Where Fireflies Illuminate The Night

Here’s a piece of news from an alternate universe, very much like ours, yet different in varied degrees.

There, a young man, some fifty years or so earlier, had published a book of short stories, which he called ‘Where Fireflies Illuminate the Night’. In those stories, in a nostalgic way, the young author depicted the realities of the place where he was born, his mother’s land, a land of endless possibilities and eternal struggles, a land of savage beauty and wonderous colours, a land owned by a river, owned by the people who travelled from all four corners of the world and decided to call this a home, a land timeless as time itself. And he added a helpful sub-title: Stories from Assam.

Some say those magical stories were very popular when the book was published fifty years or so ago. Strangely, however, no copies of the book is currently available. Oh, in that alternate universe, very much like ours, yet different in varied degrees, computers have not been invented.

This last existing cover was found in the sack of a travelling mendicant, one of those few men who can travel between the universes, effortlessly, and apparently without any notice; for, for them, all universes are the same; all universes are a trap, a machine to punish the flesh, a living, breathing Iron Maiden.