| Karan Goyal | January 2026 | Short Story |
A sharper than usual April sun beats down on the clutter of Monday morning commuters. Skilfully, they manoeuvre past routine near-misses, somehow keeping the scene from crumbling into pandemonium. The toasty aftermath of the city’s coldest winter in a decade feels almost vengeful in its arrival. Temperatures are expected to soar above forty-five degrees Celsius. Even the old Banyan on the busy sidewalk is seldom able to prevent, under its shade, those frequent salty trickles from being irritably brushed off.
The boy hunched beneath it seems annoyed by something else. A tiny-winged intruder. It’s been disrupting his concentration nonstop. Amir whacks his arm and misses a third time. He should move closer to the action. He’ll have a better angle from the subway entry with fewer walkers obstructing his view.
But not a moment of what’s about to unfold must be missed.
The great closing, he likes to call it. How he envies all the first timers in the queue! They haven’t the slightest clue of what’s next – the magic they’re about to witness. How one wrong move, could be the tiniest of errors, is all it takes to render the entire buildup meaningless. Such is the precision required. Clearly, something he lacks after still not having put that fly out of its rotten existence.
Amir hasn’t been lucky enough to taste the drink yet. But the nimbusodawala’s artistry is enough proof that once he does, it’ll be worth the wait. Yes, in his eyes, this recent addition to the line of thelas is nothing short of an artist enacting his elegant masterpiece over and over, opening with the lining up of freshly washed glasses, the slicing of lemons into perfect crescents, the satisfying sight of them being squished, the tap of a spoonful of salt against the rim, which paves the way for the pouring of mysterious potions from those green yellow bottles, the hurried chucking of ice cubes, and finally kicking off the great closing, with the tucking of the screwdriver’s tip under the soda bottle’s toothed cap, till it gets the right kind of stuck, a downward push of palm against handle, a deafening THAK! launching the cap skywards (making Amir snicker at the thought of it landing in someone’s dal at the dhaba), the timed blocking and unblocking of the bottle’s mouth with the thumb to…
Amir mumbles a curse at his flow being disturbed again. That too during the last leg of his favourite segment. This time it’s not some unwanted buzzer. He recognizes the voices behind him. It’s that same lot at the dhaba again, being louder than usual. Trust them whining oldies to ruin the experience. Even the nimbusodawala had looked up for a moment. So did some of the first timers at the head of the queue.
One of the oldies accuses the TV of being more of a manipulator than an informer these days. Another reminisces the ‘good old days’ when they had just the one channel and fewer shows to choose from.
Isn’t simplicity relative, Amir wonders. What’s fancy now might be simple ten years later, so aren’t we still living the good old days?
Just then, the dhaba’s seventy-year-old owner, Pandit, lets out a ‘Hari Om!’ burp. It’s loud enough to not only obliterate Amir’s enlightening conclusion but also reach one-legged Raju under the flyover, who promptly goes back to staring through his plastic binoculars at the langar being prepared outside the Gurudwara. Chawal ki Kheer, he’d been told by one of the sevadars, is the sweet dish for the day. Just the thought of it makes his stomach grumble.
However, Traffic Constable Joshi is looking forward to their Dal Sabzi just as eagerly while sipping his nimbusoda and stroking his handlebar moustache. Especially after storming past breakfast this morning to get back at his missus after their heated argument last night. A decision he immediately regretted on realising she’d cooked him his favourite Poha.
The nimbusodawala receives another round of applause from impressed customers. Real badmaash that guy, grunts Joshi. Nothing special, this drink. But who wouldn’t think otherwise after seeing all that acrobatic tamasha!
A magnified visual of the constable’s drink pulls Amir away from everything. A mere speck in the godlike structure’s shadow, he stands before it, transfixed by its enormity, marvelling at a thousand drops that resemble little ornaments, trickling down the glassy exterior one at a time to lure him deeper into its spell.
A runaway from the recent communal unrest in Sarangpur, Amir had been roped quickly into the trade by Shambhu, the area’s notorious handler.
