A Clumsy Parable
Posted: August 14, 2013 Filed under: Fiction, Mixed Fiction | Tags: Color, Death, Happy, Making Love, Melancholy, Mother, No fear, Numbers, One World, Prism, Renting a Cab, Strange, The Other World Leave a commentParashuraman, OLA- S566, is a strange man.
When he goes to bed at the Parvati Chawl, his yellow black auto-rickshaw rested beside a corporation vat, his dead mother comes to sleep beside him.
“Har, har,’ snickers Langda Raju, his paramour, lifting a ‘Blue Riband’, pointing a poison finger at him, ‘Bonkers, Pashu. Your amma is still alive!” Parashuraman’s melancholic eyes gleam.
He knows, he knows. It is an impossible problem.
The ghost
of my desire
whispers
from the craters
of the nightly dreams.
Their voices
are echoing-
Deepali Sane, XII A, 14, is a lover of prisms.
In the lab, the assistant Kumthekar Kaka issues her two prisms instead of the regular student quota of one. Placing them on a white paper, one after the other, she goes to the window to fetch the light.
The frivolous rays are netted. They scatter. She begins counting, “7, 13, 29, 67, 91, 4, 48 …”
When the rays emerge from the second prism, white and whole again, she multiplies them silently in her head. When the teacher arrives to ask her the measure, ‘3089276736’ is written in her notebook.
A terrible repetition.
Dark water
on one side,
disappointment
on another.
No sun.
No compass to the north.
Darpan Sen, CMO, UTEX Communications, Inc., sees himself.
Climbing up the staircase, during a power cut, of his Baner apartment- from the parking lot to the barbarous fourth floor- he sees himself floating like a balloon in the air. A man, who resembles himself, stares at him from the bathroom mirror. Darpan Sen stares back. At night, while making love, his buttocks rise and fall- he watches their movements with disinterest.
The marriage counselor is in disbelief. She asks, “As if you are in a movie?”
“More like I am in a taxi,’ he replies. ‘It goes wherever I ask it to go. Even when I don’t wish to go there.”
Even when emptiness:
a different brass cup.
Full of remembrances-
it does not tell
how it has begun.
How it will end.
(The fiction was first published on EKL Review website. Here is the link: https://eklreview.com/a-clumsy-parable/)
The Coin Story
Posted: August 13, 2013 Filed under: Fiction | Tags: Chance, Coin, Normal Distribution, Probability Leave a commentI flipped a coin. It showed ‘Head’.
I flipped it again. It showed … umm … ‘Tail’.
Amused, I asked the coin, “Do you remember the last toss?”.
The coin shrugged, “I am pretty independent that way.”
“Then, how come, if I toss you one hundred times, you will show ‘Head’ fifty times? If you don’t remember anything?”
The coin said, “I may or may not. If I don’t, you won’t call me a fair coin, will you?”
I pretended I was in deep thought.
It continued, “Maybe, you should toss me one million times, one thousand sets of one thousand tosses, you know, to see for yourself whether I behave NORMALLY.”
“I don’t have time,” I grumbled.
“Besides, how can one behave ‘normally’, if one doesn’t remember anything about the outcomes of the previous tosses?”
The coin grinned, like a wise man.
“If I give you the answer, will you read anymore your probability books? Will you listen to your professors?”
Annoyed, I stopped talking to the coin since that day and started befriending a racehorse.
arunparia 