Sulfurous Dreamscapes @sulfurousdreamscapes - Tumblr Blog

Writeblr Intro! Sulfurous Dreamscapes!

I'm Rahul, a writer from Mumbai, and this is my writeblr! You can use either he/him or she/her pronouns for me.

In January 2016, I started Sulfurous Dreamscapes as a daily writing practice blog. By some bizarre blessing, I managed to keep up the habit, without fail, for a solid 5 years. This blog contains all the daily writing I did from 2016 to 2021.

Several of my short stories have been published in literary magazines, including Barzakh and Strix!

I also briefly ran a Substack called Sulfur Dreams, where I published short stories. It was previously paywalled, but is completely free to read now.

Thank you for reading!

#writing #writeblr #writing community #writeblr intro #writers on tumblr

The fiction I valued the most was the kind that made me cry, so naturally, I assumed that the best fiction I write will be what makes others cry. I chased that desire to write something that'll make people cry with desperation.

However, as it turns out, people cried at things in my fiction that I did not expect would make them cry. It left me pleasantly baffled.

There is an old cliché that artists convey their emotions and feelings to their audience via their art, as if art is a delivery box of emotions and feelings. I'm starting to think it's more like gacha or lootboxes. You'll give your audience a box alright, but what they'll get out of it? Neither you know, nor do they.

#writing #writeblr #art

Been thinking a lot about Lydia Davis' writing advice to take lots of notes and then revise revise revise those notes.

It's easy to take notes and then just forget about them. Maybe you'll come back to them in the future, and just go "Huh this is neat". But the real game changer, in my opinion, is that you have to revise those notes. You have to engage with them, build on them, edit them.

And when you do this, what's very interesting is that you end up in conversation with your past self. Of course, the converse of that is that whenever you take a new note, you are having a conversation with your future self.

The more I think about that, the more beautiful I find it, and it leads me to thinking that the act of writing itself is a conversation with yourself. This is obvious for non-fiction and journalling, but it's also true for fiction.

This is you stating something, reacting to it, reacting to that reaction, and so on until you're done. Then, when it's shared or published, a different conversation occurs between that text and the reader, none of which is in your domain or control.

But that first act of taking notes, of writing something, and then revising it and editing it, is a conversation between the past, present, and future yous. That's priceless.

#writing #writeblr #writing advice

(Continued from 1.)

I was practically bathed in sweat by this point. My head swirled. It was a gamble, but I figured it was the best damn lead I had.

With a crunch of the dead leaves beneath my boot, I approached the log with my gaze roving around the tree line. If this was a trap, surely the bandits would come out by now? I looked behind me, expecting the boy to have disappeared, but he sat on a rock staring at me with squinting eyes.

Then the smell hit me.

The smell couldn't really be described, and it filled my nostrils so suddenly that I immediately took a few steps back, dazed. Instinctively, I turned back to the boy again, who had two hands forming a loudspeaker at his mouth.

"It is that," he shouted and pointed at me.

By this time, I found it harder and harder to stand still. I stumbled and tripped on the log behind me. I landed with my head on the ground. There, half-covered in yellowing leaves, I found the crack in the ground.

I cleared the leaves, knelt and bent down to the rift. It was barely a couple inches wide, about a foot long, just a tiny secret of the world that had been waiting for me for who knows how long.

My thoughts became a jumble. Between blinking eyes, I bent down, took a whiff of the smell. My head immediately rose up to the sky, and I rose up to my feet, rose up above ground, rose up higher than the log even. When I looked down, I could see the tops of some trees, and snaking through them, a boy bolting back home.

This entire phenomenon induced a bit of a panic in me, and I turned further down, hoping to find a way to descend. But there was no body to descend any more. I felt for my legs, my waist, my head, and there were no hands to feel anything with. Down on the ground, I found myself, standing, dusting himself off and backtracking to the village.

Due to a haze of thoughts and memories that wouldn't stop flitting in and out, it took me some time to realise that my consciousness was now gas itself. I was floating across the trees, and my molecules were separating the further I drifted. They found themselves stuck on mountains, settling on lakes, driven to the sea by rivers, and escaping to space.

Eventually, every single molecule that was me had separated, and every single molecule that used to be still held my consciousness. Was this really Horsekick? How was I going to return to Calvin and boast about my exploits to him?

