Thoughts too short to be stories

The landlord has raised your rent every year except this one. Instead he has left a sealed envelope and told you to open it only if he dies.

You have been sending your mother voice notes every day for a year. Her phone has been in your sister's drawer the whole time.

The local cinema still runs one show of the same 1987 film every Friday at noon. The ticket counter says it is always sold out.

Your new tenant pays in old five-hundred notes, the ones banned in 2016. Every one of them is crisp and in sequence, and every one is real.

Your father's cycle has hung on the verandah wall for twelve years. This morning the tyres are full and there is mud on them.

A girl at the bus stop has been reading the same novel for three months, one page a day. You have started buying a copy to keep pace with her.

The panchayat has voted to move the whole village two kilometres to the east. Only the oldest woman knows why, and she has stopped speaking.

Every Diwali your neighbour bursts exactly one cracker at 3 a.m. This year you went out to see, and he was already waiting with two.

The ration shop owner has kept a page for your family since 1994. Last week he wrote a new name on it, in pencil, and refuses to say who.

Your father's pension still comes on the first of every month. He died in March. The bank says he signed for it on Tuesday.

A wrong number has called you every Sunday at nine for six years. Today, for the first time, the caller asks how you are.

The tailor on your lane stitches a secret pocket into every blouse he makes. Half the women in the colony know. None of their husbands do.

Your grandmother's recipe book has one page sewn shut with red thread. She has asked for it to be cremated with her.

At the Vijayawada junction a porter has carried the same empty trunk onto every Howrah train for twenty years. Tonight someone finally claims it.

Two families booked the same function hall for the same muhurtham. Neither will move, so the cooks have started a single menu for both weddings.

The school bell has rung at 4:10 every day since the school shut down in 2009. Nobody in the village has climbed up to check.

Your daughter has started answering the landline in your late mother's voice. The calls she takes are for your mother, too.

After thirty years in the Gulf, your uncle is home for good. He keeps setting his alarm for the morning shift, and he keeps going somewhere.

The village well returns everything thrown into it exactly one year later. This morning it gave back a wedding ring nobody admits to losing.

Your boss sends a thumbs-up to every message, including the one where you resigned. On Monday your salary arrives doubled.

Every exam season the hostel warden leaves a flask of filter coffee outside one door. This year it is outside yours, and you don't drink coffee.

A man in a white Ambassador has attended every funeral in Guntur district for a decade. Nobody knows him. Today he is at your grandfather's.

Your wife keeps a second toothbrush in the bathroom cupboard, still in its packet. She has bought a fresh one every month since your wedding.

The cyclone took the roof, the cow and the coconut trees. It left your neighbour's locked steel almirah standing in your courtyard.

The astrologer matched your horoscope with a girl from Nellore and gave it thirty-six out of thirty-six. He adds that he has never seen one so dangerous.

In your town the barber knows everyone's secrets and has never told one. On his last day before retiring he tells them all, alphabetically.

Your brother's Aadhaar card lists a different father. Your mother laughs at it and says it's a typo. Your father has gone very quiet.

At midnight the RTC bus to Tirupati stops at a bus stand that was demolished years ago. One passenger always gets down there.