A Lucky Escape from Ms Travis

The anecdote I’m about to narrate took place during my aunt’s garden party.

In order to preserve the chronology of the events that took place on that fateful evening and also to do a bit of good to my readers who think that putting pieces of a puzzle together during his leisure time is no job for a gentleman when he should actually be busy doing a spot of good here and a spot of good there instead, I must be most lucid in my diction and start from the very beginning.

With my left arm resting across my belly, my right elbow perched snugly on the cup of my left palm and my right index finger scratching my chin, I was standing at the foot of my bed staring attentively at the collection of bowties sprawled across the linen landscape and meditatively deciding on the one that had a closest fit with my aunt’s temper. My aunt, don’t you know, is a woman who is difficult to reckon with. She has a very imposing personality and in her presence strong men are known to quiver like aspen and dive behind thick bushes in order to avert her penetrating gaze. She is very censorious of shabbily dressed men and loses no time in ticking them off if one, the shabbily dressed man I mean, happens to cross her path and unwittingly arrest her attention. I was once an object of her pique when I appeared in white bowtie to go along with a black dinner jacket at the coronation dinner of Lord Duxbury. Well, that’s a story for another day, if you know what I mean. Let’s get on with the one at hand for the moment.

On second thoughts, the selection of ties and my subsequent dressing up is not pivotal to the plot of this anecdote and must not to unnecessarily stretched. Allow me to fast forward this narration to the point when I greeted my aunt while trying to balance a loaded plate of cucumber sandwiches in one hand, that of steak and kidney pie in another and a large slice of sponge cake snugly wedged between my incisors.

“Um...um...um”, I uttered as I somehow managed to elicit a courtesy with the limited resources at hand.

Needless to say, my aunt stood there like a cat whose saucer of milk had been removed at the very moment she was about to exercise her first lick. I’d be deceiving my public if I were to say that in order to lessen the tension I what-hoed my aunt with a non-chalant air and strolled past her. Nothing of that sort happened. I continued goggling at her like a stuffed gazelle until the good old saliva melted the piece of cake that was precariously perched between my front teeth and affected it to fall on the ground with a plop. I gulped the reminder of the dessert, shut my eyes tightly and braced myself for a dressing down.

The Timekeeper

Well, it keeps time.
But, it doesn’t work on intuition
as a bird would or
on temperament
as an infant would.
Things are precise here;
demand almost no bargain
from my end -
except ofcourse
an occasional twirl
(to the crown)
or a periodic stab
(to the dial).
Well, it does keep time,
you see
and also my heart beating
(at times)
when it pierces
my whelming emotions
and the deathly silence
with its sharp, metallic ticks.
It’s my keeper -
my world revolves among
these twelve digits.
The pleasure lies in chasing
and in being chased
by the hands -
constant motion and
quotidian persistence
keeps me ticking,
you see.

Ratandeep Satwant Singh

The Curious Case of the Missing Ring

I’m not a very big fan of mystery thrillers. They tend to stretch my imagination to the point of collapse. I hate to read into the idiosyncracy of a battery of characters and then based on a framework of puzzling evidences attempt to detect the person behind the murder of a middle-aged woman in the solitary country house infested by her nonagenarian bedfast father, head-gardener, pigman and a nondescript scullery maid. When every single evidence seems to point at the scullery maid as the prime suspect in the crime, a sudden and an illogical twist in the plot affects the collapse of the cardcastle of evidence and establishes that bedridden nonagenarian bloke as the main culprit who committed the crime in a fit of rage by digging a machete into his daughter’s bosom when nobody was looking.

A few months back I was in the center of a similar mystery-ridden storm; only there were no machetes and no murders of middle-aged women by their bipolar fathers. I was having a very peaceful and a romantic candlelight dinner, which is one of the rarities these days, with my wife June celebrating our first wedding anniversary at a very cozy restaurant. We were talking about this and that when my gaze decided to leave her beautiful eyes and roost on her right ring finger, instead. I was still absorbed in a romantic chat with June and did not notice anything amiss. I watched her lissome fingers carefully twist off the claws and legs of a steamed blue crab, pull off the top shell and then extract its meat. Everything was so neatly done that for a moment I convinced myself that my wife was a professional crab eater until a revelation hit me with the same intensity as the gust of torrential rains would – her wedding ring was missing.

In the Jug, with Love

When he is cooped up in the jug for fourteen days without an option, a lad of some twenty summers has nothing much to do except rue the events of that fateful day which brought his fledgling career as a young man in love to an abrupt end and forced him to tap his way through solid rocks under the influence of the searing sun with nothing but a sledge hammer.

After spending hours as an infant on my mother’s lap learning to value truth above anything else, I would not take the liberty to lie to my audience now. I would rather most regretfully admit that I am this same young man in question and would assume complete responsibility for my actions.

On second thought, allow me to rephrase my last statement. Yes, I was the very man serving his sentence in the chokey but I was not the one entirely responsible for my current state of affairs. I’m a fair-minded man who believes in giving credit where credit is due. I won’t go about robbing banks with my team of professional robbers without even tendering a single word of appreciation to my accomplices on a job well done. I won’t yarn that had I not furnished Brinkley with the right sized hammer, he would not have been able to break the lock or incessantly harp that had I forgotten to dip the handkerchief in chloroform, Corky would have failed to put the guards under. Following suite, I’d hold Ms. Brown, my ex-betrothed, equally responsible for the delicate position I was in.