Who was the man now returning home from his quest to find Horsekick? Was he like me? Did he also want to return to Calvin and tell him about all this?

Ah, but I did find Calvin eventually. I don't know if the me in my body ever did, but the me in the gas, the me in the drifting molecules certainly did. Calvin looked quite happy with his pregnant girlfriend in their new house in Australia.

The scientists had their own name for it, but we had several others. They all referred to the same thing, but back as teenagers, we didn't realise that until we grew a little older and much less wiser. Horsekick, Disintegrator, Flight, Partyculate, they were all the one gas that had been discovered in remote regions across the world.

It wasn't long after word got around that the governments began cracking down on these spots. The cracks the gas came out of were sealed off. New discoveries were silenced. They wanted us to go back to the world as it was before this drug had appeared, and I think they were mostly successful at that.

Calvin and I though, we had a bet going for years on who'd be the first to experience Horsekick. We didn't want any of the pedestrian shit. We wanted to journey to Brazil or Cambodia or Iceland to find a ten-inch crack in the earth and breathe deep.

Well, as an adult, Calvin lost interest in Horsekick. His parents put him in an engineering degree program. We stopped talking as much as we used to. I mentioned Horsekick to him after he graduated, hoping maybe we could go on an expedition together, but he laughed it off like I was making an old in-joke.

The challenge was real to me, though.

I sifted through coded reports of new Horsekick discoveries on the Internet and eventually I found myself travelling to Jharkhand in India. Deep inland, the sun was unforgiving, and I did my best not to stand out as a foreign tourist, which meant not shorts, no backpack, and no sunglasses.

Here, the locals called it sūr. I made my inquiries carefully, pretending to be an anthropology researcher, making sure I neither attracted police attention nor acted too suspiciously. There were reports of armed rebels in the area, and the last thing the authorities wanted was some foreigner interviewing them.

The goose chase led me from one village to another. I travelled in jeeps amidst men with hunting rifles, boats on rivers polluted by industries, crowded trains, and I squeezed between two other men on motorcycles. It took perseverance. My patience was running out, but every time I thought of giving up, I thought of Calvin and the bet we made, and I believed that Horsekick was right nearby. I just had to reach out and grab it.

A boy fourteen years old, no older than when I'd made the bet with Calvin, led me into a forest where the terrain seemed to rise and fall like a wave. I wondered if he intended to shoot me and loot my body, and I also wondered if I'd be able to escape such a trap. It could also be that he was simply there to soften up victims for the actual bandits.

We reached a clearing, and the boy remained at the edge of it, along the tree line. He pointed to a fallen log and told me in broken English that the gas was just beyond the tree line. Or so he thought. He explained, haltingly, that his father would break every bone in his body if he actually went closer to the log to find out.

(Continued in 2.)

2 (Continued from 1)

Everyone knows the Notre Dame of Paris. She didn't have to write it down on the back of the photograph. I felt a wave of disdain towards her for this, and I immediately chastised myself for it. I was the one inventing stories about her. Would she really know that her then-unborn child would invent stories about her old photographs?

So she stands there, with a black beret on her head. She's younger than in the Hong Kong photograph, and her smile draws dimples. Yet again, she's looking off-camera, but just a little above. She's either mid-laugh or mid-sentence, like she's asking if both she and Notre Dame are in the frame. There's a slight blur around her head, perhaps because she's moving a bit. Her hair is so chic.

When the picture moves, I see her biting down on her lower lip. Tourists and locals stroll past her, the same as in Hong Kong, and in her energetic movement, her beret falls to the ground, where it's trampled on by an older woman. Mom makes a face, a pout that shows that she's annoyed by her beret getting spoiled, but also that she'd rather be cute about it in this moment.

Three young women emerge from behind the camera, entering the frame with smiles and laughs. One of them picks up the beret and dusts it. Another pats Mom on the back. The third points to the top of the Notre Dame and says something excitedly. Mom laughs incredulously and motions towards the structure with her head.

The four women disappear into the crowd, and the one who picked up the beret puts it on her head, the shoeprint still showing.

There's another picture taken in Paris. This one's all about the rooftops, and of course, in the distance, you can see the Eiffel Tower. It's terribly corny, but at least there's no one standing in the frame this time. It's a picture taken for the aesthetic of the city, as if the city posed and asked the viewer to take a picture of it.

