the brown critique

july 2011

2011-07-31T21:27:00.014+05:30

i.
Julie O'Yang
interview

“Sexual Love as an Antidote to Totalitarian Control”

In memoriam of those who perished on 4 June 1989 on Tiananmen Square. An accidental cross-examination with the Chinese exile author Ma Jian, who dares to remember China’s past in his novel "Beijing Coma."

Big demolition prior to the Summer Olympics

The first time when I met Ma Jian, it was two years ago on a wintry day in Brussels. We were both at Europalia, Festival biennal des Arts et de la Culture hosted by the European capital. It sounds better than it is. While a cold wind blew outside the large windows of Royal Museum of Fine Art, the vibes inside reminded me somewhat of Commissaire Maigret coloured haphazardly with a child’s felt pen set. Two days before my publisher had phoned to ask me if I could help a Chinese author named Ma Jian, who was on the Continent to be interviewed by Dutch/Flemish media. “He needs an interpreter. You get paid for the job,” my publisher had said. Certainly, I had answered. The same afternoon I set out to do my research.

I knew Ma Jian from my high school years in China. His short story collection about Tibet, Stick Out Your Tongue, caused quite a stir at the time. “Stick out your tongue” is what a doctor says when you go to a hospital in China as part of forming a diagnosis. In his stories, the author portrayed a Tibet and Tibetan Culture in a harsh, unpretty but honest way, contrary to the popular, romantic version a la Heinrich Harrer. I don’t remember if I particularly liked the book, but back then I read China’s literary avant-gardists with gusto and devoured every letter that came my way. The fact that language became an enjoyable game, and the outcome excited me and brought me sensational shocks. Six months after the military crash on Tiananmen Square, I went abroad to study. Consequently, I lost track of the literary scene from my motherland as I myself was left to the hand of fate. I needed to fill some serious gaps, that’s for sure.

A quick consult on the Internet resulted in sufficient interviews and reviews featured in Guardian, The Independent and The New York Times as well as Chinese language media primarily from Hongkong and Taiwan.

Ma Jian was born in Qingdao in 1953. After political pressure, he quit his job as a photographer in 1983, travelled throughout China and later turned these experiences into his non-fiction recounts Red Dust. He moved to Hong Kong in 1987 but continued to travel in China. In 1989 he took part in the Tiananmen Square protests. He left to live in Europe in 1997, where he established his fame as a dissident writer – “Solzhenitsyn of China’s amnesiac surge towards superpower status” as Guardian wrote about him – which gave me an instant shudder of antipathy. Comparisons are odious. Comparisons of this kind underrate a writer and disclaim the literary quality of a work, if there is such intent present in his/her artistic toil.

I recognised a life course similar to mine except for the label part. Legacy of persecution and fear, that’s what we share from our past. Not a chummy begin I’d say; it is utterly depressing. Above all, after I left China, I quit Chinese language as a writer; I felt the need to move on. Ma Jian’s published novels are originally written in Chinese and translated by his wife Flora Drew, with whom he currently lives in London. I have consciously left my past behind, in which I refuse to indulge. As a writer and artist I’m reluctant to treat past experiences in a presupposed way, which I suspect and mistrust. In art, newness and boldness is not only vital, it is necessary as a way to keep the past alive. Familiarity is a trap. In my own creative works I have wanted to invent some sort of universality, which I stipulate in my approach with a pair of fresh eyes each time, each book. And so I decided to meet Ma Jian as an interpreter. I won’t say a single word between and beyond. I will shut up.

But sometimes life does offer surprises.

We spoke only five minutes after his interview was done. He said I was the best interpreter he had had yet. I was and am, I take pride in what I do and earn my crust with it.

“You speak Chinese beautifully,” he said. I stood in silence, astonished by his remark, since musicality was something I failed to discover in my mother tongue.

“But you write too, don’t you?” Someone must have told him so.

“Yes, I write… novels… in Dutch and English…” I answered hesitantly, gratefully.

“I want to read your writings,” he insisted. Politeness is half good manners and half good lying. Ma Jian has good manners, I have to find out about the second part.

I wrote down my www on a piece of paper which I handed to him, “Check out when you find a moment. I have posted a few chapters of my latest novel China Noir, which I translated into Chinese. The original was written in Dutch,” I added hastily.

We said goodbye. One week later I received an e-mail from Ma Jian. “I read the chapters on your website and liked the terse rhythm in your language,” he wrote. “Perhaps it’s only one of your styles. Your writing reminded me of Orff’s Carmina Burana.” All right, let’s face it. This is more than politeness. And again he talked about music! This is my big secret. I have learned to master all my languages through musical notes I discover in them. I sing them and find good music in each of them. It worked for me. I vocalise until I achieve Cecilia Bartoli’s effortlessness and Bianca Castafiore’s drollery.

Our contact continued through e-mail. I told him that I visited London regularly, and I liked the hand-made noodles with chilly bean sauce in Soho. He wrote back let’s have noodles next time and talk more about novel writing. Which we never did. Partly because I’m a slapdash mailer, but also because I was finishing a new novel, my first written in English. ( I had decided to quit Dutch for a few reasons but mainly I wanted to be read by an international readership.)

As soon as I finished my manuscript in 2010 around Christmas time, I sent Ma Jian the synopsis, telling him that I was looking for an agent. Shortly afterwards I found my present agent to represent my English manuscript Butterfly. I was relieved, my confidence went through the roof. Ma Jian didn’t answer until more than two months later. He mentioned the structure of my novel which he liked a lot. At this time several of my short stories had been accepted for publication in the U.S. I wrote Ma Jian to tell him this, and that I had found myself an agent.

“I’m considering to interview you,” I made a request in the same e-mail. “I want to talk to you about your latest novel Beijing Coma.”

I had read the book in English and was dazed by his style and mannerism with a heavier hand. Somehow his writing calls to my mind Virginia Woolf; a moon river tumbling down dark rocks of thoughts towards a new found land speckled with astral bodies of narrative pleasure. Nevertheless, when I received the Chinese/original version of Beijing Coma a few days later over the e-mail, I was STUNNED. My first thought was Tao Te Ching, not in terms of murky wisdom modern soothsayers savour, though. Ma Jian’s
writing in Chinese is connected, clear and unobscuring, the kind of lucent beauty one discovers in an ink
landscape from the Ming dynasty whose ever expanding perspective adds layers of meaning without losing a valid intention. In short, I found in there the poetic depth that has echoed through two thousand years of a literary tradition, from Book of Odes to Lu Xun.

“O’Yang, you are the one who master languages,” Ma Jian wrote in the accompanying message. “I would like to discuss with you about language as means of literary expression and experience. Translations trigger a growing interest in Chinese literature, and yet it feels often like a ribbon around a bomb blast of misreading and falsehood. I believe I have given too many interviews where the vital point of my writing is left untouched. From your distinctive writing style I expect you hold an unique outlook. Let’s talk about matters ignored by the ignorant.”

It’s time to address important questions.

J O’Y: Beijing Coma is about slaughter and forgetting. On 4 June 1989 on Tiananmen Square, Chinese security forces killed many of those who had over six weeks demonstrated for democratic reform. Estimates of the dead range from 1,000 to over 7,000. Yet you chose to write a densely detailed, panoramic fiction with a strong prophetic voice. You want to tell more than just a story with huge documentary value. Because this is how the so-called “ethnic”, “multicultural” fiction is treated by both literary critics and contemporary readers. How do you handle this denial of your, say, ambition, as a serious writer? How do you want to be read?

Ma: Tiananmen Massacre took place in the twentieth century. It is a tragedy frozen in the past. Sadly, life moves on, people forget. However, death touches only the flesh, “the wronged ones never can die” as an old saying goes. The Communist Party has done everything in its power to delete the history. Libraries are cleaned and archive are burnt as if to show us that nothing at all had happened in the night 22 years ago. Until today the Internet is censored in China. The 4^th of June is a date gone missing. Even worse. In today’s China, anyone who would dare to touch the subject his life faces danger. Why? Because the rulers are afraid – they are afraid to forget the violence they have committed against mankind. In a sense the Chinese government is the keeper of the traumatic memory buried very deep, but yet none of us is able to put an end to it. Censorship is wasted. By writing Beijing Coma I wanted to revive the past. On the other hand, fiction is meant to draw a parallel reality. What I’m saying is that by creating a fictive truth, history will become more real because the writer has added flesh and blood to it. Western readers like to talk about the depth of a certain protagonist in my book; they worry about the decision he makes, and are moved by the loving character of the mother who is devoted to her comatose son. With the emotional space built around a story, the author enables his reader to access the past, with which s/he can relate with the present. The universal significance is born. After the publication of Beijing Coma, I watched literary critics on English TV channels discussing my work. They said the most stupid things I’ve ever heard. One of them even think that my book is a true documentation of the massacre, and could be no more than that because of its lack of literary imagination! I wondered if they have read my book! If these critics can read at all! My story tells about a coma patient who reveals his mental interior to us, blending impossible with possible, making the absurd of life bearable. The critics have missed the symbolism completely, namely, my comatose protagonist IS China and the Chinese. As for the readers. People choose to read a book for different reasons. In this case it must be the exotic, the outlandish they assume and impose on you. Misreading, yes, in both cases. But it is also arrogance.

J O’Y: English translation of your book recalls Virginia Woolf, not only the fluid, elegant style. I especially think of a sentence she said. “For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?” Beijing Coma is,
apart from an epic novel about China’s recent past, a story about the body, “sexual love as an antidote to totalitarian control”. Do you think the Chinese are able to recognise the physical emancipation you seek to communicate? It’s my understanding that sexual oppression is not a communist invention but a deep-rooted Chinese tradition represented by the Confucian School. What do you think of the current revival of Confucianism in China? How should we, as self-chosen exiles, react to the western readiness to embrace the murkiest, biggest export product called Confucianism from a totalitarian country?

Ma: My patient has sacrificed his body in order to keep the memory of the past alive. He is the one who preserves the Chinese conscience but yet he is considered dead by the living ones. The death of his body made it possible for him to confront himself and tell the truth others dare not to touch. His lifeless
body symbolises China that is the corpse princess flirting around a global stage of capitalism. As long as you can get business done, everything else is negotiable. Memory is suspended in the dark abyss between life and death, not being able to decide whether to die or live on. The thing is when your body dies, memories die with it. Da Wei, my protagonist realises that. While he is not in control of his own body, his oversensitive, overactive mind continues to function. In my book the only communication he is able to have with the world around him is through sex. People make fun of his sexual organ; men as well as women take advantage of him and make him their sexual toy. Later on he is even exploited by his mother who sells his urine! The question that should be asked here is: who is in coma, the patient or the society? In my book his erection has become a monument for China’s political persecution in the past, which has turned for profit, commercial shamelessness in the present. Confucianism oppresses the body and the individual. In our day Confucianism is cleverly adapted by the regime to serve the same purpose as it did in the past. In my book the younger generations seek sexual emancipation. It is a protest, but most of all sexuality lies in the heart of humanism. Subversive bodily acts demanding change. Obviously, the individual is beaten by a suppressive tradition in the end. Either it is the genuine Confucian School or the one faked by the regime, it is used as a weapon to kill China’s future. Chinese government is exporting Confucius and his ideas as a cultural product. It appals me because Confucius was in exile in his own time; he was seeking a spiritual home. Until his death he was unable to finish a single book. Thanks to his pupils we are now able to be acquainted with his teaching. During the Cultural Revolution Confucius was condemned, his grave was robbed and his offspring persecuted. Now the Party thinks they can use his name for a wicked purpose of subduing the Chinese people and pulling the wool over foreigners’ eyes.

J O’Y: At times the novel’s narrative feels like a dark comedy. For instance when Dai Wei’s urine is seen as a miracle cure and people all over the country come to buy it from his mother. It bears a message similar to Lu Xun’s short story Medicine. Then again, this is your witty accusation of China’s capitalism. You blend scene after scene the drama and terror of Chinese life with lyrical tenderness and a desolate, tragic sense. How do you relate your writing with the Chinese poetic heritage? Your reference to a Chinese classical work Book of Mountains and Rivers added not only a symbolic strength to the story. Which philosophical truth did you attempt to investigate and how universal is your Truth?

Ma: When the story becomes unbearable, humour is the solution as well as a mask of despair. During the ten years I was finishing the book, I delved into the subject matter. I have learnt to know that the state of coma is continually, ceaselessly fighting the two extremes of life and death. The research process became so agonizing and horrifying, to such an extent that I even considered suicide at some point. The joy of imagination couldn’t save me. In the end I sought liberation in humour that toned down the terror.

Ming landscape

China enjoyed a poetic tradition that was as diverse as it was complex. Tang poetry unites the natural world with the philosophical, the divine with the everyday. It uses colour, repetition, and parallelism to evoke the great beauty and vibrancy of the world that surrounded us. As for me, I used medical jargon in my story; words forgotten by literature. What I mean to say is that to achieve a poetic sense of beauty, one must dare to take risks and not repeat the past. Also I used The Book of Mountains and Rivers as a literary hyphen between time and space, between imagination and reality, between ideology and spiritual emptiness. But most of all, I want to convey the philosophical sense of time: do we ever possess time? What is Time? Albert Einstein said: “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”

J O’Y: Tell me a little about your working process. Does the desire to explore certain topics come first or a character?

Ma: The story started as a poem of a couple of thousand stanzas. I saw a man lying on a rusty bed with a bird perching on his chest. I had no idea what was going to happen to him. As I began to tell the story in its present form, immediately I felt the need to cleanse, not out of religious fancy or the want to let go or even love. The bird in my story has no wings to fly; it’s an wingless and featherless creature. It knows no freedom and is naked and defenceless.

The patient in my story is based on my brother who slipped into coma on 28 May 1989. I looked after him while the student movement shifted from optimism to military crackdown outside the hospital window. My story came to me, another character turned up who is the mother of the coma patient. A poem had a plot. A few parallels dominate the entire narrative structure. The fate of the mother which echoes that of her son towards the end. Then, there is the tank versus the dozer, which is the timely icon of China’s capitalism. Politics in the past versus boundless laissez-faire of the present day. And finally, individual versus the Chinese state. All very sad and tragic. But why do the Chinese still keep hope after being beaten again and again?

J O’Y: Words mobilize our visual imagination. Like you, I am a visual writer, in contrast to the non-visual that tends to dominate the western tradition. Do you feel you are misread on this level of commanding
of the language and you are rejected because readers in our time still prefer mashed potato topped with a homey gravy? How important do you consider yourself – us – in today’s shifting literary landscape?

Ma: My book ended with the girl’s face flattened by the tank and become thick again on the asphalt because human flesh is resilient. We are resilient. For me literary imagination is visual, and should engage all our senses. In Beijing Coma, the patient feels alive through his ears. He “hears” life, he observes a world that is blind and soulless. He leads the reader into an imaginary landscape. In literature there is no difference between old and new, there is only the difference between explored depth and shallowness. The dilemma every serious writer faces is the struggle between his individuality and the expectation of the society. If our sorrow and misery be the key to our inner self, our suffering is to achieve the final exaltation that would give birth to love and compassion. How such a story is told depends on the experiences of each individual writer who considers his individuality worth fighting for. I maintain humanism and freedom of imagination as the final goal of literature.
Beijing Coma by Ma Jian (Chatto & Windus ISBN 978-0374110178) by Julie O’Yang © 2011

ii.
N. Pillai
three poems

The First Cut [Doctor in the Making]

The whitish belly is a dome on the cutting-board -
Frozen frame mouthing an opaque cry.

The frog limbs cling, holding the empty air
Pleading against the pleasure of waiting steel.

The T-cut flap opens the membrane doors
First step wounding, to heal greater wounds.

Heartless, the heart and kidney systems lie -
Fleshed soft and gleaming, striking a nail in me.

I cut a prayer, blood colors this sketch
Painting a death, for a future living.

I hear the croak, feel the raindrops splatter -
Growl of thunder darkening, the etherized senses.

The body cell by cell dissolves in the air,
Clotting dreams, netting neurons in my sweat.

As the forceps fingers clutch the scream
The frog leaps and lands on my soul

Nuances of Board Room Beings

Subtle bubbles foam at the meeting
The oval egg breaks in the cold hum;
The silhouettes spring, the feral gleam sparks,
The silky folds of decibels tear up.

Words wrestle fingers, softly lay wreaths
Abacus of sales rattle, slide to ciphers.
Graphs cruise the hearts, dying on the MD’s cheek
Whizzing past teeth, down the painted tongues.
Anger powered, sarcasm driven snagging
The secretary’s nylons to his tie.
Busting Production, heaving marketing
Dragging the slumped sales in decibels.

One chews hungrily his lips, another
Makes lollipops of his pencils.
The icon on the others lap top,
Fingers a fish, in his neuron net
Red in the face, he waves his catch.

The smart one cascades his Niagara
To catch the rainbow in his boss’s eye,
The time watcher, plays tongue footsie with his teeth.
The new entrant dream-fingers his mistress
Lost in the memory of her diamonds.
The keen type keels over, flattened against -
Arguments, loosing shape and stewing in despair.

The token lady at the table top, ripples in waves
Echoes her executive shine, gleaming coins -
Lightweight, only seen and not heard
In the nuances of their word

Gloves

Delight gloved the infant’s hand,
Rolling, squeezing the gruel in squishy squeals.

Clock hands, grew up the lovely fingers
To cover up her skin.Yucky! ugh! with disdain,
From sun and wind and all dirt of living.

Gloves became the knights of digital armor -
Riding to the ladies rescue, to keep alive amour
Sometimes duenna, some times police.

Gloves are companions, full of compassion;
Protects old fingers from cold and cruel creases;
No tucks, nor botox nor scalpel can make young.

The pair of gloves married in holy matrimony -
One is lost, a spouse is lost forever
Born together, they die together.

iii.mradul sharma
poem

a little less than black

i want to speak to you.

using words garbled up.
making no sense whatsoever.
no sentences. no punctuation. perhaps not even words.
and i want to keep speaking.
and i dont want you to try to understand.
or say anything.
i want you to listen not to the words i speak
but to the sound of them.
like i listen to the sea.
and i want you to look at me.
just like that. and not mean anything.
like i look at the sea.
and i want you to keep looking.
i will keep speaking.

iv.
Tapas Bandyopadhyaya
four poems

Forest Dreams

Dappled sunlight of the fragrant forest

measures the highs and lows

Filled in dust-coloured leaves.

Sentinel tree trunks lost in lofty windy dreams.

You begin to get undone

You let things be

You will the shadow of a tiger in every bush

A bird call takes your mind away

to pubertal breezes of love.

You would sleep that afternoon of squirrels,

curled in the after-love of trees,

to whispered ancient stories

floating hillock to swaying hillock.

But then the unseen ocean

Sweeps you to your counting table

To balance your books

of duties

And desires.

Do you dare?

Then I wanted to look for the one I was

before the wrong trainon the wrong night

from the wrong platform

Having paid my fine

Having forgotten my destination

Having settled in my corner

I wanted to look for my course

before the hurricane

before the revolution

before the tsunami

The girl opposite

In the black and white photo

In black chiffon

Turned me to a kite

And I soared

amid dreams of earthen lamps

and cotton sari smells

and patient rain.

She turned me into a corporate

And I became a rat

She turned me into a gentleman

And I became a Spitz

Thus, when the Inquisitor came

Asking for my ID

[as we rumbled over Sone]

I was looking for my eyes

I was looking for my destiny

I was looking for the link

to nineteen seventy one.

So I gave him my college ID

I gave him my Voter ID

I gave him my job ID

I gave him my PAN card

I gave him my passport

But they put me away

Nonetheless.

Ashes float in the sunlight of the new rice

And the deep purple melancholy

That oozes from every pore of the earth

And congeals around the trunks of deceiving luminescent green

(leaping to low branches in evenings)

The empty cold wind turning

Turning on itself

And again

Floating on the new light of the new year

Can no more lead me astray

To her tripping alleys of pleasure

Of the mischievous running staircases to the terrace

Of skirts and knees and the warm surrender of laughter on my chest

Of her hair on my neck across her face of the salt of her kiss

Of the fullness of love.

No more.

For I who have traversed fifty cycles of the sun

Who has been drowned nine lifetimes

In the endless gutters of monsoon afternoons

Who has lost his steed and sword

And is condemned to ration queues for life

When on a wrong turn of the dice

Exchanged a Mohenjodaro of sighs

For the endless brook of her chitter chatter

Who in the endless wait for the yet unformed

Has watched kites as dusk condensed on her inconsolables.

Have worked it out (though not understood)

That only the Light

Is.

