The Collected Short Fiction of Chintu Parekh

This is a book that has never been written. Its author, a short, inconsequential man with a toothpick mustache and impeccable teeth, was never alive. He has no mother or father, no wife or children. He doesn't wake up in the morning to the shrill eruption of an alarm clock. His feet don't slide into plush slippers, his morning shower isn't hot, his breakfast table isn't sprinkled with cornflakes or toastcrumbs. The train station near his house isn't crowded with strangers who aren't waiting for him to occupy his usual seat opposite them. They shuffle on to the train without him and open up their newspapers as if he never existed. They are wise.

Chintu Parekh does not work. He knows nothing of paychecks or deadlines or income tax. He doesn't ride an elevator to the sixth floor and follow a frayed carpet to a cubicle decorated with family photographs. There are no telephones that insist for his attention, no emails that flash across his screen waiting for an urgent response. He doesn't carry a lunchbox smelling of sandwiches. At lunchtime, when all the others are busy inhaling the exotic aromas of takeout or frilly home-cooked leftovers, Chintu Parekh doesn't sniff the air and feel his heart break at the hint of parathas. He doesn't nurture any colleagues or water-cooler alliances. No woman waits patiently for his attention or fastens any hopes of a secure future on to him. He does not carry a cellphone. He certainly never sends text messages. When work ends, Chintu Parekh does not go to bars or nightclubs. Not wishing to be comforted by strangers, he subscribes to no carnal virtue.

In the evening, when night closes around him and the dinner plates are never cleared away, he doesn't sit at his desk and write about his life. He has no ambitions or regrets, no disappointment or failures that haunt him to eloquence. ("Chintu Parekh, Kahan jaa rahe ho?" is never a question he asks himself.) He does not feel his soul shrivel with loneliness at the thought of a life spent alone among shadows and strangers. There have no been no past loves, no failed affairs. He does not excavate through memory to locate slivers of contentment, measures of a live well-lived. Chintu Parekh cannot do that. He was never alive.