Shaleen Rakesh Blog

  The air in the Doon Valley during the cusp of the festival season is a fickle thing—it carries the crisp, pine-scented promise of the Mussoorie hills, yet it remains thick with the competitive humidity of middle-class aspiration. In the Mehra household, this atmosphere had condensed into a singular, agonizing question of aesthetics: the exterior of their home. The house, a sturdy but fading structure in a quiet lane of Dehradun, was currently draped in a "Sandstone Beige" that had, over a decade of monsoons, surrendered to a weary, tear-stained grey. To Mrs. Mehra, this was no longer a color; it was a white flag of domestic surrender. The debate was not merely about pigment; it was about the topography of their social standing. Mrs. Mehra possessed a vision that was vibrantly, stubbornly sky-blue. "Look at Mrs. Khanna’s house," she would say, her voice rising like a prayer toward the neighborhood’s newest landmark. "That 'Mediterranean Azure.' It brea...

  The air in our house has a weight to it, like the thick, gray water that gathers in the buckets during the monsoon. It smells of burnt lentils and the sharp, stinging scent of my father’s cigarettes. When the voices start, the weight presses against my ears until they thrum. My mother’s voice is a jagged piece of glass; my father’s is the heavy hammer that tries to smash it. “Manku!” my mother screams, but she isn’t looking at me but at the space where my father stands, her finger pointed like a bone. “Manku, go to your room!” I don’t go to my room. The walls there are thin, and the sound leaks through the cracks in the wood. Instead, I reach for my yellow cloth bag. Inside, there is a tin soldier with a chipped red coat, a blue plastic car with three wheels, and a marble that has a universe of green smoke trapped in its center. I slip out the back door. The latch makes a small clink, but they don’t hear it. They are too busy building a tower of words that always falls do...

  The air in the apartment was a pressurized vessel of unspoken accusations and the sharp, metallic tang of anxiety. To Nirmala, silence was the quiet before a structural failure. To her husband, Mukund, it was the only sanctuary left in a world that had become increasingly loud and unnecessarily frantic. They were seventy-two and sixty-eight, respectively, ages where time should have slowed to the pace of honey. Instead, the upcoming trip to Nainital, orchestrated through a fly-by-night storefront titled “Easy Travels,” had turned their living room into a theater of the absurd. Nirmala’s panic was not a frantic thing but rather was architectural. She built it brick by brick, starting at 6:00 AM when the first dial to Bharat, the proprietor, went straight to a sterile recording: “The number you are trying to reach is currently switched off.” “He’s gone,” she announced, her voice a vibrato of practiced doom. She was standing by the window, her silhouette framed by the dusty li...

(1) The sun in Rajgarh negotiated its way past the jagged teeth of the Kedarkantha range, casting long, bruised shadows that pooled in the man’s courtyard like spilled ink. He woke before the light, not out of necessity, but because the dawn was the only time the world felt unauthored. He sat on the low stone wall of his terrace, his spine a plumb line dropped into the silence. Below him, the village began its rhythmic clatter—the metallic complaint of a hand-pump, the wet slap of dough against a tawa, the high, thin calling of names. These were the sounds of the social grammar he had unlearned. To the village, a name was a hook; to him, it was a weight. He had shed his own years ago, letting it dissolve into the silt of the Tons River until he was merely a kinesis of gestures: the man who sweeps, the man who boils tea, the man who watches. His courtyard was a masterclass in subtraction. There were no photographs to tether him to a lineage, no mirrors to demand a performance of s...