who played their role in public life.
Underlying this memoir is a certain imagination of India. Thapar stands in the vanguard of those invoking, protecting and saving the idea of an India which is secular, multilingual, diverse and heterogenous. Thapar’s narrative warns us time and again of the dangers of a single narrative , a single story. Thus, she calls out the crises of democracy both during the Emergency[1] and in the present time. Is the failure of democracy attributable to the pervasive atmosphere of fear where citizens were/are cowed into silence? Or is it the failure of the education system within capitalism which has oriented individuals to fulfilling privatised desires rather than their duties as citizens? Or is it a comment on our civilisational failure that we have been reduced to acting as echo chambers for ruling elites?
In Just Being, historian par excellence Romila Thapar reflects on a rich, variegated, path-breaking life ― along with the people, relationships, ideas and journeys that made her who she is. In this compelling memoir, she invites us into her illustrious world ― a rich, testimony from a scholar who has profoundly shaped and moulded our understanding of India’s past and present. From her childhood growing up in British India, through her years of education in London, her extensive travels to archaeological sites across Asia and beyond, and her trailblazing role in shaping the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Thapar reflects on a life lived in the service of education and research. Written over the past few years, Just Being is ample proof of Thapar’s ability to view herself within the larger flow of history, and to give a splendid account of it with a scholar’s depth, a storyteller’s sensitivity and an artist’s luminosity. It reveals not only an extraordinary, boundary-defying life but courage, integrity and a profound conviction that understanding our past in the light of undeniable evidence is essential to understanding the present and shaping a more thoughtful future.
She completed her doctorate in 1958 and was offered a temporary job at School of Oriental and African Studies to teach a course in ancient history in London. Thapar’s father had set aside funds – it could be used for either marriage or education. She chose the latter and proceeded to educate herself in myriad ways. From attending the lectures of Eric Hobsbawm on European political thought, reading Ismat Chughtai, Simone de Beauvoir, enrolling herself in evening courses on Chinese art (she did Chinese landscape painting) and archaeology, learning italic calligraphy, playing table tennis with monks, holding the stepladder for friends in libraries while the other reached for books in upper shelves, her discovery of Africa, to making posters and going for marches at Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park, hers is a rich and variegated life.
One is enthralled by her narratives of the people she met, the places she visited, illumined by the rays of her razor-sharp wit and comprehensive intelligence. What also dazzles is her knowledge of jazz, her cosmopolitanism and her capacity to engage with politics and culture, art and music. She narrates about her experiences in both white and coloured jazz bars, among musicians across the racial divide, in the immediate aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination in January 1968. She writes about her meeting with the writer Nelson Algren, who had previously shared an intense relationship with Simone Beauvoir and featured in her work, both fictional and non-fictional. Undoubtedly and confidently cosmopolitan, she is able to make a place for herself and earn respect in widely varying contexts, including many international fora and platforms.
Professor Thapar’s feistiness is evident throughout this absorbing memoir. So is her impeccable scholarship. In the chapters on “History Rocks” and “Textbooks in the Fray,” she calls out the ideologically motivated peddlers of popular histories prevalent on Whatsapp groups and contrasts them with professional historians and historiographers. She is a stickler for honing the historian’s craft through the discipline of method and process and sharply critiques the ideologically motivated peddling of history at the cost of professionalism. Two points are made very clearly by her: first that history is and should be based on scientific evidence and there should be no mixing up or conflation of mythology and history. “Mythology is the other kind of literature that is often quoted in public discussion and confused with history.’’ Another distinction is made with equal precision: following a Weberian or Marxist methodology is not necessarily a sign of ideological persuasion as much as a methodological preference for a certain rational process of historical analysis.
Thapar is one of the world’s foremost authorities on ancient Indian history, celebrated for transforming how ancient Indian history is studied. Rather than treating history as a sequence of kings and battles, her structural, sociological, and text-critical approach shifts focus on social formations, economic shifts, and the evolution of cultural identities. Her definitive research has fundamentally challenged both nineteenth-century colonial stereotypes and reductive nationalist narratives.
Her contribution to Indian history is immeasurable.She meticulously dismantled the Eurocentric colonial claim that ancient Indians lacked a “sense of history”. In works like The Past Before Us, she showed how early Indian society embedded its historical memory through distinct traditions — such as the Itihasa-Purana literature, Buddhist/Jain monastic chronicles, and royal biographies (charitas).
Her chapter “Textbooks in the Fray” traces the ideological warfare being waged over school textbooks, some of which she had written along with other well-known historians. Her interrogation and contestation of monolithic and singular identities pave the way for a layered reading of history.
Thapar argues that modern conceptions of a singular, monolithic “Hindu” or “Muslim” community are modern constructs. Her study of the historical narratives surrounding the Somnath Temple in Dwarka illustrated how a single historical event was interpreted in profoundly different, multifaceted ways by varying social groups over centuries. Similarly, her study of Sakuntala’s contrasting depictions in the famous Indian epic Mahabharata (around 4th century BC) and Kalidas’s play “Abhijnanashakuntalam” (4th-5th century AD) point out different conceptualisations and representation of women from a chronological perspective.
Prof Romila Thapar’s skills as a memoirist are perhaps comparable to her skill as a historian. Her endeavours have both decolonised history as well as given the discipline the status of a social science. The book gives an insight into her life, her beliefs and reflects on our times with an unbiased perspective of an adroit historian. It is a prized and rare read.
