Unconditional Love

                             

          Surekha shivered as the damp breeze hit her from all sides.  She was sitting on her porch, watching the rain falling steadily, each drop making a merry little noise of ‘tip-tup’ ‘tip-tup’, as it fell to the ground.  As she watched the puddles forming on the wet ground, she remembered how her elder sister Supriya, her younger brother Suprabhat and she herself would spend hours trying to sail paper boats in such puddles, long, long ago.  Yes it was a very long time since those care-free days of innocent childhood.  Of pranks and laughter, fun and gaiety. 

The copyright of this story is with Mrs. Priya Ramesh Swaminathan.

The Garbage Dump

                                                       

         Hiralal was highly amused.  He had been so intoxicated last night that when he had sat atop the garbage heap on the garbage truck, as usual, he had fallen asleep and was dumped along with the ton of rotting, smelly garbage on the huge wasteland of garbage in the outskirts of the city.  It was a remote area. It was past midnight when he happened to wake up. He was assailed by the nauseating stench of garbage.

        
        Sitting on that 10- feet high mound of rubbish, he felt like a king sitting on a throne, surveying his vast kingdom.  All around him for acres and acres of wasteland was the stinking filth, spewed by the numerous garbage trucks which emptied the city’s bins.

         
        He was a garbage-handler, an expert at heaping the rubbish on to the garbage truck.  He could simultaneously rake in the muck and sort the wet and the dry garbage.  His sharp eyes often spotted valuables in the filth, which he would sell at some store and get some money which he would immediately squander on buying illicit liquor.  It was his life-line.

        
        He couldn’t live without it.  He couldn’t sleep without it.  It made him forget the dirt and the squalor of his miserable, hand-to-mouth existence.  It also made the stench of the garbage bearable!  It prevented him from the vomiting spells that he had had when he had first started on his job.

        He now wondered how his name suited him and his job!  

The copyright of this story is with Mrs. Priya Ramesh Swaminathan.

The Exchange

                                                                   

         “This is just not done!  I gave you my sari for dry-cleaning a week back and now you say that it is not being found.  Where did it go?  I demand an explanation.  Either give it back to me or refund me its value.”  Mita was fuming at the laundry owner of ‘Ace Laundry’ who was sheepishly keeping his eyes down-cast.

       

The copyright of this story is with Mrs. Priya Ramesh Swaminathan.

The blind date

          
             Nisha admired chivalry, though her friends considered her to be old-fashioned.  She was of the firm opinion that only a chivalrous person could be a thorough gentleman, hence a good and ‘ever-lasting’ life-partner.  

The copyright of this story is with Mrs. Priya Ramesh Swaminathan.