To,
The Editor,
Literary magazine Quirk
Dear editor,
I send here a new work for your magazine. I have been publishing short literary pieces since 2005, in Muse India, Chowk, and International Journal of Post colonial Literature. Some of my significant works are
- A Star Manqué (in Chowk, US)
- The Shattered World. (In Chowk)
- The Disappearances of a Woman (in Chowk)
- The Recluse (in Chowk)
- Superseded (in Muse India, India)
- Sons of the Soil (in IJPCL, India )
- The Second Immersion (IJPCL)
- The Third View (Selected Short Stories from Indo-Anglican Literature, India)
I hope this work, with its new style and highly magnetic literary contents, will be found fit to find its way to the readership of your magazine.
Thanking you,
Yours truly,
Anand Mahajan
102./23, Silver Oak apartments,
DLF phase 1, Qutab enclave, Gurgaon-122002 , India
25/10/09
Cell : 9711415112
FESTIVAL OF A WITH DRAWER
An engineer, scientist, inventor and academic man, after 26 years of active life, was at this moment decidedly preparing to delete all his credentials and identities from the e- world, to step into an average profile settled life. He was terminating his betterment pursuits that continued for years on end, so this day he was decidedly sitting in the Internet cabin. He then started withdrawing his data from various national and international job sites one by one. He removed his ids, passwords, and resumes in his mixed pain and reinforced determination as these details being erased had 20 years old roots; the software would repeatedly ask “ Are you sure?”, he would overlook and press yes. In about an hour or so, he had withdrawn himself from the e- world; impeccable blocks of his identity fell off the e sphere as cancelled
tickets. Had the Internet services been manned, the operators would have remembered this event and watched for few days the voids created by claiming back the now unusable superior material of his data. Have you ever travelled in Bombay locals if you been to Bombay? Commuters of a compartment know all others in their vicinity as they have been seeing the same faces for decades together. It is hard for them to believe that certain seats in front of them occupied by same so well familiar people for decades of their train travel are going vacant for initial few stations now for the last few days. Then they gradually believe that the seats have been permanently vacated.
He had done the above after a long hunt for ensconcing nicely in his profession. During these months of unbroken efforts, he would see blankly aged people and people about his own age. These moments of blank observations would send chills in his heart. He would envy people in seventies and would become scared as well at sight of people in fifties. He would envy old men because like them, he had no enthusiasm to linger till his fragile old years. He would be afraid of younger men because his average, hackneyed resources and loneliness would torment him if he lived beyond a limit. He would sit at a bench at the solitary railway station of this town of Himachal, and would look at two taps of drinking water. One of the taps, faulty, would remain open all the time.
Adjacent tap was OK. People would come and ignoring faulty tap would open the good one with their filthy hands. The one open all the time was better off that way, he would think. Sooner or latter the all time open tap would run dry; but it would never be turned by filthy hands.
He tired of his unsuccessful attempts in Metros, had been living in this Himachal town for last two months. This time monsoon had deceived the hopes of everybody.
The monsoon months had gone dry this year as never before; complete absence of rains had killed crops, mounted costs of food grain; unfading heat had infused disability into the systems of cities, towns, and villages to maintain supply of basic needs like drinking water and electricity. Then there was global slowdown already inflicting stings on life to drain away energy. Masses would think that it was all set for the doomsday. So human beings had now resigned and approved sickness of nature and fate. Then without a hint, the life on this part of earth negotiated a U turn and there were rains allover. Rains- softening, overflowing, cooling, inundating, raising hopes for next plantation, solving problems of water and electricity. Like an American science fiction, forces to destroy and sicken nature were overcome. Gods of
nature like the medics awakened at a last moment were trying medicine after medicine in the form of continued downpour without caring for stock and variety. They had to cure this sick part of the earth, come what may.
He would be woken out of his sleep at nights because of his dreams. He would sit recovering for sometime; but little would he gain. Then he would read his Hanuman Chalisa and let the words of the powerful prayer sink into his scared soul; as if he were falling down a precipitous cliff and the words of the potent prayer would each become a redoubtable spring which would take the impact of his fall.
This night he was feeling much better after the prayer. He came near the front room’s window and sat there. The downpour could still be heard that had continued into 3rd unabated rainy day on this day. Sometimes dry monsoon and sometimes this!
Then at 4 AM, the rains had stopped a bit but the valley was allover laden with white clouds. The white invisibility outside was suddenly broken by loudspeaker of a temple somewhere down in the well of the valley. It was, however, something tangible. The prayer’s words pervaded the entire white ether of clouds in a split second, like a rolled carpet covers in acceleration the entire cleaned up white tiled floor of a big room in a jiffy.
Not all the time he had suffered here. This was a large flat, and only 1 or 2 % of the space was covered with his belongings. Earlier he used to live clumsily in his flats with floor space covered mostly by the furniture and machines. He turned on the sports TV channel. A F1 speed car race was being shown. Presently a tyro rich rider rammed the high cost car into the bulwark running along the race track as if it were not a race of professionals. The car was reduced to unusable scrap with everything destroyed. Rescue team people rushed to the spot and remained bent examining the fate of the rider. After some 5 minutes of their examination, the rider-totally unhurt- rose in complete ease and stepped outside the confused mass of metal. Not even a scratch appeared bothering him with any pain. He recalled the boy next door who in his wrath
over some denial by his parents tore his text book vigorously. He tore it repeatedly and could destroy all pages but one that had hard plastic reinforcement.
This day- one day past Diwali festival - he returned to Himachal to say his goodbye to the hilly town he had been living in for the last three months. He was in professional line for 26 years now and each year a dull Diwali came which he sometimes not even celebrated. Now he was at the end of his career with all dreams of a big career having been curtailed. He was sick, withered and wilted from tragedies and only now here was this coveted Diwali in this hilly town. The hill town people, mostly shopkeepers had spent no efforts to make the already beautiful hill town remarkably enchanting at extents with colorful lighting and expensive fireworks he had never seen before. The town looked like a hilly lass stepping into most beautiful year of her youth and wearing ornaments that won’t look more beautiful on any other women on earth.
He, in his hardest time, enjoyed Diwali for the first time in years. I know a man who lived all his life in city flats that had shining big diameter expensive pipes in his Kitchen. Never had a forced discharge of soft and fresh water come in those taps of his kitchen. Then when he switched into a small house in a hilly town, there he found gushing crystal clear water into small sink of his kitchen from the thin capillary like pipeline that descended in a serpentine route from somewhere and opened into the sink of his kitchen.
He was traveling in the toy train this day to exit these idyllic hilly swathes weaved with clumps of variety of unbelievable pulchritude in their natural symmetry. He had penned only a part of it and got it published for reading of people allover the outside world but there was a lot more undone; and he was leaving it incomplete. It appeared the hilly swathes, the small towns with tiny houses perched on hillocks, the streams of crystal clears water, the drifting pieces of clouds just next to the trundling train were all looking at him with blaming eyes for his shying away from his work to describe all of them to the world of business and concrete away from here. Swaying of the trees threw little volumes of cold fresh air inside the windows of the train, and he, tired by traveling from Delhi to Himachal, snoozed a bit. By a whistle of the train, his snooze and his dream were both broken in the same moment ; in the dream he saw a lad who had practiced a lot at breaking piles of hard bricks by hand to take part in a tournament; in the tournament however, he could not go beyond the second round; there were so many bricks in the pile in the third round to be broken by hand; the lad had broken only two of them with the ones below the top two intact.