03/01/2008, 06/01/08, 27/2/08, 13/12/09

The Harvest

Chasing the colours of the whirlwind

You reach your trail

To the emptiness within

(Full of yourself)

The choking, aching loneliness

Dust on the rail coach

Dust on the table

Dust on the mirror

Your past life’s soap

The gravy is a nuisance

But it’s something to do.

Blankness makes coffee

Don’t know when it got cold.

The heat, the traffic

The sweat, the noise

The stink, the meeting.

The toad wants all.

Nine to nine

But the pennies count.

When tires out the night

On fb and TV

Switch off the light

Sleep recedes between

Eyeball and eyelid

In the blue moonlight

The steep step-well

The brink of poetry

Back to the tail.

Morning’s on the groove

On the gravy trail.

13/6/2011

v.
Shriram Sivaramakrishnan

poem

Emptiness

Pushed down

by emptiness

I fell helplessly

to the bedrocks

crimsoning myself

all over the body,

cleansing my cells

of their sins;

and like a baby

I was born from

the womb, again.

vi.
Sunil Sharma
three poems

In the home for the elderly

The grey women sit huddled

Lost and blank

In the cold afternoon

In the verandah of the tiny shelter,

Like the dried-up lonely branches

Of trees in autumn,

Waiting,

Yet

Waiting for

None

In the

Wide-wide

World

That

Exists

Not

For

Them.

Love Strange

When it
Blooms
In the hard rock
It makes
The
Craggy
Stony
Thing
Brittle
and
Soft.
It
Makes
Folks cry
When
The Strange
Feeling
Strikes.

Love Strange

Can make you

See the reason

In hate

And

Make

Adversaries

Into

Old

Mates!

On long nights

On long silent nights,

After tedious arguments,

A remembered face

From lost times,

And --

A burning desire for

Dialogue

That revives

The Soul

The errant

Rains

Passing over the

Desert!

vii.
Pravin Nair

three poems

To write poetry

To write poetry, is to taste your tears.

You realize sorrow can have a flavor too

- salty

: like salt, of salt,

the salt of the displaced, the broken earth,

of truths spoken too late,

the living walking out of your lives, the empty hearth.

It is to watch the ceiling gather moss and converge,

to feel, as if on the verge,

a shriveled sun,

immersed in the solitude of the horizon.

It is to lick the claustrophobia,

of open spaces,

of lovers, lifeless in their embraces.

It is about peeling your heart,

however painful it may be,

It is to open your eyes, to an uncommon art

: of making love, to melancholy.

To write poetry,

is to speak the language of the lonely.

Speaking of Attachments

The sun frets and mourns,

at the light-eyed day passing by,

and licks his ruptured wound,

while red, bleeds the blue sky.

The red then clots into a dark pore,

only to burst shadows on rocks,

(beneath which huddled lovers hide)

like dappled polka dots, on cute frocks,

or a million crabs, awash with the tide.

But the day after, the black still remains,

on the morning skin, as misty stains,

which stay back and remind,

of ties that will always bind.

Who Am I?

I melt away,

moment by moment,

torment by torment,

a snowman in the blaze

of the scorching sin;

peel my skin,

a sap of regret oozes out;

skin my soul,

a blind man steps out;

groping and rummaging

through life’s current,

feeling the light,

but not seeing it.

Slit me

and you will find,

a million impoverished mouths,

agape and hungry,

begging to be fed.

Smell me and the stench of

dead, maggot eaten ghouls

of my history slaps me in the face.

Pierce me and thick blood shall trickle,

from the nib of my spiteful thoughts.

I am the wasted giant star, now a white dwarf,

I am centuries of looking away and not into the eyes of truth,

I am jealousy's handmaiden and greed's midwife,

I am a piece of scrap, relegated to oblivion's bin,

I am the mythic black serpent, that gobbled down the sun,

I am guilty humanity, on the run.

viii.
Arturo Desimone

poem

Was it you

Was it you

Who scattered fireflies

in the meditation room

in the dingy un-vacuumed chapel

Was it you

I want to know

For I gathered them

I made a necklace out of them

I do not want to be a thief

I brought it with me

to the monastery in France

where they go to St. Therese

and Santita Teresa

I have carried them,

the burden of fireflies,

truer thans forms, heavier than

mercurial kilogram lies

pocketed, across streets

the Hostels the Hotels

the homeless shelter

the damp hells and dry wells

I have brought it

to Amsterdam

Tell me it was you

black girl of the island

where the dispossessed farmed

and city, oh Tamil town

of the firefly lights

and lamposts

that glow only with firefly

Tell me it was you

Who abandoned your eggs

While bending

and haphazardly shaving your legs

I do not want to return

what I have found

Let me keep my garland

Without bearing the face-stain

of a Thou-Shalt-Knot

Tell me you had kept them

under the Dhupatta

in the polyester of

green gauze brassiere,

the corpsicles now

eating light

photosynthesis

from the phosphor hairs

on your asphalt breasts

tell me so I can keep

the fireflies, seasoned

with

a splinter-atom

a fractal

of Saffran

Then I will saunter to

London

to your graze in

marigold-lots of King's Road

I will wear kurta

the long top

Only this garb

is cleansed for your rain

I will not bring

a fractal

I will import

kilos

kilograms of Saffran

I will donate one firefly

under your parrot-tongue

that parrots verbs and vowels calm

and strong

as rainfly

fallling flightless deaths on kitchen

table's

albino formaica

I will import another

into you hairs again,

the third

will gain

immortal static frescoe

congealed in amber tree-sap

you secrete from the navel strands

your flightless rain

transfers down spidersilk Dhupatta

woven in the artha-rich Tamil-owned

forests where

a deer sauntered off,

got lost, vine-entrapped,

and in historical conflict with

golden-leafed, carbon bark

acquired her

irreducible black

(by pattern-faultline of such conflict

I chart and demarcate

calm migration to your

graze in King's Road

from my

dream-damaged mattress

lacking contingent roof:

marking trail

with splinter-atom,

fractal, pebble,

and eventually, 1 heavier-than-ten-lies

kilogram of Saffran)

ix.

Swati Singh Sambyal

short fiction

Fourth Mistake

Times when something leaves a deep impact on the course of your life are the ones we term unforgettable. Years pass by and circumstances change, but the wound never heals, and it hurts at the most unexpected, unwanted moments.

I did not want to wake up with this thought but subconsciously, while sleeping, I used to go back in to a place from which there was no escape. I was short of breath and I splashed cold water on my face, but it wasn’t enough to relieve me so I thought a steaming cup of coffee would do. Weekend meant nowhere to go but to keep myself locked in the room, the four walls were a far more secure zone then the world outside.

I lay on the couch to let the winter sunshine fall on my face, and it was relieving, it felt like the rays from heaven, and I was lost!

October 28, 2007—I very precisely know the date because of him.

I’ll be all right Pa, don’t worry, I ain’t a kid, my friends will be joining me in Shimla, and I’ll keep you updated with my trip. I felt suffocated because I wasn’t a small baby, I was working and still dealing with an extra-protective father was something close to a nightmare at times. I remember the time when he shouted on my ex for no reason and the time when I had to go on a birthday party with my school friends and he came back to pick me up just after an hour. He never let me be free, and I loved my freedom, loved life—for sure it was about to take a new turn.

Excuse me, will you please shift—that was the first MISTAKE.

He didn’t shift an inch, not even a millimeter or the minutest fraction of a micrometer. Somehow I managed to take my window seat … a magazine covered his face and its contents proved what type he was … you know girls have this habit of typecasting men; the sober one, the perfect one, the dogmatic one, chauvinist, well he for sure was a typical snob….men with no concern for the opposite gender … or in his case even for his kin.

I knew that the next twelve hours would be darn pathetic and seemed my Ipod was the only rescue. So I loosened up my hair, which was so tightly tied into a pony that I was having a bad headache, and put the headphones.

I did not prefer to turn to my right, SECOND MISTAKE … I did!!

I cannot recall things as of now … it’s been thirty years … but what I still remember is his eyes. There was something about them … it was a mutual hate and admiration kind of feeling. I could dive deep into them for a moment and the other I was out like a splash of water all over me.

It was the most neutral expression that can ever exist between two people—we proudly call them strangers. The Volvo was moving at a smooth pace and sounds of The Weepies were taking me again and again to the abode of the hills. I knew this weekend will be like never before—my assumptions did not disappointed me either.

Where are you heading? He asked …

I turned again toward him, in a way as if I had an encounter with a dead frog. He was not ugly, but an amalgamation of good and bad … when you know this ain’t your way, but you still want to go there, to the deep woods. The species is dangerous and you know, I ain’t a heavenly forest but you hardly bother. There was something very attractive about him… and yes I was drawn toward that good-bad soul … he appeared contradictory.

“Hmmm…..Shimla!! What about you??” I was curious to know.

“Well you gonna bear me for the next twelve hours then …”he replied with a smile!!

And this time, I smiled back. Long story short, first impression ain’t the last ones at times….

The THIRD MISTAKE …

And we were able to strike a conversation. Music was my life and we did not leave behind any artist in our discussion. It was getting cold in the bus (AC never suits me) he lent me his jacket and we started off again. He told me about his life; about the fact that he loves being a wanderer, he had almost covered half of India and travelled to more than twenty cities abroad, and yes he had some amazing stories to share. I laughed and was inquisitive to know more about him.

There was this gradual interest which felt fresh and a bit odd at the same time. He loved making friends while on the journey as there was always something interesting to know about the other. He loved chocolates, loved his independence. He kept mentioning about how much less time he has and the fact that he would miss out on a lot—I did not understand why time was such a boundation for him.

I, on the other hand always loved listening, and speaking less. So as the seventh hour arrived he was done and coaxed me to tell him something about myself…

I just could say “may be next time.” I mean some five hours left to reach our destination, I will surely tell you … the next time.

“Oh c’mon … OK, tell me what is the best and worst thing about today,” His eyes all set on my reply.

I felt as if he read my mind and he even knew what I would answer. But somehow, he rested his face on his hand and looked straight in to my eyes for the answer, glancing at my soul.

Well … ahhh ... the best thing … I met you,” I smiled gently.

“The worst … ahmm … just five hours left,” and it ended with a frown…

He laughed aloud.

I gave him a look that you give when you are disgusted by somebody’s act as it was the last reaction I expected from him.

“Oh … ha ha … whoooooh. I am … sorry … I am overwhelmed by your answer. Just don’t know how to react. I mean it was nice to hear that from you!!”

“Honestly, I was watching you from the moment you came to the bus stop…nah nah..Don’t take me wrong…I was just overlooking and then from nowhere you entered like a flash … zeroing my vision to only you … keep wearing that smile on … looks pretty and makes your face glow!”

And rest …

“Take this.” He gave me a piece of paper.

The next five hours we hardly talked. I was eager to open the paper and read its contents, but he had sworn me to only read it once we get down and bid adieu.

The hills and the fog made it a journey to bliss. We finally arrived.

That is what he said while getting down (he took his rugsack and stood right in front of me):

“Hey … I’ll never forget this… Thank you!!”

He kissed me on my forehead. I remember I closed my eyes and the moment I opened them to say something to him he was nowhere to be seen …

My friends were waving to me on the other side of the road, but I was on this side … looking for his glimpse … but he was gone …

I opened my eyes … the sun was no more warm and the chill was running through my veins; piercing me and making my bones hollow. Thiry years gone, and it still is like a memory all fresh, like I just met him yesterday.

I opened the piece of paper he had given to me.

“A distance of one mile … one day … or even years is not enough to part something that is straight from the heart … for a life that would come to a full stop in no time … for the moment that I have captured in my eyes. Somewhere I hope I will always stay alive … in an aboard called your heart!! GOODBYE!!”

Those three mistakes lead me to him … I wish there had been a fourth one …

x.
Yolanda Lindsay Mabuto
three poems

I’m not a punching bag

I’m not a punching bag -

Bruised from the inhumane thrusts -

the silent blows that deny me my freedom.

Perhaps it’s a gesture of “power,” “fear” or “superiority.”

Perhaps a greeting from subtle manipulation or reality.

The intentions are dripping into the essence of deceit

I can almost feel the advancing pressure rising from my feet.

From “embrace” to “caress” to an “aggressive touch”-

the motions seem to be stranded on the isle of vindictive violence -

Punch real hard - Punch

Till you bleed.

Emotional perhaps -

But trapped in my own strength and morals -

I see no path for this deed.

It’s bordering on physical propaganda

So repetitive – it forms a chorus of cries -

Tears stream – as I wonder why or

To whom do these threats belong

The flesh of our flesh – which attack -

Punch till you leak -

Till you break or ache.

Repetitive

Like a song.

Unnecessary

Yet my frame remains the playground of this affair -

The cries may remain unheard but the cry itself speaks

Entirely on behalf of retirement.

I’m not a punching bag.

The Flow of My Soul

Written in the palms of my fading haven

a script so weak.

Inscribed in the abyss of loneliness

are the words of my heart.

Like a dying river – flowing so meek

through my silent grave.

Perhaps the end

of my darkened nirvana.

The end to

the flow of my soul.

Leaking – the ashes of my past

Dripping – the cinders of my forgotten dreams -

I alone – walk the paths of burning pebbles

Aching beneath my feet.

Heartbreaking.

Perhaps too slow -

Too slow for my fingers to write in their sands

Too slow

To draw shabby castles in its air

Perhaps it’s the end -

The end

Of my soul.

Drowning in Lonely

Whispers swirl in a forgotten distance

a mishap of merciless fate and chance.

Fading into the midst of memories that never existed

where the footsteps of unreal reality anxiously stampeded.

A sunken heart, in the depth of pain's forest

a home to desolation where lonely rests.

An unfamiliar breeze, rages in a deserted heart

and affection's winds sway the emotions of pity in every part.

The wind's heartbeat echoes in a place named nothing -

every pulse gathering guilt – I’m bleeding

no one hears, sees or feels – it's merely a shadow

Darkened reflections of joy's misery in this silent meadow

Still, serene, bitter solitude – this sanctuary of a single amplitude

Together remained unmarried to Forever,

and Endless slowly untied Eternal and Always,

In the company of alone – silence sings

Laughing with tears of friendless stings

Held tight by ghostly hands – drowning in lonely

Walking side by side with only me.

Steps that I hear echoing behind me are my own -

as I inhale the essence of being alone.

xi.
Swakkhyar Deka

fiction

How I almost got myself killed!

This is then the story of mine….a certain Mr. Nobody. Always out to find a “kick” and many a times landing with the foot in my mouth. But nevertheless always game for infusing some excitement into my otherwise mundane existence. I work in government health project on contractual basis (which adds to my insecurity and hence my need for cheap thrills!).

So as the fateful day panned out it brought a lot of new things to light. On a day when my frailties, my timidness and the general cowardice I have associated myself with, went for a toss, though for a couple of hours. It was a plan made quite in advance…..to get drunk and have some fun. Four of us went with the aim of having a nice time by the riverside with rice beer in hand. Got the office car sans the driver (one less man to drink…we liked it) to go for the field trip. We went with an intensity to visit the film screening programme run by us at a School at Bokakhat and head thereafter towards our main objective. And so we did. We went to the school, spent some time and then, without much ado, left for our colleague Tulsi’s home. The idea was to get the rice beer from his home (lucky chap…he can have it all the time) and go to the river bank to drink to our heart’s content.

That was the first time I would taste Ahom rice beer or the Xaaj and I was excited in anticipation of some forbidden pleasure. We bought some cucumber on the way to eat with the drink and reached Tulsi’s place. His humble parents were cooking lunch for us as Tulsi informed them in advance about our visit. He was told by us to get the “stuff” and make a quick exit. He got a flask full of the liquid and green grams, Naga chilies and salt for snacking with our cucumbers (ah! it looked so tempting on that hot and humid afternoon). We told Tulsi’s parents that we would be back in an hour just in time for the lunch and headed straight to the river side. I was driving in absence of any one who could drive except Troilukya, who started learning only couple of days before.

We reached near the spot going by local boy Tutsi’s direction but only after traversing through a very potholed bumpy road. Inhabited by Missing tribal people the place was surprisingly calm and devoid of any human activity apart from a lone boat floating on the river. May be it was time for their noon siesta after a heavy meal on a hot a day. After a little scampering we decided upon a place to sit and opened our paraphernalia.

Troilukya: This is a nice setting (peeling the cucumber).

Me: oh man! This is amazing (making face as the strong tangy taste of Xaaj hit me. Yes I couldn’t resist and poured myself a glass and sipped)

Alit: Cheers to us and may the good times begin. (raising his glass to which nobody gave any notice and took a big sip)

Tulsi: Munching a piece of cucumber and drinking---Screw work..we will drink.

Troilukya: (Drinking) Oi Deka fill your glass (pointing to my empty glass).

Me: Hmm…yes sure( smarting from the strong taste of my first drink)

I start my second drink, almost forcing myself to believe that I am liking it.

Me: It’s so peaceful here man. I like it. I can spend my life here drinking like this. It’s better than sex. (Others chuckle)

Alit: I have so many problems in life. I find nothing in this job. But I can’t leave it also. I need to build a house back in my village.

Me: Shut up you bugger. Stop crying. Everybody has problems in life (wht’s happening…why am I blubbering?...my tongue is getting stuck..bloody hack…my head’s spinning…may be I had gulped down my 5^th glass…I forgot the count)

Darkness (My eyes are closed…I hear sounds...they are talking…laughing…I am sleeping here on the grass…but I can’t get up…I don’t want to get up)

Me: Oye Tulsi, what’s up?...where’s Troilukya?

Tulsi: He’ gone for a swim. Alit is there looking out for him. (he answered me without taking his eyes off from his camera as he was taking photos or videos of I did not know what)

Me: You buggers...why did you let him go to the river? That jerk will drown.

I can’t sit up. I should sleep. I lied down again. This grass feels so good. Freshly sprouting out of the ground, green and soft. Ah! I lied there face down and grass blades titillated my nostrils.

I did not know for how long I was lying there in that state. Memories came and went. Like many high speed trains passing through a dark tunnel. One by one.

For unknown reasons, memories of a long and intense session of love making in a shady hotel room kept coming back. Sex with my ex-girlfriend. The grass smelled like sweat dripping from her forehead when she was over me. There was a particular deodorant that she used….

I threw up. Oh my god. What’s happening to me? It’s coming out again. Ooh…I am puking like crazy.

The bouts subside. I feel little well. This Xaaj is really taking me for a ride today.

I look for the others. I see them by the river, a little away from me, walking behind Troilukya, who is in his underwear and all wet. Thank god, he did not get lost in the water.

I couldn’t keep sitting. My eyes were closing and I lied down again. Thoughts came rushing.

Dad is here. What is he doing here? He was picking up the dry leaves and plastic bags from the ground, murmuring to himself and shaking his head in annoyance. The man couldn’t tolerate dirt. Why the hell he has to be so finicky about these things? He called me lazy and good for nothing. Aptly so, I guess.

Just relax Baba. Chill. Just come and sit here. Baba…

Trring trring….trring trring (my phone rang…where’s it by the way?..ah found it…relief)

My ex’s number was flashing on the screen of the phone as it kept ringing for a few seconds. Why is she calling now?

Me: Hello. (Is that my voice?)

Her: Hi, what’s up?

Me: Nothing. Just out for some field visits.

Her: But today’s not Wednesday. (she knows I have to go out on Wednesdays, bitch!)

Me: Today is Saturday and I have work in the field. What’s the matter with you? I am a little busy right now. Please tell fast. (I can’t carry on talking like this man…I need to sleep)

Her: Nothing. Bye. She cuts off. (Bloody heck…as if I care..go to hell)

I dozed off again as the smell of grass and cowdung hit me. I knew that the effect of Xaaj was not going to leave me any sooner as I was trying to gather my senses. But I also kind of liked the state I was in.

What the..? who the bloody hell is doing this? I shouted in anger. (Somebody poured water on my head and it startled me)

I opened my eyes and saw Troilukya standing over my head (still in his underwear!) with a silly grin in place. Others were also gathering our things nearby. It was pack up time, I thought. I looked at my watch. 6.30. We came here…ok let me think…on 12.30. What happened to lunch at Tulsi’s place?

Me: Why on earth are you pouring water on me?

Troilukya: We need to go. Its getting dark and you were not getting up.( bloody bugger is still drunk…I thought..what with that silly smile?)

Me: I thought you drowned in the river. (Trying to sit up…I find no shirt on me). Where’s my shirt? Why the hell you have to remove it?

Tulsi: I took it off. You puked on it. So I washed it and kept it for drying. Now take this (handing me the shirt). Let’s go.

Me: I will have to drive now. Don’t worry guys. I am back and drive nicely.

Troilukya: No no. You come and sit in the car. I will drive.

Me: Are you mad? How can you drive? It’s the bloody highway. We will all die. Don’t worry. I will drive.

