Fiction: How a middle-class man lives a regular life (before getting a credit card that ruins it)
An excerpt from ‘Scent of the Nameless’, by Geet Chaturvedi, translated from the Hindi by Anita Gopalan.
Black News 
Morning struck me like a slap of sunlight. I shuffled onto the balcony, the sun already high and blazing in the sky. My body burned partly from oversleeping, partly from the four showers I’d taken in the span of four hours during the night. The stink just wouldn’t go away. I sniffed at my body. It didn’t reek – no, the pure unfiltered stench of sweat was wafting from my armpits, where it had concentrated overnight, thickening and intensifying. I didn’t even want to think of the smell that had already ruined my night and was now seeping into my day. How was I supposed to go to the office after waking up this late? To be honest, I didn’t even feel the slightest urge to work. Such sheer listlessness was rare for me. From inside the house came the morning clatter of dishes being scoured and rinsed.
I went in and asked, “How did you sleep?”
“It was alright,” she said, dumping the wet tea leaves from the pot onto a piece of foil.
I lit my first cigarette of the morning.
“It got damn hot last night, didn’t it?”
“That’s why I tell you, take a shower before bed. All that exhaustion, dust and grime from...
