Foreword
With the addition of ‘Prey on the Prowl’ to my body of work, I thought the accretion was over without short story genre. Not that I didn’t try my hand at that, indeed I did, but finding the output wanting, I didn’t refill my pen again.
Maybe, literature was keen to have my contribution in this fictional sphere as well, so it seems, as beginning from July 2015, Vinita Dawra Nagia came up with “Write India Campaign of Times of India”. Her idea was to let the aspiring writers build their stories on the ‘prompts’ provided by eleven of India’s popular authors starting with Amish Tripathi.
When I penned Ilaa’s Ire on Amish’s prompt, it felt like I had crossed the unassailable frontier, and thereafter, for the next ten months, thanks to the prompts by Chetan Bhagat, Aswin Sanghi, Ravi Subramanian, Preeti Shenoy, Tuhin A. Sinha, Ravinder Singh, Durjoy Datta, Madhuri Banarjee, Jaisree Misra and Anita Nair, I had experienced the joy of short story writing.
That in the end, I could pen my Twelfth Tale, sans any prompting, perhaps, is a testimony to the success of Vinita’s Write India Campaign.
Story 1) Ilaa’s Ire
Story 2) ‘201’ Qualms
Story 3) “?”
Story 4) Cupid’s Clue
Story 5) Autumn Love
Story 6) A Touch Affair
Story 7) Love’s How’s That?
Story 8) A Hearty Turn
Story 9) Love Jihad
Story 10) Tenth Nook
Story 11) Eleventh Hour
Story 12) Twelfth Tale