Alit: Troilukya will drive. You are not in a state to drive. Don’t worry I will sit beside him and won’t let him drive fast. (I looked at Alit. His pot belly protruding out of his open shirt buttons and a look of nonchalance on his face.)

Me: Ok. Your wish. I will sleep a little. Then we will go.

Tulsi: No time to sleep now. Common let’s go. You can sleep in the car. (he held me tight as I was going to lie down again and started walking me to the car.)

I kept dragging my feet, leaning on him, towards the car (why the bloody car is so far away?)

Me: Oye Tulsi. Don’t mind man. We couldn’t go to your house to have lunch. I feel really bad for that. I murmured in his ear. (I was getting my sense back after all!)

Tulsi: Hmm. Don’t worry. It happens. Some other day. You drank a little too much.

And it’s really strong.

I bet it was potent as hell. Now I remember Tulsi’s father telling him when we were about to leave on our rendezvous “Will you guys be able drink so much (looking at the flask full of Xaaj in his son’s hand). It is enough for a whole village.” To which we obviously did not pay any heed.

We all got into the car and Troilukya started driving slowly on the bumpy road. Alit sat in front. And we two were at the back. We dropped Tulsi at his home and I heard Alit and Troilukya apologizing to his folks. I sat there with my eyes closed as the Xaaj’s intoxicating effects were kicking back in.

We started moving again. Alit shouted as Troilukya narrowly missed hitting an oncoming truck. May be he fell asleep. He woke up with a start and rubbed his eyes. I felt the breeze on my face and hair. The car’s zigzag movement continued as Alit tried to navigate through the evening highway traffic.

I had no energy to talk or to do anything as so much puking left me weak. I only could think about how narrowly I missed getting myself killed. A sense of déjà vu hit me. Waiting outside the principal’s office after I was caught cheating in an annual test at the school in anticipation of something bad that would happen. The incomprehensible extent of punishment that would be meted out. The moment of not knowing.

But it’s good to lose control sometimes. I get tired of wearing the masks of propriety day in and day out. This is who I am. This is the real me. These moments of utter loss of control over me are the moments lived without any pretence. No inhibitions. No fear. Only life. Pure and Raw.

xii.

Biswajit Dutta

three poems

A Common Sight
Down the street,
Beside a neglected nook,
A tattered figure crouched
On his haunches emerged,
With a buried head in
Between his worn-out knees,
And with a face unnoticed, unseen.
The morning yawned
With commuting bodies and machines,
A common sight.

A Thought

When a flower loses its fragrance,
When the sky loses all its cloud,
When water loses its purity
And the moon loses its shine
No one feels the pain.

Rain and My Pen

With a sweet ache, I began to behold,

Tiny drops pouring on,

The roof, the rubbish, and the rubble.

A silent whisper, wash out with a force,

The dust on and the rust in.

xiii.

Sohini Basak

poem

Dreaming of Home (or April)

What I remember of last April
is a lot of car-rides and a lot of rain.
This April I’m somewhere else,
and strangely enough, (betraying climate experts)
the rain clouds followed me here.

This afternoon,
I watched leaves fall—lazy, golden, piscine
when caught in the net of midday rays.
And I watched
someone else’s suitcase being packed,
homewards.

It’s quite easy to miss home.
All you have to remember:
a smell, some hands, a wickerwork chair,
the typical morning, a calling-bell
and then realize that you cannot open that door
at least not from here.

This evening,
as I sit on the balcony ledge,
(the heat of the day hasn’t left the stone yet)
I try to figure out why Delhi is ‘two tall syllables’ to Octavio Paz.
And then I see a moon,
shaped just like the Os she contains (or do they contain her?)
only bigger, only brighter, only far away
and I see the translucent fish clouds
swimming over her, asking me to drift along.
It is a home sky up there, I’m glad it’s still the same.

Last April, I was home, wondering,
on a wickerwork chair in Barrackpore,
what this here I now am
would be like.
Last April, strangely, this here was a there:
Uncertain, in discussion, imagined a hundred times over.

Last April, I was home,
I was there.

25 April, 2011

xiv.
M. Rohit
two poems

The Wind

A wind puffed by the raising sun,
branched into my room,
shattered paper,
spilled ink,
galloped from corner to corner,
thudded doors,
disturbed the solitude, raped the room
made the world shaggy
and went away flapping the curtains,

as I saw the scene
pleading that wind to come again,
and do the similar thing
inside my body too!

Bell

Someone stitches a song with the wind,
do you know who it is?
She chuckles and shows me the scarecrow.

Someone screams silently, is that you?
She turns toward the naked girl
standing on hill's top.

Someone is suiciding, do you know?
She sees the sun that is setting into
a valley of hallucinations.

Someone laughs with lifeless sarcasm -
who is that?
She shows me her wristwatch.

Silence become eloquent
a glass splinter, the thread vibrates

Can you hear that? The sound of bell?
She came closer and leaned her ear on chest
as doctor, and said
"Yes!"

old issues
(all from 2002)

xv.
Shoma A. Chatterjee

fiction

The Perfect Script

Like the hero in Polish filmmaker Kieslowski's first feature film, 'The Camera Buff,' Rahul could not see anything without placing it in front of his imaginary camera. Camera angles and shots overshadowed his vision. He would join his palms, backside up, at the outstretched thumbs of either hand. Then, stretch out the rest of the palm straight-ahead to form three sides of an unfinished rectangle. He would then place this in front of his face, like the frame of a cinema-screen, to watch anything and everything, through this 'frame.' It is a familiar pose assumed by directors and cinematographers of the tinsel world. Some directors do it reflexively. Others, consciously, specially when other people, not from films, are around. Rahul did not belong to films though. He did not even own a still camera, not to talk of one that took moving pictures.

He kept his ears pricked, to pick sounds off his environs, wherever, whenever. Sounds of doors being slammed, closed, shut, banged, opened. Sounds of the television remote being clicked every other second, shifting channels from the staccato English of the BBC to suddenly switch over to the perfect Bangla of DD7 to the Bombaiyya Hindi of ZEE to pure Urdu on the Pakistani TV and the Yankee English of CNN. Sounds of birdcalls, chirping sparrows, cawing crows, and crowing cocks. Sounds of barking dogs and mewing cats and screeching mice. Kitchen sounds of the whirring mixer-grinder, vessels being washed at the sink, a leaking tap, fish curry being seasoned in steaming hot mustard oil, starch being sieved off the cooked rice in a giant-sized sieve, the shrill shriek of the pressure cooker, his mother barking out instructions to the maid. Sound of tea being poured out of an aluminum kettle into cups, often sloshing over into saucers to make a splash. Living room sounds - of the antique standing fan, a family heirloom that made its presence felt more by the loudness of its whir than by its speed. Or, the old radio (his father refused to give it up) blaring forth news of the day's weather in a dead monotone sans emotion or pitch. Sounds of the grandfather clock's chiming on the hour, the constant ticktock of the minute hand. Sounds of his father shuffling the pages of his newspaper, or talking to his sister in whispered tones, so that his mother wouldn't hear. Pooja-room sounds of jingling bells, jangling of keys tied to his mother's pallu, low-chants of mantras, blowing on the conch shell after the pooja was over, his mother washing the pooja vessels in the large basin filled with water. Bathroom sounds of the running tap, the shower in full blast from behind the closed door, the jangling of the flush chain being pulled and pulled and pulled, water gushing down the water closet, his sister belting out a Tagore song, tunelessly as usual, during a leisurely bath, clothes being washed and rinsed and beaten even when they defiantly refuse to 'die.' Day sounds and afternoon sounds and night sounds. Interior sounds within the apartment and 'outdoor' sounds from the immediate neighbourhood - the sound of a neighbour's car being parked inside the garage under their flat, his brother wheeling in his Hero Honda onto the parking lot outside the apartment block, the sound of the neighbor's daughter practicing sa-re-ga-ma on the harmonium - something he picked up from a Ray film long ago, or the couple next door forever squabbling in voices that grew louder by the minute, indifferent to their breach of their own privacy.
Sometimes, the strains of a beggar song floating in from the street outside, or the whimpering of a tantrum-throwing child followed by a few stinging slaps from his mother. He associated the smells to go with the sounds because he did not quite know how to 'store' smells. Like he still had not discovered the secret of storing 'silence.' He stored what he could, in the hard disk of his memory. To be drawn from and drawn upon, when the time came to make his dream film. He did not own a cassette recorder, much less a computer.

Rahul was jobless by choice. No amount of cajoling, begging, scolding or insulting by father, older brother, younger sister, could shake him off his obsession. He wanted to make the best film ever made. His friends had reduced him to a living joke. He had lost three wonderful girlfriends one after the other, in quick succession. They found his looking at them through that unfinished rectangle of his palms insulting and humiliating. Especially in a public place like a restaurant or a park or in the lounge of a theatre. Onlookers would watch for a minute, assume puzzled expressions and go along with what they were at. They probably dismissed him for a crackpot. Rahul knew he was not one. He had a dream like everyone did. Only, his dream was too big, too incredulous, too much of a fantasy for others to accept and adapt themselves to.

He wanted to go to the Film Institute in Pune after his graduation. His father would not hear of it. "We cannot afford it" he said, with more firmness than he actually felt. "I am going to retire in a couple of years. You had better pull up your socks and queue up at the employment agency for a decent job. We do not have anyone in the family in films. I do not want to begin with you," his father said. Then, as usual, he hid behind the day's newspaper, a regular escape strategy from disturbing family debates he did not know how to get out of. He did not like to argue with his younger son. It always led to raised voices, angering Rahul's mother. She was far from the sati-savitri type. She was perfectly capable of walking out of the kitchen to go to the Ramkrishna Mission at Gol Park and listen to devotional speeches and songs. The family then had to make do with just dal-rice for lunch. Because Rahul's sister went to work. Rahul's father hated dal-rice. Besides, it turned the fresh, sweet-water fish he had bought from the market that very morning, tasteless and insipid within the coldness of the refrigerator's freezing compartment. It happened all too often, though, because, like all Bengali families, they argued all too often. His wife, uncharacteristically named Sita by her parents, pampered and spoilt her kid son and did not care for others rebuking her favorite boy. "There is more of Hitler in you than Sita" he often told her, without result. With the solid backing of his mother, Rahul did not bother to queue up at the employment agency. He did not bother to respond to ads in the classified columns of newspapers either. He knew he was born to make the greatest and the best film ever made. A clerical post in a bank or peddling insurance or writing accounts was not up his street. Oh dear me, no!

Rikta, his last girlfriend, told him to meet the great director Satyajit Ray. This would give him ideas on how to go about realizing his dream, she added. So, one fine morning, Rahul climbed into the underground metro from Tollygunje, got off at Rabindra Sadan, took the rear exit, and ambled in his leisurely fashion, towards 1/1A Bishop Lefroy Road, where the great director lived with wife Bijoya and son Sandip. Ray's official photographer, Hirak Sen tipped him about catching Ray in the morning. "It is the best time to catch Ray in an ideal mood" he had said. Rahul discovered that there was a personal elevator that took one directly into Ray's living room. But the watchman wouldn't let Rahul use it. Determined to fulfill his mission of meeting the great genius, Rahul took the stairs. He was unaware of the fact that visitors who took the elevator were automatically given 'clearance' to meet Ray. Those who took the stairs, were 'eliminated.' So, when the servant who answered the doorbell would not even accept his visiting card, Rahul brushed him aside with one shove of his strong shoulder and walked straight into Ray's living room. The Nepali servant, now stacked against one of the walls of the narrow passage, gaped at this unexpected dismissal. Rahul turned back once to register how well this scene would turn if kept as a 'freeze-shot' in his dream film.
He'd add it to his script, he decided.

Rahul was speechless when he stepped into the room. The august presence of one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of world cinema seemed to rob him of the power of speech. There was the great master, Satyajit Ray himself, relaxed in his arm chair, pipe sticking out of his mouth, sketchpad resting on knees folded up to make a 'table', sketching away onto the sketchpad. Slivers of sunlight filtered in through the slats of the large window behind him, lighting up one side of his face, adding to the sculpted features, rough, uneven, dusky, and strong. The 'picture' was a live 'translation' of one of the thousands of photographs of the great master, photographer Nemai Ghosh had taken. Ray did not notice Rahul's entry, so deeply absorbed was he in his work. Rahul was tempted to put up his palms and form his 'camera' rectangle. So before his hands rose in reflex, he shoved them determinedly into his pockets, and glanced around the room to divert attention. He realized that the left pocket of his trousers had a hole in it and a couple of fingers of his left hand stuck out, thankfully, beyond vision. He turned his mind away from those disturbing fingers and allowed his attention to wander across the room. The walls were lined with books, books and more books. There was the historic piano, its lid invitingly open, the keyboard on display, on one side of the spacious room, where Ray created many a hypnotic musical score for his later films. A book of musical notations rested on the 'holder' above. Rahul looked here and there for those famous visual scripts of Ray written and sketched directly into grocer's accounting books bound in red cloth. But they were nowhere to be seen. Rahul simulated a gentle cough to attract attention. Ray bent his head to look up at him from the top of his glasses, waved his pipe at Rahul first, and then at the circular cane stool in front of him. "Boshun," ("sit down") said the great master in his golden baritone.

Voice touched with a slight tremor of nervousness Rahul never imagined he was capable of, he told Ray about his dream. Ray put down his charcoal pencil and listened to him patiently, as he puffed into his pipe from time to time. Rahul watched mesmerized, as smoke rose from the pipe in ambivalent circles, slowly fading away and out of the large window. The fingers sticking out of his torn pocket began to twitch, reflexively. When Rahul finished, Ray asked him to show the script he had written for his dream-film. Rahul could not. He did not have one. With the rather funny confidence Rahul had acquired over time, he said, "I don't have a script, Sir. It's all written inside my head." The great director gently suggested Rahul put down in Black-and-White the script that he had in his head. "You come back and show me the script after you are finished. I'll take a look" said Ray and went back to his sketchpad, as if the dialogue with Rahul had never happened.

Mridul Sen, another famous director, dismissed Rahul almost as soon as he met the director at his modest apartment near Hazra Road. Defining a vague arc in the air with his black pipe, a habit he had picked up in unconscious imitation of his one and only rival, Ray, Sen refused to listen to Rahul's dream of a dream film. He laughed at Rahul. His cronies who had come in for a cuppa, laughed along with him. "Where's the script, my dear boy, where's the script?" he kept on asking, sounding like an ancient 78 r.p.m. gramophone record with the pin always stuck on the same line. Then, he turned to the human cutlery assembled around him and said, "this boy wants to make a great film and he does not even have a script, does not even have a script." They laughed in chorus. An insulted Rahul made his way out, slowly, silently. The only sound that marked his ignominious exit was the click of the latch as he pulled the door close behind him against the soundtrack of chorused laughter, now partitioned off by the closed door. Unknown to him, Rahul's body language had altered. His hunched shoulders and tired gait reminded one of Arnold Swartzenegger in `True Lies'. Of the scene where after overhearing his wife, he thinks she is having an affair because he has been neglecting her.

So drowned was Rahul in his thoughts, that he failed to notice a Cielo come rushing onto him. His dream may have got crushed under the car along with him. The driver, however, was more alert. She braked the car with a loud screech. Then, stepped out, trying to help him up. She gave him more than just a piece of her mind. "What are you doing, you rascal? I don't mind one bit about your desire to commit suicide. But must you pick my car to be run under? Please, I've got a career and family to think of. Don't be so bloody selfish, you rag!" Before Rahul could open his mouth in protest, he found himself being pushed into the backseat of her lovely Cielo. He noticed that a crowd had begun to gather around them. Before it could surround the car, she sped away quickly, taking him along to her spanking apartment at Mandeville Gardens.

Who do you think she was? Hers was a beautiful face, but Rahul did not recognize it. He felt there was something vaguely familiar about the way she threw back her head to shake off the mane of lustrous black hair, the curve of her full mouth, the curls neatly arranged around her forehead to conceal its broadness. But he could not put a name to the face. She was no ordinary woman. Her name was Sreelekha Sengupta. She was currently the best box office draw of commercial Bengali cinema. Rahul never saw Bengali commercial films. He did not know one star from another and wouldn't know how to begin. Mainstream films, for Rahul, especially in his own mother tongue, were just so much wastage of precious raw stock, finely honed technical skill, and time. As they chatted over a cup of Espresso coffee she poured out of her imported Espresso machine into dainty cups of bone china, she told Rahul about herself, and about her dream. Rahul realized why her face was so familiar. It stared out of every other big-sized hoarding in the city at every street corner. The kiosks were flush with her face in close-up, wearing a different expression each time, at times, weeping away, at others, flashing a perfect set of teeth, or, in open-mouthed invitation to suggestive seduction. Rahul only saw the face, but did not care to read the credits. The face, then, meant nothing to him. Because the only Bengali films he saw were the ones made by Ray or Sen or Buddhadev Dasgupta, Gautam Ghose, Aparna Sen or Raja Mitra. He did not recall having seen her in any of their films.

"You've got to have a dream" said Sreelekha to Rahul, bringing him back to the present. She was quoting from memory, her lines from the latest film she was shooting for. "When you lose your dream, you die" she went on. Rahul, a voracious reader, knew at once that she was quoting from` A Story of Rose'. He put in his own contribution by adding one more line - "We have so many people walking around who are dead and don't even know it" he finished, hiding his pride with a deep red blush, which however, revealed more than it concealed. Sreelekha was amazed. How did he know her lines? When Rahul told her, she realized that her lines had been plagiarized by the dialogue writer and she didn't even know. This did nothing to embarrass her of course. So, she did not blush. One of the first lessons of stardom was never to be embarrassed by anything at any time. It was a lesson painfully learnt, and easily remembered. Having spent a good seven years in the film line, Sreelekha's peaches-and-cream skin was not half as delicate and as fragile as it appeared on screen.

Sreelekha wanted to act in the best and the greatest film ever made, she told Rahul. She wanted to surpass Kate Blanchett in `The Titanic', Susan Sarandon in `Step Mom', Marilyn Monroe in `The Seven Year Itch' and Sophia Loren in `Two Women'. But no director was prepared to listen to her. All they wanted was a fat wad of currency notes pressed into their palms before discussion could begin. They wanted to discuss the 'script' in rooms booked at lavish five-star hotels with the food and drinks of course, thrown in gratis. She did not tell Rahul about the other side of the bargain she was not prepared to submit to. Quite a few wanted to sleep with her. Being a star, she had a very different set of morals from mainstream people. But she was no longer at a stage where sleeping around was mandatory for any and every role. Besides, she had had her quota filled and was not ready to take in any more. "Why don't you produce your own film with your own money?" Rahul asked her, though he had heard stories of the shark-like qualities star-families acquired as one of them hit stardust.

"I don't have any", she confessed. Her family took it all away, she added. In exchange, they let her live in this flat. "See this beautiful flat? My parents bought it for me and furnished it for me too, appointing Fareeda Khan to do the decor. You know, she flew all the way from Mumbai to Cal to do up my apartment and my parents paid for her ticket. Can you imagine?" she said proudly, waving her graceful arm in a liquid line to embrace the room. The walls had large-size photographs of Sreelekha in different poses. Some in Black-and-White, many in color. The Black-and-White ones, Rahul noticed, were shot with diffused lenses, with careful backlighting that created an ethereal halo around the head, investing it with the star-like quality of the unreal. The counterpanes and glass cabinets were filled with statuettes and medallions of all sizes and makes, inscribed with her name, awards collected by Sreelekha for her roles in different films. One of them, Rahul noticed, was the BFJA (Bengal Film Journalists Association) Best Actress of the Year trophy. And he did not even know her from her face!

Rahul did not know who Fareeda Khan was and why her name had to be so familiar. But for him, the dazzling decor was a bit unnerving. There were imitation chandeliers crafted out of fiberglass hanging from a false plaster-of-Paris-carved ceiling juxtaposed against textile lampshades bought off Cottage Crafts. Priceless crystal clashed with blue pottery from Rajasthan. A batik panel on pure silk was placed right beside a reproduction of a Picasso 'blue' abstract. A brass statuette of the Buddha stood alongside a Chinese Laughing Buddha in jade, arms raised in laughter. The velvet-covered settee had a stained glass center table and kantha-embroidered cushions. Rahul winced at this pot-pourri and mishmash decor that must have taken a neat packet out of Sreelekha's hard-earned money. "I'll never use this kind of decor for the interior shots of my dream film," he told himself.

