RainDrops

I found the notebook in a second-hand shop in Fort Kochi, sandwiched between a mildew-stained hymn book and a shipping ledger with the ink eaten away like lace. The shopkeeper said it came in a trunk from "some foreign-return family" and he did not care for it because the pages smelled of salt even after a hundred monsoons. The cover was plain. No title. No name. Only a faint stamp, half rubbed out, that looked like an official seal. When I opened it, the first line was dated in a steady hand. April 1907 If you are reading this, then either I have become brave enough to send it, or I have become something that no longer needs bravery. What follows is not a tale I invented to frighten myself in the dark. It is my account, written with the only weapon left to a man who has lost his place in the world: words. And if you think a disease is the only horror in this story, you are still safe in your ignorance. The Summons My name is   Shankara Menon, born near the backwaters, raised...

Night had folded itself over the sleepy hill town of Marayoor, muffling its cardamom-scented air. In a hollow near the old forest check-post sat an abandoned government bungalow, once used by botanists who mapped the shola groves. Over thirty years the roof tiles had slipped into crooked smiles and the verandah planks had sprouted white mushrooms that glowed faintly after rain. Local tea pickers swore that the place breathed on misty evenings, but nobody bothered to prove or disprove that claim because the front door was chained shut with a rust-eaten padlock. Nobody, that is, until Amala reached the gate one September afternoon. She was a postgraduate researcher from Ernakulam, tasked with cataloguing archival field notes rumored to be languishing inside the bungalow. Those notes belonged to Dr Varghese, a vanished botanist whose last expedition never made it back to town. The department had sent three interns in the past decade to retrieve his materials, yet the gate had always def...