[1] 1975-77: Period of curtailment of civil liberties in India due to internal unrest.
Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory. Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.
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The river keeps its oldest songs beneath a skin of silver light. It teaches stones the art of patience and carries every dawn downstream.
Birds arrive before the sun, stitching morning into the trees. Their wings awaken sleeping branches with whispers softer than the breeze.
The reeds bow low to passing currents, as though greeting an old friend home. Clouds pause upon the mirrored surface, watching their pale reflections roam.
A fisherman waits without complaint, trusting time more than his net. The water knows the language of hope better than words have spoken yet.
Children skip smooth stones across the flow, counting each bright leap with delight. The ripples gather every laughter and carry it beyond my sight.
I leave with empty hands, yet somehow return carrying the silence the river lent to me. Its quiet lingers in my heart, a gentle guide through restless days, reminding me that steady waters often reveal life’s deepest ways.
Hassan Ismail Adekunle is a Nigerian poet whose work explores memory, identity, and contemporary African life. His poems have appeared in literary magazines, including the Inverse Journal.
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Somewhere between the borders drawn on maps and the divisions carved into human minds, an ancient truth has been quietly waiting to be remembered: the world is one. Not one in the trivial sense of sharing a planet, but one in the deeper sense that every human being, every culture, every living thing is woven from the same fabric of existence. The recognition of oneness, the understanding that “I” and “the other” are not fundamentally separate. It’s not merely a spiritual ideal but the single most practical foundation for building a happy, peaceful, and sustainable world.
Division, by contrast, is the root of nearly every form of suffering humanity has inflicted upon itself: war, exploitation, prejudice, ecological destruction, and the quiet loneliness that plagues even the most prosperous societies. If the world is truly one, then healing it does not require inventing something new; it requires remembering something old.
Human beings are born into a world that immediately teaches them to see in categories. We learn our name, our family, our nation, our religion, our race and with each label comes an invisible boundary. These boundaries are useful for organising social life, but they become dangerous when we mistake them for ultimate reality. We begin to believe that our group’s survival, prosperity, or pride depends on being separate from, and often superior to another group. This is the illusion of separation, and it is the psychological seed from which most human conflict grows.
History offers endless evidence of what happens when this illusion hardens into ideology. Colonial empires justified centuries of exploitation by convincing themselves that colonised peoples were fundamentally different, lesser, and therefore fair game for domination. Wars have been fought over religious identity, national identity, and racial identity each side certain that the other was so essentially different that violence became not just permissible but necessary. Even in peacetime, this illusion shows up in economic systems that treat the poor as disposable, in social hierarchies that treat certain lives as worthless, and in environmental policies that treat nature as a resource to be extracted rather than a body of which we are a living part.
Yet science itself has quietly dismantled the illusion of separation even as culture continues to reinforce it. Physics tells us that everything in the universe emerged from the same cosmic origin and is composed of the same fundamental particles, endlessly recombined. Biology tells us that all life on Earth shares common ancestry, that the boundary between “self” and “environment” is porous. We breathe the same air, drink water that has cycled through oceans and clouds for millions of years, and carry within our bodies more microbial cells than human ones. Ecology tells us that ecosystems are not collections of separate organisms competing in isolation, but interdependent webs where the health of one part depends on the health of the whole. Even neuroscience suggests that the boundaries of the self are far less fixed than we assume, shaped by relationship, language, and culture from the moment of birth. Modern knowledge, in other words, converges with ancient wisdom traditions on a single point: separation is a useful intellectual map, but it’s not the territory.
Long before modern science offered its evidence, the world’s spiritual and philosophical traditions arrived at the same insight through direct contemplation of experience. In the Indian civilisational tradition, the Upanishads declare “Ekam Sat, Vipra Bahudha Vadanti” — Truth is one, though the wise call it by many names. The Vedantic vision of “Tat Tvam Asi” — “Thou art That”, points to the identity of the individual self (Atman) with the universal self (Brahman). The Bhagavad Gita speaks of the wise seeing “the same in all beings,” neither elevating nor diminishing anyone based on external distinctions.
This is not a uniquely Indian insight. In Buddhist philosophy, the doctrine of dependent origination (pratityasamutpada) teaches that nothing exists independently; everything arises in relationship to everything else. The Christian mystical tradition speaks of all humanity as members of one body. Sufi poets, like Rumi, wrote of the lover and the beloved as ultimately indistinguishable, using the language of romantic union to point toward a deeper metaphysical unity. Indigenous traditions across the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Asia have long understood the human being as inseparable from land, ancestors and community, a relational selfhood utterly different from the isolated individualism that modern economic life often assumes.
The philosophical concept of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — “the world is one family” — captures this spirit precisely. It does not deny the difference; it does not ask us to erase the beautiful diversity of language, custom, cuisine and belief that makes human culture so rich. Instead, it asks us to hold that diversity the way a family holds the differences among its members: as variation within belonging, not as grounds for exclusion. A family does not stop being one family because its members have different tastes, temperaments, or talents. Diversity and oneness are not opposites;
If oneness is true at the level of physics, biology, and spiritual insight, it also turns out to be true at the level of practical psychology. Modern research into human wellbeing consistently finds that happiness is not primarily a function of individual accumulation of wealth, status, possessions, but of the quality of our relationships and our sense of connection to something larger than ourselves. People who feel isolated, even when materially wealthy, report lower life satisfaction than those embedded in strong communities, regardless of income. This is not a coincidence. Human beings evolved as intensely social creatures; our nervous systems are wired for connection, and chronic disconnection registers in the body as a form of stress that erodes both mental and physical health.