He vaguely guessed out of sheer common sense that this flat, and everything that went into it, was bought off Sreelekha's sole earnings, as was the Cielo they had driven in. "They give me a monthly allowance that is quite generous, you know" she informed Rahul innocently. He did not care to ask her why she lived alone, and away from family. "Heroines may have their own standards," he felt. After coffee, she offered him a Scotch-on-the-rocks from the well-stocked bar. Rahul graciously refused the drink. All these years, in his determination to break every rule in the film director's book of values, he had rigidly kept himself away from the three well-known vices of filmdom - cigarette, wine and women. His girlfriends were simple friendships wrongly labeled 'affairs.' "I did not even kiss them" he said to himself, a bit remorseful in retrospect, for never even having made the attempt. He knew the girls would not have stood the test of time, dream film or no dream film. With a shock he realized, that with all his unconventional and radical dreams, he was still a virgin!

After a few more meetings, now secret by design, between Sreelekha, the star-actress and Rahul, the would-be director of his dream-film, unknown to Sreelekha's parents, producers and gossip-writers, (since Sreelekha lived alone and only had part-time help coming in,) Rahul decided to rewrite the script of his life. He did not have to put pen to paper. He did not have to approach Ray to show him the script. Nor did Sreelekha have to ask for money from her parents to produce her own film. The two incorrigible dreamers just put their lovely little heads together to make the best film ever made. What's more, it was a 'live' film, the first such film ever made in the history of cinema. It needed no re-takes, no editing, no cinematography. No studios, no sound-rooms, no recording studios, no dubbing. Yet, the dialogues were real, springing forth naturally out of impulse, no mouthing of absurdity or melodrama written down in premeditated calculation. No wipes, no fades, no mixes, no superimpositions. No jump-cuts and no match-cuttings. No flashbacks. No montages. Nor did it need the jugglery between financier and producer, distributor and exhibitor. No promos, no P.R. work either. All it needed was a bit of careful planning, choice of proper 'location' and a lot of post-production work in a 'lab' commonly called 'home.'

In case you've not guessed it yet, Rahul and Sreelekha got married. They shifted to the relative anonymity of Bolpur, the picturesque little town where Tagore built his dream Viswa Bharati, the university at Shanti Niketan, in Birbhum district of West Bengal, a 'location' ideally suited to the lifestyle they chose and the ideology they lived for - dreaming forever. They bought themselves a lovely little bungalow with the money the sale of the Mandeville apartment brought them. 'Post-production' work consisted of two little children named Satyajit and Shabana, after Satyajit Ray and Shabana Azmi, 'created' with love, in that 'lab' called their bedroom, during night shootings. This was the dream-film they opted for, when the other one did not seem to be very functional. The best and the greatest film ever made. The perfect script ever written, or rather, not written.

How do they manage to make a living? Through Sreelekha's contacts she had never exploited till then, they have built an empire in the underground hoarding and selling of cinema tickets of Hindi films in the black-market in Calcutta. They have thus created an avenue of employment for street urchins and runaways into Calcutta, conveniently distanced from direct contact with Rahul and Sreelekha and their two growing children, studying at elementary school at Viswa Bharati. The Cielo is still there. They have retained it as a tribute to the memory of that first meeting. It draws a lot of public attention in this small-town. But they know that with time, the locals will get used to it. Rahul will never rush into it absent-mindedly ever again. Because he drives it himself. You do not really need to drive around much in a small-town like Bolpur. He drives it on his weekly drives to Calcutta and back, sometimes with Sreelekha and the kids, mostly alone. His hands are now conditioned to be around the steering wheel of the plush Cielo. They no longer rise, either in reflex, or by designed intent, to make that three-sided rectangle with outstretched palms to simulate the frame of a shot, viewed through a movie camera.

(2002)

xvi.
LB Sedlack
five poems (usa)

The 7-11 Connection

My parents stayed in room 711
while they were in San Francisco
but they didn't get the connection
- see we don't have very many
7-11's in the south where they're
from although they do have
some in Virginia
'cause the last time I was there
- right outside of D.C.
(the District of Columbia)
I stopped in one off Quaker Lane
and I bought a Coke, a Ginger Ale
and a Peppermint Patty
plus 3 scratch tickets for the lottery;
when I scratched the tickets with my quarter
I didn't win at all
'cause the odds are against me
as they were for the men who escaped
from Alcatraz - a.k.a. the Rock - in the
icy water not far from the Golden Gate Bridge
- my parents got to Alcatraz by ferry on a tour
with their friends from home - North Carolina -
since they bought tickets in advance by phone
after getting the phone number off the Internet
which holds the key to lots of information
but not without a doubt proof
of whether of not any Alcatraz escapees
ever survived - lived -
but if it were you and you made it
off the Rock
would you tell anyone just so you could go
back to jail albeit as a famous criminal
- probably not 'cause I don't know about you
but I like having the freedom to buy Slurpees or whatever
at 7-11's whenever I please, wherever I please
even if I have to cross a state line to do it.

Wild Onions

Wild onions growing in an abandoned field
Divided by cement and asphalt.
To the right a furniture factory, and
to the left a house full of Mexican immigrants;
in front a decaying chemical lab,
and behind a loan office and Laundromat.

Once in a while a city employee
gets around to mowing it
on a weekday morning.

Every hour, every minute
Cars, trucks and kids on
Bicycles or skateboards go
around it, never through it -
always practicing avoidance -
never having to acknowledge its presence.

Still the wild onions grow keeping the
weeds, grass, sticks and rocks
company - absolutely content
to coexist even though
everyone else seems oblivious.

White Cars and Waterbeds

My neighbors are washing their
car again even though it's
white and not dirty; just
because it has rained they think
they have to rush outside on
the first clear day, and scrub off
every single speck
of mud, dirt, debris - whatever
may have stuck between the
hood and the windshield, or
on the wheels.

They're oblivious to the
weather - far too cold for
washing cars with cold water
that could be used instead
for ice cubes or bathing or
cooking; they soak the plastic
with the hose, dripping drops
of pure, precious water into
the cement drive, down into
the grass.

On a hiking trip once we
buried ourselves in tall, dark
blades hoping to fill our
canteens enough to heat
something to eat over a
fire that we were never
able to build - not one
Boy Scout, Girl Scout between us.

Maybe we should've gone camping
with our folks more often; the
one time we did it was at
the beach, near the ocean
and there were no campfires -
only grills with charcoal.

The neighbor's car is clean
now so they park it in their
garage; all safe, not exposed
to any of the elements,
especially rain.

Alien Showers

An ice cold shower is something
not even a corpse would want to take
with every nerve tingling,
every blood cell freezing
and skin prickling with goose bumps.

A steel table for a towel,
leather straps for a washcloth
bright lights for a hairdryer
that could blow with a power surge
like a hot water heater -
fixable only by appliance repairmen.

The American Dream

A German in America; putting in
the time - working hard, getting
promoted and becoming a citizen.

Toiling for hours, days and nights,
in a factory saving
every extra cent year after year.

The sons go to college, and the
family buys a house, still putting
away anything extra.

Years vanish, he retires and his sons go to work,
the mortgage is gone, the
extra savings are put to use.

Finally, the motorcycle - a BMW
from home - sits in the
driveway ready for long drives
in the mountains of North Carolina.
Now, the dream is real.

xvii.

Niyati Mehta

four poems

Premature

April: Your fingers strum my hair
In your laughter this joy is mine.
A glance in the side view mirror
Confirms 'this is no ordinary high'.
May: I awake, in an out of the blue
Dark night, to blush and be enflamed,
As I dance the suicidal eulogy
Of the odds, with the God of Love.
June: These numb scorched
Fingers struggle to stretch.
The weight of sorrow on an empty
Palm, wide open, cripples.
For now, this is all premature,
I love knowing I could trip and fall!

Go Your Own Way

Fleetwood Mac sang 'loving you
Isn't the right thing to do.'
I loved you.
I tried. I fought. I laughed.
I waited. I hurt. I smiled.
I loved you.
The picture is no longer pretty.
You do not understand.
It is not in the grey of the odds
And change but in your bearing.
Knowing it is time
To give in, and walk away
I let go,
Still loving.

Cappuccino Buddies

His loneliness haunts me
In the darkness of the day
It is a shadow
In the light of the night
It is my only companion.
His uncertainty attracts me
I feel it
Flowing with his spirit
It is our
Silent trademark.
Her pain I feel
It makes me feel like her
Lonely, mad, lonely
We walk on the edge
Taking turns to fall.

Five Minus Three

Audience on Two Levels
Stillness
The Muse enters.
The body pulsates
Movement breathes.
Pecked bud
Uncurled
Bounding within space
Communicating
in expanding rhythms
A circle.
Twist, turn, turn
Fingers protrude
Flitting passion … volatile conception … moonlit waves unfold…
silhouettes cast into space
Swirl
imbibe into the spirit.
Momentum
The self
Dawns
The circle is complete.
Enter within
A dew drop
A womb
Space
is extended in whirling spheres of consciousness.
On the edge
The railing
Stands locked on the past.
Self locked. Even the 'beyond' stands out.
Controlled within the spirit
the Present
Offers
Interacts
a symmetry
that allows every movement
to be its own.
Stretch
the manifestations of Wombic child = Grown adult
In fingers of creativity
And one foot on earth
Yearning
Contemplating
Fulfilling the need to hold on
the inner balance
of inter-dependence.
In waves of colours
I have grown
seen the world
Woven
Risen
to quest the aesthetic crest.
He bows. The Muse departs.
I stand. Applaud.
W a t c h
the words circle to a still.
This space is now yours.

xviii.

Mustansir Dalvi

two poems

If We Should Cease to Correspond

Must I return your trouble of flowers?
Whisk away your familiar shawl?
If we should cease to correspond.

There would be little left to see beyond:
I'd only watch time fade, as a thrall.
Must I return your trouble of flowers?

My bold nib would wither to a farce,
Blue tracery veins slow to a crawl
if we should cease to correspond.

Nothing stirs, nor will you respond,
How could you then see this child at all?
Must I return your trouble of flowers?

Push dead ink behind all the jars;
Bleed unreal impulses in the hall;
If we should cease to correspond.

These hedgerow senses, on which I fawned
still spread their bouquet despite your wall.
Must I return your trouble of flowers?
If we should cease to correspond.

Terna Circle

A car parked. It's rear lights wink,
Reminders of derelict owners.

In the distance, yahooing jayriders
Doppler shift from buzzsnore to wail.

Regular joggers. Red laser lights flash from heels,
Part the twilight couples into epileptic trance.

Night at the circle. Streetlights clack
on. The florescent drone scatters fireflies.

Flat breath. Eyes squint at the intrusion of day.
Curses splatter the pavement with rusty stain.

Rat-arsed, he reaches into his pocket, and points.
The circuit reaches round to complete its orbit.
Auto-lock makes lewd whoopee, and all is calm.

Turning over on one side,
He shakes a wet trouser-leg from clammy skin,
And snores in the leeward darkness of his parked car.

xix.
Brenda Porster
poem

A Gypsy Mother's Tale

Cast out we were
into the dark sailing away,
not towards, but together;
she exactly filled
the empty cradle of my arm,
a damp-warm weight her need only I
could meet, the dark vague depths
of eyes, the desperate searching,
the shell-clenched fists rosy
uncurling prawns grasping
my breast tentative
lips and then that clamping pull
of life from me to her, fulfilled
our mutual need, each to each
bound, in perfection
the circle closed.

When did I see she was not
there, her small weight gone
limp, suspended, all warmth
drained, the searching ended?
She no longer needed
me, while I was left, longing,
and my arm circling
empty? Chill terror clamped
my breast and suddenly I knew:
that they would come and
cast her down to depths
infinite she would drop
down never to be found
her tiny body unfurling,
waving anemone limbs
forever searching forever
exposed.

No! This could not be! I,
her mother, would provide
for her a warm covering, decent sand
and place, a collocation
of the mind, for both our needs, together
a final time, before I said
once more good-night,
good-night, my heart's own dear,
and left her there.

Note: For burying her baby daughter on the beach of Apulia, where she had landed after escaping
from Kosovo, this ROM mother was arrested by the Italian police and charged with illicit concealment
of a corpse.

xx.
Bibhu Datta Mohanty (translation-Oriya)
Antaryami Mishratwo
two poems

From There

Does the childhood end, there?
Can this vagrant heart
remain charmed there?
How can I bid goodbye
to those commonplace memories?
Can you invite back
your intimate playmates,
to those very places, today
where you can dialogue with yourself,
exchange with your memories?
There sitting by ourselves,
we didn't feel conscious at all.
I feel myself in communion
with my past when
I still remember your frown
after a heated-exchange,
the confession of my guilt
and the blooming of a smile
on your lips, so sweet!
What is this fear
that grows along with your flesh and body
on the slippery shore
of suspicion where
you place your foot
so cautiously, only
to soak your whole body, that has been
untainted until now!

Assurance

Let's not spoil this brief meeting
by raising such issues
on which we differ.
After all, what can the Gandhian's do
after they know about the earthquake
in the 'Gandhidham' itself,
if you question their competence?
What will the poets carry
in scripts if a seminar is organised
at 'Bhuj'? What will be
the intensity of vibration
of that poetry in the Reichter scale
of apprehension and fear
of the hopeful audience?
How many runs
will Tendulkar's bat yield
in the coming match
that you are waiting for so eagerly?
Will this be the end
of the march of victory
of the visiting team?
What do you think that
The opposition can't argue in this budget,
in the new chapter of increase
in taxation by the ruling party?
There is yet no hope
of the yes-clouds of appointment
in the slashing down
of expenses in the order
issued from the capital
or in the thunder
of our ensuing arguments.
We don't see you as before;
where are you hanging out these days?
Won't you come for a while!
We'd again forget ourselves
in the 'Nadiya' rhythm,
in a revived, devotional dance party.
Don't you feel uneasy,
sitting all the while,
in the corner of your home;
how can you lie in such a deep slumber?
Red and blue - all
are available free, here;
which one would you prefer?
After such a super Cyclone
and the earthquake
what else remains to be seen
in the new almanac?
If you believe, you'd
rather wait patiently
for some new possibilities
until the notification of the next election.

Kalpana Acharya
three poems

The Golden Cage
For once, at least,
release me from this
golden cage of your family
and its aura of heavenly happiness,
pull apart this silky curtain
of attachment without reason
before my eyes.
Unfasten that chain
of soaked affection, woven
with the anguish
of our loving expectations,
from the deep concern of my mind;
cut off in your own hand
that string of soft velvet
of your charmed fancies.
Let my desires fly
on their winged fancies.
For once al least,
my desires captive
in the golden dish, the silver urn
and the shining bunch of grapes
of your gifted acres;
let them fly unconcerned,
in the remote fragrance
of the sandalwood jungles
across that distant hill,

the home of the wild flowers.

The River and the Woman

O river! you are bound
to a vow from your very birth
that you won't overflow your banks.
You'd be flowing on
in your snaky bed of sands
in your due course.
Like you also I am
a woman, forbidden to cross
the line of decorum,
the decent traditions
of my father and husband
while following the winding roads
of my own small world.
Your banks are sketched
with the sketch
of so many wounds of time,
of the burnt ashes of my ancestors,
of the crops destroyed
in drought and floods,
while I carry on my back
that dirty sack of memories,
the marks of a burning fight,
soaked with tear and blood.
I am almost buried
under a heap of tales of torment
of those escaped seasons,
in your sands,
while an under current
of some forgotten tune
of sweetness flows within.
I am branded
with an obsolete impress
of a wife, mother or sister;
a tune of an exile
in a lonely island moans within.

Grandfather: Legacies
(For Bibhu Padhi)

My brother returns
from a short trip
to Mochi Sahi square.*
His bulging pockets seize my eyes.
Crisp, round sweet-nuts
roll into my taste.
He wraps them out
with a generous smile
that Bhang alone can give.
His reddening eyes, matching walk
carry me away.
My nostalgia shapes into Grandpa
with his walking stick.

* A joint for traditional soft drinks prepared from raw Cannabis-Indica, called Bhang, a great favourite among the natives.

Translated from the original in Oriya by Bibhudatta Mohanty

xxi.
tbc recommends . . .

Muse of Murmur (Art & Poetry Ensemble)
edited by Subroto Bondo
This special 2009 edition of Muse of Murmur is "dedicated to Celebrated Telegu Poet, Seshendra Sharma, Master Brush-man Tayeb Mehta, and Artists and Poets who enriched this collection by bestowing their valuable creative pieces."

Ankur Betagiri
book launch

Basant Badal Deta Hai Muhavre, the Hindi translations of Ankur Betagiri's English poems, translated by Rahul Rajesh was launched at India Habitat Center, New Delhi, on 30 August this year. Ankur Betageri is assistant editor of Indian Literature, Sahitya Akademi

contributors

Julie O’Yang is a novelist and visual artist based in The Netherlands. Born and brought up in China, she came to Europe in 1990s to study at the University of London. Then she read Japanese Language and Culture at the University of Leiden, Holland, and Nagasaki/Tokyo Japan. Her previous publications include short stories and novels in English and Dutch as well as a number of translations. Presently she works as a freelance writer, screenwriter and visual artist in different, international fields. Find out more about her and her exciting new projects on her blogsite http://julieoyang.wordpress.com. Nirmala Pillai is in the civil service. She have published two books of poems in English and a number of poems and short stories in various magazines in India like PEN, The Asian Age, Sahitya Academy’s Indian Literature, Bare root Review from Minnesota University, POETRY CAN, LITERATURE SOUTH WEST, UK, Kritya, The Telegraph, The Little Magazine, Cha; an Asian literary journal from HONG-KONG, etc. She paints and has held painting exhibitions in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Cochin, etc. Mradul Sharma (Age 24) was born and brought up in Gwalior and currently lives in Noida. She is an Engineer and had her professional education (B-Tech) in Varanasi (BHU). She has been writing poetry for some years and has an interest in literature. She has written a few articles and book reviews too. She likes to travel and has travelled a lot across India. Tapas Bandyopadhyaya is a poet based out of Kolkata. Shriram Sivaramakrishnan is from Chennai and consider himself a budding poet who is trying to learn this art called Poetry. Sunil Sharma is India-born story-teller, poet, critic, freelance journalist, literary editor, reviewer, interviewer and essayist. He is a college teacher. His debut novel, The Minotaur, is inching towards critical acclaim, and, short fiction and poetry are featured in many prestigious international and national print and online journals. He also edits NFJ (New Fiction Journal) and is on the board of many literary journals. Pravin Nair is a brand researcher who doubles up as a blogger and poet in his spare time. He is a new entrant into the poetry journal space and has only recently started exploring. Ever since this adventure began, his poems have been published in a few journals such as Gloom Cupboard, Fried Eye, Mused Bella Online Literary Review. Arturo Desimone (1984) was born and raised in Aruba (Dutch Caribbean) but is of Argentinean origins and has led a nomadic existence. He left high school at the age of 15 to work but took online courses in writing and world mythology with The New School University of New York. He now lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. This year he won a prize from the El Hizjra literary contest for immigrants writing in the Netherlands—his submission of a theater-play was the first English-language winner. At the moment he is working on projects inspired by his travels through Poland and Tunisia in 2011. This poem (Was It You?) was written on the train from Amsterdam Zuid World Trade Center Station, March 3 2011, Netherlands, written in homelessness and transference. Swati Singh Sambyal is a Research Associate at the Centre for Science and Environment. She studied Energy & Environmental Engineering at UIT University. Yolanda Lindsay Mabuto (1988) born in Gweru (Zimbabwe) began writing poetry at the age of 9. After joining Young Writers, at 16 her first poem titled “A love story” was published. Since then, she has been published in 11 anthologies in Peterborough, featured in Applaud Africa magazine (Kenya), Zai magazine (Nigeria) Sentinel Literary Quarterly (London), Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey), Sentinel Nigeria, The Ghanaian Book Review (Ghana), lagos literary and arts journal (Nigeria), Saraba Magazine and Klorofyl magazine. She also holds 3 certificates of Poetry writing distinction. Now aged 23 she still continues to make poetry the center of her happiness. Her writing is inspired by the life of others as well as her own and it reflects the artistic craft of life’s pain and joy. Swakkhyar Deka works in the National Rural Health Mission, Assam, as District Media Expert in Dhubri District of Assam. His job requires me to make strategies for effective campaigns to make the people aware about different health schemes initiated by the Assam Government through NRHM. “Abarodh” was Deka’s first attempt at making a film, especially fiction. The writings of James Joyce and poems of T.S. Eliot are his inspiration. Abarodh won the best film award in “Commfest 2008”, a media student festival held in Assam University, Silchar,

