As I Write It

 Circumvention   Vinod Wasnik had moved his lips closer to the cup to take his first sip of morning tea, when a shrill cry of the landline telephone induced a sharp twitch in his hand destabilizing the teacup and momentarily disorienting his senses. It was three-trill set indicating an outstation call. The year was 1995; the mobile phone had not yet made its debut in India. A few feet away from the device, Vinod was standing on the balcony, cup in hand, watching his son Rohit walk to school. The steaming beverage spurted out of the tilted ceramic cup, scalded his fingertips and blotched the front of his sky-blue full-sleeved shirt ─ its stiff cotton fabric softening under heat and moisture. The curve of his paunch had grown rounder since he turned 40 two years ago and pushed the buttons out ever so slightly, but short of exposing the vest at the seams. Below his waist he was wrapped in a towel with which he had just dried himself after a bath while a pair of beige cotton...

  The farmer is here! On a comfortable winter morning – if you are not too snobbish about the winter in Mumbai - the farmer parked his truck on the camber of the street. He was turned out for business in loose white trousers, a full-sleeved white shirt and topi – a monochrome bright figure against the gray backdrop of paver blocks. He was from Nashik; as the large vehicle very proudly declared. A woman, his co-farmer and perhaps his wife sat in the truck’s bed surrounded by bright blue crates. A young lad dressed in overused jeans and checked shirt stood next to the farmer and was likely his son. He discernably felt out of place amid the milling urbane crowd as he looked uncertainly about him.             ‘The farmer is here!’ Over the ambient buzz of grocery shoppers in that restful locked down street, the farmer’s voice rang loud and clear.       ‘Get yourself the sweetest grapes from Nashik.’ The Nashik grape-grower hollered onc...