‘A respectable step forward from selling outdated toys, huh?’ Shambhu had croaked encouragingly while handing him a pile of yellow car cleaning cloths on his first day.
It hadn’t taken much to convince the boy. He’d seen enough back home to be more than grateful for whatever his new big brother had to offer. Besides, the soft pile did have a sheen far more appealing than the crummy toys he’d sell back home.
Pandit notices Amir licking his parched lips. Just yesterday, he had offered him money for a full glass. Enough for even a delicacy to go with it. But only to be refused again. He’d keep hearing his father’s voice, the boy had said, telling him the drink would taste a whole lot better if earned with his own hands and not someone else’s charity. He’d also admitted, rather funnily, to never quite understanding why, since his friends took money from other people all the time. They’d even indulge in the occasional pickpocketing to buy kebabs from ‘Roll Maal’, the takeaway joint on the other side of the flyover.
The traffic signal switches to red with a flash of urgency. It’s the longest one in the area. Almost 4 minutes. There’s always a handful trying to sneakily zigzag past, even after the switch, sometimes just to experience the thrill of being chased by a lathi-wielding Joshi. The rest just curse the coming wait and squeeze into every visible patch of grey.
Amir skips excitedly towards a big black car with his precious pile. It looks foreign. So do the people inside it. One of the women looks like someone he’s seen on TV. Or does she just look like her? He’s not sure. There’s another at the back with short hair. Both look a lot younger than the man at the wheel, who’s smoking what looks like an enormous cigarette. Again, Amir can’t tell if it’s a cigarette or something else. All he knows for certain is that he needs just one sale for half a glass of that sweet nimbusoda.
The last few days have been unkind to him, with nobody buying even a single cloth. And rightly so. Everything has re-aligned itself to gravitate mysteriously towards the holy brew. He must work harder now for a better reward. Isn’t that how the universe works?
So why should a simple cloth seller like him be an exception?
A sudden thud of cloth against glass startles all three in the car. The woman in front bursts out laughing. The short-haired one lends Amir a playful wink. He takes it as a positive sign and starts wiping the windshield when the window rolls down with a soft hiss.
‘Oye!’ growls the man, his face turning sinister. ‘Don’t touch my car!’
Amir stumbles back in fright. The short-haired one gestures for him to wait. She leans forward to whisper something in the man’s ear. He turns around and reacts unpleasantly. They start arguing. Amir hears engines groan back to life. The left side of the pattern on the light is gone. Soon he’ll hear frantic honking all around him. The woman in front tries pacifying the drama, but to no avail.
‘Okay, quickly give me one!’ finally grumbles the man to Amir, who’s now running alongside the car.
The same towering glass resurfaces his thoughts. Except it’s empty this time. But not for long, to his dismay. The elixir starts pouring from an unseen source. It quickly reaches high enough for its sweetness to hover just above the rim like an invisible halo, inviting him to grip the glass, perhaps even hold it against his cheek to feel its cool touch on this hot summer day.
‘We don’t have change, Chotu,’ the man yells with his head poked out the window.
A passing autorickshaw shouts at Amir for being in the way. But he’s still trying to catch every glimpse of the receding black car. One sale. That’s all he can think of. And the more he thinks of it, the more logical it seems to try persuading the shorthaired woman one last time. She couldn’t possibly be okay with her friend’s car being that dusty!
‘Amir, come back!’ howls Pandit from somewhere. ‘The light is still green! You’ll have an accident! Have you lost your… Watch out!’
Raju slaps his thigh and laughs out loud from the flyover’s shade at Pandit’s cries. You can always count on Amir to turn an ordinary afternoon into something electric! He checks the time on his new black Casio watch. It was gifted to him last Diwali by Shambhu and dons a display like that of the traffic light. Just a few more minutes for the Kheer. He lights a cigarette to tame his irked stomach and looks up just in time to see an elated Amir hurry towards the nimbusodawala with a note raised to the blinding sun.
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Karan Goyal is an IT Services professional based out of New Delhi, India who writes short stories and poems in his free time.
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Photo by Jan Dommerholt on Unsplash
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