Assam

. Deka made a documentary titled “OF LIVES...UNTOLD” in December 2009 about a Karbi Tribal village in the outskirts of Guwahati, where there is still no power, hospital, schools and mobile connectivity. It is an attempt to highlight the plight of these people and also the work done by a Karbi youth to set up schools there. Born on 1984, Biswajit Dutta hails from Chaibasa, a little-known town of Jharkhand in the district of West Singhbhum, the land of Birsa’s freedom struggle. He is with Human Resource Development Department of Jharkhand working in the post of Post graduate teacher. He has been teaching English to predominantly tribal students of this region for a couple of years. The published poems in The Brown Critique is his first poetic flight in the horizon of creativity. Sohini Basak is a second-year student doing BA English (Honours) from St. Stephen’s college and found The Brown Critique an interesting place to explore new Indian writers. Rohith, a young poet from India, a medico, who started his tender poetic journey at the age of 13 and never stopped penning from then. He wrote in different online workshops and poetry web sites and is currently writing in facebook, getting good criticism from poets and critics around the world. His poetry was published by a print magazine “Side Stream” from Newzeland. Shoma A Chatterji is a well-known journalist, writer and film critic from Kolkata. She has also translated an anthology of her mother, Sumita Gangopadhyay’s poetry (from Bengali) which was published by the Brown Critique. LB Sedlacek’s poetry has appeared in more than 50 magazines and literary journals such as Facets Literary Magazine, Unlikely Stories, Starry Night Review Literary E-zine, Blue Collar Review, Black Creek Review, The Sidewalk’s End, Paumanok Review, Portals, Write On!!, Muse’s Kiss, The Oak, Footprints, Red Owl Magazine, PKA’s Advocate, The Guild, IdioM, and New Works Review. LB has poetry forthcoming in Doggerel, Carpe Laureate Diem, Poetic License, and The Horsethief’s Journal. LB’s short stories and articles have appeared in FrugalSimplicity.com, Frugal-Moms.com, Ascent Magazine, Writer’s Choice, The Outer Rim, and Duct Tape Press. LB has an MA from Wake Forest University and is the Editor of Pop Poets poetry publication. LB’s contemporary fiction novella Suicide Pumpkins was published last year. Niyati Mehta has a BA degree in History and an MA in 19^th Century Studies. She is currently doing research on one of Bombay’s oldest school - architecture, education and history since 1860s. She is does freelancing on the Arts and loves traveling and her true passion is poetry. Mustansir Dalvi is an architect and a teacher. He heads a College of Architecture in New Bombay. His poems have been published in POETRY INDIA: Emerging Voices, 1992, the POETRY INDIA: Voices of Silence, 1997; H. K. Kaul (editor, both); and in POESIS, Summer-Winter 1996. Recently, his poem ‘Choosing Trains’ was awarded First Prize in the Asian Age All Poetry Contest 2001. Brenda Porster is a poet and translator based in Firenze, Italy. Her poems have been (and will be) appearing in various magazines especially in Italy and of course in the Brown Critique. Her anthology of poems is also due for publication. Bibhudatta Mohanty, poet, short story writer and translator, teaches English in a college in Puri, an ethnic coastal district in Orissa, India. His works have appeared in well known magazines and periodicals like The Brown Critique, Poiesis, The Green Lotus, Pratilee, Bridge-in-making, The Journal of Poetry Society of India, The Sun Times, The Indian PEN, Mother India (Pondicherry), Indian Literature (Published by The National Academy of Literature), Kabya Bharati (American College, SCILET). Anthologies/Collections Indian Poets United. AIPC-2000 (Jointly by The Poetry Society [India] and the British Council).

May 2011

2011-05-29T04:34:00.005+05:30

new work

i.

Trisha Bora
two poems

Pornografia

everything is in the words

like twisting the night into spools of time. sometimes I am quiet like the made bed, waiting for the weight of arms and legs and backs, and at others I am the dinner tray, wine and clams and reluctant poinsettias, set for dining. but all the while the television set threatens to burst into life.

and headlights pull into the parking lot at the hotel, throwing up latitudes of light that catch the shifting curtains and pin our shadows against the peeling wallpaper. for that instant, the outside — dishwater and bank holidays — is let in, till the engine dies and we are lampblack once again.

to think that rain can be alive in a square, framed by the room’s window; this variation of a theme can become anything — a rip of thunder and stocking, better still, a Norse god in nylon pantyhose, or setting out of here in thin paper boats to the waterfront a hundred feet away

where the wind, thick with salt, presses into the mast, breathing it on across the rough breadth, and the waves lash against the hull — collapsing it inward — the agony of a reprieve. when morning steals upon the grainy night, the storm breaks. the windows fly open, and the rain is finally set free.

Derailment

it is seminal.
                    this coming of Tuesdays.
when it arrives I am still here.
                    it is still night.
spring still cautious at my door
                    like a cat waiting to slip in.
skeletons of the city still collect around me,
                    fracturing my breath
till I become a collective,
                    a flicker of pulleyed light on
the sixteenth floor
                    as seen from down below.
below, the arterial streets
                    bleed out and break horizons.
here, the home grows heavy,
                    pregnant and still,
like a fat Matryoshka doll
                    waiting to be spun.
but any order is arbitrary,
                    extra — certain types cannot be set
or destroyed and made anew,
                    like spring (if it comes).
where is our god
                    when we are trembling
and filthy and separate?
                    where is our god
when a bald dawn murders
                   the night, waking us all?

ii.

Ankur Betageri
two poems

Monsoon

I asked her to touch me
and by touching
stitch a silk-lining
inside my skin

and today when I rest my palms
on the wet window sill
and look on lazily at the rain-drenched streets
I feel her electricity spreading through my bones
charging the silk-lining around my heart

and suddenly I hear it flutter overhead
a red dupatta of passion against the cool blueness of the sky.

The Egg of Desire

As I stood at my 4th floor window
the sun
(shot like an orange bullet)
left my forehead drenched
with warm orange blood

As I emerged out of the lift
the sun followed me like a mad lover
and poured its pleading heart on my cheeks
as the lipstick danced over the lips
in the jumpy auto

The sun had singled me out
and its light wooed me from the eyes
of every passing man

To the five-year-olds in the classroom
whose eyes shone like pearls
from between the wet mouths of seashells
I was goddess incarnate –
and when their red mouths opened
their fever-breath fell on me: like roses

The sun had singled me out
my body was glowing with its warm orange blood;
and slowly, my girl-body turned into an egg
and waited for him who could break my shell.

iii.

Vinita Agarwal
four poems

Born

You didn’t exactly want him
but he came anyway
a jostle of life amidst the plaid nudges of time
glistening with the water of my womb
the way a pebble gleams after countless stokes
by a river of love
I would fast for him
you loved him like the changing seasons
yoyo like
blistering hot to awning cold at times
a parent’s love should be rock solid like a mountain
when he left for college
I was relieved
the way only a mother can be
when father and son have finally laid down their swords
the house would no longer cower
at last he became your friend
no one noticed that one of my veins
had fossilised and would never come alive
in the rains again
and that the bridge sprouting between
you both had used up all my soil.

That part of me

Like krishna’s flute
talked about but not heard
you are in that melody
Like the church on Shimla’s Mall road
visited but not entered
you are in that view
Like sandalwood powder
aromatic but not an intense paste yet
you are in that fragrance
like the hint of life in a seed
existing but not quite out
you are in that desire
Like a newly sown paddy field
promising grains but not yet yielding
you are in that future
I am on the threshold of love
In my next breath I shall be yours.

Krishna – A prominent Hindu God who was said to play mesmerising melodies on his flute.

Brown

i like brown skin
colour shouldn’t really matter
but there’s something about the colour of wheat
that makes me hunger for its touch
cane and jute
a footprint embedded in wet shimmering sand
the bark of a tree or the throbbing soil beneath
doors and windows
wood and sills
an old unpainted boat humming to itself
a torso, a shared cup of tea
sometimes coffee
nibbles of chocolate in between
the back of your hand
the colour of baking
earth and all its solidity
just plain mud
eons of settled dust
the colour of kernels
brown is in my ovaries
and in my passion.

A sufi night

It was a sufi night
and it wouldn’t pass
I lay sleepless for so long
like an agitated river
on the unmoving rock of darkness
being close to God
I saw the red marks in my life’s book
and knew that they would be
in my eyes the next morning.

iv.

Kabir Arora
article

Sadhana Forest: A Temple of Environmentalism in the South

Integrating the planet into daily life: Aviram Rozin

“I don`t see any conflict between human development and the health of the planet. By integrating the planet in our thoughts, in our daily life we will realize the importance of Madre Earth”, said Aviram Rozin, founder of Sadhana Forest, while telling me about a forest-in-making; Sadhana Forest.

Sadhana Forest is to be found in the extreme southeast of India, in a village called Morathandi near the former French Colony Pudducherry (Pondicherry). It is not a fully-fledged forest yet, but is on the way to becoming so. Under the supreme guidance of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo, this project started on 19 December 2003, on the day of the Jewish Light festival in the Aiyanar Temple. It is a unique collaboration of eastern and western spirituality that could be called a Mecca of Environmentalism in India.

This reforestation project was initiated by Aviram Rozin with the support of his wife Yorit, together with two locals, Ballu and Swami. When they settled there, the area was totally barren and yellowish, he says. The only wish they had was to save the tropical evergreen dry forest. As a priority, they created earthen dams to stop the water flow of rainfall away from the site and then planted more than 18,000 trees of the indigenous variety.

Slowly, said Aviram, a green landscape started to emerge. A mud pool was created with other earthen dams, and this harvested the rainwater. Indeed, this veritable water vision that Aviram and his team had in their minds, was implemented with a resultant rise of the underground water level by up to six meters.

Life in Sadhana Forest

The only law which governs Sadhana Forest is to live in peace with nature. For this purpose huts were constructed, solar panels installed to supply electricity and the toilets made in such a way to ensure that nothing remained as waste. Manure is prepared from both the kitchen waste and human excreta. Only biodegradable toiletries are allowed. There are no fans and air-conditioners, with natural, pure air there to enjoy. For food, only vegan is on the menu.

A whole community has now emerged from Sadhana Forest, which includes 1,500 people, both Indian and foreign. The experiment reminds one of Mohan Das Karam Chand Gandhi’s Phoenix settlement.

Everyone staying in Sadhana Forest has to work for four hours a day. The day starts at 5:30 with the first wake up call. For the first two hours, from 6:00 to 8:00, everyone works in the forest except for the breakfast chefs. After that, again a couple of hours of work is carried out in the compound from 9:00 to 11:00. After this, everyone is busy with whatever they wish to do. This is how life goes on.

This forest has supported the growth of a huge family that stand by one another, even living across ‘borders’. Every Friday, for example, the Sadhana Forest Eco Club organizes a film show to which people from Auroville, a nearby sustainably-living community, are invited. After the show, a delicious vegan dinner is served to everyone. There is no television in Sadhana Forest aside from this, but many musical instruments are there. One can enjoy anything from Indian classical music to Portuguese melodies in the forest. A small library is also there with books on many different subjects.

There is no boundary made in the name of religion either, in recognition of the fact that in a nation everyone is for everyone.

Story of the Founders

Aviram and Yorit came from Tel Aviv, Israel. Aviram was a psychologist by profession. But the way of life in which they were living did not suit him and his family. They were in search of a true goal in life. This search brought them to India, and they decided to stay here for the rest of their lives.

A true friend, said Aviram, asked them to move to Auroville and there, they became followers of Aurobindo and the Mother. Later on, they acquired 70 acres of land in the outskirts of Auroville to form a community of their own, aimed to save the environment.

These two environmental gurus now live there with their two daughters, and guide people on how to live in peace with Madre Nature.

Planes Para el Futuro

This project has inspired people living in all of the far corners of world. As a result of Aviram and Yorit’s effort, a sister project to Sadhana Forest has been founded in Senegal, Western Africa. Aviram, with his team, is planning to take a round of the whole of India as part of an outreach program.

The true driver behind all this has been the raising of consciousness, as Sri Aurobindo taught. Let us all contribute to this haven of environmentalism.

v.

Mousumi Roy
three poems

PLEBISCITE...

A sinusoid
on the graph
swings of pendulum
bends out in
smooth curve...

The silent grope
of the moon
among the stars
and the heart beat...

Motionless ships
in their morning
drowse-filled
life at all the same
was stored all there...

The promise
seemed
far away...
time ticked
away...
As if an eon
was dawning....

24 January, 2011

Tanzanian Crater…

A winning combination of lakes
Swampy grass lands
Green lush attracted
Forests an assortment
Of air and land
Bound creatures…

Thousands of wild beasts
Roaming freely
Yellow sun baked
Grass, trees hugged
Deep crater walls
Curtains of heat waves
Emanated from the ground
As these grassy plains
Sweltered under a blazing
African sun….
Breaking the reverie of
Pool side panorama..
Young male lions, possibly brothers,
In their prime.
Developing golden manes
Clearly biding, time to adulthood
Eventually they would
Fight another male
To take over his pride
Would ensure the right
To mate with the prides
Lionesses and sire
The next generation
Of the lion cubs….

Moved from the bush
Into open grass land
Saw red!! scarlet
Swathed Maasai tribes
Stood casting long shadows
In the late afternoon sun
Permitted to graze
Their cattle in the crater
By maintaining
Long established ethnicity….
Dusk settle and insect
Call infused the air
As a turmeric sun
Set over the majestic mass
Of Tanzanian terrain
Like member of privileged
Audience……..

Note: Experience gathered during my visit and stay in African Countries has been shared through this poem…

Wrong Guessing

How helpless ! How helpless !
Their old memories
On the earth
She could paint...
Inprecations on
The heavens
She could hurl...
Of the high spirit...
She could beg...
Old women
This is the single
Anti-death
Of this morning
It was her mistake...
Never stop sweaty deals
Keep busy...
Keep occupied...
Keep going...
She had stopped,
Had permitted
Her mind
The liberty of
Mother’s mind and
Women’s mind
She vowed that
Never to forget
That again...
No matter
What were the calls
From her heart
And silence
No more children there,
There could be no more
Youth...
In the filtered
Sunlight
She stood at her
Desk
Felt enfeebled and
Lost...
Oh how!wrongly
She had guessed
About the
Later years...

vi.

Kurang Mehta
two poems

viewer

CITYSCAPE
(Random thoughts)

Laden heap of concrete and stones
Vanished farm fields
Blowing ashes of the dead farmers
A labor melting in boiled Asphalt
Masses swallowed by the supermarkets
The house sparrow soon to be extinct
A mall getting transformed into a termitary
Citizens are slowly becoming the termites.

April 2011

A White Mermaid

I was standing in front of the sea,
With the folded hands and closed eyes...
was praying for inner peace.
When I opened my eyes, I saw a white deity Mermaid...
playing with the pebbles by the sea.
Lord Sun was sinking down far at the horizon...
Darkness was coming from the east.
But I kept looking at her...
without any greed.
When I saw wings coming out slowly from her back,
I went down on my knees.
I realized, she was turning into a butterfly.
But suddenly, the lord sun turned into red...
and my dirty hands were inflamed... I screamed.
I fell down with pain, the darkness covered my eyes...
Though, I could see the flying butterfly...
was ripping apart the darkness, with its white flapping wings.

March, 2011

vii.

Shivani Mutneja
poem

Passé

I'm not the artist you are looking for
I make porn films,
I film them blow jobs.

I'm not the girl you are looking for
I make love to me,
I rub it clit till I scream

I'm not the lady you isolated a compartment for
I relish the rear
I letch. I stare. I feign interest.

I'm not the poem I write
I device a plan to outrage
instead I fall flat on shopper's stop
I botch them glass doors
I rather escalators
I grow wings in a few lines,
They melt in marvellous conceit
of genders.

viii.

Sunil P. Narayan
two poems

A Swan Who Wallows In Lotus Laden Ponds

She walks into the banquet room of the Château de Versailles feeling out of place
Such a refined lady with skin as soft as a doe’s coat
Pearls that dangle above her swan-like neck
Eyes so tranquil, flutter like butterflies in a garden
A woman who floats from room to room unaware of everyone’s presence
They look into those lotus petal shaped eyes to see a secret world
Gardens stretching for miles fill the air with the scent of roses
Uṣás-Devī cannot help but inhale this sweet perfume

Radiant marigolds bask in the Sun’s warmth
Jasmine trees stand tall to give shade for all of Pṛthivī’s critters
They lay at the base sighing for amour had consumed them
A gazelle who once nestled at the feet of Pṛthivī-Devī is now an elegant lady
Yes! Suraiyā is the child of Pṛthivī-Devī
Her hands decorated in emerald rings have fingers that flow like the Gangā
So pure and gentle men have followed her around the world just to be caressed by those
fingers
They are savages who have succumbed to the feminine power of an untainted goddess

Yet, why does she not look at these men?
At the far end of the room gourmet Indian dishes line up a long glass table
An aroma of mixed spices travels through the air
Men who smell it divert their eyes to Suraiyā

She stands before the table delighted by such a sumptuous feast
Her hands move towards the glass spoon dipped in the dāl bowl
Ashamed by bad manners Suraiyā pulls her hand back
The host who has been seduced by Suraiyā’s beauty tells her
it is quite alright

A smile transforms Suraiyā’s face like Uṣás-Devī bathing the world in light
Those eyes of her enchants the host, bringing him to his knees
His heart grew ten times with each pulse sighing in joy
A goddess has locked eyes with a humble king

An elegant lady created in the nest of the Pṛthivī-Devī looks into the eyes of many
The pain, the happiness, the frustration, the excitement, the joy!
These emotions are the colors in her gardens
And all men, women and children have their own inner gardens

Suraiyā’s lotus-petal eyes see the world’s inner beauty permeating all things
Even the Sky, an ocean for the Devás, is a jewel created by Pṛthivī-Devī!
Suraiyā’s śāṭī is fashioned from the Devás’ water

A long train from her shoulders floats above the floor as she walks around the room

All guests spend hours watching Suraiyā create a stream with her śāṭī
The scent of lilacs flows from the fabric into their noses
Śakra-Devá’s heaven cannot compare to the moment they are lost in!
A rarity in this world is locked away for centuries but comes out when humanity
has submerged in harmonious bliss

A Guarded Secret

Īshwar and his lover saved Bhūmī-Devī from
persecution, thus the many arts of mankind blossomed
like the mallikā
Everywhere the delightful scent of Svargáloka encircled
the minds of unimaginative men and women
Thrusting them into a fantasy of a guarded jungle
with celestial flowers and rivers endlessly flowing
towards the sunset!
Blue butterflies follow the trails never taking a moment
to rest

While the selflesss Parinirvivapsā-Devī will offer a tender
touch to any one who asks, her abundant hair began to
fall to the grassy floor
No one knew about this humble maiden who kept
two isolated lovers alive for many years
She was stricken by a dreadful abandonment
It is the thorny fate all women run away from

One warm night, a small bhūruha containing the heart of
the divine muse dropped onto the bank
She grabbed it before the hovering balíbhuj could swoop
down
It was the fire that consumed Īshwar and Parīkṣit
during their lovemaking
Too hot and heavy to hold when fresh but glistening and
light when cool

As she lost herself in admiring the pearl, its surface changed
from white to deep red
Parinirvivapsā-Devī turned away from Rajanīpati-Devá,
hiding her treasure with kuṅkumam palms for no one
can take away what is rightfully hers!
She had no diamonds or turquoise jewelry yet
Rajanīpati-Devá is bedecked with nīlagandhika pādakilikās
and maṇícīras
Śatárūpa-Devī’s gift to her shall be hidden in the soil
so no one can find it!

The next morning Parinirvivapsā-Devī saw a woman
clothed in a light yellow śāṭī in the forest inhaling the
mixture of campakas, bakulas and mādhavīlatās
She carried a basket of yellow kundamālā though did
not speak

Her eyes were two blue pools reflecting the majestic
Candrá-Devá
Hidden by a yearning for love in the form of
deep pink satin

The ethereal seer’s skin as white as the yuthikā had
no scars
It was adorned with māṇikyamaya armlets and
necklaces of yellow, orange and white!
The hair woven tightly was covered by long strands of
mālatī
On each wrist a prāvṛṣya bracelet sparkled under
Sūrya-Devá
No parāgas were worn though the śāṭī covered her feet
She walked from one mākanda tree to another, her
dress fresh as if it were just bought at the market!
Her long neck lengthened to capture the scent of fragrant
orange flowers
She is a perfect jewel unknown to mankind yet loved
by the Divine!

