Avik's Story

She loved to smell random flowers, born out of neglect in Maidan, when we sat on grasses and looked at sky-crappers lurking ahead. She loved to hold my hand, sometimes my arm into her, while walking down cobble-stoned footpath in the heart of City of Joy. She loved to kiss my fingers, and then forehead, and then lips in god-forsaken odd places – in a patched backseat of faded yellow taxi, on a broken rikshaw drenched in sudden shower, sometimes in full public glare – a sneaking kiss. That was the best time of my life, but even at that happiness, I had this conviction that this’d not last forever. Sooner or later, she was destined to leave me to love some-other lucky one and to be loved thousand times more than I ever loved her. But in my wildest dream, I never thought that my own children would steal her from me. The prophecy was written on wall, but I was a naïve. I read the words, but not the sentence. I noticed the signs in bits, but not the bigger picture. An...

I love to dream. Now, please don’t brouhaha about this, or have even a slightest impression that my dreams are in any way like that of great Martin Luther. My dreams are literally dreams – classic culminations of daily experiences through sub-conscious mind in sleep and are often weird, embarrassing, foggy and confused. And I remember most of my dreams. I thought of it a gift like that of a superhero, until one day my heart shrank inches after ‘discovering’ that most people dream and remember those dreams. Even dogs dream. I have few recurring themes, which cycle themselves throughout a sleep at night. And the weirdest and best of those is a world, where me and my ‘big’ daughter Vedantika are survivor turned fighters in an alien infected dystopian earth. Another often recurring theme is my village, which is modified and transformed into a town with modern transport and amenities, and then I fight to protect my family from brutal invaders, cloaked in black robes. Some...