A worldview built on separation is, in this light, self-defeating. It tells us to compete rather than cooperate, to accumulate rather than to give, to defend rather than to open. It produces short-term gains for individuals or nations at the cost of long-term wellbeing for everyone, including the “winners.” A world of walled nations and gated communities is not a happy world, even for those inside the walls, because the psychological cost of maintaining separation, vigilance, suspicion, fear of the other is corrosive to the very peace it claims to protect.
Oneness, by contrast, offers a coherent foundation for sustainable happiness because it aligns our inner orientation with the actual structure of reality. When we act from the understanding that another person’s suffering is not truly separate from our own wellbeing, compassion becomes not a moral obligation imposed from outside but a natural expression of clear seeing. Generosity stops feeling like sacrifice and starts feeling like common sense, because what benefits the whole ultimately benefits the part. This is why every contemplative tradition that has taken oneness seriously has also produced ethics centred on compassion, non-violence and service not as rules to be obeyed, but as the natural behaviour of someone who has stopped mistaking the part for the whole.
Nowhere is the practical urgency of this vision more visible than in the ecological crisis now facing humanity. Climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and resource depletion are not separate problems to be solved by separate nations acting in isolation; they are symptoms of a single underlying error, the belief that human beings stand apart from and above the natural world, entitled to extract from it without consequence. A river does not recognise a national border; a warming atmosphere does not respect a treaty line. The planet itself is demonstrating, in the most literal and consequential way possible, that separation was always an illusion. What happens in one place is now measurably connected to what happens everywhere else.
The only responses capable of matching the scale of this crisis are those built on a recognition of interdependence: shared responsibility, shared sacrifice, and shared benefit. Nations that continue to act as though their own prosperity can be secured at the expense of the planet’s shared systems are, in effect, still living inside the illusion of separation and the consequences of that illusion are now measured in extreme weather, mass displacement, and ecological collapse. The idea of ‘one world’, one that understood its own unity, would treat the atmosphere, the oceans, and the biosphere as commons to be tended together rather than resources to be seized competitively. This is not utopian idealism; it is simply what the physical reality of an interconnected planet requires of a species intelligent enough to notice it.
It is not enough to affirm oneness as an abstract truth; it must be translated into the texture of daily life and public policy. On the personal level, this means cultivating the practice of seeing beyond the labels that separate us, learning to recognise our shared humanity even if language, religion, or politics differ sharply from our own. It means choosing curiosity over contempt when we encounter differences, and remembering that every person we meet is fighting a battle we cannot fully see, shaped by circumstances as real to them as ours are to us.
On the social level, it means building institutions that express interdependence rather than domination: economic systems that measure success not only by growth but by the wellbeing of the most vulnerable; educational systems that teach children to see themselves as citizens of the world as much as citizens of a nation; media systems that resist the temptation to profit from outrage and division, and instead cultivate genuine understanding across difference. It means recognising that international cooperation on climate, public health, migration and peace is not a diminishment of national identity but the mature expression of a species that has finally understood its own unity.
At the spiritual level, it means returning, in whatever language or tradition speaks to us, to practices that quieten the noise of the separate self: meditation, prayer, service, silence, art and honest self-reflection. These practices do not manufacture oneness; they simply remove the obstacles of fear, greed, resentment, pride that prevent us from seeing what was true all along. A world of individuals who have done this inner work, even imperfectly, becomes a fundamentally different world from one populated by people who have never questioned the walls their minds have built.
Skeptics will rightly point out that talk of oneness can become an excuse for erasing real injustice, a comfortable spiritual bypass that tells the powerful and the powerless to simply “see themselves as one” while existing inequalities remain untouched. This objection deserves to be taken seriously. Genuine oneness is not a call to ignore difference or injustice; it is, if anything, the opposite. To recognise another person as truly not separate from oneself is to feel their suffering as one’s own concern, which makes it impossible to remain indifferent to exploitation, discrimination, or cruelty. A oneness that excuses injustice is not oneness at all; it is merely separation in disguise. True oneness demands action precisely because it refuses to let us hide behind the excuse that “their” suffering is not “our” problem.
Others will argue that difference and competition are natural, even necessary, drivers of progress, and that a world without boundaries would collapse into sameness or chaos. But oneness, properly understood, is not the demand for sameness. It does not ask nations to dissolve, cultures to merge, or individuals to abandon their particular gifts and identities. It asks only that these particularities be held within a deeper recognition of shared belonging, the way notes in a symphony remain distinct while contributing to a single piece of music. Diversity is not the opposite of oneness; the erasure of relationships is.
The claim that “the world is one” is not a slogan for a greeting card or a convenient sentiment for moments of crisis. It is, on the evidence of physics, biology, ecology, psychology and the converging insight of nearly every major school of philosophy in human history, simply an accurate description of reality, one that human culture has spent millennia obscuring behind walls of ego, power, and tribe. The suffering these walls have produced is not incidental to human history; it is, in large part, human history. War, exploitation, ecological collapse and the quiet epidemic of loneliness in even the wealthiest societies are all, at root, symptoms of forgetting what was never actually true. We were ever truly not separate to begin with.