The buildings shake. Dust sets off from their walls and gables like pigeons taking flight. The shuddering invites the sound of a deep, terrifying rumbling, but that's not something you can hear in a photograph. One of the buildings, barely in the frame at all, collapses and throws up a cloud of grey. Another building collapses to its side, slanting as if it were desperate to crash on a mattress. Birds fly along the top edge, now in view and now out.

The Eiffel Tower stands strong, defying the earthquake that's so desperate to level Paris. Mom is long gone from where she was when she took the photo. Somewhere far away from this frame, she's descending stairs and helping an elderly lady out of the hotel. But we don't see that, so did it really happen?

There is in fact not a lot that we see at all, because the cloud of dust is obscuring the frame more and more. By the time I move on to the next photograph, all you can make out in the field of patchy grey is a black tower squatting in the distance.

Woman in a trench coat, waiting by a noodle stall, somewhere in Asia. The photograph is obscured by a lot of passersby, but she's clear in the centre of the image. Her skin is rosy in the humid city, and sweat beads around her jowls.

She's looking off-camera, but you can tell she isn't looking at anything in particular. She's waiting for something.

The only scrap of information on the back of the photograph is a handwritten 'Hong Kong, 1991'. Mom's handwriting.

I slip the photograph back into the family album I found it in, and I impress the image against the back of my eyelids. I don't have photographic memory, so I imagine I get a lot of things wrong about the image. I don't remember the clothes of the passersby, or the detail of the noodle stall, or the shapes of the characters on the writing plastered to the walls.

I remember Mom's face, though, and I remember what direction she's looking in, and that's enough to start the shifting stop-motion animation in my head. I put pen to paper and start writing what I see.

She turns to the other direction, and her eyes sparkle. A man approaches - not Dad - he towers over her and bends down to hug her and kiss her cheeks. A few passersby turn to look at the odd foreigners. Mom and the man converse with wide smiles, just cordial enough that you know they aren't a couple just yet.

The man gestures to the back, Mom nods, the man gestures to the noodle stall, and Mom looks unsure and then she points to nowhere specifically, and the man nods this time. They walk out of the photograph frame.

I slide another photograph closer to me, and there's nobody in this one, but you can see a wide balcony with a lounge chair, a canopy, several cane chairs, and in the background, a bunch of green hills. A colourful inflated ball sits in the sun by the balcony railing.

I'm about to turn the photograph over, but I stop myself. Do I want it to steer my writing somewhere else? But something else has stopped me, too. I raise the photograph close to me, and I focus on the ball with the colourful bands stretching from pole to pole. Do I know this ball, or am I imagining that I know this ball?

A baby crawls into frame. She stands up, points out of the railing, looks off-camera, and says something with conviction. She then crawls to the ball and picks it up.

Just at the edge of the frame, Mom's hands gesture to the baby to throw the ball towards her. The baby lifts the ball above her head, steadies its footing, and throws the ball straight up.

The wind carries it off the railing, and Mom rushes into frame laughing. The baby is confused. Mom stops at the railing and she's laughing so hard, her eyes are closed. She continues laughing even as the baby, realising that the ball is gone, starts to cry.

(Continued in 2)

The man we only knew as King, a frail and hunchbacked being who carried a mummy on his back, passed away one summer night, in a lonely corner of the city. The city's cats congregated at his corpse, snarling at anyone who dared approach the man's body. Even the police gave them a wide berth.

We never knew whose mummy he carried on his back. Every time I asked King, he'd glare at me like I'd asked something personal or taboo. The most widespread rumour about it was that the mummy belonged to his own dead mother, embalmed but never buried. A little boy proudly claimed to have gotten an answer from King as to why he carried the mummy on his back: he was searching for a pyramid tomb.

It would be difficult to find a pyramid tomb in the city, if it were at all possible in the first place. And yet, King never left the city. He was as much a part of the city as the labyrinth of sewers underneath it and the winding alleys in the slum town.

He was a favourite of the cats, but you may have already guessed as much. Whatever food he was granted as alms, he divided it in three. One portion went to himself, one to the cats of the city, and one for the mummy on his back. He mashed the food against the mummy's mouth, and carried on with his business.

The cats held vigil over King's corpse for a full five days before dispersing. The city authorities dislodged King from the mummy on his back. There were no pyramids to bury the two in, so King was buried in a corner of a cemetery with little fanfare or decoration.

