Short takes

Get me, I got her!

She spills hot tea on me when I look away, feigning innocence through blinking eyes as I get my gaze back. I know it’s her – am dead sure. But, “Oh, my God!” she exclaims. I want to shout, and hit her, but she is just blinking. So I curse her friend, her best friend actually, and that feels so good. “Leave her out,” she yells and jumps on me, and we roll on the ground, along the slope and finally over the cliff. It is now my turn to echo, “I love you Gulab.”

The Traffic
(Also at Sonora Review, the magazine put together by the students of the Creative Writing Department, University of Arizona)

The vehicles, the people, the animals, all swam around me like a badly directed movie. But Rita wasn’t there. A buffalo chased a dog and was hit by a car. I sneezed and suddenly she was there. I blinked, smiled. A dog ran past chased by a group of dogs, barking, bringing the world to an end. I wished to cross the road; Rita waved, her scarf running away from her, dancing in the wind. An elephant, cars, a camel, a family of pigs, cars, buses, auto-rickshaws, cars, and a donkey; but Rita was gone.

The Coconut

“Coconut on my head, coconut on my head,” Ramu was screaming. He had just taken the extreme haircut, everything scraped by the razor. But I needed a change. “Have you seen the calendar?”

“Why?”

I laughed, “Today is coconut’s birthday.”

Ramu screamed, clapped and ran three fast circles around me. “But how is that possible papa, my birthday is still two months away?”

“But you are not a coconut, are you?”

“I am coconut, here see my head, feel it.”

“Your head is a coconut, but you are just a nut.

“Yeah I am a nut, yeah!”

:)