To build a happier world, then, is not primarily a matter of inventing new technologies, new economic systems, or new political ideologies, though all of these may help. It is primarily a matter of remembering individually and collectively that the boundary between self and other has always been thinner than it appeared. When enough people remember this, compassion stops being an effort and becomes an instinct; cooperation stops being a strategy and becomes an expression of common sense; and the happiness we have spent so long chasing through accumulation and competition becomes available, quietly, as the natural condition of a mind no longer at war with itself.
The world is one.
Living as though we know this is, perhaps, the only path to a world worth living in.
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Yathish Kumar S is a postgraduate student and a volunteer at the One World One Family Foundation. He is deeply interested in promoting the values of unity, compassion and global responsibility. His vision is to create awareness about the importance of recognizing that we all belong to one world and therefore, share a collective responsibility to contribute to the happiness, well-being and welfare of all people.
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One night in the dark, deep and black, you whispered ‘you and me’ and then I knew it would be me and you because you breathed those three words into me and my world became you and me, and even though the poet said one thing he knew for sure was ‘life goes on,’, I say one thing I know for sure is ‘you and me’, even though you are gone and I buried you by the seaside facing east and planted daisies on your grave and visit you every day, it is still you and me, and our photos sit high on the piano you used to play for me in the evenings when the sun was setting and the notes would float around us as I sipped my gin and gazed out across the fields of wheat and grain and you sang the song you wrote about me and you, ‘You and Me’.
SHELVING
I was always nagging you to clean your house, to tidy your mess, to hang your wet washing outside on the clothesline instead of on an old wooden rack in the middle of the lounge room. When I first started to visit you, it didn’t bother me much that your mantlepiece was still decorated with last year’s tinsel or that you had last century’s newspapers stacked on one end of the couch. But when I began to contemplate growing old with you (it was you who suggested it, after all) I realised I could never live with such cluttered disorder no matter how much I loved snuggling up to you in your warm bed on winter nights, or sitting with you in the sunshine on summer afternoons beside your weeping cherry tree. I lived in hope that you would change your messy ways so we could live together in harmony, spend our mornings in the garden, our evenings by a cosy fire in a beautiful house with everything shipshape. Come over, you said, one rainy Sunday. I’ve done a bit of cleaning up. Excited at the prospect of seeing all the work you’d done to impress and please me, I drove through the fog to your door. But everything looked the same, dusty as ever, except for the shelf with the framed photographs I had given you to remind you of me. The shelf was polished and clear. The photographs were gone. I dusted off the shelf, you said smiling from ear to ear. Have you dusted me off, too?
RELEASING
Difficult to sleep, she finally settles and dreams, an un-extraordinary dream. A small girl sits alone on a park bench waiting —just waiting—her tears spilling down into a pond at her feet. Just before dawn, she drifts ghostlike out of her dreamscape into her kitchen. Familiar cobwebs, crumbs on the bench. A cockroach races behind the stove. Making tea is her first line of defence. The water begins to bubble and just as the old tin kettle lets out a low screech, she feels a thick sob rising inside her, slow and deep, trapped in her throat, so hard it hurts. She lets out a long loud moan, a sound that circles and hovers for a moment, then floats through tattered lace curtains fretting in the cool morning breeze and finally escapes like steam, through the open sash window to meet a golden sunrise and rests at the foot of the new day.
Mary Pomfret is an award-nominated writer whose creative work has been published widely in literary journals and anthologies. Mary lives and works in regional Australia.
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They couldn’t simply walk out of the wedding and drive home. Earlier, a vintage double decker bus had conveyed the guests to the chapel in the neighbouring town, leaving cars behind in the car park. He gripped her hand muttering ‘’We’ll have to take the bus back.’’
Once on the bus, he sat by the window his face turned away from her. She felt temporarily shut out as in silence he tried to grasp the betrayal. All she could do was continue to hold his hand. When he finally spoke, there was a rage she had not witnessed before. As if it was a secret weapon, he had kept hidden away from her.
His voice was granite. The few words were emphasised by a shake of the head. “I ‘d never have believed he’d do that to me.’’ Then the taboo four letter word was discharged like a bullet never before used against this favourite brother. Hearing it she took a sharp in breath.
Another silence as she saw him battle tears. His eyes filled, a few overflowing down his cheek to be hastily flicked away. She stroked his arm knowing that no words would palliate. It occurred to her that she was witnessing someone’s heart break. A cliché but this was not the romantic love the phrase was coined for but backstabbing by a sibling he adored. Suddenly an admission, “You warned me, but I wouldn’t listen.”
Sam and Maria loved an opportunity to wear fine clothes. In the current preference for casual dressing there were fewer occasions for them to peacock. So, this wedding gifted them a chance. Sam had treated himself to a new blue suit, ‘’ Don’t want to let Nick down,” he had declared. His black hair had been cut. Sam was fortunate that at 60 he still retained a full head, that gave him a youthful look. The style unintentionally echoed that of Rod Stewert and garnered
comments to that wherever he went. His red tie matched Maria’s red dress. Red was her colour and complimented her brunette hair worn long still even in her 50s. Applying her eye make-up contemplatively around her dark eyes, Maria considered how relieved she had been at the advent of Clair into Nick’s life. It had drawn his eyes away from her to this bubbly blonde girl whom Sam approved of largely because she made his brother happy again.
