Words From Vaish

THE HIT A man waited in an attic room in Srinagar . The room’s only door opened onto a narrow cast-iron spiral staircase to the shop below. The attic was dark with shadows in a dingy half-light. Dust motes danced in the dank air. The room was filled to overflowing with stacks of cartons and boxes. A nest of hosiery and ready-to-wear garments in transparent wrappings had been carefully arranged on an overturned display case. The man lay almost full-length in the nest, cradling a Kalashnikov AK-74 rifle. A length of twine was taped taut from the edge of the display case to a large gap in the broken slats of the shutters on the front window. An irregular patch of light, striped with bars of shadow, crept down the wall beneath the window and down on to the grimy floor. The gunman in the back of the room was invisible to any watchers out in the street. He wore a dark gray woolen balaclava mask that revealed only a narrow crescent-shaped area around the eyes, zip-up navy-b...

ROUND-THE-WORLD ROBYN “What goes out, comes around in the end.  It happened to my Mum and me, it really did. My Mum was born in New Zealand in 1899. She was the only daughter of a Welsh ship’s engineer and an Anglo-Irish seamstress, one Kathleen Ann Bailey. Sadly, Granddad Lloyd was drowned in a ferry disaster in 1909. He’d provided as well as he could for his family with his savings and an insurance policy, but it simply wasn’t enough. So, that year, Grandma Lloyd moved herself and Mum to India . She had relatives there in the British Raj, who promised to help her s et up a small tailoring business in Bengal Presidency, as it was called then. You could live quite well on a little there, in those days. Grandma and Mum set up shop in a small town upriver from Calcutta on the Hoogly. It was hard going initially because the native tailors were pretty good, and much cheaper too. But Grandma could do the European fashions for ladies and kids that they couldn’t. Both sh...

A Winter Vignette T he park was a patch of lawn fenced in by black iron railings and a privet hedge. It was a green oasis sandwiched between three rows of mews houses in a quiet housing estate. The people who lived there were mostly childless, so few kids at play  disturbed the neat rows of chrysanthemums, carnations and hollyhocks. Every morning, the girl in the window used to crank up her recliner bed. She would get into the wheelchair parked by her bedside and wheel herself to the big bay window at the end of her bedroom. The park below was as desolate as a cemetery in the pale fog of a cold December morning. At 7 o’clock sharp, the man from the Central Reserve Police Force wheeled his battered old bicycle down the gravel path from the main gate. On this morning, like so many others, he propped his locked bike against a tree and went into the gardener’s shed. The policeman came out a few minutes later, wearing a tracksuit with the letters CRPF stenciled o...

VANISHING ACT There was a gadget in the old Star Trek TV show that de-materialized people and then re-materialized them thousands or millions of miles away. This sounds like a fun way to travel; no waiting in queues for visas, no expensive airline bookings, no rotten flights for the air sick or those afraid of flying... But it wasn’t really much fun when it first happened. That was when the “gift” first manifested itself. “Gift” did I say? Curse, more like.  I didn’t notice at first, going to University College Cork and adjusting to hostel life for the first time has a way of distracting you. Attention-grabbing peers, the academic course load, etc. etc. also didn’t help. Anyway, I had a history of losing stuff since I was a wee colleen with flame-red hair in pigtails. So I chalked up the mysterious vanishing of sundry study materials and some of my personal kit to a natural propensity of mislaying my possessions and didn’t give it much further thought. Big m...