#101 fiction (101 words exactly)

Outside the peaceful village, the progressive creep of a barbed wire fence and smart signage announcing chic bungalows had apparently gone unnoticed!

The old shepherd had noticed, however! He saw what was happening: a slow takeover of the area by slick city builders. To his wife, in private, he predicted that land costs would soar, that families would be torn apart when sons fought over inheritances!

She smiled slowly, then showed him a sheaf of title deeds to 25 acres of land along the road she had bought quietly over years, telling each seller she needed protection from her ‘insane husband!’ (101 words)

Initially, there was a hubbub of excitement. My companions were picked up, dragged off the growling conveyor belt and reunited with their owners. Then, they were either wheeled away or slam-dunked onto baggage trolleys. I finished one circuit of the long track. And another. Eventually, I realized, I was the lone traveller on the belt. I was now ‘unclaimed baggage’. Abandoned. Soon, rough hands grabbed me and gingerly placed me on a baggage trolley. I barely had time to register the stencilled BOMB DISPOSAL UNIT on one uniform before everything went dark! A heavy lid was slammed shut over my head.

It was a simple oil lamp, too small to be seen in the well-lit room! The flame danced around as he swung the lamp, placed on a traditional ornamental salver, round and round, in front of the deity’s face. His stereo system belted out Sanskrit hymns. Adding to the serenity, incense sticks wafted wreaths of smoke and perfume in equal measure.

He folded his hands, closed his eyes! He remembered his grandmother! “The day you reclaim your own heritage in the distant land you are going to,” she had said, “you will have made your adopted country your own! Never forget!”

#VeryShortStories3

The entire mission was planned as if it were of the utmost importance to national security. Both the ‘soldiers’ chosen out of the group of six were known for their bravery, their skill in climbing to awkward places, and their steady nerves under fire.

The best time suggested by the strategists in charge of planning was between 11 and 11:30 pm, when there was a lull in pedestrian traffic along the busy streets of the capital city.  Stealthily, over three days, all the required equipment was smuggled to a central departure area which was close to Ground Zero, the site they had decided to target.

The night they suggested saw a large yellow moon hover low on the horizon, with no clouds in sight!  The mission was on!

Rucksacks secured on their backs, the two commandos started out after the ceremonial fists bumps with every member of the team. They approached the row of small shops, each with its shutter locked shut. The target was the largest, most ostentatious of the lot. Outside the shop, they stopped, and upon a mutually arranged signal, the team went to work!

Cans of fluorescent paint were uncapped and expertly, in three minutes exactly, the front of the shop was ‘re-decorated’! Two names (Savita and Ravi) separated by a large pink heart appeared on the shutter, and before anyone around raised the alarm, Ravi and his bestie melted away into the night.

The next morning, at 9 am, Savita’s father was bewildered when he arrived to open his tyre shop. (256 words)

#VeryShortStories2

Day after day, she came into Flat 8 at almost 11 am, and let herself out of the flat 45 minutes later. 

For those 45 minutes, she whirled around like a tornado: cleaning, sweeping, rearranging, putting back, dusting, possessions that were not her own, that she could probably never afford! She repeated this feat on five floors, seven times each day. In this building alone.

Her work was spotless, her reputation sterling! So all those flat-owners, her “masters and mistresses” in absentia, trusted her with their house keys, their messages to the watchman or postman, their errands from corner shops, the bakery, the flour mill, the laundry. She was general factotum-cum-secretary to several ladies of the building,

Shantabai was one of a dying breed in the city – trusted housemaids whose existence meant the ladies who worked jobs to ensure the mortgages on their flats were paid regularly had the luxury to keep their jobs going!

Until last week. Thursday afternoon, to be exact. For that’s when Shantabai’s overworked, 36-year-old heart gave way, the strong-willed, square-jawed Amazon was felled by a cardiac incident on the landing between the third and the fourth floor. Discovered by conscientious delivery-men, she was transported to a clinic. 

Anxious visitors, well-dressed ladies congregated at the clinic, milling around, not knowing who to speak to! One question was paramount in their minds – when would she resume her duties?

            Their interest gradually waned. By the fifth day, no-one from the building was around, not                   even the watchman, to see the ambulance drive off, followed by a lamenting group—                           Shantabai’s husband and two kids being consoled by various aunts and uncles and cousins. (274 words)

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17        For the savvy entrepreneur he had become, life was just a series of business opportunities that allowed him chances to pad his bank balance (the cash component he kept hidden away from prying eyes, like every self-respecting businessman of his category did!) and get one step closer to his dream house!