What happened to the mummy, no one is really sure. The rumours suggested that it had been taken to a laboratory, so that the identity of the mummy could be determined. That the mystery of King's mummy had reached such highborn ears was news to many of us.

King's memory persisted beyond his death, with children lifting each other on their backs and roaming the alleys shouting out their kingly proclamations. Many of them could be found playing on the same street where he'd died, where the cats had protected him for five days.

Five years later, I built a small pyramid of clay and placed it on the spot where he'd died. I put a few flowers around the pyramid, and some fish for the cats, who ate the meal without gratitude or hesitation.

When I revisited the spot a few days later, the pyramid was trampled on and reduced to mud. The flowers were gone. There were no cats in sight.

It made me wonder if King would have even appreciated a memorial we'd made for him. Perhaps he would wonder why no one celebrated him so much when he was alive. But perhaps we'll carry his embalmed corpse on our backs until the day we die.

I found the evil Digest for the first time when I visited my friend Jitendra at his home in the Naval District. I had called him to congratulate him on his recent victory in the city polls, and he'd invited me over for dinner, given that he hadn't seen me in so many years. I naturally declined, not wanting to bother the newly elected city official, but he bargained with me, insisted I at least visit on a Saturday afternoon to catch up.

He had remodelled his parents' vast bedroom into a study, and the walls were lined with bookshelves that curled towards the centre. Behind there curls were more bookshelves, as if the whole room was an imitation of two open books facing each other. I marvelled at the design, and Jitendra grinned in pride. According to him, it was his own idea.

Instead of the promised catching up, I ended up exploring the crannies of Jitendra's library. He informed me that he had been collecting obscure works for many years now - specifically obscure works, as he had struck upon the idea one day that you can only hone your mind by reading what isn't popular.

"And where did you find this?" I asked, holding the small paperback that simply read 'Digest' on the front, along with a month and a year. Inside, there were no pictures - only text arranged in multiple columns. There was no information on its authors, editors, or publication.

Jitendra leaned over my shoulder and shrugged. "Can't say I recall this one. Do you reckon it snuck in through the window?"

"The stories in it are… quite morbid."

Waving my concerns away, Jitendra retreated to another fold of his library. "Obscure publications often highlight the raw and rough side of the human mind. Pure expression."

Even skimming through the book gave me a headache, and not just because of its tiny type. I started to gather that the book was describing the horrific happenings that had occurred the month prior to its stated publication month, and yet, given the nature of the writing, they did not seem like reportage so much as personal experience.

I eventually closed the digest, my mind swirling with twisted thoughts of harm in ways I had never even considered in the past. I remained disturbed for the rest of the visit, and even Jitendra seemed put off by my mood. We parted with few words.

Later, I would find the same digest lying near a rubbish bin, with its pages darkened and its edges charred. It had a different month and year on its cover, and the last three letters of 'Digest' had been eaten up by the fire, but it was unmistakeably the same horrific digest.

The following day, I would find a man reading the same digest on a bench that faced the seafront. He smiled quite pleasantly as he read it, only frowning when he spotted me staring at him.

I found another copy in the hands of a young woman as she held on to a pole in a tram headed uptown. She looked engrossed in it.

Over the next week, I would find more and more people reading the dreaded Digest, and I started to find fewer and fewer books of any other sort. I visited a bookshop off Curzon St. to reclaim my sanity, and found it crammed full of various copies of the Digest, stretching back months and years.

"Don't you have anything other than this damnable digest?" I asked the shopkeeper.

"Oh no, this is what sells now. There's no reason to stock anything else." He grinned, and turned down to read a digest with familiar small type and multiple columns.

Mara wiped her hands on her apron and watched the horizon, a clean line of distant farmland interrupted by a horseback rider coming her way. Her husband Fidel, leaning against the stone fence, also had his eyes on the rider. He looked at Mara, who motioned her head towards the farmhouse. Fidel headed there.

The sun baked the field, and the rider's shadow reached Mara before the rider did. His light armour, scabbard, quiver, helmet, all gave away who he worked for. The sweat that made his face glisten gave away how long he'd been working that day.

"Hail in the name of the King," he said. His voice was hoarse and he immediately looked around the farm for a jug of water. He was used to the farmers offering him water even before he'd arrived at their gate.

Mara nodded.

"Water," the rider said as he got off his horse. "I will have water."

"We can offer more than water," Mara drawled. "Stay for a meal."

