The Shelvankars' Ventures

April 1st, 2014 11.30 a.m. Mrs. Anaysha Shelvankar had carefully read an article on social media. Then, with the dry chuckle which was her nearest approach to a laugh, she handed her laptop to me. “For a farrago of the contemporary and the of the medieval, of the empirical and of the wildly fanciful, I think this is surely the damper,” said she. “What do you make of it, Ronit?” The article read as follows: “Rishi Pathak, a 22-year-old man from India’s Madhya Pradesh state, has recently accused his wife of drinking his blood on a regular basis, for the last three years. Although it sounds like the story of a cheap vampire movie, young Rishi swears he’s telling the truth and even bears the scars to prove it. He and his wife, Nilansha Pathak, employees in the IT Sector, got married in 2010, in Indore. A few months later, she started drawing blood from his veins, emptying the contents of the syringe into an empty glass and drinking the contents. She threatened to do t...

19th July 2012 8.15 am Anaysha’s office: Mrs. Anaysha Shelvankar, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not fitful occasions when she was up all night, was seated in her high back chair in her office. I stood on the rug with a couple of cups of coffee. Her entire attention was riveted to an amber kerchief.  “When will you stop entering my office in your manky sandals?” she said. “Uh-Oh! Sorry! I was in a hurry. I couldn’t find you at the breakfast table. Anyway, here’s your coffee”, I said as I sat down facing her pensive visage.  “Tell me Ronit. What do you make of our visitor’s kerchief? Since we’ve been so infelicitous as to miss the person and have no notion of her errand, this accidental souvenir becomes of importance. Let me hear you reconstruct the person by an examination of this kerchief”, Anaysha said while she took a sip of her coffee. “How do you know our visitor is a she?” I said. “Well, I can get a smell of jasmine from this kerchief, and...