Tag: life

the world of the unbalanced elephants – ten minutes of story (microfiction)

17.08.2025

Alfonso had given me just ten minutes to write a story. He had odd whims. And he knew that I had a busy schedule, so he did not make inordinate demands.

So what could I write?

I thought about an elephant that was climbing a wire over a city. The elephant was making its way across the wire sedately and elegantly. It was definitely possible. However, then a child let off a balloon from the crowd, a red balloon that veered into the elephant’s delicate trunk. Instability had been introduced, and missteps. The elephant desperately tried to regain balance. Everyone thought that the elephant was done for. Then, either from a stroke of luck or from a generous and hopeful intention, a crow landed on the uneven side of the balance. The elephant was saved. However, the unscrupulous bookies and organisers of the event decided that this was cheating on the part of the elephant, notwithstanding the fact that the bird had actually saved the poor creature’s life. They disqualified the elephant straight away. Yet the elephant was a beast of dignity. The elephant finished the walk across the wire. The silly child who had let off the balloon kicked up a fuss for more ice cream and treats from its entitled parents and the world went back to doing what it was doing: destroying, killing and hating. It is the world of the ignorant, not the world of a balanced elephant. And for that reason, because of the mindless mob, it is the world of the unbalanced elephants.

Alfonso did not deign to comment on the story. He asked me why all the characters in it were genderless, nonetheless. I asked him what difference he thought it would make. He was silent and suggested that we both go out for a chocolate sundae.

life as a bus (microfiction)

14.08.2025

‘You don’t have a reason to complain. You have a good life.’

Alfonso wasn’t wrong. I did have a good life. A disposable income. Savings. Food and shelter. Nice things. An interesting job. Interesting friends. The best education that money could buy. My health was pretty good and I had high energy levels. But was I happy? There was something very important that was missing from my life. Not something but someone.

The loss of one person. When there are several billion people in the world. It was a marginal loss. I was stupid to feel it. I should be like them. Forget everyone. Have no one as special. Forget about caring about someone. They did it and they were happy doing it. Why couldn’t I be like them? Nobody really cared about losing me from their lives. I sincerely doubted whether I could get more than ten people to come to my funeral if something happened to me.

‘When you search for a metaphor for life,’ I told Alfonso, ‘you would think of a maze or a dark forest. That is the stereotype. However, something happened today which I think is the perfect metaphor for life.’

‘And?’ Alfonso sniffed peculiarly. His guard was up and he eyed me warily. He knew that I was going to say something cynical and suspicious.

‘As I was crossing the road, a bus came that would make my walk back home redundant and conserve my energy after I had been on my newly healed leg all day. I sprinted to catch it. I got there at the door. The bus driver was letting some passengers off. I waited patiently at that bus door for it to open. The bus driver didn’t even give me a look while I was standing at the bus door. He drove off. That situation explains my life. Not a portion of my life. But my whole life.’

‘How so?’ Alfonso looked scrupulously at his fingernails. It was good of him to always ask for elaboration, when no one else ever did and I often wondered if they ever listened to anything that I said.

‘I beat that driver who had an unfair advantage to me in a race and then he still would not pay up. He would not give my reward. I was faster than him, more courageous than him, more talented than him. Yet he had something and he would never give it to me. He did not care about fairness. He did not care if he upset me. He would not do the right thing.’

‘That is your life?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have a chip on your shoulder.’

‘You would have too if you were a genius and had to live with these people.’

Alfonso harumped. He knew that I was right. This was how they treated me. This was the treatment of our people. We were a threat to them so they tried to keep us down.

‘You have done well if that’s how you think you have been treated.’

‘I don’t think. I know.’

‘Life as a bus,’ continued Alfonso, pretending that he had not heard me, ‘is not very appealing. But it is moving.’ He smiled at me naughtily. I did love Alfonso. I smiled back at him. You do not have to agree on everything, not at all. It was about friendship. You could always listen even if you did not agree. It was sad that people had not learnt that lesson yet.

the saddest thing in the world (microfiction)

13.08.2025

‘What is the saddest thing in the world?’ Alfonso asked me. He looked sublime. The hot pink blazer, the perfect blue jeans. His handsome, handsome face and those piercing eyes. It was sad that I was only interested in the opposite sex. Because otherwise, he would have done very nicely.

‘Love.’

Alfonso stared at me with surprise. ‘You cannot be serious.’

‘It is a deadly serious answer. Love is what makes you sad. Do you not agree?’

Alfonso just looked at me. Then he changed tack. ‘Let us forget about your personal situations. Let me ask you instead when was the last time that you really wanted to cry? Don’t tell me that you can’t cry. We all know that now. But when did you last want to cry?’

