Extraordinarily Ordinary: A Collection of Short Stories

By KRG

This collection of sixteen short stories is like music of varied, soft notes and chords which is soothing and pleasant and has a simple beauty. The delineation of characters and emotions has no sharp strokes or harsh lines. Ordinary people go about their daily business and yet manage to find narratives hidden in the hum-drum of a daily routine.

These stories celebrate the ordinary fears, anxieties and joys of the common man. Trivial fragments are defined with clarity and its very placidity and reality startles the reader. They do not shake our sense of security or safety but in some reassuring way intensifies it. Fourteen of the sixteen stories are in the first person narrative and this adds a certain candour and poignancy to the emotions.

The sagacious narrator foregrounds in his subtle understanding and wisdom a penetrating vision of compassion and sympathy. The style of narration has no philosophical complexities or psychoanalytical exploration. Avoiding frills or gimmicks, it uses implication and understatement to make its point.

It is a must read for all those people who have had these simple experiences in the process of their lifes pilgrimage.

-Mrs. Kasturi Kanthan, Former Associate Professor,
Department of English, Lady Sri Ram College for Women,University of Delhi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Dec 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781482868708

KRG

A popular Delhi University teacher of world-repute for socially relevant research has recently taken to creative writing. Naturally, there are meaningful things said interestingly. His two earlier forays have been called must reads. Live and laugh with him in these sixteen short stories giving a kaleidoscope of India in transition.

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Copyright © 2016 by KRG.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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www.partridgepublishing.com/india

Contents

The Desperate Woman

The Mysterious Stalker

Divine Bondings

Love-lorn

Love Birds

The Vanishing Act

Nature’s Costumes

Unashamed

A Miracle

Jewel in a Pond

The Bundle of Joy

A Vacuum in My Life

The Car Thief

The Divine Flash

Oh, for a Cab

Some Birthday, This

To

Professor Gour Kishore Das

(Former Vice- Chancellor, Utkal University)

A Brilliant Scholar, A Wonderful Human Being

&

My Mentor in Creative Writing

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to my better half - Ratnam - for making me take to creative writing - my most enjoyable pastime these days. She is paying the price by having to undergo the torture of being the first reader of my writings. My heart-felt apologies to her! Words cannot adequately express my gratitude to another wonderful lady- Mrs. Kasturi Kanthan, former Associate Professor of English, Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi. With great trepidation, I approached her to have a critical look at the manuscript from the point of view of stylistics, language and grammar. She agreed to do so with a smile and painstakingly went through it in record time. She made many useful suggestions, all of which I accepted. This has resulted in churning mere clay into elegant marble. If the finished product has some faint resemblance to gold, the alchemy is also that of the eminent publisher, forever insistent that grass does not grow under the feet. The usual disclaimers apply and any errors that still remain are attributable to me alone.

K.R.G.Nair,

New Delhi

The Desperate Woman

My wife Seema and I have tastes, attitudes to life and life styles that are not drastically dissimilar. We seldom have loud quarrels and that too never in public. We are hence looked upon as a happy couple in our neighborhood. But to any new family moving into the area, this does not seem so. While both of us are regular morning walkers, we seldom undertake this ritual together. I am not too bothered about public opinion resulting from this, but Seema is. A new family had moved in a few days back and Seema had noticed the piercing and taunting look in the eyes of the lady of that house when we start out at different times and go our separate ways for our morning walks. To dispel that, Seema insisted that we perform our ritual together that morning for the neighbor to see and change her wrong notion. I willy-nilly agreed. The ploy worked and the neighbor’s eyes literally popped out on seeing both of us emerge together, laughing and joking, for our morning walk.

We were not destined to continue our walk together for long, however. We had hardly walked a few metres, when strange things began happening.

Being somewhat early, there was neither a soul nor any vehicle moving around on the road. Suddenly, from nowhere there emerged a Maruti Zen. It was bright red in color and was being driven by a man. Besides the driver, there was only one person sitting at the back seat in the car. Instructions were being given by that person in a loud and desperate voice to the driver. From the sound of the voice, we could make out that the sole passenger in the car was a woman. The driver was made to stop at every second house, get down and check the details on the nameplate put outside. He was then to go to her and convey these. We saw him perform this duty assigned in the case of two adjacent houses. The information thus conveyed seemed to make her totally puzzled and more desperate. As a result, when the car reached the third house of that side of the road, the lady literally jumped out of the car along with the driver to check these details herself. What she found with her own eyes seemed to have put her in a terrible quandary.