The rider shook his head. "Not now. I only need water."

"I cannot possibly be so rude as to have you sup at our place," Mara said, "After all, you've come so far from the manor."

"Just let me do my job," he growled, his words getting clipped as his dry mouth refused to cooperate.

"If word got back to the manor that I didn't offer you a meal, it would really be the end of me, wouldn't it?"

The man's face contorted into a threatening grimace. "Nothing will get back. Just get me water."

"I'll give you water if you agree to sup with us." Mara folded her arms.

The man's eyes burned brighter than the sun behind him. "Are you a madwoman? Where's your man?"

"He's attending to business. Tell me, will you sup with us?"

"Are you threatening an officer of the kingdom?"

Mara's eyes grew wide. "I wouldn't dream of it. In fact, you'd sooner see my head lopped off on my own farmland before I threatened you."

"We can arrange for it," the officer said, slowly unsheathing his sword.

Mara yawned. "Fine, we'll get you your damn water. Will a bucket suffice? Or do you need a lake?"

The officer brandished his sword and stepped closer to Mara. "You'll pay dearly for mocking an officer of the kingdom."

"You were going to make me pay dearly anyway," Mara said with a shrug. "Let's get you your water."

She turned and held out her palm to her side.

An arrow shot past her, a clean, sharp whistle that ended with the sound of metal piercing skin. A light groan, and then the sound of armour hitting the earth followed.

The officer writhed wordlessly, clutching at the arrow stuck in his throat. His hands were drenched and caked in blood, and he struggled to make a sound.

Minutes later, as he was losing consciousness, he was jolted awake by cold water splashing on his face. Mara and her husband stood over him, with Mara pouring water from a jug onto the dying man's face.

Missed yesterday's daily writing post, but that's alright - I'm being more lenient this time around. I don't want to sacrifice my sleep or well-being this time.

I'll try to post two stories today to compensate!

Old Man Rodolfo played a different kind of song that afternoon. The sun blazed over the island, two hours from dipping below the horizon, and Rodolfo's voice sounded like a dog howling from the old, ruined castle rampart.

I'd been hiding in behind one of the walls from the other kids. I expected to be caught early, because they knew I was never far from Rodolfo. To his credit, he never looked at me or gave me away.

This time though, even though I was caught, I told the seeking girl that I didn't want to play any more. She glanced at Rodolfo on the rampart with his guitar and left me alone.

Rodolfo's voice twisted like a vortex of wind, spinning a flamenco wail with closed eyes and heaving chest. I climbed the rampart and sat near him, where his voice bombarded my ears like a cannon, so loud that my hands moved to cover my ears. I stopped them, of course. Rodolfo was louder than any speaker or radio. I deserved to be struck by his cannonade.

When his last, floating note drowned in the sea that crept up to the castle's feet, I clapped for him and told him that this was a difficult song to listen to, and yet it was the best I'd ever heard from him.

Rodolfo strummed his guitar with a melancholy smile in reply.

"I didn't know you could sing something like this," I said. I used the familiar 'you' for him, which was a gamble that I think I had earned after so many months of listening to his music in the ruined castle.

"I am a man of many talents." Rodolfo grinned. "Most of them behind lock and key."

I didn't grasp what he meant then, but a shadow of understanding did fall on me. Rodolfo had been around in the village since before I was born, but he'd showed up quite abruptly one day and minded his own business for most years.

Eventually, he'd been coaxed into playing at the local fiestas, and the village had come to respect both his music and his sagacity. And yet, he kept his distance enough that no one was really sure what he did before arriving here. He had some kind of business, and he may have come from the capital, but that was about the extent of what people knew.

"Did you come up with this song yourself?" I asked.

"Me? No, no." His shaggy hair shook with his head. "It's an old song, but not one you'll hear on the radio. This one you hear in whiskey-drowned basement bars, where the cigarette smoke is so thick, you forget what air tastes like."

He turned to the broken gate, where a man in a grey suit, boxy sunglasses, and expensive shoes guided a team of policemen, some of them armed with holstered pistols.

Rodolfo grinned at this new company. The fear raised me to my feet, and I asked Rodolfo who these people are.

"An old snake," Rodolfo said, relishing the syllables in his mouth. "But then, we were all snakes. We all burrowed deep, and we all got sick of it, didn't we? And there's the tired ones like me, and there's the smart ones like him."

