Excerpt from “Metamorphoses”

That was it then.  There could be no reprieve.  It was over.  Stopped with the finality of a defective watch.   

Pankaj crossed the street, scarcely aware of the horns of auto-rickshaws honking like over-excited geese.  Their drivers shouted at him, making frenzied signals with their arms, nimbly swerving on three wheels to avoid him. 

He joined the throbbing mass of bodies pushing forward in the dusty heat. Nobody noticed him as he passed through them slowly. He felt numb and invisible, a non-person, looking down on himself, struggling to find his reflection in this unheeding throng. 

He might as well have been an ant, he thought…but he was far too aimless for that now.  Ants, after all, had purpose.  His had just been stopped in its tracks, removed out of existence, an empty shell for whom time had ceased being measured in heart-beats.  For whom time had ceased.