‘I was on the tube. I was coming home. Then I read a passage in a novel that I was reading about how some youngsters stumble about when they have to tell a brother that her sister is dead. It reminded me of a situation that happened in my life. I had come home from wherever I was and I sat down to dinner. My grandmother had gone to a doctor’s appointment with my parents earlier in the day. I asked what had happened. My parents told me that nothing had happened. I then told them off for having such long faces if nothing had happened. I told them to be happy that there was nothing wrong with grandma. After dinner, when I had quite finished, my mother told me the truth. My grandmother was going to die from lung cancer.’

‘They hid it from you? Why?’

‘So that I did not spoil my dinner.’

‘They lied!’

‘My mother did it out of love for me. So that I could eat my dinner.’

‘And so you wanted to cry because what happened in the novel happened to you? Why didn’t you cry?’

‘I could have. I wanted to. Badly. But then I sneezed. And then I lost the will to cry.’

‘Saved by a sneeze.’ Alfonso sneered at me. He was prone to do it. ‘Would you have really blubbed in front of the other passengers on the tube?’

‘What would they care? Do you think it would even register on their radar? This brown man crying? Have you watched that movie? No one would even care if you died on the tube. Your corpse would probably ride on it for three days before anyone noticed and even then the only thing that would give it away would be the emerging stench.’

‘Do people tell you that you are cynical?’

‘Yes. They have asked me to change. But if my life cannot change, why would the way that I cope with it change? Don’t expect any happiness in life. Don’t expect any recognition or reward for fighting for the truth and knowledge, for dignity for your people and Mother India. Don’t expect love. Don’t expect anything that you deserve for being the best. Expect instead indignity, marginalisation, unfairness, stupidity, ignorance.’

‘One day, make yourself cry,’ said Alfonso. ‘But aside from that, be happy. You have a heart still. That is better than most.’ He looked at me. I sensed pity. What good does pity ever do anyone?

russian roulette

09.08.2025

At the most, I had twitched my lips as a prelude to a word. Essentially just the moment before the action. Alfonso raised his finger aloft and intoned, ‘Enough of your vileness about love. Perhaps one day…’

‘There is no now, there was no before and there will be no before me.’

‘That’s the positive kind of attitude!’ Alfonso smirked at me. ‘Stop wallowing in pity.’

‘It makes for a good bed.’

‘The bed is precisely what you have to free yourself from. Your late mornings have started again in earnest.’

‘Do you know what the dream is now, Alfonso? While I am awake, I see myself with a black pistol. It is very elegant and very beautiful. Irresistible. And I am sitting at the table with this little fiend. She is inviting me. I stroke her. I love her. It is a seduction that is hard to resist. And there is one pretty little bullet in this sexy little fiend. I open the gun and roll the barrel. Now, no one knows where the pretty little bullet is. Does it have my name on it like I have its name upon my heart? Who knows. I aim the sexy little fiend at my temple. There is an audience. They watch. They have thirsted for my blood from before I was born. I am what they have to kill to survive. Then…’

‘And then?’ asked Alfonso coolly.

‘That is the thing. At first, this waking dream was that it is all over. But then, do you know what my luck is? I have never been lucky in anything. This society is against my luck. Then, perhaps I get the bad luck. Perhaps I survive. Perhaps there is no big BANG.’

‘It is only a dream. You detest guns. You have told me that they are for cowards. It is against your culture to use a gun against yourself. The dream signifies nothing.’

‘Still, it is a pretty dream.’

‘Get a prettier dream. Put some flowers in it.’

‘The flowers are a tired metaphor and a false one. There is no romance. There is no beauty. There is no life principle against the death principle. There is nothing and no one in this world and there are no flowers.’

‘Pull yourself together,’ Alfonso admonished me. ‘You would let them win over you? You would accept defeat on their terms? In the world, there are flowers. You just have to find them.’

‘I have looked my whole life. Even the flowers are impure.’

‘Purity is a fiction. Hence so is impurity. It is the impure that are capable of holding power.’

‘An impure power or a pure powerlessness? What would you prefer?’

‘You want to bandy words around when you should be living life? Tomorrow you could be the happiest man in the world. Tomorrow, it might be impossible to prise the smile off your face.’

‘Who lives in tomorrow? We live in today. Today has always been foul.’

‘What is foul is your mood.’ suggested Alfonso. ‘Did not even the chocolate ice cream I gave you add a moment of joy to your day? Why did you eat it then? Remember,’ said Alfonso, ‘even the cat that gets the cream is not satisfied with its lot. Remember the Hindu philosophy: life is suffering, life is pain, life is a punishment.’

‘Some are punished more than others,’ I responded.

‘Even when you are sad, that troublesome tongue of yours looks to argue and to defy the world. One man cannot defy everyone else. One man cannot argue against the huddled voices of the world.’

‘Let me die in the attempt.’