The policemen jerked their pistols out as Rodolfo let out a tall howl into the air above him, up towards the cloudless sky that grew ochre and orange. They spread out and surrounded Rodolfo, while the man who had brought them here stood at a distance, hands in his pockets, a coward among snakes.

"I knew he was coming," Rodolfo said, interrupting his song. "I sang for him to come, too. Some of us have a conscience, and some of us have prosperity."

A wrathful sandstorm battered the windows of the prisoner transport, and Bani couldn't decide if she should be grateful or angry that she couldn't see the landscape outside. It was as if the planet itself was intent on punishing her. Perhaps that's what the earliest colonists thought too. Maybe that's immediately when they decided to turn it into a penal colony.

Rocks and gravel struck the transport as it mowed through sandy terrain. The sounds reminded Bani of machineguns from the war. Once again, she found herself torn in contrasting feelings. The war - it was another lifetime, and simultaneously, it was like yesterday. Swatting mosquitoes in a tent and eating old rations and stabbing the enemy with a bayonet - memories that had somehow transformed into being kicked out of a prison ship.

"Do you know how long they'll keep us?" a younger woman asked her.

Bani couldn't determine if the question was earnest or rhetorical. She just stared at the woman with smooth, unscarred skin, with smooth, untangled hair, and small, hunched shoulders.

"I mean, they have to send us back at some point, right?"

Earnest. Bani shook her head. "They could just execute us at some point."

"Yes," the woman said, "of course."

A rock struck the window, which remained defiantly uncracked. The howling of the wind and the vortexes of sand gave off the sensation of travelling through primordial chaos. As if some god would cleave heaven and earth at any point - establishing night and day, mountains and seas, trees and animals… Bani's mind wandered.

"But they could keep us for a prisoner swap too, right?" the woman asked, dragging Bani away from her fantasy.

"Depends. We weren't taking prisoners in my theatre."

"Oh. Now that you mention it, no, I don't think we took any prisoners either."

"You thinking of escape?"

The woman smiled far too sadly for someone her age. "All the damn time, sister. Every bloody thing that isn't bolted down, I'm wondering how I can use it to get an edge."

Bani smiled. That kind of optimism had long left her, even if it could have been useful now. Perhaps escape was a possibility that she'd discarded without entertaining. This younger woman was different. She wasn't as numb or calloused. She could still think about breaking out and making it on her own.

Of course, Bani had to rain on her parade.

"So what will you do once you break out?"

"Apologise to my parents. Drink a keg of beer. Go to a concert." The woman seemed to have the answers ready already.

"No, I mean if you broke out right now, what would you do? Go to a town with no direction? In your prisoner uniform? And then how are you going to get home? That's assuming they don't realise you're an escapee and send you right back."

"Have to admit, it'll be quite the adventure. Do you have any pointers?"

The question caught Bani off-guard. "No, not really."

"Well, I'll share mine with you once I'm out."

A few days after moving to the village to take over my grandparents' house, I learnt from a boy that the Mhatres were weird. I didn't pay much mind to the boy's rumour-mongering at first, but then I mentioned them to a neighbour, and she became curt in her replies to me. Her insistence on changing the subject fascinated me so much that I made it a point to bring up the Mhatres every time I talked to someone in the village. Most of them didn't have much to say. Others seemed to look at me like I was talking about a ghost.

I collected the rumours I heard in a small notebook. At first, I'd assumed the Mhatres were into something shady - crime, maybe? But the rumours didn't indicate crime at all. Rather, they fell into the vein of 'I've never seen them visit a temple', or 'They never do their own shopping, they always send their domestic help to do it', or 'Sometimes you can see the family patriarch on the roof of their bungalow, scanning who-knows-what with his telescope'.

One of the rumours went so far as to say that you shouldn't even pass by their bungalow, or you'll be struck with bad luck. This one pricked me in particular. It sounded like hate mixed in with superstition, and to feel that way about a real, flesh-and-blood neighbourhood family, really irked me.

And yet, of course, I couldn't just saunter up to their gate and ask to be let in to verify if looking into their eyes will cause you to be injured later in the day.

The breakthrough came by way of the domestic help. The woman was buying greens in the market when the grocer asked if she was buying them for herself, or for the Mhatres.

"Why do you care?" she snapped at him.