All eyes alighted on Sam and Maria as they entered the pub that would be the locus for the wedding festivities. They were eyed up and down simply because they were so well dressed. But Maria also picked up inquiring looks from a crowd who did not seem to know them. They were not hostile merely curious as to the couple’s identity. She assumed they must be friends of the bride and groom, strangers to Sam and Maria because they did not reside in the town that had a micro community of original families who stuck together in the face of an invasion of newcomers.
Nick stood with a pint of larger in his hand. A cue of guests greeted him, and he answered with his easy banter basking in the attention. Sam and Maria waited their turn like seeking an audience with a VIP. At length there was a pause. Sam, hand outstretched greeted him with their usual salutation, “Hello mate.” Maria kissed him and whispered, “You look great.” But, the brother’s bonhomie seemed to fade at the sight of them. There was none of the usual joshing that came so easily to them. Maria picked up a distance in his demeaner, as if he was mentally stepping away from them. His greeting was polite but not warm, treating them more like acquaintances rarely encountered. The brothers’ conversation was reduced to platitudes – “Nice day for it’’, “Looking forward to …’’ until a silence fell between them like a sword cutting off further dialogue.
“Well,’’ said Nick, “better greet the other guests.’’ and he was gone.
“Yes of course,” said Sam his words trailing after the brother. Maria saw once again the dynamics of the relationship. Her husband the elder, deferred to the younger, blind to the slight, making excuses. “He looks nervous.”
Sam and Maria were left drinks in hands feeling like extras lacking direction. The rest of the guests were clearly familiar with each other. In knots that precluded mingling, they exchanged hearty private jokes and shared anecdotes. To look less conspicuous, the couple examined the buffet, admired the blousy wedding cake. Eventually, they were forced to make small talk between themselves, until even that ran dry. Sam scanned the room and remarked, “Strange but I don’t know anyone here.”
An old lady presented herself in front of the couple and with all the forthrightness of the elderly asked, “Who are you?”
Sam with impeccable politeness responded, “I’m the older brother.’’
She looked surprised, “I never knew he had one.’’
Clearly, she was an elderly relative belonging to Clair. But Sam hissed to Maria, “Apparently, I don’t exist.’’ His tone was humorous but with a slight note of hurt. Nobody likes to have their existence challenged. At this point an uneasiness began to nudge Maria. A mixture of the brother’s off hand manner and her previous experience of being the butt of his ‘banter’ a word she came to associate with the smiling face of bullying.
She knew from the moment they heard of the engagement that Sam did not expect to be best man. There was a younger brother and although their relationship had been smashed years ago, Sam was fair-minded enough to accept that Nick would diplomatically not select either brother
for that honour. Indeed, Nick had been at pains to explain, “Don’t want to play favourites mate.” Consequently, Sam and Maria assumed the role would go to one of his friends.
Several characters from Sam’s time in the town began to drift in. They too skirted the clusters of guests who were strangers to them and gravitated towards Sam and immediately went down memory lane. This involved bemoaning the town’s infestation of newcomers that had driven up the price of housing.
Maria had never been part of these reminiscences since she was not deemed a local. Letting them meander through their shared past, she idly looked at the people in the bar now brimming with wedding guests in all manner of outfits. Consequently, she was first to see the entrance of Nick’s best friend and David, the younger brother, and observe as they gravitated towards the grinning groom. Standing together she saw instantly that the three men were dressed in the same wedding livery. Grey suits, lilac ties and buttonholes. It was a subtle and elegant look. She read the situation clearly. There was only one reason that David would be included in this ensemble. With her pulse racing as if she had been running, she knew that she must prepare her husband. Stepping close to him, despite the group still chewing on the past, she whispered directly into his ear “David is best man,” But Sam brushed away her words with “No Nick would never do that to me.” She felt sick at this blind faith.
In some ways the younger brother and Sam were alike. Both were bright and attended grammar school. Both excelled at sport. Both developed an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. But while Sam had taken full advantage of everything a grammar school education had to offer, David had squandered his schooling. Sam had recognised and seen off his alcohol dependence while David continued to embrace it. As such he took low grade jobs which he routinely lost when he stole from the till or the cellar to fund his drinking. The rest of the family were indulgent towards this dilettante lifestyle. His routine was beer for breakfast, followed by a lurch up the high street around 11 am to spend a couple of hours in the bookies, then home for an afternoon sleep before heading out in the evening to the pub. This waste of life infuriated Sam. He had patiently tried to help him quit the drink, but each time he failed. Largely because David was resentful of his older brother. He envied his career, his abundant travel and his strong will that enabled him to kick the drink. For Sam the death knell to their relationship came when David stole a substantial amount of money from their mother. While the rest of the family forgave him, Sam would not. The brothers had not spoken since.
When the local gossip was finally exhausted, Sam turned back to his wife. “What made you say that?’’ he frowned.
“See for yourself,” she gestured.
There was silence as he took in the group of men clearly at ease with each other, smiling over their pint glasses. She saw as he observed them a slight flicker of doubt in his grey eyes. That were usually so inscrutable. ‘’ I see David’s on his best behaviour.’’ He remarked dryly as he observed that his brother was clasping a pint of coke. Before Maria could prepare her husband still further, the moment was sabotaged by Aunty Francis, the much-loved sister of his late mother. With her typical acuity she had observed the sartorial anomaly and greeted Sam with a “Didn’t you get the dress code memo?’’