A secret pearl offered to a miserable woman as a gift for
showing compassion towards the son of Sarasvatī-Devī
Parinirvivapsā-Devī’s daughter looked at her for a few
minutes
In her mind she heard the name “Ouimi”
Sounds can be rubies crushed by hammers but to her
they were the jingling of maṇíguṇanikara

When she awoke from a nightmare she heard the calming
name “Ouimi” from the rāgitarus
A lost spirit whispering her name
She seems so far away like the golden rājabhavanam of
Mahādevī
Unreachable by a small being such as an earthly creature

A tired devī touched her tummy, surprised by a life
forming inside
She was left wondering how such a miracle could
befall her
For many months her belly swelled while the mādhavīlatās
continued to multiply
It was the least a celestial plant could do for a generous
friend
When Ouimi saw her mother for the first time she gazed
at her with sincere gratitude
The varṣártu grew more violent yet no rain drop
touched the radiant face of a newborn child
Sāvitrī-Devī blessed the loving nourisher with an oracle
inside a red jewel
By instinct Parinirvivapsā-Devī buried it near her resting spot

It is where Sāvitrī-Devī dug it up and pushed inside
the motherless āryan’s mind while she slept
To mankind a gift is an oracle who can guide them to
righteousness, though to a woman a child is all she
wants
She can wear the most luxurious garments and still
feel empty if there is no one to share them with
A child is her pricelesss treasure for each moment
is more valuable than a parihārya or parihāṭaka set with
bhārgavakas
Collecting mālatī off of vines that cover marble
sculptures is the enchanting Ouimi’s favorite activity
The smile of each one belongs to Lakṣmī-Devī
She touches the hard lips to feel the expanding
warmth
It has an alluring scent that rubs against her cheeks to
give a permanent perfume!

Every day a blissful mother laughs with her daughter till
Sóma-Devá awakens from his needed rest
It is the sound of a dundubhí echoing through the
minds of all mortals, devás and devīs
When the rain hits the ground hard these creatures hide
under the branches
The giggling of Ouimi helps them to endure the
temper of Índra-Devá

Ouimi has no reason to be angry since she sits on the
vájratulya laden chair of Bhūdevī
A fortunate fate she received when her mother and Bhūdevī
became sisters
The comfortable lap of a selfless mother is what Ouimi
will ask for in every afterlife
Nothing to her but the unlimited grace of a mother matters

ix.

Tahera Mannan
poem

Chief Hawk Eye

The mighty Chief Hawk Eye
Rests under this ancient tree
All his weapons lost
Ignores the sounds of English guns
His heart heavy with his people’s sorrow
Plays his flute towards the setting sun
A man who loved too deeply
Lonely and defeated
His spirits remain free
As music rises around him
Shimmering colours in these enchanted woods
Fades and vanishes into his soul
His mind searches memories
Of those long lost years
Before the white man arrived....
The sad song of the thrush
The tears from the clouds
Pierce his body with pain
Shadows dance around him
His scared lands are stolen
Mountains blasted open
Gold ripped from the earth’s belly
An end to the old ways of life
He is ready to become a stone
And to be left alone...

x.

Insia Fatima
impressions

The desert and the river - part II: The Tree and the Ocean

She hangs at the precipice, almost falling in. For centuries she has stood there; and for centuries, she has been contemplating the depths of the waves that hit at the foot of the cliff. The depths. By now her roots have grown so deep that there's no chance of what appears to be inevitable.

He returns to her again and again. The urge to touch her - know her - overpowers him, and he leaves the psychedelic depths of the ocean to crash at her feet, get absorbed into the soil, and reach deep to her warm roots. Sometimes he goes wild and ravishes her passionately; sometimes he storms at her; sometimes he soothes her with his gentle rythmic cooing.

She closes her eyes and listens to the familiar sound of the crashing waves: he crashes and he recedes, he crashes and he recedes.

The shore-line and the tide

By moon-rise, he is overcome by a nagging urge to retreat to the mysterious and spine-chilling depths of the ocean. With all the new barriers between them, efforts to reach her fatigue him and he is consumed by a desire to rest in the folds of the sea unfathomable. He morphs into a recluse, a saint meditating on spirituality, a hippie high on passionate wonder.

The abandoned boat rests on its side upon her exposed breast. Crustaceans crawl around searching for crevices to hide in. The shore-line still has the undulating ridges from where he had lazily drawn circles on her. And she had let go and swirled off with him in reckless abandon, and rested back light and happy.

Rhythmic impressions on her slowly get replaced by random scars left by crabs digging for a place to hide and fisher-men dragging their nets. Hopefully, tomorrow he will come and clear away the mess in her head again.

("The desert and the river", inspired partly by characterization of humans into the Earth and Water element in astrology, and partly by nature. In this particular piece, the banyan tree is the embodiment of the Earth element, the monsoon rain is the Water element, the tree is the female, rain the male; the story is about what happens when they meet.)

xi.

Mradul Sharma
three poems

Untitled

People undermine sadness.
it has brought me lyric,
reprieve
and patience.
for purposes of vanity
i don't count you though.

Scripture

every evening.
while the sun is blushing
for not being as industrious
as the poets lay claim.
the sea
the birds
the sky
the wind
and even children
do their best
to distract
everyone's attention.

Population

i yearn for sparsely populated days.
like a desert
you know.
with a thought here
a sentiment there
and miles of vacantness
in between.
that i could paint
if i wanted to.
tinted glasses
white rumble etc.
deserts,
as is common knowledge
are coveted destinations
of semi-professional
tourists.
and emptiness
in times to come
could very well
be selling
in niche markets
for respectable
and yet
maligned prices.

xii.

Paramjeet Singh Berwal
two poems

"Chords of a Lonesome Heart"

I met an artist
I lived in myself
I had fake and sparkling world around me,
I met an artist,
Artist said to me “I am nothing”
I was blind,
Saw what I wanted to see,
Thought I met everything,
Erased myself,
Then came reality,
I became child
Asked nothing to scare away the reality,
Nothing said “I am a thought, I am feeling”
I took help of wind and moonlight
Nothing said “I am an artist”
I cried tears,
I felt pain,
Not because I erased myself,
But for nothing,
It was too late,
Then one day,
I met Nothing,
Nothing was silent,
I erased myself,
Found myself,
Nothing became everything
Now I live for Nothing.

I never wrote poem

I never wrote poem,
Just dipped the brush
In the blood of my heart,
Painted my soul after
Stripping it of the feelings,
And then made it dance on my face

xiii.

Tapas Mohanty
three poems

A Summer’s Verse

Summer, it arrives today and splays itself
On our Verandah, listening to the raven's calls,
Drying the seeds Baba* spat out last evening;
His skilled tongue, though slow have always
Held me in awe.
It will remain the summer, faithful and
Unquenched for months,
Or as long as you want it to be for I have known
Summers feeding on our expectations.
Maa**, why then you pat it on your skin like talcum,
Why then you hold it back as if it would never return?
Yesterday when you sat on the floor and picked pebbles
From rice I, standing behind you, explored the grey
Of your hair; the patches you dye return overnight to show
Time's binding with itself. You haven't had a secret
Since 84, it seems. Is there hidden in those silver weaves
A summer you haven't sung?

*Baba-Father
**Maa- Mother

To a Poet

You arrived today wrapped in
Thick covers, your words still warm
In those pages. You have travelled
Through times, survived the ages, to
Be discovered by me and my afternoons.
Are you tired of the journey?
Your words, lost rivers of your times,
Fill heart to heaviness once again.
As I touch the skin of each of your lives
I wonder, can I ever be like you?
Probably no. You have seen life
From within life; you have dug deeper
Into your ancestor’s burial grounds.
That is how a poem must be written.
I try though on afternoons when
feasting on words seems to be the only,
act of gratification.
But I am unquenchable. My angry veins
pump hunger to my heart.
Is it why I take refuge in the recesses
Of your verses cracked open with silence?

House

Sometimes when I ask this
House about our history,
It speaks of strange reversals.
How walls have sprouted out intimacies,
How mouths have formed over words,
How songs have flowed from hinges.
At nights, when the sound of the sea
Drowns me away, this house follows me,
To the edge of my world
And there it waits for my body to arrive.

xiv.

Swati Singh
poem

So hard to find a way…

It’s so hard to find a way...
Waking up every morn to this sunny day.
The cold breeze hits like the thunderstorm,
just want to break free without following any norms;
The green meadows and the pastures that I pass on by-
Seeing the birds i wish to fly.

It’s so hard to find a way,
but even amidst darkness the hope stays...
Blooming flowers and the roses that have dried,
Counting times when I really have tried??
Chasing happiness to trace a piece of mind,
Sometimes even with eyes I was blind.

It’s so hard to find a way,
life ain’t that easy to be moulded like clay…
A garden of lilies- Beautiful and White,
Ain’t any wings but still I glide;
The tide of dreams so unstoppable it seems,
One is over and the other one screams..

It’s so hard to find a way,
but still there is this blissful ray.
The signs I read passing by as I walk…
there’s something deep inside that talks.
It’s the soul and I hear every word it says to me.
Destiny gives us what we want to be---
It’s a journey against all odds and against will...
Hard to find but you got to drill.

Like the colours of the rainbow, vivid but together...
That feeling of being the birds of the same feather,
It’s so hard to find a way,
but closing my eyes I see a faint trail.
I gather some pebbles on my way home…
As a mark of what I learned from the path I left behind!!

xv.

Kim Farleigh
fiction

“so fantastically innocent”

Kamal said: “Oh, Baby, you know you can’t do that,” and Chi tilted her head and dropped her shoulders and smiled. Often Kamal said: “Oh, Baby, you know you can’t do that,” and often Chi smiled.

“I’d like to start an animal rehabilitation centre here,” Chi said.

“Oh, baby,” Kamal said, “you know you can’t do that.”

Chi smiled.

“Imagine how an animal rehabilitation centre here could change people’s attitudes towards animals,” Chi said. “Oh, baby,” Kamal replied, “you know that won’t happen.”

Chi smiled.

A family, visible on the footpath through Kamal’s living-room window, was beside a tent next to the road, the family’s silhouettes visible inside the tent at night. Two chanting, blind men in rags past the family, holding hands, led by a sighted third.

The blind men’s eyes, facing the sun, possessed a surprising belief that showed up the deadness in Chi’s eyes.

Her back faced the family. Her hair, thin frame, and porcelain skin created a fragile-doll look of innocent sweetness. The contrast between her black hair and her white skin, with her ivory corneas, sharpened the impression of blackness in her irises.

She was coming with us to Agra the next day.

“The carpets I bought yesterday,” she said, “are so beautiful.”

The blind men’s chanting disappeared.

“How much did they cost?” I asked.

“Three thousand dollars,” she replied.

She smiled.

The footpath mother, stirring the contents of a pot, was wearing the same clothes she had had on yesterday when Tim and I had arrived from the airport. The same frazzled-edge shawl was on her shoulders. A half-naked child was standing next to her.

“How do you know,” I asked, “that the carpets are going to be sent to The States?”

Her slither-of-a-film smile fell off her face – replaced by shocked calculation. Her iris blackness hardened, with savage consideration, like solid islands of mica in the milky lakes of her corneas. She is, I thought, as innocent as she tries to look.

Detachment filled her eyes, even when she was content.

“Kamal’s family can follow it up,” she said.

Her voice aged. Before, that voice had only projected infantile sweetness. She seemed to be suddenly talking to herself.

“What if the carpet shop has disappeared?” I proposed.

“Kamal can go there tomorrow and pick them up.”

“Oh, Baby,” Kamal whined, from an adjoining room.

“Kamal!” she screamed.

Vehement disbelief ignited in her eyes.

“But---”

“Kamal!”

“Okay, Baby, I will.”

Kamal had come home from Switzerland to set up a software company; time was short.

Chi’s voice then re-entered the green pastures of dreamy youth.

“The Taj Mahal is going to be so beautiful,” she said, smiling.

The mother waved away an emaciated dog from her family’s tent.

*

Star-dotted black-sky-velvet covered the hotel’s courtyard in Agra, the misleading, distant past serene with reassuring promise. Velvety silence had fallen, like a veil of peace, upon a desperate world. The light on a wall above the table darkened the shadows. Chi faced away from the shadows. Artificial light illuminated her face.

During the conversation there had even been a period when she had been an adult.

“I like reading obituaries,” I said.

“You read about dead people?!” she gasped.

“Dead – physically,” I replied.

“That’s sad, reading about someone who’s just died.”

“It’d be sadder if we didn’t remember their achievements.”

“Still, how can you do it, knowing that their family and friends are suffering, it’s --”

“It’s important to understand the past.”

“The past has had no affect on my life.”

The certainty in her voice hammered home the vastness of her unconscious denial.

I asked: “Your mother worked in the US embassy in Saigon during the war, didn’t she? When you were a kid?”

“Yes; and?”

“Nothing.”

“Why did you ask?”

“Curiosity. The Vietnam War was my first ever media event.”

“I don’t remember much about it,” she said. “We emigrated to The States before it finished. I was only seven years old.”

She still doesn’t appreciate, I thought, that the war stopped her development.

“I thought that there might have been hope for her,” Tim said, later, “but the obituaries, as it were, killed things off.”

“Imagine the syrupy head-patting she must have got,” I said, “in the US embassy when she was a kid.”

“The past has had no effect on my life,” Tim said.

*

The day’s sky spears of radiation mocked the prettiness of night’s sky.

Brown-yellow earth, in wilderness luminosity, disappeared into a hazed horizon.

Cut-smooth sapphire touched the world’s hazy edges.

A two-headed creature appeared in the distance!? Weoott!?

Tim and I leant forward. Our heads came closer together. The bus we were on was heading towards a mystery.

“It’s a bear!” Tim gasped.

Obscenity slammed into the padding protecting our moral cores.

Chi’s eyes reflected nothing, as if the world was an imaginary construct without drama.

“Arghhh,” I groaned.

A chained bear was being controlled by a man carrying a stick. One hand held the chain.
The black-and-white beads in Chi’s face remained inscrutable with emptiness.

Greenish saliva was hanging from the bear’s mouth. Its head was tilted up. The chain was thick around its neck.

“Geeeawd,” Tim hissed.

Fracas hope sat on the bear-man’s face as he stared at the faces in the bus’s windows. He was hoping to get paid for a little act of bear entertainment. When the inexpressive slithers of Chi’s eyes met the hopeful beads glinting in the man’s face, she turned and looked down the road.

*

Pushing, shoving, screaming men were clashing outside the parked bus, desperation expanding the whites of their eyes. They were behaving as if they had been stranded on an uninhabited island and a boat had just appeared over the horizon.

Baby looked down at the battling men, her iris screens revealing neither feeling nor thought nor curiosity. Because the men were useless for the glamorising of her self-perception they were irrelevant.

We were parked before a crimson wall. Screaming heads met us outside the bus.

Local marketing caused us to look at the wall. The wall, with its door, looked like a face with rectangular eyes. We walked towards the wall. Trinkets, cheap jewellery, cooked corn and clothes sat on portable tables that the sellers were pushing beside us as we headed towards the wall. If pointless screaming doesn’t work, then try it again; so they tried it again; and we headed towards the wall.

Inside, the serenity of privacy was like an unexpected gift, the heat suddenly pleasant, the refreshing silence charming, like an attractive novelty.

Puppies were rolling around on the ground. Their round faces displayed round, brown eyes and round, black snouts. Their waving, round, finger tails flailed.

Crimson-coloured buildings, with towers and slanting roofs, bordered the courtyard where the puppies were rolling around.

Flashing saris made impressionistic brushstrokes against ochre.

The puppies sniffed and leapt about. Their mother, her eyes were without want’s fire on the other side of the courtyard, was resting her snout upon the pillow of her front legs, the laid-back contentment in her eyes contrasting with the hunger we had seen in the sellers’ craving corneas.

Chi looked at the puppies, and, tilting her head, she gasped: “Ahhh…”

“I’m going to stay here awhile,” she said, “with the puppies.”

The thin lines, protruding from the corners of her small mouth, resembled cat’s whiskers.

But maybe this was a reflection of my perception of her predatory sweetness?

Tim and I walked towards a walkway whose columns fanned out to hold up a roof that sat above a sleeping chamber where a clay slab covered the floor. A window, shaped like a candle’s flame, revealed a plain that met the horizon in a misty blending of earth and sky – a meeting so tranquil that it blurred my view of time, enhancing my perception of its immensity. This time-expanding obscuring of the horizon brought me closer to nature’s immeasurable, languid pulse. Something greater than myself was great with its unaffected, gorgeous imperturbability and the palace and its gardens fitted in naturally with this graceful languor.

“You can fit about fifty on it,” Tim said, observing the slab.

“All experts,” I replied, “in the Karma Sutra.”

Trees melted into distant haze. I felt envy and sadness for the loss of an openness that had once enlightened the world – and it must have seemed as if this sedate openness was going to go on forever.

The columns were inlaid with coloured marble. A woman’s blue and yellow sari was wrapped around the exposed smoothness of her brown stomach. Her silky attire possessed an iridescent felicity that complimented the palace’s silence – a quietude made even more relaxing by the human voice.

Chi was still with the puppies. Her slight, distant figure failed to illicit admiration in my imagination. She made me realise how much I admired people generally, and how little I acknowledged this. If the palace and the plain enhanced my perception of time, she contracted it, the past irrelevant to her self-esteem – so she believed.

“Puppies,” I said, “usurp history in the Chiian School of Personal Glory.”

She stayed with them all day. When we were about to leave on the bus, Tim joked: “We thought you were going to bring one with you.”

Her face was lacquered up with dreaminess. She lifted up her T-shirt. A puppy was curled up on her stomach. For Tim’s benefit, I said: “Oh, how sweet!”

She was sitting in front of us. Tim’s eyes shone with overjoyed cynicism. We adored madness – provided it didn’t affect us directly.

Chi struggled to control the restless puppy whose consistent attempts to escape were futile. It wasn’t able to see its master’s good intentions. It rolled around on Chi’s stomach – bewildered; occasionally it yelped. She grabbed its snout to stop it from yelping. Defenceless, dependent creatures can yelp too much, especially if the inspiration to control and guide is loveless.

In the hotel courtyard, under the impassive gaze of the sky’s blue cornea, we were having lunch, the restless puppy writhing on Chi’s lap.

“Its mother was too skinny to produce milk,” she said.

“Why was the mother in such good condition then?” I asked.

“Tourists have been feeding it,” she replied.

“Oh.”

The puppy’s mother, fed by palace workers, may have been a reincarnation of the original Maharaja, Chi oblivious of local philosophies.

She tried feeding the puppy hot milk, claiming it was “starving”.

Shoving of the puppy’s snout into boiling liquid caused it to yelp. The yelping was shrilling, high-pitched, a scream from nature’s candid heart.

Tim’s azure gems oozed with condescending amazement. There was a purity in his eyes’ delighted disdain that was attractive because of its amoral sincerity. Chi hadn’t been expecting the dog’s resistance. In her imagination, the puppy had been a pliable cog in her dream of self-ennoblement. She was only aware of one thing – herself – and purely naively so.

“What do you intend to do with it?” Tim asked.

Great question, I thought.

“Kamal’s family will look after it,” she replied. “They’ll adore it.”

Silence reigned under pitiless blue.

Tim and I decided to go to the Taj Mahal. She stayed behind to rearrange her ticket back to Delhi, and “to nurse the puppy”.

In the rickshaw, on the way to the Taj Mahal, Tim said: “It’ll represent nothing more to Kamal’s family than an extra mouth to feed; they’ll get rid of it the moment her back’s turned, and right about now,” he grinned, “it’s probably pissing on her.”

“It’s inevitable,” I said, “that something will.”

The cynical richness underpinning Tim’s laughter turned his chortling into a joyous thunderstorm of hilarity.

Men were carrying heavy loads on the roads around us, their grim resignation to the inevitability of their dire lots contrasting with our arrogant amusement. The brown in their serious eyes was hard – compacted by strain.

We charged down streets lined with rotting garbage. Animals were fighting over the scraps that the beggars ignored. The atmosphere’s humidity was redolent with frying fat.

A religious freak in a soiled rag was rolling down the road; at traffic lights a man without legs, on a thing like a skateboard, was holding his hands up to detached drivers who were looking straight ahead. Black fumes were rising over moving vehicles; suddenly an elephant was next to us and were passing corrugated-iron
hovels and then a woman in a red sari was emerging from a hole in a grey slag heap and the stench was sudden, putrid, foul; cows were sprawled out on a traffic island; then we were passing more straining men carrying heavy loads and in a park we saw men in white fabrics lying on brown grass and then we saw a cow wandering into a temple and then we were amid a chaos of scooters and bikes and pedalled ricksaws and suddenly we were passing a man who was carrying rolls of fabric on his right shoulder and then we were beside a two-seater rickshaw whose removable roof was folded down and then we were passing a man with a wreath of flowers around his neck who was sitting on a flat slab of concrete next to Hindu statues and then we were passing a crouching boy who was depositing faeces onto the roadside and then we were beside a cart being drawn by a camel and all the while men on scooters were streaming by and we were passing shop after shop and man after man on motorbikes kept passing by and then the ricksaw stopped and before us were high, clay walls.