It emerged later that she was trying to locate one Dr. Agarwal. While she was quite certain that he stayed in our colony, she could not recall the exact number of his residence. She had a vague recollection that it was either 65 or 67. Despite the utter chaos in the numbering of houses in our colony, she had successfully made out that odd numbers were on one side of the road and even ones, somewhere else very far away. She identified the side of the road with odd-numbered houses and was keeping to that side in her car. Her driver located two adjacent houses numbered 61 and 63 and made sure that there was no Dr.Agarwal staying in either of those. For the next round of verifications, she had herself got out. But to her utter surprise, she found that while there was a house number 65, there was simply no house numbered 67. The house next to 65, was numbered 69 and in neither of these was there a Dr.Agarwal. Totally perplexed, she was on the verge of tears.

The desperate woman was going in the direction in which we were also heading. When it all began, she was actually a few metres ahead of us. But by the time this stage was reached, we had caught up with her. Since we were the only ones around, she turned to us in sheer desperation for help. In any case by this time the ‘Good Samaritan’ in me had been considerably aroused by the sight of these happenings for this damsel in distress. Ignoring the disapproving look on the face of my better half, I went towards the lady saying Can I help you? This was possibly music to her ears. Without any ado, she requested me to help her find house number 67, which according to her was the residence of Dr. Agarwal. Having been a resident of the area for decades, I categorically assured her that there was no house numbered 67 in the colony. But she simply stuck to her guns. I could see that she was getting real paranoid about reaching Dr.Agarwal’s residence at the earliest for some reason or the other.

It occurred to me that maybe she got the number wrong. I was aware of at least three Agarwals staying in the neighborhood. I hence wanted her to tell me as to what the Dr. Agarwal that she was looking for did for a living. Out came the reply that he was a medical practitioner. A bell immediately rang in my mind. I asked her as to whether she was trying to locate Dr. R.K.Agarwal who was the only medical practitioner of the three Agarwals in the neighborhood. The mention of these initials had an electrifying effect on that lady. She shouted at the top of her voice Yes, yes, that is him. Do you know his residence? As I nodded my head, she went on Please tell me his house number immediately. I told her that it was 167 and located at quite some distance from where we were standing. I then began giving her directions to get there. As these started getting a little complicated, she literally fell at my feet. With tears in her eyes, she pleaded "Bhaiya, things are bad and it is urgent. It is imperative that I reach his house at the earliest. Please get into the car and guide me to his house". From her tone, it appeared that it was a matter of life and death. I was completely taken in.

Seema was a mute and somewhat disinterested spectator to all that was going on. This is hardly surprising because she is generally wary of strangers. All the more so, if the stranger happens to be a woman. Further, Seema had expected the desperate woman to approach, in traditional Indian style, her and not me, for help. The fact that this was not done, made matters even worse in this case. Added to this was the irritation caused by her husband, on a romantic walk with her, turning Good Samaritan for another woman. But if there is something that can have a magical impact on Seema, it is tears. So, she too melted. She looked at me and her eyes had the message Why don’t you please help this poor woman in tears?

Dr.R.K. Agarwal’s house was in a direction different from the one we were planning to take for our walk together. We therefore abandoned the idea of a joint morning walk. After telling Seema that I will meet her at home after I finish my walk, I got into the red Maruti Zen to help the lady.

The car had to take quite a few turns including a red light crossing to reach house number 167. It hence took us three or four minutes to reach our destination. On seeing the board of Dr. R.K.Agarwal displayed outside prominently, the lady just jumped out even before the car stopped. After hastily mumbling a word of thanks to me and asking the driver to follow her with her luggage, she pushed open the gate and rushed towards the door of the house. It was only 6 a.m. and naturally no one was up yet. She had therefore to ring the bell a few times before a sleepy female voice, possibly that of the house maid, peeped through the glass eye on the door to ask from inside "Kaun hai?. Losing her patience at this last minute obstacle, she yelled Batha do ki Anjali aayi hai. The maid did not know who Anjali was nor did she catch the name correctly. But since the doctor practiced from home and did not object to patients visiting him in case of emergency even at odd hours, she just went back to report that a distraught woman, with disheveled hair was at their doorstep. This made the master of the house –a night owl- drag himself out from the warmth of the bed, come cursingly to the door and open it. He was still only half awake and greeted his potential patient with the customary Yes, come in" guiding her towards the door of his clinic. Though somewhat hurt at this reception, she showed no trace of it. She knew that she could not blame him because they were meeting after a gap of around three decades. She had changed quite a bit and in any case