Shaleen Rakesh

​ Traffic light flips from angry red to green go-ahead, but our young protagonist at the curb? Frozen. Everyone else surges across—shoes pounding pavement in perfect sync—but he’s lost in his phone’s glow, a glitch in the city’s flow. This is less about bricks and bustle and has rather become a global battle of screens versus streets. Simmel nailed the city-dweller’s “blasé shield” against the overload. But for today’s youth, it’s shattered into fragments. They’re embracing the city—but they’re also running a louder one in their pocket. Horns blare, brakes hiss, bodies press in sweaty waves… all background noise to the “elsewhere” pulling their eyes. Here, the city stops being a place—and becomes a series of nonstop pings. Urban speed? Sure, but the real drag is half-being here while your brain tunes another channel. Byung-Chul Han’s burnout society shows up in clashes (crashes?), a low hum of exhaustion—juggling realities till you’re drained. Being young and city-bound means partial p...

​ In Dehradun afternoon’s slanted light, yellow is a colour that packs a punch. It drapes the narrow parapet wall between buildings like scorched parchment. From her balcony, Urmi Aunty watches a stray cat prowl it—liquid-slow, precise as a tightrope walk in slow motion. No crowd, no cheers. That’s what makes it sacred: pure balance, untouched by eyes. Inside, the house hums with finished tasks—utensils silent in their racks, floors damp and cooling, air thick with echoes of old talks. Aunty is moored by routine, a renter in her own habits. Woolf dreamed of a room of one’s own, but this one’s overflowing with her. Loneliness? It’s not empty chairs—it’s too much unshared time, golden pressure with no escape. The cat’s her foil—ego shed for the walk, ignoring the street’s din below. It owns the city’s edges; she feels caged by roles, like de Beauvoir’s sanctuary-turned-prison. Threshold woman: domestic hush meets wild glare. Balance isn’t stillness, she muses—it’s endless tiny fixes. Cat...

The steam from the black coffee rose in a jagged, translucent swirl, a ghost of heat against the sharpening chill of the Dehradun morning. It was a bitter brew, the kind that stained the teeth and anchored the soul, yet today, its acidity felt distant, as if he were tasting a memory of coffee rather than the liquid itself. On the terrace, the air was heavy with the scent of damp earth and the impending petrichor of the Mussoorie hills. The clouds were thick, bruised swells of indigo and slate, huddling together over the peaks like a congregation of mourners. He moved among the pots with a rhythmic, practiced tenderness. The bougainvillea was thirsty; the ferns needed a gentle misting. Around his ankles, the cats—a shifting mosaic of calico and shadow—weaved in silent, desperate anticipation. Their mews were sharp, needle-thin sounds that usually pierced his morning fog, but today they sounded muffled, as if he were listening to them through a thick pane of glass. He turned towards the ...

  The tea was lukewarm, a stagnant pool of amber in a cup that had outlived its saucer. He sat at the mahogany dining table, the silence of the house a weight—a physical presence that pressed against his temples. Inside his mind, the archives were burning. The flames were quiet, consuming the edges of faces he once loved until they were nothing but charred silhouettes. He could no longer summon the specific frequency of his mother’s rage; the sharp, staccato rhythm of her scolding had been smoothed into a dull, featureless hum. Even the bird—the frantic, hollow-boned pulse of life he had cradled in his palms as a boy—had flown into the white mist of his senility. He knew he had saved something once, but the "what" and the "why" had evaporated, leaving only a faint, phantom sensation of warmth in his fingertips. He lowered his gaze to the table. There, at the far edge, was the jagged lightning bolt of a crack, a permanent scar in the wood. The house breathed. Suddenl...

  The river spoke in the language of erosion—a low, rhythmic thrumming against the silted bank, a sound like a secret being dragged over smooth stones. Elias sat on the knotted root of a willow that had long ago surrendered its dignity to the current. He was a man composed of parchment and silver hair, his skin mapped with the geography of eighty winters. He listened to the water’s low, liquid gravel. “It is your duty in life to save your own dreams,” the river whispered, a cold spray catching the light like shattered diamonds. Elias leaned forward, his reflection in the water fractured by the ripples. “And what of yours?” he asked, his voice a dry rustle. “What has a creature of ancient gravity been dreaming of lately? Which of your own have you managed to pull from the mud?” The river slowed, pooling in a deep, amber eddy near the shore. “I dream of the ascent,” she replied. “I dream of flowing back—not towards the salt-choked mouth of the sea, but upward, to the source. I want t...

