Original name of the village was Sunder Gaon or the beautiful village on account of its situation where it was set in a countryside surrounded by a pretty panorama of land and hills .Its population consists of about six thousands souls and their mainstay is farming and when the monsoon season arrives the wetness takes over every nook and corner of the landscape. It is a time for planting rice, which is the staple food of the inhabitants.

There lived a poor Brahmin couple and had a little cottage with a thatched roof.
They were so poor that most of the time they could not afford to buy any food and in order to stave off hunger, they searched the countryside for herbal foods and any edible grasses.

They did not have any children and were glad to be so. They could not bear to have seen their child suffering from hunger. Once they were searching for wild food, they came across a plant with shiny purple fruits and plucked some of these fruits to take home.
They cooked some of the fruits but saved the seeds and planted them in their little garden.

The bus was crowded with travelers, shoppers, each one trying to push its way to find a place to sit or just a convenient niche to stand easy, with their heavy loads. Tempers were getting frayed and atmosphere within the bus became loaded with anger and frustration.

After few stops people got down and it became somewhat peaceful. A young mother entered with a small girl in her arms and people found a seat for her to sit. The little girl was alive with smiling eyes and tried to draw attention of other travelers, sitting opposite her. She was smiling and waving her hand and eventually waved at me. It was a winning smile to enchant you with a happy innocence and grace.

On a spring morning while it was still dark, the villagers were woken by loud human voices and the enquiries yielded that a big whale had landed on the village beach and everyone became anxious to visit the sight and see the huge animal and like of which they had never seen.

The tide had gone out but on the empty beach they saw the huge body of the stranded animal. As they went closer, they saw the injured animal in a miserable state. While struggling it must had brushed against the sharper points of the coral reefs of the surrounding seas.

He lay there half closing his eyes and swallowing a taste of blood down his throat.

Through the window he could see in the backyards of houses: trees, flowers in bloom and various green plants. He and thought that it was not a place for these in urban courtyards and should be where they belonged and that was in barren countryside. There was no place for such sentimental trivia in urban planning of the modern world where everything should be steel hard in some post- modern era.

Such things belonged to the past where some people having the so-called ‘souls’ and went to the countryside to drool over them.

This was town where people were proud of their personal hygiene and cleanliness and always boasting to their neighbours about this virtue of theirs. People from other surroundings, towns and villages slowly became sick of hearing this again and again and wanted to do something about it so as not to be humiliated on account of their deficiency in things of personal prestige.

Women institute of a certain town invited women from that town as to come and see themselves that their town was as good as theirs but did not disclose that some of their children were affected with lice. A dirty trick was being played on the visiting women. There was an evening of entertainment, which the host put out in a lavish manner, with provisions of tasty food served at the evening banquet.

When you live in a big city and are absorbed in its daily activities and routines, you long for some country scenes as to refresh your soul and to get away from it all. Such was my situation a few years ago and I was traveling in a train and as usual I am the one who breaks the ice with my fellow passengers. I started talking to a man about life in general and it expired that he used to be a city slicker and working in a financial institute and was always preoccupied with the profit motives and with making of more and more money. It was exciting for few years but the whole effect start diminishing and with it any job satisfaction went out of window and he ended up buying a small plot of land in the country to get away from it all.

It was a hot, sweaty and suffocating afternoon. Not a bird in sky, only the sound of some dogs barking at the sun perhaps showing their anger at the injustice in creating such an unpleasant weather for them to bear.

Water was evaporating fast from every pour of your body, you try to replenish it by filling your stomach up to the bottom your throat but still felt thirsty until it was rippling inside your tummy. You line your courtyard with big earthen pots and then fill these with fresh water and after that the scientific principle came into force. Water seeps through all those pours and wants to escape into space and it had to borrow the heat from the pot in order to evaporate itself and thus cool it down. As the pot became cool so did the water inside the pot.

Shamu lived with his mother and brother on the outskirt of the town. His brother had a big family and was working for a trader, dealing in grocery. He was employed as a munshi or the accountant, which was a skilled job, and you had to learn a special script of lande to do the accounts in, a sort of strange short hand for quicker entries. The account book had long white yellowish sheets which were folded over, thus to reduce the length for easy upkeep. These were tied over with a string and all the books were stored neatly in chronological order by the banya, the shopkeeper.

The night has been oppressive and Sharat has been dreaming, feverish dreams. He has been dreamingof alchemical ingredients. Mercury has been taking horrendous shapes and these shapes have beenattacking him fiercely but whenever he took courage and tried to grab these shapes as a matter of defiance,
they just melted into his hands & then took even fiercer shapes.