            These days, his brainwaves came from more sources than ever before, since he was connected to the Net via his i-phone, his tablet, his laptop and his stationary desktop! He kept his ear firmly to the ground, and in that very James Hadley Chase mode, was rewarded with nuggets of information that people paid money to hear.

            One day, when he walked sombrely on a beach early in the morning, he suddenly caught snippets of conversations the matrons and their paunchy husbands exchanged as they walked in the opposite direction.

“Such a shame …”

“I couldn’t bear to look ….”

“There must be something we can do …..”

He understood that somewhere in the world something had occurred to shake the collective conscience of the public – to shame or to revulsion or to horror!

Aircrash! Robbery! Page 3 scandal! Corruption uncovered in high places!

His mind raced! Absently, his phone sprang to his hands and he checked CNN!

Soon, he smiled with satisfaction! Beaches, he concluded, rightly, as it happened, were very convenient places for consciences to be exploited! En masse. Involve an event on any coast and watch sales figures rise vertically!

Now that the world’s conscience was freshly pricked by the young child found dead on a beach far away, he knew his “I Do Care” T-shirts would sell like hot chai! (275 words)

#VeryShortStories

#VeryShortStories
The young couple seemed like perfect buyers for the quaint cottage – they were friendly, bubbly, successful! During the two-hour long property visit, they had walked around the house with keen interest, pointing things out to each other and marvelling at little conveniences put in over the years.
Their incessant chatter revealed a lot about who they were and how they lived – a nice balance between party weekends and quiet times. They planned on getting dogs, they said, since they now would have the space larger dogs required. And the wife shyly revealed that she was expecting a baby!
A baby in the house would change everything. Life would continue after a long interruption, when the cottage was abandoned after a ghastly incident with the last residents. The sales representative had a ready-made little speech about the accident – he knew exactly when to recite it. And at the right moment, he started!
“. . . . but of course, none of this has ever been verified, nor do we know for sure that the father killed three daughters and his wife before shooting himself in the head!” he finished. 
The wife had listened carefully to the morbid story. She was quiet for a moment, then drew a deep breath. The poor sales representative felt his sales commission start to slip away. This was the fourth time he had brought prospective clients to this property.
The wife looked into the representative’s eyes. “Every bit of what you just told us is true,” she said quietly. “I know. I was there,” she concluded, her hands clasped around her belly now full of new life! (271 words)

#VeryShortStories

In an instant, the young lad knew what had to be done to repair the situation. She was on the verge of going completely berserk, and she had to be stopped at all costs! Already, her mane of wild grey hair had started to fan out around her head, she moaned deep in her throat, and she swung back and forth in a rhythmic dance-like movement.

            So, he took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and started humming his soothing lullaby. To others, it sounded tuneless, a mere four-note progression that a newbie singer might be asked to repeat endlessly. But to the entity that had started churning inside her, it was a calming balm!

            Once the sound of the lullaby reached the unseen entity, she started slowing down her frenetic movements. He breathing steadied, she was no longer in danger of hyper-ventilating. Gradually, her head was still, and her hair no longer fanned out like a crazy halo. She sat down on the ground, then drew up her legs close to her chest and was curled up in the classic fetal position, thumb in her mouth, eyes closed!

            The child stared down at her, then reached out to caress her sweaty brow. His grandmother looked after him completely on all days except two each month. On those two days, he had come to realise, it was his turn to return the favour! (233 words)

Sunil Ganu

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Sunil Ganu
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#WithoutThisPlace5
His hands shook with excitement as the stooped man opened the rectangular box. Yes, there were the documents he had expected and hoped to find! For well over 30 years, he had looked for verifiable sources about the library of al-Sīmāwī, a 13th century expert on alchemy and magic. But in vain. The old man’s dogged determination had led him to Cairo, to Istanbul, to the Vatican, trying to sleuth an ancient ‘paper’ trail.
He had painstakingly established that while al-‘Irāqī’s 13th-century autograph manuscript was now lost, one source of his illustrations was recognised: the Book of Images. It has been traditionally attributed to the 4th-century Egyptian alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis and preserved in a copy made in Egypt in 1270! And today, finally, he had been allowed access to the vaults of the British Museum where a kindly academic had led him unerringly to this section of treasures.
The old man examined the contents of the box carefully, his heart racing. There was the familiar drawing of three men with their hands raised as if in surrender! There was no doubt any more – this indeed was the source for the drawing he had found in the book written centuries later!
A lifetime quest had just been fulfilled. Slowly, the old man looked all around him. Thousands of boxes in the vaults held the past in sacred trust – waiting for mankind to rediscover what had gone before. Zosimos of Panapolis and al-Sīmāwī smiled, as it were, from their places in the Universe. The old man whispered to The Book of Images, “Without this place, I would never have found you!”