Sweet 'n' Sour Sagas

It was a cold moonless night. The sky was a sooty indigo canvas with only a few fragments of it visible through the canopy of trees, like strewed pieces of an impossible jigsaw puzzle. The chilly air carried a fragrance of leaves and marshy earth as it gingerly turned foggy.  "Turn right in next 100 meters." announced the GPS.  The car moved steadily at 60 kmph, all one could see out of the windows was the patch of highway briefly lit by the headlights and hear was the radio that played the latest tunes. "Watch out!" shrieked Zain when he saw a flood of headlights racing toward them from the opposite direction. The car came to a screeching halt before they could turn right.  Everything froze, Zain could no longer hear the song playing out of radio or chew the gum that sat on his frozen tongue. The highway that offered nothing but trees along it, for a company had suddenly bestowed them with a biker gang for...

"What shall we cook today for lunch?" enquired Neelu, dressed in a peacock blue salwar kameez sipping her morning tea post breakfast. In her mid-40’s, Neelu is beautiful in the most classical way. She is a little over five feet and four inches with a gorgeously sculpted face that is home to a pair of hazelnut brown eyes rondure with alluring hickory spheres that reminds one of the earth kissed by summer rains which promises to stir life into dormant seeds and a cloud of kohl-black hair with few silvers that fall well beyond the shoulder in soft curls seamlessly. Summer vacation and her recess from lunch packing for a month was here and she decided to visit her sister Numa in the city for couple of days along with her kids.  No matter what the season is or which day of the year it is, the prime question after every meal a mother asks is "Kya khana hai ______ ko?", where the blank can be filled with any segment of the day. ...