“Simla, newly-washed by the afternoon rain, sparkled in the sun. As they made their way through Lakkar Bazaar, Kishore and Bhaskar saw shopkeepers wiping down shop fronts and lugging out wares that had been pulled inside when the storm burst.

‘Ma will be furious,’ Bhaskar said as they passed an old Bhutia, hunched under a load of skins as smelly and weathered as him. ‘We’ve never been this late before.’

‘It’s never rained so hard before. Chaachi knows we can’t play cricket in the rain.'”

I’ve been very busy the past few weeks, working on the latest Muzaffar Jang book. But, since I’m also incorrigibly fond of writing short stories, I do take out time now and then to write yet another. So here’s one: ‘Just Like Hutton’.

Published in the latest issue of the literary magazine Earthen Lamp Journal, this is a story that I’d initially written years ago, in a much shorter form. It brings together a lot of things that are dear to me: history (of course!), the Himalayas, cricket, and the concept of prejudices, biases, the darkness that lives within each of us and sometimes clouds our minds…

Click here to read the entire story.