  The light retreated from the edges of the valley in a slow, rhythmic ebb, stripping the gold from the tall grass and the bruising purple from the mountains until the world was rendered in the stark, uncompromising ink of a lithograph. This was the hour of the monochrome, the transition where the garish distractions of the day dissolved into the essential. The old man sat on a weathered trunk of driftwood, his spine curved like a question mark against the darkening sky. Before him, the river was a vein of molten silver, moving with a heavy, muscular grace over the rounded shoulders of the stones. He took a slow, deliberate breath, feeling the damp chill of the Himalayan foothills settle into his bones—a familiar guest, uninvited but no longer unwelcome. In his calloused palm, he cradled a small, translucent pouch of ghenti. It was cheap, illicit, and tasted of fermented secrets and mountain earth, but it held more warmth than the sun ever could. He bit a small hole in the plastic,...

The light in Dehradun at dusk was thickening—a bruised purple silt that settled over the Sal forests and creeped into the cramped geometries of the city’s apartment blocks. For Maya, the twilight was a physical weight, a communal exhaustion shared by the dusty curtains and the tepid remains of her Earl Grey. She sat on her balcony, a concrete lung barely large enough to breathe in, watching the shadows stretch like ink spills across the valley. It had been a day of jagged edges. At the school, the air had been thick with the sterile cruelty of bureaucracy and the shrill, unyielding demands of children who had not yet learned the grace of silence. As an English teacher, she dealt in the currency of words, but today, words had failed her. They had been used as blunt instruments by the administration—critiques of her "pedagogical pacing," the cold architecture of a performance review that ignored the soul of the work. She felt diminished, a ghost haunting her own life. In the co...

The terrace has become a vessel, and I am the sediment settling at its base. High above the street’s mechanical pulse, the air carries a texture that refuses to be categorized. It is a presence that registers just behind the ear, a silver thread of frequency that occupies the spaces between my own breaths. At first, the mind attempts its clumsy forensics. I tell myself it is the hum of the city’s distant chaos or the ghost-echo of a wind that has already passed. But these are the lies of a frightened logic. The sound lacks the indifference of nature. It possesses a terrifying, patient lucidity. I have noticed the shift in the architecture of the evening: the sound is shy of my scrutiny. When I hunt for it with a sharpened focus, it retreats into the mundane—the rustle of a dry vine, the click of settling brick. It waits for the precise moment when my intention dissolves, when the "I" that listens begins to fray at the edges. Only then, in the softness of my diverted attention...

The sun was a white-hot furnace, a merciless eye fixed upon the dusty geometry of the neighborhood. On the terrace, the air shimmered, a viscous liquid of heat that made the concrete hum. Mrs. Talwar sat anchored in her wicker chair, her movements slow and rhythmic, like a priestess performing a forgotten rite. In her lap lay Minu, a creature of silver fur and indignant patience, as the brush moved through her coat with a steady, rasping shush-shush. It was the dead of the afternoon—that suspended, hollow hour where time curdles and the world holds its breath. Then, the silence was punctured. From a distant, tinny radio, the first few notes of a sarangi filtered through the heat, thin and ethereal. It was a melody from another epoch, a ghost of celluloid longing. Mausam hai aashiqana... The lyrics of Pakeezah drifted upward, heavy with the scent of jasmine and the weight of Meena Kumari’s kohl-rimmed sorrow. Mrs. Talwar paused, the brush hovering mid-air. A dry, brittle chuckle escaped...

The tea was cold, a stagnant amber pool in a ceramic cup, but Rakesh did not mind. In Dehradun, time drifted like the mist clinging to the charcoal ribs of the Mussoorie hills. Since retreating from the concussive roar of Delhi—a city that wore its noise like a serrated blade—Rakesh had become a map maker of the quiet. He had learned that silence was a presence. It was a textured fabric, woven from the silver thread of a distant mountain stream and the coarse hemp of a dry leaf skittering across the driveway. He could hear the neighbor’s cat, a feline ghost, sharpening its claws against a cedar frame three houses away. He could hear Mrs. Kapoor’s brittle, rhythmic cough, a sound like dry parchment tearing. He sat on his porch, suspended in the hollow of his own breath, watching Dogly. Dogly was a creature of indeterminate lineage and infinite patience. He was a patched-quilt of a dog—russet, soot, and bone-white—who had claimed the dusty patch of earth outside Rakesh’s gate as his sove...

