Retreat

Ashok Patwari

Description

Ashok Patwari, an eminent creative writer for the last three decades, has found "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks" in his extensive voyage through life and lands. He presents us with characters from an array of physical backgrounds and a gamut of emotional make-ups, and subtly penetrates the cosmetic layers of his characters to identify the common thread of humanity in them. Retreat is an eclectic collection of fourteen selected short stories with a range of themes, situations, and characters from across the continents.

Sujets

• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
• Date de parution: 31 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781645366249
• Langue: English

Extrait

Retreat
Ashok Patwari
Austin Macauley Publishers
2019-07-31
Retreat About the Author About the Book Dedication Copyright Information Acknowledgement Author’s Note Retreat Curse of the White Witch The Holy Powder The Savior Vendetta The Fragrance of Mustard Leaves Bridges, Not Barriers The Banyan Tree Groundhog’s Shadow The Forbidden Island Crossing the Bar The Native Poster Boy Mom, You Don’t Lie
About the Author
Ashok Patwari is a pediatrician and a public health researcher by profession. He has been a professor of pediatrics at Lady Hardinge Medical College, New Delhi, and a research professor at International Health at Boston University School of Public Health. He has also served the World Health Organization, giving him the unique opportunity of traveling around the world and exposure to a wide spectrum of social issues and events which often jiggle a creative mind. In his extensive voyage through life and lands, he has striven to find “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks.”
Though drawn from particular backgrounds, Ashok’s stories, situations, and characters generate universal appeal, and he holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of life and manners. His characters are not individuals but mostly species, being “the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find.”
Ashok Patwari has been writing short stories for over 30 years. His earlier collections of short stories include Turquoise Tulips (2015) and Down Flows the Stream (2017) . Kuch Lamhey Kuch Saayey, his collection of Urdu short stories, was awarded by Delhi Urdu Academy (India) in 2005.
About the Book
Ashok Patwari, an eminent creative writer for the last three decades, has found “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks” in his extensive voyage through life and lands. He presents us with characters from an array of physical backgrounds and a gamut of emotional make-ups, and subtly penetrates the cosmetic layers of his characters to identify the common thread of humanity in them. Retreat is an eclectic collection of fourteen selected short stories with a range of themes, situations, and characters from across the continents.
Dedication
To my dear granddaughters,
Aanya and Ava.
Copyright Information
Copyright © Ashok Patwari (2019)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Ordering Information:
Quantity sales: special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Patwari, Ashok
Retreat: And Other Short Stories
ISBN 9781641828543 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781641828550 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781645366249 (ePub e-book)
The main category of the book — FICTION / Short Stories
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019907935
www.austinmacauley.com/us
First Published (2019)
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
40 Wall Street, 28th Floor
New York, NY 10005
USA
[e-mail]
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Acknowledgement
A special thanks to Mr. Atreya Sarma Uppaluri for his expert editing services.
Author’s Note
Retreat has some of my favorite short stories published in print as well as online over the past thirty years. These stories, inspired by events and situations at that time, reflect different time periods, different generations I would say. I am not sure who the target audience for these stories should be but I do believe that human emotions remain the same whatever generation one belongs to. My professional assignments through World Health Organization gave me ample opportunities to travel around the world, particularly to Switzerland, the Maldives, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Jamaica. This collection is a reflection of my feelings as a storywriter when I visited these countries. I confess I have not lived enough there to write about the cultural practices and ethos of the local people but whatever I could carry with me as a writer when I looked at faces, perceived emotions, explored locations, and visualized situations, I penned them down to share with others. I stand corrected if my understanding of people, their culture, emotions, and social expressions are different from what I have conceived and written in these stories.
Retreat