Yes, cell phones do puncture eardrums

On this peaceful Sunday morning, I was relaxing with a beaker of piping hot tea after having pampered myself with a hearty English breakfast of eggs, bacons, kippers, marmalades and whatnot, when my cell phone, hitherto sitting as lifelessly as a pebble in the left breast pocket of my morning coat, suddenly sprang to life with unprecedented fervour and demanded every bit of my attention.  I’d be deceiving my public if I were to say that I was shaken out of a reverie by the shrill cry of my phone and in the excitement disturbed the table I was breakfasting on, thereby decanting its contents including those of the beaker of piping hot tea I was relaxing with, if you remember, on my crisply ironed trousers and neatly polished wing tips. Thankfully nothing of that sort occurred. This eventuality might have manifested itself and things would have taken a nasty turn in all probability had I not have pushed the first morsel of the day in my face before that cell phone of mine had started performing calisthenics in my pocket. After having had breakfasted, I was braced to face any challenge including those presented by ringing cell phones which would have startled lesser men with weaker hearts and no breakfast.

In an effort to answer the call, I slipped my right hand nonchalantly in the pocket containing the instrument and without looking at the screen punched the answer button and brought the device to rest against my right ear. There are some things which providence has already planned for you and would occur despite your best efforts to avert them. Had I read the contents the screen of my cell phone had to offer before planting it on my ear, I would have saved myself an undesirable agony of a torn eardrum brought upon by the blast of a thousand canons going at once.

My Unfortunate Engagement to Ms. Moon

Author's Note: This anecdote is a prequel to About Ms. Moon 

I wasn’t quite awake yet. The rays of the morning sun had snuck into my room at their usual hour and were busy playing with my unconscious self in an effort to defeat the demons of laziness I was quite prone to get sequestered with, when a booming voice came crashing on my eardrums and ordered me to get my feckless self out of the bed. This booming voice, not to say the least, scared the mists of slumber away and immediately sent those playful sunbeams and whatnot into oblivion. I was up and about in an instant. It was the work of a moment for me to discover the source of this blast at such an ungodly hour. It emanated from my aunt who stood glaring at me towards the foot of my bed. Her gargantuan and overbearing frame seemed to have plunged the entire room into darkness. She looked like a newly resurrected corpse who had come back from the dead in order to put some unsettled scores with the living to rest.

I was quite miffed at my aunt for charging into the room of her innocent nephew without warning, scaring the Lord Jesus out of his unsuspecting self and robbing him off his well-earned slumber, but I felt too weak to register scorn and express disdain at her brashness. I courageously swallowed my venom and asked her politely, ‘What ho, Aunty?’, in order to initiate small talk.

At this point, the learned Reader must be complementing himself for reading correctly into my nature and dismissing me as a dithering poltroon. But allow me to assert, dear Reader, that there is more to me than meets your careful eye. I’m not quite the lad I am without my regular eggs, bacon, French toast with poached eggs, marmalade, kippers and a piping hot cup of tea resting snuggly in my crevice. Bring me Hitler’s aunt, or any aunt for that matter, after I have had my eggs and b. and I’ll demonstrate to the multitude my ability to weather any hell raised by the aforementioned gaggle of aunts. Since I was not fortified with the nourishment at that point in time, when my aunt came charging into my room, I had no option but to patiently nod my head and hang on to her every syllable.

About Ms. Moon

I was once engaged, in my early twenties, to this girl called Ms. Moon who bore a close resemblance to a sergeant-major of the infantry. She was neither as plump as a cheese-cake nor dressed in camouflage suits nor loved shooting at moving targets with a shotgun nor sported a toothbrush mustache but she had this peculiar aura about her that easily scared the bejesus out of anyone who fell in her direct line of sight; the type of aura which sergeant-majors possess and go about demonstrating to the multitude in order to assert their respective martial statuses on the proletariat. Although Ms. Moon was a wiry sort of a girl, yet she had this special knack for stirring the souls of lesser men by a coordinated wag of her tongue and a syncopated vibration of her larynx.

Ms. Moon’s ancestors were crusaders, so I was given to understand. They had served in the British army and had emerged glorious in many a battles fought to preserve the honor of the British crown. Her family tree is known to be infested with more Knights than a multistoried granary would be with rats; not hard to believe where she gets her intensity from.

She was also very notorious as far as her views on the subject of the consumption of daily nutrients were concerned. I didn't see eye to eye with her on this matter. She sustained on a frugal diet of parsnips and that sort of rot whereas I believed, and still do, in having hearty square meals at least three times a day. At the dinner table, she always had a word or two to say about the way I ate asparagus, the nasty slurping sound I produced while eating soup and the manner in which I almost entered into a tussle with the contents in my plate and the silverware thereby making a lot of din on the way. This obviously turned the contents of the plate to ashes in no time.