  The sun over Dehradun softened the jagged edges of the Mussoorie hills and turned the air into a viscous, golden amber that pooled around the old man’s ankles on the terrace. He stood there, a witness to the slow-motion alchemy of the afternoon, feeling the familiar, stubborn turn of his own frame. His right shoulder rose, a jagged peak of bone and muscle aspiring towards his ear, while the left sagged like a tired shelf. It was a posture the world had spent seventy years trying to "correct." He remembered the sharp rapping of a wooden ruler against his scapula, the stinging commands of gym teachers who viewed his body as a failed architectural project. Stand straight. Square your shoulders. Be a man. To them, his slanted gait was a moral failing, a physical manifestation of the "softness" they loathed. They saw a fat boy, a nerd, a "slob"—as his mother’s voice would echo in the caustic hallways of his memory—but they never saw the boy who felt the rotat...

  The geometry of Vidya’s existence had begun to soften, the sharp, architectural angles of her youth surrendering to a slow, relentless silting of the flesh. It was a quiet accumulation—a soft sediment of ghee and sugar that settled around her middle like a secret kept too long. To Vidya, the vocabulary of the halwai was a ceremony of sacred incantations. Barfi. The word itself felt like a cool, silver-leafed square dissolving against the roof of her mouth. Jalebi. A golden, syrupy labyrinth that mirrored the tangled impulses of her own heart. Gulaab jamun. Dark, orb-like promises of a temporary reprieve from the friction of the world. These were not merely confections, but portals. One whiff of cardamom-heavy steam was enough to dissolve the drab walls of her living room, transporting her to a space where the air tasted of saffron and the weight of her responsibilities felt as light as spun sugar. “Life is a brief flickering,” her mother had often said, her voice a sandpaper rasp...

  The sun examined the village of Alaknanda, pulling the ochre rooftops and the sleeping dust of the lanes out of a shallow, violet grave. While the other patriarchs—men with skin like cured leather and voices like grinding stones—gathered at the temple to barter their remaining years for a favorable afterlife, Madhav sat on his terrace. He had spent sixty years walking towards horizons that retreated as he approached, and he was tired of the geometry of arrivals. Instead, he chose the salvation of the stationary. The terrace was a rectangle of cracked concrete, its edges softened by moss that bloomed in the damp shadows like miniature, velvet forests. To the village elders, Madhav was a man drifting into a senile fog, a soul neglecting its final duties. They spoke of Moksha as a distant port, a liberation from the "maya" of the material. They urged him to lose himself in the divine. Madhav, however, found the divine far too interesting to be lost in. He preferred to find it....

  The sky above Dehradun became a sudden, bruised purple collapsing into sheets of silver. One moment, the air was a stagnant weight of pre-monsoon heat; the next, the macadam of the bazaar was steaming, hissing under a rhythmic assault. Biswas stood under the rusted corrugated eaves of the fishmonger’s stall, the scent of river-silt and brine rising to meet the petrichor. His wife’s voice, a shrill directive about the freshness of Rohu and the necessity of mustard oil, was still a phantom vibration in his ear, but here, it was drowned out by the roar. He adjusted the empty jute bag on his shoulder, his thumb tracing the frayed fibers. He was not in a hurry. He had nowhere to be but here, watching the world dissolve into a watery blur. Around him, the street had turned into a theater of frantic motion. It was a carnival of the hurried. A group of college students, draped in translucent plastic ponchos that fluttered like the wings of panicked insects, swarmed the narrow sidewalk. T...

The air in Seema’s apartment felt stale. It held the faint, metallic scent of unwashed tea strainers and the heavy, velvet dust of a life lived in a minor key. At fifty-three, Seema had become a ghost in her own geography, a woman whose existence was validated only by the casual, rhythmic punctuations of her neighbors. “Hello, Seema Aunty!” Nimmi’s voice would drift down from the terrace of the blue house, bright and disposable. “Hello, beta. How is your mother?” Seema would reply, her voice a dry reed clicking against the teeth of the afternoon. This was the architecture of her days: a series of polite inquiries that never sought an answer. The crisis arrived as a realization that she was a vessel for a history no one intended to read. She was starving for a "Second Life," a phrase that tasted like minerals and fresh earth, something she could grip until her knuckles turned white. She wanted a purpose that felt like a pulse. Driven by a desperate, misplaced piety, Seema soug...