All the passengers and the shopkeepers seemed to know about him, but nobody knew who he was or where he came from.
On a cloudy autumn afternoon, in the foothills of the Himalayas, the last tourist bus was about to depart. The devotees had already occupied their seats inside the bus. All of them wished to leave the place as quickly as possible. Fear of an impending storm, a cloudburst, or even an avalanche was real. People had not forgotten the tragedy which struck the area a few years ago when the whole village was washed away by a snowstorm. It was their strong faith and devotion to Lord Shiva that brought them all the way to Kedarnath (Holy Shrine of Hindus in the uphills of North India) for pilgrimage despite bad weather conditions.
The tourist bus had arrived in the morning. The devotees quickly had a holy dip and offered prayers inside the holy shrine. It was partly sunny when they arrived, but by the time they performed puja inside the shrine and came out, the whole area was engulfed with fog and there was a strong possibility of torrential rain over the mountains. The bus was scheduled to leave late afternoon, but everybody was keen to leave immediately.
The cause of concern for the devotees was obviously the journey down the mountains. The slippery rocks and narrow roads covered with potholes were as much frightening to the devotees as it was a pain in the neck for the drivers who regularly drove on these rough roads. When the devotees came out of the shrine and saw the fog around them, they unanimously made a decision to leave before it started raining. The bus driver and his helper endorsed their decision. Everything was set, except that one of the passengers was missing.
While counting heads, the driver realized that one passenger had not returned. Everybody was anxiously waiting for the delinquent passenger who failed to show up. It was already past noon. They waited for him long enough, for over an hour. The passengers started getting restless with every passing moment. Some of them began to suggest not waiting anymore, but the driver did not yield. He was conscious of the fact that the bus service to Kedarnath was seasonal and it was the last bus for the season. He knew it for sure that the let-down passenger would have to trek a distance of more than 40 miles to find some transport to the plains.
The missing passenger did not have any friends or acquaintances amongst the restless passengers who were now urging the driver to start the return journey. The driver asked the passengers to identify who was sitting with them when they arrived. In a matter of a few moments, everybody knew who the missing passenger was.
“He was a strange man,” said the person who finally declared that his co-passenger on the twin-seat had not turned up, “and he did not utter a word throughout the journey, not even a ‘jaikara’ (loud chanting in the name of God) , as if he was dumb. Even the food he was carrying was different, something like a wild shrub.”
“Yes, yes,” recalled another passenger, “he looked different. White skin and blue eyes like a foreigner, but surprisingly his hands and feet were cracked like laborers. And it was funny, he was walking bare feet.”
“Did you notice that he was wearing just a small piece of cloth to cover his private parts like an Adivasi? I was quite surprised to see him without any clothes in such a cold weather,” another passenger commented.
In no time, the man became the topic of discussion and almost everybody had something to say about him. But where was the missing passenger, remained the unanswered question as well as the problem.
The discussion about the mysterious passenger would have continued endlessly had the rain gods not sounded another alarm to the driver. It started drizzling. The driver looked at his watch and with his experience on these deadly mountains and the rough, serpentine, and ruthless terrain, he made a quick decision and started the engine. The atmosphere echoed with holy chants of the devotees “ Jai Shiv Shankar… Jai Mahadev… Bam Bam Bhole ” and the next moment the bus was moving down the hill.
The owners of the makeshift shops in the vicinity of the shrine had also noticed that the missing passenger looked different and behaved differently. One of them told the rest that soon after getting out of the bus, instead of paying his obeisance to Lord Shiva in the holy shrine, the strange devotee quickly moved past the shrine and started moving towards higher terrains of the Himalayas in the direction of Kailash Parbat . The shopkeepers were also concerned because the last bus had already left and the mysterious passenger was still up in the higher mountain ranges. They decided to search for him after the rain stopped.
***
Harvard Square was lively as usual and they were sitting near the window, their usual chatting corner in Grendel’s Den . The trio was enjoying every bit of their nostalgic memories of MIT. It was a memorable get-together for them soon after their graduation, as it was a goodbye party to Hitoshi.
After gulping the last sip from his Red Stripe , Philip to