An emaciated dog, with wary, submissive eyes, like a rib-cage on legs, tried beating a cow to rice that had fallen from a consumer’s bowl. Mini-van fumes were swirling in the steamy air. The cow beat the dog to the fallen rice. Horns were honking, bleating, snorting. Motorbikes kept flashing by. The bleating horns, like a language between the machines, produced an unfathomable cacophony of chatter, as if loquacious, mechanical animals were prattling in a vast, squalid pen.

Women in saris were queued up before a window in the wall to buy entry tickets into the Taj Mahal. A line of men stood beside the line of saris. A crowd was facing a stall where rice was being fried on hot plates. A woman with a baby perched on her hip confronted two tourists, following them with raised, open palms, her eyes fraught with yearning demand; a ragged, orange shawl covered her chest and shoulders, its edges frazzled, the baby’s plump face surrounded by orange, woollen headwear, bangles on its wrists.

The police pushed the baby-carrier back onto the road. The bangles clattered. The baby-carrier screamed with violent, sudden-white eyes. One of the tourists had taken her photograph. She was still demanding money even though the police were pushing her further and further away from the tourists who had already turned their backs on her.

The beggar screamed as if she was being separated from loved ones by an evil force.

We queued up to buy tickets. Frying-fat stench churned my stomach. Smoke rose from road-side kitchens. Traffic’s roaring got punctured by horns that sounded like honking geese. A man dropped a clay bowl. A beggar and a cow went for it. The beggar won.

The puppy had avoided this – by chance.

Inside, bamboo and ferns were rising up a wall. The grass beside the path was gorgeous green. Silence and shadow, like the therapeutic impact of good news, had replaced the smelly disorder unfolding, like a Stravinsky symphony, on the other side of the walls.

Through another door, the space widened.

Marble steps rose to where the Taj Mahal made a white silhouette against the sky’s effervescent light. Fabrics, flashing against the building’s creamy marble, resembled tropical butterflies. Colourful gardens complimented the saris that glided between breast-topped cylindrical towers that sat at the four corners of the marble floor upon which the building’s curves and lines rose in a balance so refined that preconception flew out of my head, surprise expanding and expanding, like an sensuous shock. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

Domes were reflected into ponds.

We went up the marble stairs. The gracious gravity of attraction that drew us forward was as strong as it was gentle, the building’s breasts rising above a rectangular facade.

A curved-top door gave entry into the mausoleum’s domed interior. The guide blew a whistle. A note echoed, smoothed out into euphonious perfection by lavish curves.

Our dome heads beautify attractive ideas.

In the darkness we could only perceive exquisite acoustics.

The guide shone a torch upon the precious-stone representations of India’s flowers that the builders had inserted into the walls: Red and green sparkled iridescently, like jewels. I felt like a child before something magical that I had had no idea had existed. I felt that I was experiencing something absolute and unquestionable, as if I was in the heart of pure aesthetics – in the core of an astonishing gift. Some
things are so arresting – because of their beauty – that they seem absolutely apart, completely unique. I felt the wings of gratitude elevating me, as if it had been the guide himself who had been responsible for these pinnacles of creativity.

Something in early childhood gives us all this uplifting triumph and whatever this thing might be, its intrinsic value – its capacity to fulfil – its social acceptability – is just a question of luck.

When the guide opened the doors, blade light, like a revelation, entered the chamber, revealing people wandering free outside.

A girl in red velvet was eating chocolate. She resembled a floating ruby – a precious-stone flower that had flown out of the building’s interior to wander free in this construct of perfect symmetry where problems and guilt were delineated. Her curious eyes stared at us as she heard Tim saying: “Imagine Kamal saying: ‘Oh, how sweet,’ then throwing it out the window and saying: ‘I’ve just wasted a day tracking down your ‘kin carpets. And guess what? Yes – my clients were more interested in finding out if I’d developed a program that could help them identify where they get their clients from. Isn’t that amazing?’”

Chi didn’t know why we were laughing when she appeared before us, and neither did the floating ruby; but Chi was pleased; her ticket to New Delhi had been sorted out. Her smile lacked amiability, as if her pretences to kindness were exposed by that syrupy-facade grin.

“Where’s the puppy?” Tim asked.

Another great question, I thought. Irrepressible curiosity emerges from all emotions.

“They wouldn’t let me bring it in,” she replied, “so I left it in the garden outside the inner walls. It’ll be better off here because there are more tourists; someone’ll look after it.”

We nodded our heads.

“Well,” she said, “I’m off to look around. See you back in Delhi. I’m going back tonight.”

She walked away. Tim’s azure opals were alight with delighted scorn.

“I suspect,” he said, “that she actually believes that stuff about tourists feeding it.”

“She believes anything,” I said, “that increases her celebrity; which means that she believes anything.”

Exotic sounds were resonating behind the holes in the whites of her eyes.

*

Marble became apricot incandescence under a circular slice of mango sun. Pronged Venus was blessing a marble testimony to love. The soundless tranquillity was bereft of restless wondering. The building’s perfection had become reality because its creator had been immersed solely in an enriching past.

A woman in gold and emerald floated before the marble, her cascading follicles reflecting mango light.

She floated away like a benign spectre of sensuous evanescence, the marble classicism reflecting her grace, as if an embodiment of the woman who had inspired the building’s creation had come alive before our eyes.

She disappeared, locked away in my memory, a creature who symbolised desirability, who had pleasantly agitated an idea that had gripped male consciousness aeons before.

In dim dusk, we re-entered the garden inside the inner walls. Vegetation covered the barrier that kept the beggars and the brash entrepreneurs out. A creature with a hanging pink tongue was wriggling in a security guard’s hands.

“It’s the puppy!” Tim said. “She must have walked straight past it when she left!”

I hadn’t even thought of this!

The man left it on the street. Horns and engines accompanied chaotic desperation.

Fat stench floated in bacteria clouds. The dog’s eyes were ablaze with terror, its tail down. The door was slammed shut behind it. It dashed out onto the street. A rickshaw’s racket smothered the fizzing of frying fat. The vehicle hit the puppy side on, the dog spinning, its head landing, the seconds stretching out, the puppy’s eyes ending up facing away from its splayed-out legs.

I looked away as if something horrible had been shoved into my face. Open dead eyes were facing away from pointing, puppy paws. Nothing stopped – the rushing continued. Tim hissed: “Jeeesuzzz Kerrreist! Tourists will look after it.”

“Self-absorbed America,” I replied, “leaving again, oblivious of damage reeked.”

The past is the present because we are unconscious.

*

It was dark in our hotel room and silent outside. We were lying on our beds.

Only the vague silhouettes of previously familiar objects were now visible, the concentrations of darkness infinite – without depth. All our heads had once been empty chambers just waiting to be filled with sight and sound.

“She’s going to lead,” I said, “animals into Kamal’s living room, saying: ‘Welcome, God’s creatures, to Kamal’s Ark.’ And Kamal is going to say: ‘Oh, Baby, you know you can’t do this. You know that.’ And then she’s going to drop her shoulders and tilt her head and smile. And everything is going to be so sweet.”

Tim’s laughter made me smile. His curiosity had given him the means to separate desire from evidence, hope from reality. Because that laughter cracked like Big-Bang titillation in the darkness, I asked: “What do you think the chances are that an omniscient creature could have planned her existence?”

“Maybe a God,” he replied, “who promotes eccentric randomness did it.”

“It makes sense to me: planned, eccentric randomness. How else can you explain her existence? Even given the psychological pressures to be perceived as innocent and sweet, you know that you don’t pick up dogs in Third World countries and expect the people whose house you’re staying in to accept them. No one is intrinsically that stupid. It’s too far beyond the limit. It has to have been planned!

Planned by a flippant wag. Randomness by itself just doesn’t have the creativity to come up with this. This must be the work of a witty wag. It has to be! It just has to be! Tell me, for God’s sake, that human beings can’t be this stupid. Please.

Perleeeseee! Before I go mad! Mad! Mad! Mad! Give me some faith, young man, for Christ’s sake!”

The delight in Tim’s laughter had the purity of mother-of-pearl, as if it had been purified to perfection by the dome that we had stood under earlier in the day. He had been very lucky with the sounds that had entered the dome that fate had given him. Luckier than most.

xvi.

Rajendra Nagdev
two poems

Night Falls

Night descends like demon
sweeps like ocean untamed, hungry
craving to swallow and destroy,
a live skeleton on cement footpath
wrapped in rag, trembles
and passes in to vastness of Arabian Sea unnoticed
thousand others wait in queue.

Night falls on megapolis
dancing in fluorescent jewellery
trickling on
hurriedly driven cars and tired souls in locals,
night, full of life
night,full of death
percolates through pores of skin
dissolves in the stream of life
devouring million body cells
sculpting immobile forms out of living bodies.

Night falls in narrow lanes
darkened with shadows.
A lone cat strolls on parapet
dozen dogs bark below
their eyes hungry and ferocious
glued to parapet, nothing happens.
wrinkled fingers dig through heaps of stale food
in a back alley of hotel
desperately searching bits of chapatis,
tummy burning, a silent violin lain by the side.

High above on sandstone pedestal
an old man trapped in marble body
his stone eyes wide open
listens to unplayed sorrowful notes of violin
his lofty dreams rolling in sand.

Stars twinkle somewhere in unseen sky
pale moon mourns in a corner
wolves shine bright in lairs
tigers roam majestically in
streets
like monarchs of the night
man is scared in the city of men.

Peddlers . . . pimps . . . prostitutes
long black corridors of Gothic pillars puff
smack, heroin, opium
in a trance oscillating between heaven and hell.

A dead man drifts leisurely on waves
to steps of Gateway (of India)
in his own pool of redness
his back up, limbs down
Gateway watches silently
a happening that occurs each night
a happening that merits immunity.
Trains halt, automobiles immobilize
midway between dusk and dawn – a two hour nap,
high tide of million brooms
cleanses megapolis’ arteries
lest it might collapse of coronary blockage
then recedes to unkempt, stinking sea of dingy ghettos
where, live brooms are compelled to retreat,
diktats of obsolete scriptures rule unrelenting,
night watches woefully unique human rights massacre
in repeated regularity
alas! in a great ancient culture.
Black curtain with blinking fireflies
drops on the city stage
in green room actors prepare for next day’s play.

Monsoon Seashore

Cloudy heavens cast gloom
over fisherfolk villages of thatched roofs
and forlorn look,
serpents slithering around, anxious wives shiver
amid thick vegetation
- their men in the unknown latitudes of ocean
fighting still for life.…perhaps!

Waves roll over sea waters
hurling canoes on mammoth boulders
crave for self destruction
finally commit suicide.

In a lightless corner
a lonely woman stares at basket brimful of fishes
netted on a tranquil day
scorn oozing from her eyes.
Away in the sea f ishes bounce , dance
gulp full hearted
the monsoon nector pouring in torents.
A mighty storm
soars over roofs
a million drums beat in the sky
to proclaim death, adore disaster.

Through crevice
eyes catch a sinking mast
away in the hazy ocean
and wish to disbelieve,
believe or disbelieve nature is immune
she dashes in fury
swallows the trees and crops
and huts and lives
and what so ever obstructs her way
till hunger finally drops dead.

xvii.

Susheel Kumar Sharma
three poems

Gifts

When
The ant --
A small one, black in colour,
A microgram in weight
Runs at a speed
Higher than that of a jet,
I am put to shame
By my lord.
When
The tree --
Huge in size, that
Shed its leaves
Sprouts again this spring
To provide shelter to the
Homeless birds,
I am put to shame
By my Lord.

When
The cow --
Indian in size, Red in colour,
Heavy in white udders
Is separated from its calf
To milk it
For the market
I am put to shame
By my Lord.

When
The grain --
Minor in size, unimportant in colour
Less than a gram or two in weight
Sprouts to make a field green
To feed the hungry,
I am full of hope
By my Lord.

For a Bride Who Thinks of Suicide

Young brides are not meant for burning
Like sandal wood in a yajña or like the
Gas emitted from Mathura refinery
The flames of which are leaping to touch the sky.

Lovely brides are not meant for leaping
From the steel bridge constructed with German technology
Like the dolphins leaping
In the air to display their giant size.
Decked brides should live-- not lay
Their necks on railway tracks for the super fast trains
Like the desperate young men do
To show their alienation.
Glowing brides are not meant for overdosing
With sleeping pills
Like a crazy person does
In the newly erected hostel
Of the young working men
To show his helplessness.
Glittering brides are not meant for hanging
From a ceiling fan
Like a chandelier in the high walled church
To scatter light all around.
A bride belongs to a groom.
She is a flute to be played on
She is a harmonium to produce a rhythm.
She is a synthesizer to modulate a discordant note.
She is the tune of a young heart,
Full of music and meaning
Signifying harmony.
Brides are the carriers of tradition
Brides are the need of the civilization
Brides are the solace of bleeding hearts
Not to be trampled and kicked
But to be embalmed with care.

Gopalpur on Sea

This sleazy town has been my home
For a month.
Covered with groves of coconuts, mangoes, cashew nuts, bananas, kevras,
It is bound by the Bay of Bengal.
The battle to win the sea,
To eat from its entrails,
Begins at four and without fail.
The white moonlight attracts the dark water
But who can touch the moon?
It roars blood and attacks
The sea-shore--
The camera of a tourist is swept away
But returned soon by frothy waves a few meters away.
After all, it is ratnakar.
The absence of the beloved moon
Tortures the Gopalpur Sea
And, the beach reels
Before the white fangs of the roaring waves.
The fishermen don’t dare to move forward
And their canoes and their motorboats take rest.
The fisherwomen whine and fight
The crow, the cat, and their poverty.
It is difficult to cover the body
Before the uncovering eye-sight
That penetrates from all sides.
The stench of mud, fish, crabs,
Competes with the
Fragrance from sweet-meat shops, fruit-laden
Peddlers and the ignited incense-sticks in the
Temples, mosques and churches.
But, the black smoke from scooters, mobikes,
Cars, tempos, trucks, minibuses wins the race.
Gopalpur loses, the tourists win.
I went to the shore
To find my footprints
Engraved a month ago.
It was high tide and
It was drizzling.
The sea recognized me
And called from a distance
To give me a hug.
A voice from behind held me back.

xviii.

Rudra Chatterjee
three poems

Traveler

Distant music, a roll of thunder nearby
Proximal touch, but miles away from the heart
On nights like this, you hold my hand in the bus
and say "He does not love you he says"

Apocryphal times calls for mind-boggling measures
Distances diminish, alcohol arouses bourgeoisie fear
She too had a name, before she left
I too had a heart, that wept.

Not for touch, not for her perfect draped body
Not for rivery hairfall, slender legs in the sea
But for miracles, yes we have met
Traumatized thirteen minutes of togetherness.
Forgot, male egos and stereotypes may still rule
Life, queer, peculiar but yet so real.

Rain, let it fall today on dry earth, pierce.
Taxis, don't ever stop for night passengers.
Music, play all over on affected nights.
Boats come and go, we are all travelers.

Romances foretold

Of how faces describe predicaments
far long ago
even before they are nurtured
leave alone nourished,
fed and sold to customers.

The inevitable sign of failure
we fail to see
as we deterministically allow events to unfold
exactly the way they would
open a wide space between legs
allow ourselves to beliefs and concepts
hardly true but only understood in
different times and probably at a different space.
It's always too late, then.

If proximity always makes wrong choices
how are we supposed to choose?
he found love in proximity
why shouldn't it work for me?
Just as every man is different
be it is insides, hypocrisy and desires
so are every woman and
I am just one.

Of how that one curve on your face
one expression would reveal a side of you
i have never seen
and will make me wonder about
my hopes and aspirations for you
ill fated and dark destinations,
they are headed at.

what poets don't know

Poets don't write poems, anymore.
They sing and dance,
cheer the local football team,
fall in love with the cheerleader,
drink beer,
kiss but forget the next step,
fall asleep.

When poems appear in dreams,
in the form of lyrical oceans,
half naked gorgeous pageants of love,
they mistakenly feel its pornography.

Golden castles filled with mythical reality
are historical fan fiction,
Provocative landscapes that appear and disappear
in myriad flashes,
are left alone ad's
for unaccomplished foreign trips,
with unaccomplished women,
due to unaccomplished jobs,
unattained fertility,
because
words were not enough.

What poets don't know
is
words were never enough
they were means to the end
not the end to the means.

xix.

Sunil Chandra Majumdar
play (excerpt)

Last Duel Near Broken Bridge
Act I

[The year 600 AD. The place - a forest clearing near a mud highway in a sub-Himalayan kingdom.
Time - late evening. A dull half-moon hung over pine trees beyond the brook which skirted the clearing. Some travellers were cooking and preparing their beds. Retreating monsoon clouds float by after a light rain.]

(A conversation ensues)

Chela: The Brahmin is restless, looking out for his bodyguards to return. Let me offer him fruits and wine, and try to make him talk about the spot. What do you say, guruji?

Guru: Try, chela. People sometimes talk over wine. But they always do when they don't want to be pushed over the line. But you are not having doubts gain? Talk or no talk, there shall be no vestige, understand? The dice is thrown. No surviving trace. Understand, chela?

Chela: Yes, guruji, I understand.
[Chela goes to the Brahman with some fruits and wine]
Greetings, Brahmin! My guru sent this fruit and wine for you.
Please accept.

Brahmin: I am very pleased, boy. I have just washed. I will sit in Yoga first, and then I will eat. But I am worried about my bodyguards. They went to collect some honey and fruits for me and kill a wild fowl for themselves when we were coming.

Chela: What is the stage of your Yoga, sir?

Brahmin: [Laughs] What is the stage of your guru's Yoga?

Chela: [Laughs] My guru says he reached Moksha. No material charms, sights, sounds, tastes, odour captivate him into attachments any more. He has renounced them all. Having practiced yoga and reading scriptures and bowing before Kali, Shiv, and Krishna has brought him here. Here where nothing abides, nothing sticks, nothing is desired or rejected. He watches his own life with detachment, all trasformations of matter and mind.

Brahmin: You surprise me, boy. You must be a worthy chela of a worthy guru. Your guru and I are so much alike. You must introduce me to him. circumstances, experience, thought decisions, matter and mind are constantly transforming but they do not touch me. Through yoga, study and thinking I have also experienced the Advaita which is Brahman. These impermanent and transforming phenomena of mind and matter are not intimately real and behind this impermanent facade is the eternal unchanging one, the Brahman, the real self.

Chela: This is interesting. Both my guru and you become Brahman in your meditation or samadhi.

Brahmin: You are right. There is no self in our body and mind, and behind this is the real self, Brahman.
When I say 'there is no self', there is still someone who is saying it or is conscious of it. This someone is Brahman. He is the one. Who is this one? Who is this one constantly changing, yet always present? Who is this one, seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, thinking about all the objects of the world? This one does not have any abiding place, any small 'self'. This one has no name or form. Yet who is aware of this 'no-self', no name and form? This is the Atman, which is none other than the universal Brahman.

Chela: Your discourse on Dharma is so illuminating. Please drink a little wine now and tell me more about the bliss of your Moksha. Please do your yoga a little later. I am so eager to hear more. What is the nature of Brahman?

Brahmin: [Drinks] Fundamentally we are only matter and mind. If we are only matter and mind, life is purposeless and meaningless. That leads to the philosophy of extinction, nothingness, no morality, no culture, a vacumn, a horrible fate indeed. I live in another dimension, I am not matter and mind only. How can I be if I am aware of matter? The mind is aware of matter but I am also aware of my mind. who is this I that is aware of all changes in mind and matter? I am that one. Whoever it is who is aware of all these matter and minds, I am that only. That one has no name, no form, eternal, released, enlightened, sacred, unborn, deathless. This is Brahman. You are not the body. You are not the mind. You are that. This Brahman is of the nature of something ever-shining, unborn, one alone, undying, stainless, all-pervading and non-dual, like the sky. That you are and you are forever released.

Chela: Sadhu! Sadhu!

Brahmin: You are free from old age, self-effulgent, always satisfied. You are neither cause or effect.

Chela: I am aware of matter. I am aware of mind. Who am i?

Brahmin: The bard sings "who is speaking, remaining invisible? He is close by, yet when I look I don't see him."

Chela: The bard is saying you cannot see him, because you are the one who is seeing.

Brahmin: Sadhu! My boy! What you have learned must surely be the marrow of what has been handed down to you by your father.

Chela: I have no father. Guruji raised me as his son. I was a sudra orphan.

Brahmin: What? Sudra? How dare you pollute me with your offering of fruit and wine? Why did you come to me?

Chela: I was sent by my guruji to find out where the spot is.

Brahmin: What spot?

