A Soothsayer’S Prophesy and Other Stories

Book excerpt: A man curious about his future goes to an astrologer. The astrologer prophesies that his wife will meet with an accident. Destiny decides to test whether the astrologer will remain true to his craft even though it entails ruin. Will the astrologer pass the test? A sculptor creates a very beautiful statue. The statue is infected with the praise hurled upon it. Is beauty a source of inspiration or cause of destruction? Or are creation and destruction the two great imposters? There is theft in the house of a businessman. An engineering student confesses to the police, yet the investigation starts. There is a dilapidated medieval fort where poltergeist phenomena are reported. Six friends visit the fort, some out of curiosity and some out of compulsion. What happens inside the fort will haunt the ghosts for eternity. Stories that are uninhibited by the constraints of grammar, by the considerations of syntactic propriety, by the rigidities of morals and messages, is a dream destination. We believe that a story belongs more to a reader than its writer. We have tried our best to refrain ourselves from force-feeding the reader with matters that are too peripheral to matter, in spite of the many temptations to do so and have made naive attempts to act as facilitators and allow the reader to paint his own environs and at times, draw his own conclusions . This book is more a sincere than a scholarly attempt to do this.