Razor Blood and Other Tales - Short Fiction, Silent, 2007

Sadasivan. A loner, living in the past.

His memories constantly build memorials within him. He waits endlessly... in the great memorial, like an enormous spider weaving its web. Prey? Or other memories?

Sadasivan was born forty five years ago. His youth was awakened by the thunder of spring*. It never became a huge fire. A small flame, now alive, now dead.

As the ends of political banners tied to two coconut palms, his life brightened up briefly. Did it all die out with the timely intervention of the police? Even today, Inspector Narayanan's battalion - that did not allow villages to round-up cities - conducts route march in his veins.

Sadasivan. Today, a barber. The sea within him has become peaceful.

Marx, Engels and Lenin remain but framed gazes in his shop. Their memories awaken only when his body pain - presented during his revolutionary period by Inspector Narayanan - awakens.

Isn't it a normal for Inspector Narayanan to visit a barber shop for a shave? And yet, for Sadasivan, that visit was like that of the teacup in Marcel Proust'** novel.

The chair in the barber shop rotated. Marx and Engels closed their eyes. Above them, an electric bulb continued to glow.

Sadasivan, walking on the glass bridge of memory, got a double barrel gun of revenge. It did not take long for the gun to become the razor. So much blood in an ordinary policeman's body? Sadasivan wondered. He realized that death is a phenomenon taking place in dreams alone; revenge, in the wings of memories.