Saugat's Short Fiction

What people found special about Leader Guillermo, the great former dictator of much of the entire world, was not the trajectory of his rise, his upward mobility from humble beginnings, and the almost total separation between what he became and what he used to be, but rather the endurance of his power, the number of years he had managed to exceed his rivals, and even the kind of consistency that they noticed on his face and form—how nothing looked to be tarnished or ever pale, neither with worry nor even with the passage of time that inflicted gashes on everything else.  When Channel 5 attempted a celebratory documentary on the 50th anniversary of his reign, they were hard pressed not to find people willing to talk about his power. Everybody, it seemed, knew him, even at the time when he was a rather humble fellow. It was as if no more than a change of garbs had declared him to be powerful, and he was already the leader of the world though long before the celebratory gesture o...

When he was coming down the stairs and onto the city street, Bill had actually felt quite fine. So strange of the doctor to ask about his walk down the stairs, which was brisk and composed, as always, as it had to be, he felt,  during office hours. Maybe the doctor was thinking of exertion, but Bill never felt tired in a draining sort of way. He had greeted his co-worker with a casual wave, and paused to look at the new issue of Golf Digest which a man had just brought in on his squeaking trolley, and then he had proceeded to go outside. The brisk, no-nonsense-cold city air had hit him straight on the face, and, as he was caught in the middle of an inhale, right after a sigh, he inhaled some of it in too. Ice cold, that day, gray, no sign of the sun. It all came in a rush, in fact. A dizziness, more like. The doctor’s eyebrows furrowed again, looking confused on their own, and he pursed his lips. The doctor’s assistant wrote something on the clipboard, something, he really ...

When Doctor Reddy is in his lab with his interns, he talks about the idea of dependence in a very specific way. By dependence, he often says to the new interns who get the rare visit to his lab, he does not mean the matter of two seemingly independent objects existing in a relation, such as an apple existing on—and thereby depending upon—a table. Rather, he always means an ‘essential dependence’ between a part and a whole, by which he means that, all else being equal, when one part changes, the whole changes just ‘by definition,’ by the simple fact that one of its parts has changed.  After saying this to the interns, Dr Reddy likes to gaze out the window at the gray Bangalore sky that mirrors his hair’s glow, and raise a hand as if about to recite a line or two of his favorite classical philosophy and interrupt the hesitant thoughts of the new interns at all he has said already. The cloud blanket turns into a marker of finitude for him vividly, and an intern even so complet...