“Apparently not,” he replied. As the three of them chatted, Maria wondered what was going through her husband’s mind. He betrayed nothing but listened attentively as Aunty Francis gave a precis of events on her side of the family.
As they clambered onto the vintage bus that had been hired as a ‘fun’ means of transporting the guests to the wedding venue in the neighbouring city, it became evident to Maria that they were the only relatives from Nick’s side of the family on board. Puzzled she pondered how the others were getting to Canterbury. She decided not to highlight this observation to Sam but wondered if with his eye for detail, had he picked on this oddity himself?
The other passengers were quite literally in high spirits. Having imbibed liberally at the pub, they now passed around hip flasks. Alcohol had unleashed their playful side. Guffaws bounced around the vehicle as the old double decker navigated the narrow country lanes bashing overhead trees, jerking its passengers abruptly from side to side like a fairground ride. Maria forced a smile at the antics. She tried to share her husband’s faith in his brother, thrusting to the back of her mine the side of Nick she was more familiar with.
The bus arrived at the venue prematurely. It was a small Zoroastrian chapel built into the ancient city walls. It had been chosen for its quirkiness. Fellow passengers finding the doors firmly closed to them were content to mill about looking at watches still however in celebratory mood. Sam was not good at aimlessly wandering so suggested a coffee in a nearby café. Making their way through the Saturday morning shoppers their appearance was met with curious stares. An elderly quartet enjoying a late breakfast remarked, “You two look fabulous. Is it your wedding day?’’ Setting them right Sam hissed to his wife ‘’ We do scrub up well.’’
In their absence the venue doors had been opened. It was a small building more like a priest hole than a chapel. Its shape was dictated by being part of the fabric of the ancient wall. The ceilings were low and the walls made of the same flint as the wall itself. It accommodated about 40 seats. None of the plain pine chairs had been reserved apart from the front row nearest the altar. Of course, the maths did not stack up. There would necessarily be a remainder of guests without seating. Consequently, there had been a free for all when the doors were opened. Every chair was now occupied. The overspill would have to stand at the rear.
No provision had been made for Sam and Maria. Losing out in the seating lottery they were forced to stand at the back of the chapel joining a rag tag of the couple’s acquaintances, who knowing their place had not troubled with formal wedding attire. Trainers and track bottoms sufficed.
The front row was clearly reserved for close family members such as Aunty Nancy and her family. The two brothers sat side by side. Their positioning screaming to all that David was best man. This casting roles was now undeniable, even to Sam. He gripped Maria’s hand as he stared at the front row only able to articulate, “I don’t believe he’s done this to me.’’
“Betrayal,” Maria thought to herself takes many forms. It can be blatant. An affair. Theft from a trusted friend. But it could also be subtle, cunning even. This was the kind she was witnessing. It was designed as a personal slight, targeting Sam only, so not obvious to outsiders thereby avoiding censure. Any accusations of exclusion could be disingenuously argued away by ‘We just wanted everyone involved in the ceremony to be coordinated.” But it was the hurt caused by these actions, felt acutely by Sam and to a lesser extent by herself that was the reality. They were not particularly sensitive or mimsy but knew when they were being slighted. It was not an oversight either. The proof of intention lay in the withholding of information, that created this shock that felt like an assault. She knew that if Nick had simply revealed his plans to Sam, he would have understood and accepted as his brother’s right to have the wedding he desired.
Maria looked up at her husband. His face was white. His mouth set in a line. She had no time to sympathise as the wedding march suddenly issued from the sound system. The choreography of the proceeding’s events built upon this undertone of spite. The bride was a petite woman whose best attributes were her blonde bob and baby blue eyes that gave a false impression of innocence. At forty and married before, she had nevertheless opted to wear a white confection. But it was the presence of Ted, Sam’s stepfather, parading her up the aisle that slapped the couple in the face. Maria spontaneously articulating, “My God, Ted’s giving her away!”
This man was a controversial figure to her husband. He attributed his mother’s premature death to Ted’s negligence. A heavy drinker, he had insisted, despite a long flight from Florida that he and Joan have a night cap at their local. Clumsy with exhaustion she had misjudged the gap between the car and the curb and taken a bad fall from which she never recovered.
With no-one to rein in his drinking, Ted became a familiar in the pub at the end of his road. Drinking despite doctor’s warnings until he compromised the use of his legs. The last Sam and Maria had seen him was confined to an electric wheelchair.
Yet here he was Lazarous-like walking the bride down the aisle dressed in the wedding livery; his steps sure, thoroughly pleased with himself. The insults seemed to come like a flight of arrows.
Behind the bride was his middle-aged sister, resplendent in an overblown lilac dress that even a young girl would struggle to carry off.
“Ridiculous,” thought Maria repressing a giggle. “She looks like a giant blueberry.”
Sam had seen enough. “We’re leaving after the ceremony.”
Maria greeted the words with relief. They would not have to attend the lavish reception that might, as the evening wore on, prove incendiary. The idea of grinning through the speeches, pretending they were not hurt at the exclusion, made her inwardly groan. The couple had been subtly wrong-footed. If they made a scene in public, lost their composure, they would be accused of ruining the wedding.
So as the newly weds embraced and the congregation applauded, Sam and Maria, slipped unremarked out of the chapel doors. One advantage of being consigned to the back, Maria conceded was the proximity to the exit.
