Short Story: Leap Day by Utkarsh Sharma

Winter had worn off like an old sock, and an urgent, prickly summer under the garb of spring had creeped in. February had grown like a welt that year. Amin did not know if it was the sun’s temperate gaze or the flames from the shops underneath that were causing this rise in temperature. He, and the six members of his family, were perched at the roof of a two-storey house － the Trivedi Villa, a two storey building of a grossly utilitarian fashion; they were tenants on the first floor.

“Who knew,” Amin thought to himself. “Those were all stories back then.” That which he saw seemed to him truer than the stories that his family － his parents, their parents, his aunts and uncles － had muffled with sibilant utterances at dinner tables and family unions at Eid. The reverberating screeches held up in those voids of conversation seemed anticipatory or rather a product of years of one who has listened to them and realised their incomprehensibility. Amin had been following the news about student presence on the streets since December; he had even participated a couple of times himself without his family’s knowledge but after a photograph of him protesting appeared on the family group, his movements were greatly restricted.