‘There.’ Alfonso clapped his hands and a brilliant smile lit up his face. ‘Spoken at last like a man. Keep that wild mind in your head and that wild tongue in your mouth. Keep fighting. Die a noble death. Die fighting. You are the warrrior.’

I watched the smile on Alfonso’s face. What a curious thing a smile is. How do these people smile? And almost all the time? What do they have to be so happy about when there is no happiness in the world? Together, they had all decided to apportion happiness across the world. And when it had come to my share, they had decided to scrimp and save, so that I had almost nothing. I was teasing happiness and joy out of consuming scraps of chocolate, inhaling scented bars of soap and an insane clinging to the cultural evenings around London so that I almost was not sleeping any more.

And yet, there it sat. The smile. Alfonso’s belief in me that I would keep on fighting without any victory. Against all. The Indian man’s belief in The Tiger.

Falsity (microfiction)

07.08.2025

‘Most people lie,’ was all the comment that Alfonso made.

I had just finished venting about a particularly preposterous lie that I heard. I had been looking into the eyes of this liar and they had not even flinched. Was it possible that they even believed their own lies? Or were they completely shameless?

‘I don’t lie.’

‘That is why you do not have much,’ said Alfonso. ‘People don’t welcome the truth with open arms. In fact, they loathe it and will do anything in their power to destroy it.’

‘It is not the truth,’ I said tiredly. ‘It is a truth. One of many.’

‘You believe that hogwash?’ asked Alfonso incredulously. ‘You have told me yourself that you are the truth.’

‘Although not everything that passes as truth is the truth,’ I elaborated, ‘still there has to be some room for manouevre. You don’t want a rigid and totalitarian framework. Which is what knowledge passes as in this society of twits. Their fascism is supposedly knowledge.’

I thought again of this liar and the lie. I had heard some good ones in my time. Some of them had even fooled me. It was obvious why these people lied. Because the truth was too dangerous, because they wanted to cover up their own guilt, because perhaps their intellects were so unsound that they could actually believe the paper thin story they were trying to wrap events in. They were so skilled at lying to your face. And then they would call it ‘civilisation’, their false narrative.

‘Don’t let it bother you,’ said Alfonso, sensing what I was thinking about. ‘You live in a society of liars. I am surprised that you still haven’t gotten used to it.’

‘Only a coward accepts injustice,’ I said firmly.

‘Yet what do you do about people lying to you? Nothing.’

‘What can you do? As you said, they will not accept the truth. It is not worth wasting time on them.’

‘And if the lie is an injustice?’

‘If I had my way,’ I told Alfonso, ‘There would be no lying and there would be justice. This world has never been ready for that in its entire history. Why would it be ready for that now or in the future?’

‘So why do you exist then?’ asked Alfonso. He sneered at me, one of his trademark sneers. ‘I thought you told me that you fought for truth and justice.’

‘Yes, by telling the truth myself. Just like you can’t make someone love difference when they are prejudiced, just like you can’t make someone choose fairness when they are biased, just like you can’t reason with a bigot, so you cannot stop a liar from lying. They have a psychological problem and they need therapy. They are just compulsive liars.’

‘I keep telling you, don’t be upset. Forget everything.’

‘I will, I told Alfonso. I will go to sleep now.’

Alfonso clasped my hand. ‘If you are the truth,’ he said, ‘show us the freedom and the wildness of The Tiger.’ He knew what was in my dreams.

where can i go? (microfiction)

07.08.2025

Finally, after several years of not taking a holiday abroad, he had decided to go to foreign shores. However, nothing in life is easy, least of all a journey of ease. He did not know where to go.

His parents had not taken him on holidays abroad when he was a child. He had never booked a holiday abroad by himself or had the decision about where to go.

He lacked any kind of experience and he was stumped.

The first choice had been Japan. Beautiful Japan, the land of inspiration. But what was it that he was actually going to do there? He had a vague impression of nature and local traditions. But how was he going to organise everything?

The second idea was to take a coach trip around Europe and to cram in as much as possible. But then, how much did Europe interest him? Surely it would be pretty much the same as England?

The third idea was Athens. He had always wanted to go there. But then there was that association…

Athens could be had for about seven hundred pounds. A nice hotel with a swimming pool and breakfast. Plenty of archaeological curiosities out there.

Choices. The whole world to be had. And yet, every time he had tried to go abroad, all the plans had come crashing down around him.

There was nowhere to go. There was no place for him.

And at the same time, he could not rest where he was.

In the universe, we are a space. Our body is a space. A tiny little space in what is almost an infinity of space. And that space of the body relates to the spaces of the bodies around it. His space, his body, it had no relationship to the bodies around it. So it did not matter what country he went to or what he did, he would never have a human space around him. So why try? Why imagine being in a different human space? It was all very well saying that no man is an island. But an island he was. He would be an island in Japan, Europe, Athens or Africa. It was not what he wanted, but what he was.

