Anil Aggarwal's "The Mysterious Old Man" (short story, forensic mystery, free)

An old man demonstrates a "trick" at a party: just by dipping his right hand fingers in a glass of room-temperature water, he can bring the water to a boil!

A forensic doctor present during the demonstration gets curious, & ends up unraveling the cause of a kind of death that has mystified doctors since antiquity.

Fact sheet.

First published: Spandan, 1989-1990. (Is the online copy a translation from Hindi?)
Rating: B.
Download full text from author's site. (Is it a translation from Hindi?)
Related: Stories of Anil Aggarwal.

Anil Aggarwal's "The Mystery of the Dead Infant" (short story, recessive genes, free): Was the newborn murdered, or was he stillborn?

A little unnamed town somewhere in lower Himalayas in India. A woman gives birth in a local hospital, & passes out. Outside the delivery room, her husband & father hear the infant's first cry.

Circumstances conspire to leave the newborn alone in the room for 5 minutes during the first 15 minutes of his life - at the end of which, he's found dead. Doctor & nurse on duty claim the boy was stillborn.

During those 5 minutes, there was a man around the delivery room who had a motive for murder. He's arrested, particularly because autopsy finds signs of strangulation around the baby's neck & the signs that the child did breath at least once after being born.

Accused claims innocence & moves mountains to ensure that there is a second autopsy. This is the story of the second autopsy & what it uncovers.

Caution: Story includes bits about human biology & related infodumps.

Fact sheet.

First published: ? Probably sometime in 1990s. Where?
Rating: B.
Download full text from author's site.
Related: Stories of Anil Aggarwal.

Anil Aggarwal's "The Mystery of the Burnt Bride" (short story, environment, free): Could air pollution be affecting human evolution?

A much better variation of author's "The Mystery of the Drowned Man".

Some years back, there were two events in India that attracted a lot of media attention:

1. A series of murders - mostly in the North - of young recently married women. Suspects were in-laws. Cause - dowry. And with similar methods of killing - a staged fire accident in kitchen. Over the years, I've sometimes heard of convictions, but they inevitably get less media attention than gruesome murders.
2. Some citizen groups in Delhi took the government to courts over the quality of air in the city. I doubt Delhi still has great air quality, but virtually all (half-hearted) air quality norms of municipal corporations in India happened after this. Or such is the impression I'm carrying.

I don't recall the dates of the two events, but I've a feeling both must have been current events at the time this story was written - which would place them sometime in mid-1990s. Both have influenced the plot.

Story makes a reference to a law that in certain crimes, it's accused who has to show innocence in court rather than prosecution proving his guilt. I'm no lawyer, but I think the author is extending imagination here. Even the anti-terror laws discussed in parliament in the wake of Bombay terror attacks in November 2008 threw out proposals that would have placed the onus of proving innocence on accused; it's always prosecution's job. Of course, there are cases where cops are biased.

Story summary.

Sarita, a recently married woman, has died in a fire accident in kitchen at home, & the police officer has formed the opinion that it's a dowry murder.

Doctor doing the postmortem (narrator) has to find out weather she was dead at the time she came into contact with fire - which will be conclusive proof of murder. Or if she was still alive at the time, which kind of leaves the possibility of a genuine accident open.

Normally a straight-forward autopsy procedure, some events complicate it. But result is a new medical discovery - the dead woman was carrying a genetic mutation that made her better cope with carbon monoxide pollution in the air.

Fact sheet.

First published: Spandan, 1996-97.
Rating: A.
Download full text from author's website.
Related: Stories of Anil Aggarwal.

Anil Aggarwal's "The Mystery of the Drowned Man" (short story, free): Biological basis of drug addiction

This is as original as most of Anil's fiction, but is probably his longest story I've seen so far (most of his work appears to be flash fiction length). It also has a lot of info dumping. Read it for the idea rather than entertainment.

Government propaganda tells us that drug addiction is a bad, in fact criminal, thing. What if people differ sufficiently in their metabolism that what is poison to one is sugar to another? That's the basic idea of this story.

Story summary.

There was "some rather dubious evidence that Ramlal had been killed by Jagga and then thrown in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Gujrat." It's also known that he was a drug addict & might have drowned. How to prove if he was killed & then thrown into ocean, or entered water on his own & drowned?

This is the story of doctors piecing together the evidence from postmortem, & finding something new about human biology.

Fact sheet.

First published: Spandan, 1995-96.
Rating: B.
Download full text from author's website.

