Vidya After her breathing had normalised, she caught hold of her senses and sat up. That is when the enormity of the situation hit her. She was sitting in a dark room of an old man's house, stark naked with only her ornaments on her - the mangalsutra, the toe rings and the green bangles - all of which implied that she was married and could have a conjugal r...
To call the past week surreal would have been the understatement of several lifetimes. Vidya had been there when Captain DuPont -- for reasons that still baffled her -- split the research team into two divisions. One, the larger, would be sent down to the surface of Arcadia, to continue researching magic in safe environment. This had struck her as odd. While...
2009 had started well. I'd gone over to Europe during the Christmas and New Year fortnight and then come back to India and headed straight for Sunita's village where her younger sister was getting married. Bahadur travelled with me by train to a town called Jaunpur and from there we'd taken a bus to the village. Sunita was of course extremely surprised since...
This is purely a work of fiction. Vidya: The entire village was abuzz with the arrival of a new dame, married to the village chieftains son Prakash. Prakash was a young and dashing son of the most progressive village chieftain. Not only was he educated in the neighbouring town and had completed graduation but also married the lady of his choice which was a...
Bone deep weariness suffused Vidya, from her toes to her bones. She had never felt quite so exhausted before in her life -- even at the worst crunch during her training to join with the space survey. That had been several weeks of training on the Indian lunar colony. She had trained in both hard vac-suits and in mechanical counterpressure suits, and gone thr...
This story is set in the Delhi Nights universe and makes reference to previous stories, but it isn't necessary to have read those stories to enjoy this one. Thanks for reading. *** Rahul stepped out onto the balcony of the hotel room and looked out at the twinkling lights of Delhi spread before him. The air was humid and warm with the charged scent of an...
Qasim glanced from the scroll he was studying and at the desk beside him. Sprawled across it, like an ungainly mop of scales and fur, was his draconic companion, T'ien Lung Hua Ling, the Celestial Dragon of the Magnificat Dawn. He was snoring and beginning to drool on an illustration that their instructor had claimed was the diagram of the Five Most Ordered...
Spacer First Class Jianhong Qasim found that traveling through an alternate universe was remarkably similar to traveling through the one he had been born in. This suited him. The week that the People's Shield had spent in an uneasy orbit in the Saturnine system with the Russians, Americans and Indians looming within ten thousand kilometers had been filled wi...
Lucas slowly opened his eyes -- his body throbbing with fatigue -- and the first thing he saw was the headless corpse, drifting slowly by. The blood that still globbed from the severed neckstump was floating in a glittering trail of wobbling, spherical stars. They were a medtech, and they were otherwise unharmed. It was almost cartoonish -- save for the hide...
Okay. I fell off the tread mill. I was talking on the phone to Crowley and misstepped. The thing dumped me on my ass. I was trying to keep the phone to my ear and wrenched my back something awful. I went to a back doctor and he put me in two days of traction. Shit. Visions of Bethlynn danced in my head and a new clock ticked in my brain. I was laid up for a...