This holiday was already stressing him out.

Jiggling the Jelly (microfiction)

06.08.2025

After a promise to write in the night, I sat there at my desk in my boxer shorts scratching away idly at my inner thigh as I endured a severe writer’s blank. I tried the usual methods to break the blank. A feverish search in my vocabulary of words. Reflection on an experiences that would inspire something. Themes.

Nothing worked.

There were certain things it was now best to avoid. That was not helping. Because it was those things that were on my mind the most. The unfinished business…

Suddenly I felt tired so I grabbed the laptop and lay on my bed. And, immediately when I done so, all the words and ideas came flooding in.

Curious. Had it been the change of scene? But why? I am comfortable at my desk and habituated to writing there. Then I realised. I had laid down. Which had changed the orientation of my brain.

I had jiggled the jelly.

That was what had sparked off the creativity. All I needed to do was to change the orientation of the mass inside my head. Maybe if I leant to the left, that would mean that I would produce poetry or soemthing like it. Then, the right might produce prose and non-fiction. Maybe if I leant my head back while it was straight, I could produce some good erotica.

So simple. All I had to do was to introduce different movements into my routine.

I tested it out. I lay down and tilted my head to the left. Failure. I started thinking of they, all the moments. They were on my mind frequently.

I tried the other side. It was worse. I started thinking of the big C word. My career. And out of work time too. I shuddered.

Why was the writing impulse so elusive today?

But if it was the jiggling of the jelly…

‘Eureka!’ I cried. The solution was so simple. I slapped myself on both cheeks and on my forehead. That would move it.

I pummelled away at my face with my open palm. Unfortunately, however, you can not get much writing done when you don’t have any free hands. The jelly was jiggered and not jiggled. And in all the experimentation, I had forgotten the idea I had when I laid on the bed. There was not going to be any story tonight.

My discerning, demanding readers would be most displeased.

The Indian Vocabulary of Love and its Meaning

14.01.2024

I’ve been watching Hindi films since I was a child. It is how I learnt to speak Hindi (my language at home – my mother tongue – is Punjabi, not Hindi). Hindi speakers have many words for love. Not like English speakers. Here are some – Ishq, Aashiqi, Mohabbat, Pyaar, Prem, Lagan, Chaahat… There’s probably more. Hindi is a rich language.

Here are some more metaphorical ones, which touch on some of the ways that love is experienced and conceptualised in Indian culture:

Ibaadat – Worship. When you love someone, you love them like a god or a goddess. They are important, powerful, masterful over you. They rule over your heart. They take the place of a god or a goddess, commanding all your loyalty and faith. You trust them without question. You hope everything from them.

Aetbaar – Belief. When you trust them with your heart. You can rely on them without question. They are the one person in the whole world that you can count on the most to stay with you through thick and thin. You expect everything from them, total commitment.

Wafaa – They hold your loyalty. You will never stray from them. The trust and the bond between you is unshakeable.

Behosh/Mere hosh udhgayee – Unconscious/My senses have flown – How love is experienced. Your mind goes on a holiday when you see them, think about them, are around them. They command all your attention. You can’t focus on anything else.

Amaanat – They say that your lover (usually a woman) is your ‘amaanat’ (‘thing or property committed to the trust and care of a person or group of persons’ – https://rekhtadictionary.com/meaning-of-amaanat?lang=hi ) A red flag for Western feminists, but indicates the possessiveness that a lover will have over their sweetheart – and even in English, you still say to someone ‘You are mine’ or ‘You are my girlfriend’.

Here are some terms of endearment which further indicate what love means in Indian culture:

Jaanu/Janaam/Jaaneman – ‘My Life’. Love is for life. Your lover is your life. They are everything for you and they are for you forever, like your own life. They are precious like your life.

Mitwa/Yaar – ‘Friend’. Indian culture does not make a distinction between friendship and love between a man and a woman in this term. Which perhaps indicates the truth – that your lover is your best friend.

Humraaz – Someone who has the same secrets as you – you share your secrets with them. You trust them. They are the only ones you can share your most personal thoughts with.

Humnava/Humsafar – Someone who is a fellow traveller through life’s journey with you (the ‘ride or die’ chick). You are committed to the same journey. You have the same mission in life.

Humdum – Someone who has the same life force/breath (‘dum’) as you, your soulmate, someone who is the other part of yourself. The sense of connection, of seeing yourself in them.

Humdard – Someone who shares the same pain as you, because you are so connected. What you feel, they feel. They are the mirrors of you and you are the mirror of them (love’s mirror).

Huzoor – Master – they rule over you because you love them. And you accept their sovereignty over you.

Deewana – Crazy one – because you go crazy in love for someone.

See more terms of endearment from the Hindi movies here:

150 Urdu-Hindi Terms of Endearment To Call Your Lover This Valentine’s Day