Rail   -   6'57"

"Now an interminable mail-train passed on the railway tracks that formed the horizon visible in the gaps between the houses on the other side of Vidyasagar Road. For a while, all the other local and habitual noises, of birds and cars, were subsumed under the long, swelling note of the mail-train whistle, which, with its lone trumpeting, made the air vibrate around one. After, when the train had gone, the air was cleansed, and the room was as quiet as its reflection in the dressing-table mirror, with Oil of Olay, Lacto-calamine, Vaseline, Ponds Dream Flower Talc and two lipsticks arranged carefully, with all devotion and seriousness, on the shelf before it."

Amit Chaudhuri - "Waking"

viLi aparatAm  -  11'06"

"I glimpsed a man in a loincloth prone on the roadside, his right arm outstretched, a brown coconut at the end of his fingers. I watched how this glistening figure propelled himself. He placed a small cushion on the hot asphalt beside the coconut, prostrated himself with his middle on the cushion, reached for the coconut with his right hand and stretched his arm in an arc to put it at his fingertips' end, as a rugby player holds the ball for a goal-kicker. He rose, moved the cushion beside the coconut and repeated the process. Trucks roared inches from his head, horns shrieking, rocking his body. Every fifty yards or so, he left the coconut, walked back and retrieved his mobile temple. This was a four-wheeled cart, painted orange, decorated with pictures of gods and fitted with a cassette player and a battered red conical loudspeaker, a lamp and a stove, a torch, umbrella and containers of sugar, milk and tea. He pulled the temple up to the coconut and restarted the punishing process."

Trevor Fishlock - "After Gandhi"

Dolmens  -  5'45"

"Air India had given me a free plane ticket on the assumption that I would go up into the Nilgiri Hills and write about sambars and sloth bears, tigers and tahrs - and figured that if I publicised their eco-tours, then lots of rich Americans might follow me, enabling them to accomplish what they eachaspired to do, which, because they were young men, was either to pay for a marriage to a Brahmin or else fly to California and go hang-gliding in the Sierras."

Edward Hoagland - "Wild Things"

Arcotia  -  5'22"

"They used to make pickles, squashes, jams, curry powders and canned pineapples. And banana jam (illegally) after the FPO (Food Products Organisation) banned it because according to their specifications it was neither jam nor jelly. Too thin for jelly, too thick for jam. An ambiguous consistency, they said. As per their book."

Arundhati Roy - "God of Small Things"

Munjikal  -  3'02"

"Masterji's spellbinding melody had neither a beginning nor an end, so at one point he arbitrarily left off playing the harmonium and burped loudly, as if to say that he had digested his breakfast and was now ready for applause and sweetmeats."

Ved Mehta - "Coming Down"