Scheherazade

From the windows, one could see the shore line, darkly comical, mottled with ash slivers and cucumber cradles of charcoal. Curtains on the window had by now become so thick with caked ash that they had acquired a life of their own. From the bedroom window, Arjun looked at the neighbors’ windows. They looked like they were secreting muck and salivating slivers of ashen cake. He seized the blanket’s edge and cello-taped it back to the window frame. Each curtained window was plastered by a pair of blankets over it. Ash had to be put away at any cost. Cosmic Poop is the story of three survivors in a post-apocalyptic world. Maulya, an avid diary writer who teased her readers with non-linear narratives; her husband, Arjun, who wore a mask that projected out like a dog’s muzzle, dark brown in colour, porous and aquiline; and her father, BLN, a misanthropic old man who threw his head back and shrugged to signify that he hated everything around him.