Short Story: The Megalopolis by Dwaipayan Bose

In this short story, Dwaipayan Bose tells the tale of a couple and how their lives turn topsy-turvy in a short span of time.

(Trigger Warning: Has mentions of rape)

Every night after dinner, leaving her husband Tanmay to the intrigue of television serials, Sucharita would pull a beanie over her head, slip into her sneakers, climb down a stone staircase at the edge of a green patch that is her garden and hit Ringking Pong Road. Her destination would be nowhere in particular – an understandable target if you are at a hill station like Kalimpong, in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, where the narrow winding roads with neither a starting point nor an end form loops around human dwellings that hug the slopes for dear life.

At that time of night, the hill town would be three-fourths asleep and quiet as a monk. Even the soft soles of Sucharita’s sports shoes hitting the ground would create a ruckus.

“Where are you now? Out for your Bat Walk?” Her mother called on a Wednesday night from Patna, the capital of the neighbouring state of Bihar, as Sucharita walked past the colonial Elgin Hotel, once the home of a jute baron.