Skip to main content

My Stories as Ebook


I have collected 33 short stories of mine into an ebook which will be published next week.  Most of these stories were written in the last two years and published in my blog.  Just to give a taste of what the stories are like, let me give the links to three stories selected at random:

Ahalya – the first story in the volume
And quiet flowed the Beas – the tenth story
The Nomad Learns Morality – the title story

The volume is dedicated to “Radha Soami Satsang Beas especially Dr Pranita Gopal.”  RSSB is a religious organisation which took over a school in Delhi where I was teaching for quite a while.  In about two years the organisation bulldozed the school to smithereens.  The bulldozer became my guru and muse.  However, the stories are in no way related to the school or RSSB.  Not at all to the bulldozer.  Not even to Dr Pranita Gopal.  All these happened to be my best inspirers.  I’m obliged to them eternally.  Were it not for them, the potential for fiction writing would have died quietly within me.  As Lord Rama’s touch brought life to Ahalya, RSSB brought a different life to the writer in me.  Dr Gopal is one of the many faces of RSSB that I came close to.  My admiration for her grows day by day.

I’m now working on a novel which is totally inspired by the RSSB.  The novel is tentatively titled Black Hole.  Following is an extract from it:

In the beginning was a black hole.  The black hole was with God, and the black hole was God.  All things existed in the black hole.  Nothing could escape the tenacity with which the black hole held everything within it.  The bonds of that tenacity grew strong and stronger until the black hole could not bear the bondage anymore.  And it exploded.  Boom.  Big Bang.  And the black hole became flesh.

Ishan Salman Panicker was writing his gospel.   

The picture in this post is not the actual cover of the book.  I designed it for fun.  I now live a few metres away from the road in the picture.  It is a picturesque village in Kerala whose landscapes suffuse beauty and vigour into my soul through an osmotic process which could not have taken place elsewhere.  I’m grateful to RSSB and its people for giving me this gift without even their knowledge.

That’s how life works.  We become agents of transmutation in other people’s lives.  We can be Desdemonas or Iagos.  Othello may fail to recognise the genuine face.  Othellos, Desdemonas and Iagos create art for us.  My stories are humble attempts to catch some of those aesthetic moments of life.  Some of those glimpses which may add some beauty to a life that is otherwise bulldozed over.


Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 24, 2015 at 8:52 AM

    Congratulations.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnuragOctober 24, 2015 at 9:21 AM

    Congratulations! I hope to get my hands on the print copy

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownOctober 24, 2015 at 11:06 AM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. rupam sarmaOctober 24, 2015 at 1:36 PM

    Congratulations :)
    Best Wishes

    ReplyDelete
  5. Online JournalistOctober 24, 2015 at 9:00 PM

    Hearty Congratulations and Best wishes sir...!

    ReplyDelete
  6. wingsOctober 24, 2015 at 9:38 PM

    Awaiting eagerly. Thanks. I want to relive the remnants of my past. Want to learn what I might not have learnt.

    ReplyDelete
  7. wingsOctober 24, 2015 at 9:39 PM

    Awaiting eagerly. Thanks. I want to relive the remnants of my past. Want to learn what I might not have learnt.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 25, 2015 at 6:08 AM

      Grateful for your zeal. The stories may not carry that sort of lessons but I do hope they will remind you of a lot of things.

      Delete
  8. Purba chakrabortyOctober 24, 2015 at 11:04 PM

    Wonderful. Congratulations. Wish you all the best :)

    ReplyDelete
  9. Devesh PrajapatiOctober 25, 2015 at 2:42 AM

    Congrts sir, good to see u again sir on blogspot.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 25, 2015 at 12:16 PM

      I had no choice, sir. Since I can't be a swami i have to be a writer. Thanks for welcoming me to where I rightfully belong.

      Delete
  10. Devesh PrajapatiOctober 25, 2015 at 12:13 PM

    Congrts sir, good to see u again sir on blogspot.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Roohi BhatnagarOctober 25, 2015 at 2:56 PM

    Wow.. The much awaited writer has arrived finally. I am happy and deeply inspired. Congratulations :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 25, 2015 at 6:44 PM

      Thank you, Roohi. You once asked me why I get caught in the cycle repeatedly (not in the same words). I have seen Rahu and Ketu playing their incessant shadow game. ..:)

      Delete
  12. UnknownOctober 26, 2015 at 6:31 AM

    Amazing! Best wishes!

    ReplyDelete
  13. Ashish KumarOctober 26, 2015 at 8:43 PM

    Congratulations sir... Wish you all the best for the success... I will read your short stories soon...

    ReplyDelete
  14. UnknownOctober 27, 2015 at 10:55 AM

    Life is for those, who dare most.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 27, 2015 at 12:04 PM

      You will meet in my stories great persons like Lord Rama and Alexander the great who faltered... I understand what you mean...

      Delete
  15. Ankita ChakravartiOctober 27, 2015 at 11:14 AM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 27, 2015 at 12:06 PM

      This is beyond me...

      Delete
    2. Ankita ChakravartiOctober 27, 2015 at 10:14 PM

      This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 28, 2015 at 5:13 AM

      Thanks for sharing. There were ways to save ourselves from that big fraud ... We defeated ourselves. We let ourselves be ruined by an entity that perceived itself as Browning's Duke of Ferrara who put an end to all smiles altogether in order to uphold the 900 year old family morality!

      Delete
  16. UnknownOctober 27, 2015 at 11:48 AM

    Sir can you send me a link to the book so I can buy.
    Looking forward to the series.
    Is there a way I can get in touch with you? Your old number I have does not seem functional.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 27, 2015 at 12:08 PM

      As soon as the book is released I'll let you know. Please don't call me. I'm under self-imposed imprisonment.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand
6 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af
8 comments
Read more