After the Delhi Rain, in SAND literary magazine, Berlin

My short story After the Delhi Rain, was published recently in SAND, Berlin. Thanks to the wonderful editor Florian Duijsens for all his hard work.

After the Delhi Rain (excerpt)

Michelle was leaving Delhi in three days, and there was nothing he could do about it. So he sat in the Metro like this was an ordinary day, in a week of ordinary days. He stared blankly at the slum he passed everyday, a slum in a city of ordinary slums, people squatting outside it in the aftermath of the monsoon rain, boys playing cricket in the drip-drip mud, mounds of earth and shit dotted with colourful debris. It was a brown-grey shanty town, little dwellings with four walls and a canopy roof, sometimes not even that, just thin fabric strung up for privacy from people like him, carelessly riding past in the Metro, reading the news on their iPhones, playing word games till their eyes hurt, holding thumb conversations, multiple ones simultaneously.

Just by the side of the railway tracks, goats and skinny dogs and happy chickens, boys and girls swatting flies. A boy was standing by a hill of banana peel, trousers halfway down his buttocks, about to relieve himself, but talking on his phone at the same time. A cart without a donkey. A cow with empty teats. A silver Santro parked in the middle of it all. 

Read the rest in SAND http://www.sandjournal.com/issue/13