Anil Aggarwal's "The Weird House" (as by Marygold Gupta) (flash fiction, weird physics, free): Heinlein fanfic

A variation of Robert Heinlein's "- And He Built a Crooked House -". Nowhere near the skill of Heinlein, but with 2 original ideas:

1. 4D house came into being by converting time dimension into the fourth space dimension! So time doesn't exist inside the house!
2. To rectify time issue, the architect makes a mistake & turns 2 space dimensions of the 4D house into time dimensions during repair - so we now have 2 time & 2 space dimensions!

Fact sheet.

First published: ?
Rating: B.
Download full text from author's website.
Related: Anil Aggarwal's stories/feed.

Anil Aggarwal's "The New Antibiotic" (flash fiction, weird physics, free): Don't flip! (when transporting goods through fourth dimension)

Neat story concept based on a familiar trope, but with hand-wavy astronomy & very ordinary story telling.

Idea is: a familiar object moves through fourth dimension, but gets flipped before returning back to 3D space - so it's now a sort of "mirror image" of its original self! In Arthur Clarke's "Technical Error", a man gets flipped, & can no longer eat normal unflipped food! Here it's the other way round - a drug transported through 4D space got flipped, & the mirror image that came out is no longer effective!

Cool thing I liked was: if transport via fourth dimension is popular, you need one more label for goods transported - "Don't flip" - like "This side up" currently used on many packages!

Fact sheet.

First published: In Hindi as "Black Hole ke us paar" in Aaj newspaper, 3 February 1996. English translation is probably by author himself.
Rating: B
Download full text of English translation from Author's site.

Anil Aggarwal's "The Freak" aka "Time and Again" (flash fiction, time travel, free): A human anatomical adaptation necessary for time travel!

This is a very unusual time travel story; at least I've not seen anything like this before.

I'm unqualified to comment on parts of the story that deal with human anatomy - something central to the story. So I had to take author's assertions about that on faith.

Story summary.

An early human starship is captured by aliens, who treated its occupants as lab animals - doing extensive genetic modifications in the process. Centuries later, harassed descendants of those men return to earth - equipped with time travel capability.

So humanity now comprises of two species - "three dimensionals" & "four dimensionals". They cannot interbreed, but are otherwise compatible enough to live in the same society.

This is the story of the discovery, by the unnamed doctor narrator, of how "four dimensionals" differ from "three dimensionals" in an anatomical structure that help us balance when, e.g., walking. He's treating Rajiv, a "four dimensional", who suffers from an imbalance problem when traveling along time.

Rajiv will die, & his autopsy & later post-postmortems of healthy "four dimensionals", will reveal their difference. Inside the human "inner ear" (which one? both?), there is a structure comprising "three semicircular canals [that] are at right angles to each other, each representing a single dimension of space. Whenever someone tips in one or the other dimension, the otoliths inside the appropriate semicircular canal would start moving and activate the vestibular nerve which would send the information to the brain immediately. The brain would then send orders to proper muscles and joints to correct the body position." In healthy "four dimensionals", autopsy reveals this structure to be a "tesseract" - a projection of the 4D structure in 3D. Rajiv had this balancing structure similar to "three dimensionals"; so had problem balancing during time travel.

See also.

1. Lewis Shiner's "Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe"; download from Manybooks (Manybooks seems down at the time I'm posting; this link found via Google; should work when Manybooks comes back); F&SF, December 1983: Another story where aliens kidnap humans & use them as lab animals. This also has a - not time travel but time displacement - where a child gets older than his parents! But I found it a very ordinary & generally a pointless story, compared to Aggarwal's.
2. Of course, there are other kidnapped humans as alien lab/zoo animals stories, but none I've read is close in spirit or situation to this story.

Fact sheet.

First published: Science Today, July 1988.
Rating: B
Download full text from Anil's site.

Anil Aggarwal's "Why Dinosaurs Beame Extinct?" (flash fiction, free)

Cool concept, but over-dramatization & occasional lack of logical consistency spoiled it for me.

Story summary.

Dinosaurs died out because of a fatal mutation introduced by alien visitors from Tau Ceti system 65 million years ago. They were here for a stopover, & played a game. They altered the physical structure of the molecule that is the "respiratory enzyme Cytochrome oxidase" (in dinosaur biochemistry) to geometrically resemble the star pattern that includes Sol, Tau Ceti, & their neighborhoods - to fatal results for the animals!

Fact sheet.

First published: Unknown.
Rating: B
Download full text.

Free fiction: Science fiction of Dr Anil Aggarwal

I accidentally found his short fiction page. Has 12 stories right now.

Mostly reprints of originals published in magazines & newspapers; at least one is author's own translation from his Hindi original.

Dr Aggrawal is a Professor of "forensic medicine and toxicology at the Maulana Azad Medical College, New Delhi".

Disclaimer: I've not yet read any of his stories.