Waiting at the bus stop she allowed Sam to brood. Maria took stock of the family. All their relationships were messy. Sam and his sister Karen skilfully skirted each other at family events including their mother’s funeral. Bridges between these two could not be repaired. She had accused Sam of stealing from their mum. Her mother-in-law had set her straight, but no apologies were issued and Sam was not a forgiving man especially where his beloved mother has concerned. Maria although she loved her mother-in-law, as an outsider could see, she was often loath to call her family to order. Strange since as a retired lawyer she had a fiery reputation when practicing but this did not translate into the governance of her children. As a result, grievances stewed. Maria saw that now sister and sister in-law worked in cahoots. They wanted a happy Facebook family. Sam and Maria had no place in their plans. It was clear that the wedding livery, the synchronisation of the wedding party were messages to the elder brother. He was being evicted.
As the local bus slowly wound its way back to the town where their car was corralled, Sam began to open up more. “I’ve bailed him out so many times.’’
Maria was aware of the phone calls from Nick asking for a loan to cover a gambling debt or car repairs. Sam had given without hesitation, reporting to her with a grin, “Nick’s in a pickle again’’ — entirely accepting of his brother’s flaws. She was also aware that Sam had for years treated his brother to expensive outings to soccer matches and Formula 1 Races, happy to pay for days out with the favoured brother whose company he so appreciated.
Maria listened attentively, her eyes never leaving his face as the idea of the brother he thought he knew began to die in the face of so much reality. He recalled how as a youngster himself he had become in loco parentis to his siblings, while his mother worked long hours in London and dad managed a public house. With a five-year distance between himself and his brothers and sister, he had made their supper, prepared lunches, ensured their homework was competed and readied school uniforms for the following day.
Sam’s mind was clearly being torn apart. He still struggled to find excuses, trying to make sense of his brother’s betrayal. “Do you think it’s Clair’s doing?’’
She saw him clutching at straws, trying to shift the blame on the pretty blonde who had turned his head and responded with a noncommittal “maybe’.
Then his thoughts changed tack again, “Well I never knew he was so weak.’’
Quite suddenly, he issued what she knew to be a death sentence to the relationship, “I will never forgive for this, never speak to him again.’’ His wife knew that this was not just anger speaking. Sam had a propensity of cutting people who had crossed him out of his life. There would be no way back for the brother. The judgement would be final.
Turning towards her he then pronounced, “You are my family now.’’ Words she never thought she would hear him say, content that she would always share him with this brother. Long suspecting that if it came to a choice Nick would be chosen over her.
While many women would have rejoiced at these words, would feel relief at no longer being subjected to Nick’s hectoring, his public put downs, all behaviour unheard of amongst her own family and friends, the emotional responsibility felt like a great weight placed upon her.
“But will I be enough?” She responded anxiously.
He hugged her. “Of course.”
Maria wondered if this was the right time to reveal her own experiences of the brother, especially his spiteful behaviour which gone unchallenged through out his life, practiced upon her even in front of her own friends, evidenced by his remarks at her own wedding reception “Déjà vu here, I can’t remember what number marriage Sam’s on now.” The other guests were left open-mouthed.
But Maria knew the timing was not right. It would seem opportunistic as if she was airing her own grievances. Perhaps too it would be too much truth for her husband to manage for one day. It would be a conversation for another time.
Later that evening although they did not articulate it, watching TV they each listened for the phone. Expecting a call that would either challenge why they were missing from the reception or enquire if someone was sick – a normal reaction to their absence– one that would at least suggest the wedding had not been a deliberate snub. But the call never came. The family it seemed were satisfied that they had achieved their objective. Either that or during their revelry, they simply had not registered the couple’s non-attendance.
Fiona Sinclair is a retired English teacher. She lives in the UK in a rural village with a Yamaha motor bike, a feral garden and a husband. Fiona has been writing poetry for over 15 years. She has had several collections of poetry published by small presses in the UK. Over the last 3 years, Fiona has written short stories that have been published in good magazines in both the US and UK.
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Feather follows me for a few steps in my modest wake, no exotic like a curlew just a domestic make,
which has left this pen lacking ink pointing without intent but by no means pausing to shrink even without consent
of the walker noting the quill lacking an author’s hand yet no light stuff, run of the mill— obeying no command.
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John Zedolik has published Measured Responses, 2026; Triple Muse, 2025; Lovers’ Progress, 2025; The Ramifications, 2024; Mother Mourning, 2023; When the Spirit Moves Me, 2021; and Salient Points and Sharp Angles, 2019.
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Original art works by leading painters and sculptors selling for millions internationally were up for grabs because of the special two-day sale exhibition organised in a leading art gallery. Though it was not something common like an apparel sale, with irresistible buy-one-get-one-free offers that people flock to during the weekends, yet there was a sizeable crowd of potential art buyers who were driven by the prospective gains of making this trek.
The sale exhibition lured art aficionados and investors from business families along with salaried employees from middle-class families who were ready to cancel their annual holiday plans to spend the money on buying an art piece when the share market was topsy-turvy due to global meltdown. Customers who queued up as early as four in the morning had no clear idea of the mystery behind the affordable prices with a modest upper cap. Some of them thought these were slightly damaged art works – much like the rejected export items sold in factory outlets.
