India, Nov. 1 -- In Kannada author Jayant Kaikini's deeply moving short story, 'Opera House', translated by Tejaswini Niranjana, readers are given a fictional rendering of the night before the iconic Mumbai structure downed its shutters after a 77-year-long run, first as a live performance centre and later, as a cinema hall. The protagonist Indranil, a theatre staffer unaware of the future that awaits, spends a rather long night thinking about the owner of a thermos flask he finds inside a bag lying on one of the seats at the venue. But when he wakes up the next morning, determined to return the flask, a distraught co-worker tells him that the gates of their beloved Opera House were going to be locked. Indranil hands over the flask to him...