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A woman can perceive the dead and that is still not the darkest part of her existence. Reading time: 7 minutes. The Broken Pendant S he moved around the dark living room, trying to get to the hall without bumping into anything and surprisingly, she did. It was as if she had moved through the furniture. The clouds rumbled over her head in the sky although the rain had stopped. She put the dish in the sink and went back to the living room ignoring the young woman who stood in the hallway, with her torn up dress and her face hidden behind her messy hair, both covered in dirt and blood. She sat on the couch, in complete darkness and dead silence. The only thing that could be heard was the remnants of the storm that had now calmed down. She moved her head towards the window and looked outside. Another woman stood just outside the window, old, this one but with somewhat the same appearance—clothes, dirty, torn-up, and bloodied; face, hidden behind her bushy hair also covered in dirt an

A forest guard's account of the final case of his life that made him retire from his job. Reading time: 23 minutes. The Forest Never Forgets 1 The year was 1993. I listened to the downpour on the shed of the local administration office of my district's forest department as I waited for the Forest Officer who, like usual, was late and going to be later because of the heavy rain. Everything looked grey and discoloured. A gloom covered the village. There was no sound except for the rain on the shed. I sat thinking, in a dark hallway with no lights because of the power cut due to the rain. I remembered my last few weeks as the newly appointed Forest Guard here and it gave me a strange feeling. I had been a forest guard for three decades. All my colleagues got promoted, one even got retired and I was still doing this job. In those thirty years, I had seen some unsettling things that kept me awake at night, or I should say days because that’s when I used to sleep. Maybe that was