That is the quality of drunkards, they have a lot of friends. Because what men find most endearing in other men are their tragic flaws.

There is a crowd outside the main door, talking softly about the death as if they don’t want the dead man to know that he is gone.

A man on a bike was riding on the pavement. When he tried to plunge into the road, a car hit him. He fell down but managed to get up. He looked shocked. That, Ayyan loved. After riding like a moron all over the place, observe the face of an Indian when he crashes. He is stunned.

He realized in an instant that all the philosophers he had read, all the religions, even Einstein, even J. Krishnamurti, were saying the same thing in different ways – there is a shocking truth hiding behind the world that we see, behind the ordinary days of our lives. God is not a lie, but some kind of an abridged version of this reality, a beginner’s course that has been misunderstood.

And one day, very soon in fact, Adi would be an adolescent. An adolescent son of a clerk. A miserable thing to be in this country. He would have to forget all his dreams and tell himself that what he wanted to do was engineering. It’s the only hope, everyone would tell him. Engineering, Adi would realize, is every mother’s advice to her son, a father’s irrevocable decision, a boy’s first foreboding of life.

A mysterious character of UFOs is that they are sighted only in the First World,′ she said, ’and no alien conquest of Earth begins until the mayor of New York holds an emergency press conference. When Mars attacks, it attacks America.

It is an inevitability that masquerades as a decision. That is the way of a drunkard. He grants himself the dignity of choice, as if there is another option. But then is there really any choice in the world? Could it be that every human action is merely an inevitability masquerading as a human decision, life granting dignity to its addicts through the delusion of choice?

Rather as an epitaph tells the story of a whole life in the hyphen between two dates.

That a mystery must have a resolution is obviously not a requirement of nature. It is, in fact, another deceit of writers.

Thoma has never understood why this moment means so much to his mother. Criticism of tea is hardly a matter that should affect a clever woman like her. But Unni did tell him one day that in the words of some women there was great injustice that only other women could decipher. ‘It is not about the tea, Thoma, it is never about the tea.