Behind the Ruins

By Raja Sharma

I suddenly recalled the words “When I was the Queen” and realized that she keeps on swinging between internal and external world.

While they were carrying her dead body to the cremation ground, I was standing at the gate, near my car. There were tears in my eyes. Her words ‘our Chandai’ were echoing in my mind. An era had come to its end with no history written and no monuments erected.

Behind the Ruins
Copyright
Chapter One: Strange Invitation
Chapter Two: Meeting with the Queen
Chapter Three: The Palace
Chapter Four: After the Dinner

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raja Sharma
• Release date: Apr 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311766441

Raja Sharma

Raja Sharma is a retired college lecturer.He has taught English Literature to University students for more than two decades.His students are scattered all over the world, and it is noticeable that he is in contact with more than ninety thousand of his students.

Book preview

Behind the Ruins

Raja Sharma

Copyright

Behind the Ruins

Raja Sharma

Copyright@2014 Raja Sharma

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved

Chapter One: Strange Invitation

That evening I was alone. I used to be usually alone in that government rest house in the evenings. It was a new place and no government house was vacant, so I had made one room of the guest house my house.

There was a long corridor in front of that room in the rest house. The roof rested on the tall and thick round pillars along the corridor. In front of the porch of the guest house there was a constructed tar road that stretched like a snake up to the main road. There was an unkempt lawn up to the boundary wall of the rest house. Among the tufts of grass on the lawn there were a few lily plants, as if lost in the crowd. Their yellow cup-like flowers trembled when wind blew. When it rained those flowers hid their petals in the jungle of grass. After that no one could tell that they were there.

I would often sit on the veranda, overlooking the lawn, in the evening until darkness descended.

One such dark rainy evening, he had come. Later on I came to know that he was Mohan. Along that muddy road, in that heavy rain, he was dressed in white clothes: white pants and loose white shirt hanging over his pants, black gum-boots, and a pink turban on his head. There was a shining badge in the centre of the turban just above his forehead. The dress looked odd on his brown physique. It was not conforming to the weather and it