As the famed artists were selling some of their pieces at throwaway prices, it was a golden chance to invest in art at a very affordable budget segment. On a practical note, an artist does not always produce masterpiece after masterpiece so he cannot sell everything at a steep price in the auction house. Some of the greatest artists have created pretty ordinary work before they refined their sensibilities. I reasoned these were some of those amateurish works they could not sell for millions. Instead of stocking them up, they chose to make some money out of their mediocre art pieces. These artworks would probably fetch a good price after their demise so it was wise to pick up the ones from the seniormost artists who would bid us farewell soon and the auction price of their genuine art works would instantly boom.
What is now a steal would become a handsome deal and fetch millions and make me a millionaire overnight. Since the exhibiting gallery had all the displayed pieces certified as original stuff, I could safely make the investment. Having shortlisted a few names in my mind, I went around the gallery walls glowing with spotlights and enriched with their works and cherrypicked a couple of those without trying to understand the meaning of the art piece. Something abstract always catches attention.
Since there was a heavy rush of potential buyers jostling and pushing each other to lay their hands on their preferred pieces before they vanished, I chose to skate around corners with lesser density of shoppers. The speed with which these paintings disappeared from the walls was amazing. As there was not much to choose from after the top names were sold out, I faced the dilemma of finding the right parameters to finalise from the works of upcoming artists who managed to find display space. There was not much discussion about their commercial potential in the art world to assist buyers to bet on their creativity.
I was left with my instinct and my flawed sense of judgment when I went around in confusion, in search of clarity and finally staked claim on a painting by a lady painter who used a plant to outline the female form in acrylic. I hoped and prayed she would become another Shergill after a decade or two.
The lady at the counter examined my choice and smiled. I did not understand for sure whether her smile indicated approval in this case. Was she feeling happy that I made the right choice? Or she appreciated that I was a worshipper of the female form? She used some highfalutin words of praise on my taste in art and called it a very good purchase. I read it as her support and admiration for my foresight and insight. While the reaction of others around was much less than what is called envy or enthusiasm, they seemed to be more familiar with the name of the artists who was scheduled to arrive at the gallery for promotion of her art works later in the day.
People with limitless knowledge were discussing art works like highbrow critics. As a first-time art buyer, I had no such interest in the richness of the art. The commercial worth was what was keeping me curious. I wanted to grab a few words of praise from them about the artist I had invested in.
I decided to approach an old man and ask him about the potential of the woman painter but he did not show much excitement except making the prediction that I could easily get double the purchase price in the next decade. I was not thrilled to hear this forecast that barely covered inflation. Since I had already made the purchase, I got it packed and prepared to leave with a heavy heart.
While coming out, I was approached by a journalist who thrust the mike in front of me and the cameraman identified me as a buyer and focused on the covered painting in my hand. I was asked what I bought and why. Since I myself knew nothing much, I could not furnish a proper answer except mentioning the name and the price and then wrapping it off with a smile and an urgency to leave as my car had arrived at the gate.
This quick bite made me curious. When the programme was aired late, I found my interview missing. Some other interesting faces were featured. Perhaps the news editor judged me as a worthless, uncouth buyer who was looking for dirty profit and nothing else.
I decided to make the painting the prime showpiece on the wall of my living room. I cast a detailed look at it to find potential but it was beyond my understanding. Whenever a male guest came in, he looked up and admired without offering a reason, making me ashamed of my ignorance while the rest of the people appeared to know a lot about art. Conversation flowed but I kept silent.
Whenever a woman came in, she looked away. I chose to ignore the reactions of my guests and continued to display it with pride and clicked my profile status shots in front of it. Seated on the couch, with the painting in the background forming a clean artistic backdrop, I sported a confident look with a strong impression that I was an art lover though it was far from the truth. I knew I was another one of those pseudo art-lover who claimed to know the world of art inside out but was actually purely a money-minded nerd who was waiting for progress in the status of the painter – to fetch a good market price for her works. I would feel proud that since I have an original piece by the same painter. I could consider myself a rich person who would sell the painting later to invest the proceeds and accumulate a large corpus of retirement funds.
For ten years I waited for the death or disappearance of the painter but she was blessed with a long, healthy life. I checked her health status and she was doing fine. I knew another wait for a decade for her pop-off was on the cards.
When she finally died in a freak accident, I thought the good times had come. I was a mean profiteer who wanted to sell off this art work and make a mega profit.
I took it to an art gallery and asked how much it would fetch now. The quoted price was well below the expectation. I was asked to keep it with me for another two decades and then see how much it would fetch. I decided to wait till my retirement to calculate whether it would surpass my insurance or provident fund payout. I checked it again but the price, though high, barely crossed the bond returns.
After holding on for so long, I decided to sell the art work in the market. Attracting private collectors meant a tough time with negotiators. I went to the corporate honchos who would pay well. Finally I chose the company I worked for in the past and quoted an exorbitant price for the painting which he negotiated hard like a salary deal and finally handed me a cheque for the acrylic painting which he would proudly display in the corridor near the lobby. Though I did not get my preferred price, I chose to be happy as the investment made after sacrificing one annual holiday trip had made me rich enough to afford an annual holiday for the rest of my retired life.
Devraj Singh Kalsiworks as a senior copywriter in Kolkata. His short stories and essays have been published in Deccan Herald, Tehelka, Kitaab, Earthen Lamp Journal, Assam Tribune, and The Statesman. Pal Motors is his first novel.
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