Samata Agrawal
A Red-vented Bulbul has built a petit nest on the sleeping fig ficus bush that grows from a pot in the balcony. There are three or may be four babies of that bulbul lying like some chunks of meat in the nest. They vigilantly guard their home day and night long and feed the new-born from their beaks – which is all they pretty much do. Hard, soiled and pointed beak; it traps minute bugs which it transfers into the paper like beak …
Kartikey Sehgal
[Fiction]
I dance to Tango. Only, I don’t know what it is. I had seen it once, in some movie. They raise their skirts, maybe they do. But that’s not the reason I liked Tango. The song had a bitter-sweet quality; like you celebrate the birth of a baby while reminiscing about your lover’s death. While the heart sings for the baby, the mind wishes the olden moments of love.
The dance watchers—who don’t dance—clap for the dancers. Then they are inadvertently drawn …
Kartikey Sehgal
“I held his hand for a few seconds but the waves pulled him inside”, says Siddharth Patil, a lifeguard at Mumbai’s Aksa Beach at Mudh Island, where a man lost his life while swimming in high tide waves at around 1 p.m. on Sunday, April 26.
Siddharth was tired and angry after his attempt. “I had warned them twice to not go into the water but they are like animals; they don’t pay any heed to safety.” Siddharth claims that this is the first drowning in six months at the beach that is known for death by drowning.
Kartikey Sehgal
I cannot accept the mirth of trivialities. Of a living below life. I’d rather joke with the honest labourer whose design on the wet brick is hardened by the sun; harmony between nature and men.
But I am given, and society has ordained, the acceptance of rooms without sunlight, precision defined within dark windows and glass doors.