The grocer had a slimy smile beneath his pencil moustache. "I suppose I don't," he said. His eyes glinted when he looked at me and asked me what I'll have.

I bought chillies, coriander, and curry leaves just to not look suspicious, and then I caught up with the woman as she hurried towards the Mhatres' bungalow.

"Wait up," I pleaded, "You're Tara, right? You work for the Mhatres?"

She turned around with her mouth open like she was about to toss an insult my way. She didn't, however.

"What's it to you?" she asked. Her tone sounded like an insult anyway.

"I just wanted to talk to you."

"If it's about the Mhatres, then I've nothing to talk about."

I plunged a hand into my pocket and pulled out my notebook. I read the rumours I'd collected to her, and I watched as her eyes became more and more incensed.

"So what is it?" I asked. "Is there any truth to these rumours?"

She looked at me from head to toe and back again. "What are you? A journalist?" She practically spat out the last word.

"Is it that obvious?"

"Find some work, Ms Journalist," she said, clenching the first that carried that plastic bag with the groceries. "Work that doesn't involve interrupting other people while they do their work."

For over two decades, Basil had made a habit of missing his husband Art. Now that they were sunbathing on a Mediterranean beach in Greece, Basil wondered what to talk about. They didn't look like they used to - age had seen to that - and Basil was certain he looked like a pot-bellied, wrinkly sack of shit on a beach chair. Art, at least, had taken care of himself, he thought.

"Look at that kid," Art suddenly said, "The one making the sandcastle."

Basil sat up and held a hand up to his eyes. He didn't own sunglasses, and he was wondering how he went all this time without them. Unlike Art, he didn't get out much. That must be it. He spotted a little girl with blonde-brown hair tipping over a red bucket to place a heap of sand on the wetter side of the beach.

"What about her?" Basil asked.

"I feel like she could've been our kid. Don't ask why."

"Why?"

"Because I always wanted to teach my kid how to build a sandcastle."

Art rested his hands together on his belly. How could he always look so collected?

"I didn't know you know how to build sandcastles. You learn that on one of your trips?"

Art choked on a chuckle and sat up to cough it clear. "Yes, actually," he replied, "Tour agent who knows how to build sandcastles? Instant hit with families. I got very good at it, too."

"I didn't know that. You never told me."

"You never asked," Art grinned.

"And on all these… hundreds of trips you went on, you thought about raising a kid with me?"

Art shook his head wistfully, eyes still on the little girl as she gently tore of chunks from her heap of sand. Basil looked at her too and leant back on his chair, even if his back wanted anything but.

"Not with you," Art replied after a while. "Just 'my kid'. An imaginary kid I'd take around on my job. If I raised a kid with you, she'd have to be home with you. She'd have school to go to and probably sports to play and music to learn and who knows what else."

Basil balled his fist and closed his eyes to avoid the sun's glare. "I never imagined anything like that. I thought you didn't want kids."

Once again, Art chuckled effortlessly. He turned to Basil with a half-grin and reached out to tousle Basil's hair. "You don't get it. Forget about it."

"It wasn't like that for me, you know," Basil said quietly, half hoping Art wouldn't hear. "I always thought you'd take up a different kind of work, be home more often, and we'd have more time to us. You'd said you didn't want a kid, so that's how it worked out in my imagination."

"That's adorable." Art took a deep breath. "But I know what you're thinking. Why was I imagining some random imaginary kid on my tours when it could have been you."

"Let's hear it."

Art shrugged. "How do I put it to words? Let's say I know you, and I know you as you exist in life. Why would I bother imagining you? You're already there, you exist. I just have to come back home to see you. But out there, working and guiding a bunch of families on the beach in, what, Mallorca, I'm thinking of what could never be. What do you call that? Escapism?"

A shriek from the girl made Basil open his eyes and see that she'd ruined the sandcastle she was trying to make. Arms flailing helplessly, she ran to her mother, who picked her up and hugged her.

"I don't know, Art," Basil said, "But I know I missed you."

Changing a client's door bell button was not something Salman was entirely unused to. Nevertheless, he fucked up, and received a minor shock in the process. In his surprise, he took several steps back and squeezed his finger. That's when he realised that he was meant to be a king.

The visions pierced his mind like arrows from a unit of longbowmen. A sunny palace, a beautiful queen, a council of advisors with a dependable general… all of these things were his, and he deserved them because he was king.

The client, hands in pockets, sauntered towards the front door. "All okay, mate?" he asked Salman.

Mumbling something under his breath, Salman nodded and looked at the screwdriver in his hand as if it were an alien implement. He turned it around, looking at it from the point, from the handle, and running his hand along the flat tip.

"If something's wrong…" the client began, and then immediately shut up when Salman glared at him.

"I have pressing matters to attend to," Salman said, and swallowed saliva. "I've… I've lost everything, haven't I? The kingdom, the palace, the queen, the advisors… I've even lost my memory."

The client glanced at the door bell. "So is it fixed, or? You need to screw the casing back on, yeah?"

Salman threw the screwdriver onto the floor and sat down on a flight of stairs near the client's apartment. He held his head with his hands. When the client bent down to get a better look at the electrician, he noticed that Salman was crying.

"I should get someone else to fix this, yeah? You don't seem to be in good shape."

Wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, Salman glared at his client resentfully. "This is no way to talk to me. I may have a curse on me, but this is no way to talk to me."

The client backed away, through the door. "I'll let you go then," he said quietly, "It's okay, I'll pay for your time."

Salman took deep breaths. "You're not the only one who'll pay." He growled through gritted teeth before releasing a roar and raising a clenched fist in the air.

"I'm sorry, your majesty," the client said with a frown. "I'll get your cash, hold on."

With that, the client closed the front door.

Veins popped at Salman's temples. He had visions of swinging a broadsword, lopping off heads, executions by hanging, chests full of gold, scrolls and ledgers being written in… If he kept jogging his memory like that, he'd eventually come across the person who cursed him.

Your Majesty will never be triumphed. Salman struggled to remember who said that. The voice was a lot like his queen's. But who was his queen? What was her name?

Your Majesty will never triumph. The same voice. Surely some kind of witch? Unless it was the very same queen he had poured his faith into.

The client pressed a couple of notes into Salman's hand. "This should cover it. I'll uh… see you around."

A telltale prick in Pankaj's brain told him that someone had tuned into his sense capture device. Officially, he wasn't supposed to know when someone had tuned in to experience what he was experiencing, because it would make him self-conscious and ruin the effect of the experience for the person on the other end of the line. Still, he'd heard rumours and made his guesses.

He played up a sigh. The rancid smell, the pollution of traffic in the underpass, the omnipresent dust, it was all being captured and sent to a someone who can afford a sense viewer. How much did those things cost? Pankaj tried to recall the suited lady at the intake office - the one detached from the main company office, so that people like him wouldn't dirty its corporate premises - the suited lady had told him that sense viewers range from fifty thousand rupees to two lakh rupees. It was a lot of money just to imagine.

To his right, his wife collected a morsel of rice and fed their son, who would ran back and forth on the pavement between each morsel. When she met Pankaj's gaze, she divined that his senses were being captured. Of course, she didn't say anything.

It's just like being an actor in a film, Pankaj thought. You have to play up a performance, because who wants to tune into a self-aware feed? More than anything else, he was glad the sense capture device didn't capture his thoughts. If they invent one that does, he'd be done for.

"You should make him stop running like that. You're spoiling him," he said to his wife. He'd said these words before… how many times before? It would spark an argument, and arguments were entertaining.

"Do you want to try feeding him?" The wife glared at him.

Another prick in the brain. Did he have more viewers? The more viewers and hours, the more money he would make from the company. He wondered if he could break a hundred that day.

"Forget it," Pankaj dismissed her with a flick of his wrist, hands still resting on his knees. "That's women's work."

A traffic jam was developing in the underpass. Pankaj's daughter, seven years older than his son, ran between the stopped cars and auto-rickshaws, selling pinwheels and rattles for kids. Pankaj got up to follow her with his gaze, so that whoever was watching could get a good view of her as she navigated the traffic maze before the signal went green.

"I hope you'll at least feed him if I die," Pankaj's wife barked at him.

His daughter paused, inches away from a delivery driver speeding on his motorbike through the gap at the side of the road. Any further and he'd have run over her feet.

Is this good material? Pankaj had been told that risk, adventure, danger, arguments, violence, these were all good for business. He watched his daughter return to the pavement just seconds before the traffic jam loosened up.

What if she made a mistake…

Dark thoughts crowded his head. He grimaced and slapped himself as hard as he could, driving away the image of a two thousand rupee note.

Was anyone still watching?

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