Chela: Where you buried ten maunds of gold. The gold you made by burning low-varna villages and selling the land all your life.

Brahmin: You seem to accuse me. But acquiring property, power and fame is an essential stage in the spiritual development of a man settled in the way of the Brahman Dharma. and I was a great success.
I have huge land, many elephants, horses, servants, wives. Then came the stage of duty and sacrifice. And now the last stage of Moksha. For the low varnas to climb to a higher varna in the next birth and enter into the stages of spiritual development, they have to serve the higher varnas in all ways and means. It is strange that a brilliant boy like you does not know these fundamentals. But how does your guru know about the gold?

Chela: My guru is a veteran highway bandit and reckless killer. It is his business to collect information. I request you, sir, please tell me about the spot and run away. I will cover you from guru.

Brahmin: Nobody can force me to disclose the spot. I am not afraid of any bandit. I have always been highly skilled in dagger fight. Besides my bodyguards will be here any moment now.

Chela: I feel sorry for you, sir. Your bodyguards will never come. They have been gained over by my guru, and have left for your home where they will await guru. They will get a share of the gold. You are just like my guruji. Your Moksha is just a figment of your imagination. You cannot rid your body and mind of greed and lust and varna, and your Brahman is glued to your corrupt bodies and minds.

[Guru enters, drunk, with a dagger in each hand]

Guru: Has the brahmin revealed the spot, chela?

Chela: He will not reveal, guruji. He will fight.

Guru: You are a good brahmin, well-versed in the scriptures. I will not kill you when you are without a weapon. [He throws a dagger] Take it. I know you were a good fighter once. I will make you die slow, stab by stab, unless you reveal the spot.

Brahmin: [Takes out his own dagger from his bundle]
I don't need your weapon and I will not disclose the spot and I am not afraid of any drunken bandit.

Guru: Chela! Drive out the travellers. Let them camp at the next village which is not far. Take out the bow and arrows. Shoot anyone who does not go. We have a private business here. [The brahmin lunges forward and thrusts the dagger to guru's left because guru was slightly bending to the left, but guru ducked to the right, transferring his dagger instantly to his left hand and swiftly cutting the brahmin's left shoulder.]

Chela: Yes, guruji; [to himself] what a unique scene? The same Brahman behind two drunken Brahmins in a dagger duel!

Brahmin: I have attained Moksha. God is in me. Nobody can kill me. [He again lunges forward, this time thrusting the dagger to guru's right thinking that guru will again duck to the right, but guru bends backward and slashes brahmin's left cheek with a swift upper cut. The place is suddenly swarmed by fireflies. The travellers are running for the road with their belongings.]

Guru: I have attained Moksha. God and I are one. Nobody can stop me from killing you.

Brahmin: [Cries] My Lord Shiv! My Lord Krishna! Do not forsake me now. I have worshipped you day and night all my life. [He once more plunges forward straight at guru but guru ducks and trips brahmin's leg and at the same time inflicts a stab wound in his belly. Brahmin falls on the ground, his face and hand and stomach soaking in blood and he presses his belly wound with both hands.] Please sir, don't kill me; take my gold, my land, my wives and horses. I will tell you where the gold is. Promise you will let me go alive?

Guru: Sure. Now state clearly where the gold is.

Brahmin: There is an ancient oak tree with three trunks on the southern bank of the pond just behind my house. In the middle trunk, there is a cavity. [He sees chela who has returned] Chela! Come close to me.

Guru: Thank you, brahmin. [He thrusts his dagger deeply in the chest of the brahmin. Chela kneels down near the brahmin]

Brahmin: [Slowly whispers to chela] The keys to the boxes are in the tree's cavity.

Chela: Where are the boxes? [The brahmin dies] What was the hurry to kill, guruji? Why did you imagine you got the spot? You should have kept the brahmin alive until the gold was found.

Guru: Shut up. Let us drag the body and throw it into the river and get out of here. I will find the gold. Brahmin's house will be in my possession with the bodyguards' help, and we will dig every inch of the land.

xx.

Subhorup Dasgupta
three poems

Genetics

ice flowers
memories
the wombed timeless
corn and maize and grapes
the knowing the coming
the hour
dreams that came true
disowning
enlightenment and the welcoming
dying
being born again
the inevitability
living
causing effect
ice flower
transcending
the ever beginning
ever ending
never ending
never begun

Keeper of the waters

An ant carries it's dead fodder
The wind pushes at the green surface
Of the water, making way
For the unreal palmfronds to
Look down on themselves.

The keepers of the waters deep
Trims the hedges, hums to the shrubs
And picks a blossom for his
Spastic daughter, as
The sun climbs a little higher
The wind dies, rises and dies again
Playing with the veil,
The algae, time and the ant.

The turning around

Still and sticky draws noontime rain
Flash back it rained almost all of yesterday
Wild sparrows trilled between spells
Of cold sharp spume.

The sky, all gray
Had packed the sun quite completely away
We sang songs, drank gallons of tea
Remembering, rejoicing, seeing clearly
The hell behind us, the promises ahead.

previous issue

xxi.

Gayatri Majumdar
(interview)

Amal Chatterjee: Going Home?

Comapred with R.K. Narayan and Vikram Seth, Amal Chatterjee is the newest writer in the Indian history scene. Born in Sri Lanka and brought up in Calcutta, Chatterjee lives in Glasgow* where he teaches English at the university. Across the Lakes (ATL), a novel based entirely in Calcutta (and contemplated by the author end-1995), with a couple of out-of-the-town detours, is a tale of four very different people (and their families) who find their fates inextricably linked.... The book, published by Phoenix House, UK (all this without a literary agent at hand), was launched here in Calcutta by British Council and Penguin India (Across the Lakes' Indian publisher). David Davidar introduced Chatterjee at the Council hall on the 27th of April (1998).

Gayatri Majumdar: Maybe you said this oftentimes before, but tell us when was it you first thought of becoming a 'writer.'

Amal Chatterjee: Well, even as a child when I was eight or so, I wanted to write. Even then I wrote stories though I rarely showed them to anyone... and never published them, either. I never really stopped writing: I made my first attempt at a full-length novel in 1992 but neither I nor the publishers I showed it to were happy with it so I left it alone, and went back to writing short stories (still unpublished)... and then this novel happened....

Majumdar: Who, according to you, can be defined as an 'Indian' vis-a-vis 'Hindu Sangh' in ATL's case? Who indeed constitues the majority? (Is it Choto - classwise - the neglected one?) Meena, the conscientious one, or one of those Haris, Soumens, Sailens, Dhirens...? I dare not mention Putul...

Chatterjee: The Hindu Sangh's idea of Indian is an arbitrary construct or invention - I'd say that Hari is its kind of Indian, he has learned to look back at an imagined (or at least restricted) past to create a future where his kind will be in perpetual power. Soumen has potential, only he is in the wrong party and doesn't view the past as Hari or the Sangh do. Choto? No, Choto can't be an Indian, not really; he has no vision of the past, no burning desire to right 'ancient wrongs' and put gods like Hari into Lutyens' palaces... he may be used to them but the Sangh actually despises him; he would just be a means to an end. Dhiren and co. would have to learn to change to Hari-ise. Meena? She doesn't even count!

Majumdar: As an expatriate Indian writer (born of Sri Lankan and Indian parents); living in Glasglow/Amsterdam, do you feel a sense of rootlessness (and I don't mean in a derogatorily 'horrific' term? Or, is your sense of belonging to a certain place/people even greater than before?

Chatterjee: I don't really feel expatriate; my current basis may be in Europe but that doesn't mean I'm settled there or anywhere. In that sense I guess I am rootless, but not without any sense of loss: I feel comfortable in several places -- Calcutta and Glasgow being primary. My sense of belonging may not be greater than it was but it certainly hasn't lessened. Perhaps it's strengthened....

Is that different from 'become greater'? If it isn't then I suppose it has become greater.

Majumdar: Why this violent end to Choto and John (somewhat in the Hindi film genre)? Or, even the nauseating one fo Durga? Couldn't it have been otherwise?

Chatterjee: Hindi film genre - are you surprised that I am influenced by that defining formative influence? Can any Indian escape? (Smile) But seriously, the violent end serve a purpose so, in that sense, it couldn't have been otherwise. Their end is their end; I saw the silver lining, not unless I wrote a different story - I wanted to convey a sense of 'this shouldn't be but is' rather than 'everything will be all right'. The similariteis with the Hindi film genre (and that's your definition not mine!) (smile) are coincidental which isn't that unusual because all stories about human beings come from the same place in the end, human experiences and imagination... our purposes may be different but our sources are the same...

Majumdar: Also, talking about endings, is leaving (in this case 'Calcutta') the only route out? For instance, Putul returns to England; Durga, to her drought-faced village (something dies for both).

Are we escaping to another death, when we indeed leave (for Meena, Glasgow's sheets of snow and, Durga's pecked-at carcass).

Chatterjee: As you say, the leaving is escaping whether it is to another death or not I cannot say. But to emptiness it certainly is; the events have affected the charecters and Putul's escape is a middle-class one to somewhere different, even to a 'better' (though not necessarily!) future while Durga escapes to the only place the dispossessed can escape to... I live it ot you the reader to decide whether Durga dies or manages to return - as Durga might to her father's house...

Majumdar: More than all the definite finalities of the narrative, I preferred the Bengali-sounding conversations; detailed nuances of the various ways of life as when Choto lights a stove (page 34 - 'He struck a match from the dwindling box...'), or remembered rituals from childhood days - some of which lost - and the sudiovisual dynamics of a joint family edifice...

Chatterjee: Audiovisual dynamics? Interesting phrase - I create visually; I see the scenes before me as I write them down. The conversations very definitely took place in my head in Bengali, even though I transcribed them in English. For me the novel needed both, the finalities and the everyday familiar detail.

Majumdar: Suspense rent the air and the entire story kept one at the edge - as they say, the book was unputdownable. Though, at times one wondered at the straightness (somewhat 'Putuled') of the characters. Why couldn't Meena (Glasgow-returned, et al) swear sometimes, like Chadu?

Chatterjee: Each character exists as a person to me - no, I don't really think they are real people (smile) but that's how they came to be. Meena never swore to me. She expressed herself to me without swearing. Somehting I admire. I wish I could be like her! There, that's what happened; the damn woman never swore at me! (Smile)

Majumdar: One or two more things.

One felt cheated of a perfectly quaint relationship developing between Meena and Ranjan. I'd hoped their relationship wouldn't fall under this conspiracy: the exposure-making 'nexus' between the businessman, the politicians and the bureaucrats... the bourgeois myopia; that they could hold their own. What happened?

Chatterjee: Meena and Ranjan's relationship isn't necessarily fatally wounded but at the point the narrative ends they are as much victims of the 'conspiracy' as others. You see, the bourgeois myopia, as you call it, affects tham as much as other members of their class... yes, perhaps they could hold their own but to do so they would have to be more active participants in the world around them. Don't forget Meena abdicated responsibility early on, she herself points out that she never really involved herself with Durga; she kept her distance...

Majumdar: How does it feel to be a debut novelist? What's the experience like?

Chatterjee: At last, an easy question! (Grin). It's wonderful, I can recommend it - life begins at when your first book is published! It's a bit unnerving too - I now sometimes meet people who have an opinion of me and what I think and say even though they have never met me! But there's nothing like seeing your name on the cover of a book!

Majumdar: You have written another book. Tell us something about it.

Chatterjee: It's just out - it's called Representations of India, 1970-1840 The creation of India in the Colonial Imagination and it's published by Macmillan, UK, and St. Martins Press, USA. The title and subtitle are pretty explanatory: it is a study of how the British saw India and the people here, both Indians and Britons. In it I looked at a variety of things. British soldiers, Indian rulers, Indian customs, thugs and so on and argue (convincingly, I hope) that the British representations in novels and journals was not really a response to India but the result of politics and economics; it served them rather than infomed them. It's historical but I think the findings are applicable today - economics and politics drive perceptions and representations than people like realise... or admit. For example, Japan and France have 'culture' and are 'respected' because they are wealthy, while Uganda and Sudan - with equally sophisticated cultures - need to prove it; they are often, at best, 'ethnic' curiosities... as is the case with many groups within India.

Majumdar: Finally Amal, when can we expect your next novel? Any clue what it is going to be about or where will it be based?

Chatterjee: I'm already working on one... but keep throwing the drafts out! (Smile). It'll be ready sometime next year, I hope - it's going to be about people! (Grin). It may not be in Calcutta but Calcutta will certainly be in it, probabaly in the characters....
Apr-Jun 1998

books & others
xxii.

Ankur Betageri
book news

Bhog and Other Stories

“Ankur Betageri’s stories… take you on a zig-zag journey through a world that is sometimes surreal, sometimes insubstantial and entirely vulnerable – but compelling in its transparent pursuit of the chimera that truth is.”
– Paul Zacharia

“Mostly allegorical and symbolic Ankur Betageri writes about the struggle for survival without ever being pessimistic. It is good to see a young writer like him trying new forms. His long story ‘Bhog’ has all the ingredients for a novel. I like the way he uses language and find a poet behind this story writer.”
– Sunil Gangopadhyay

***
A man lives through the moment of his own death; a bicycle narrates its experience of a day in the garage; a man made of up of five different parts comes face-to-face with his situation on meeting a fatally attractive nurse; a nervous village boy who hates his chameleon-like father accepts him for what he is; a bear climbs a disintegrating mountain in spite of the knowledge of a certain death; a girl born out of the womb of a cow does the unthinkable to deny her origins; a young man tries to understand the desolation and gloom of his city of walls; a poor farmer battles against the elements, and his fate, with a strange sense of dignity; two city-bred boys look for the source of a stream away from the great materialistic junkyard of the city; and a stylish college-going girl encounters the meaninglessness of her “normal” life and prepares herself to embrace something bigger.

In Bhog and Other Stories debutant author Ankur Betageri takes us on an unforgettable journey through the real and unreal landscapes peopled with strange men, women, creatures and objects. Illuminating and disturbing by turns – but always compelling – these superb stories draw us, gradually, into very heart of the silence and anguish of our times.

xxiii.
Sudeep Sen
book release (news)

Aria

The Nehru Centre of The Indian High Commission cordially invites you to a multilingual evening of poetry, art & music ARIA. Sudeep Sen along with co-contributors Jenny Lewis & Frances Kiernan plus George Szirtes, Jane Draycott, William Radice, Sangeeta Datta, Mukulika Banerjee, Shirin Razavian, Natasha Dabeski & Leona Medlin at 6:30 pm on Wednesday 29 June 2011
THE NEHRU CENTRE 8 SOUTH AUDLEY STREET, LONDON W1K 1HF
Programme will be followed by a reception & cocktails
(RSVP: Gautam@nehrucentre.org.uk)

Widely recognised as a major new generation voice in world literature and "one of the finest younger English-language poets in the international literary scene" (BBC Radio), Sudeep Sen [www.sudeepsen.net] "is fascinated not just by language but the possibilities of language" (Scotland on Sunday). His prize-winning books include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Distracted Geographies, Rain, Aria (A K Ramanujan Translation Award), Letters of Glass, Ladakh, and the forthcoming Blue Nude: Poems & Translations 1977-2012 (Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Award). He has edited several important anthologies, including The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry. His words have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Financial Times, London Magazine, Literary Review, Harvard Review, Telegraph, Hindu, Outlook, India Today, and broadcast on BBC, PBS, CNN IBN, NDTV & AIR. Sen’s recent work appears in New Writing 15 (Granta) and Language for a New Century (Norton). He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS and editor of Atlas [www.atlasaarkarts.net].

xxiv.

Debdoot Das
film release (news)

THE QUICK & DIRTY GUIDE TO HIP HOP

Digifilm and Navarre release "THE QUICK & DIRTY GUIDE TO HIP HOP" Dance/Exercise DVD on 10 May, Celebrating National Fitness and Sports Month.

Scientists recently identified certain dance moves that make you look more attractive to potential mates. Instinctively, that is what Syndee and Phil teach in this DVD. This DVD contends that the body communicates more clearly than the brain. To put it simply, dancing is better than talking.

THE QUICK & DIRTY GUIDE TO HIP HOP

New York, NY (PRWEB) May 11, 2011

Digifilm celebrates National Fitness and Sports Month by releasing director Debdoot Das’ instructional epic “THE QUICK & DIRTY GUIDE TO HIP HOP” dance/exercise DVD.

Featuring popular and iconic Hip Hop dance moves taught by Syndee M. Winters and Phil Turay this funky hip hop dance and workout DVD promises an extraordinary and unprecedented learning experience.

The trailer is available on Youtube.com, Vimeo.com, and Digifilm.com.

The DVD is being distributed by Navarre Corporation.

THE QUICK & DIRTY GUIDE TO HIP HOP takes us to a spectacular virtual New York City of our imagination, where professional dance instructors Phil Turay and Syndee M. Winters embark on a step-by-step journey of dance training and instruction, as they lead the novice to ultimate Hip Hop dance mastery.

The idea was first conceived by Das four years ago, when the means to realize his vision did not yet exist. Now, after four years of actual production work, THE QUICK & DIRTY GUIDE TO HIP HOP delivers a fully immersive cinematic experience of a new kind, where the cutting-edge technology used to create the production, acts as a catalyst to Hip Hop dance to produce a magical learning experience.

Scientists recently identified certain dance moves that make you look more attractive to potential mates. Instinctively, that is what Syndee and Phil teach in this DVD. This DVD contends that the body communicates more clearly than the brain. To put it simply, dancing is better than talking.

"After the success of 'The Quick & Dirty Guide to Salsa,' we wanted to make something even better. So we found a way to make a feature length CGI project with little or no resource" said director Debdoot Das. "The gigantic virtual set of New York City was distributed on many old and borrowed computers and somehow the job got done."

"Learning was never so much fun," wrote Angelique Flores of Home Media Magazine describing the THE QUICK & DIRTY GUIDE TO HIP HOP. "And it's a good workout."

Underscoring Digifilm's commitment to helping inform and educate THE QUICK & DIRTY GUIDE TO HIP HOP is designed to promote a healthier lifestyle.

About Debdoot Das

“I had a heavy dose of cinema growing up,” says India-born Debdoot Das. “I wrote my first script when I was 11. Living in central Calcutta, which has a really old film industry. To humor me the movie people gave me strips of negatives to play with.

So it wasn’t mere fancy for the movie-loving son of a photographer to imagine himself directing his own feature. It is slightly more improbable that what has brought Das within reach of his dream is the unexpected success of his dance instruction video, “The Quick and Dirty Guide to Salsa.”

“The Quick and Dirty Guide to Salsa” has been a best-selling dance video on Amazon.com, leading to distribution deals with Navarre and NetFlix.

About Digifilm

Digifilm (R) Inc. is an independent publisher and distributor of instructional and entertainment software for the home and mobile devices. Established in 2003 in New York City, DigiFilm both produces and acquires high-quality home video/DVD products, publishes them under proprietary and third-party brands, and distributes them via its own web and mobile interface and through partnerships with larger distribution organizations worldwide.

About Navarre

Navarre (R) Corporation is a publisher and distributor of computer software, home entertainment media and related products. Navarre Distribution Services provides complete distribution and third-party logistics (3PL) services to North American retailers and their suppliers. Navarre was founded in 1983 and is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Learn more at http://www.navarre.com.

About Syndee M. Winters

Born in Queens, New York, Syndee could sing before she could speak. Excelling quickly as a dancer, she developed the skill of choreographing for dancers and non-dancers alike. She danced back-up for the Daddy Yankee Tour, Reggaeton artist Lisa M and traveled the world as a working dancer. She spent a season as a NY Knicks City Dancer at Madison Square Garden, and has danced and sang with the likes of American Idol Winner Jordin Sparks and Pop Star Demi Lovato. She worked with the legendary DJ Grandmaster Flash on his heavily anticipated album, co-writing two songs and collaborating with the likes of Snoop Dogg, Red Café, and Big Daddy Kane. She is currently making her Broadway Tour debut in the role of Nala in Disney's The Lion King U.S. National Tour.

About Phil Turay

Phil Turay was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York; Phil has been dancing since the tender age of three. He began taking tap lessons at the local PAL and fell in love with dance as an artform. In high school, Phil dabbled in musical theatre, playing Tyrone in the stage production of FAME. In college, Phil joined an international dance group specializing in multicultural styles. After college, Phil joined the ReMIXX Performers in New York City and began performing for various music industry artists and events. Phil currently resides in Los Angeles where he is pursuing a professional career in dance as well as a Graduate degree in Psychology from Pepperdine University.

(Members of the media may contact Digifilm for a full preview.)

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contributors

Trisha Bora is an editor and writer who has been away from her hometown – Assam – for many years now and currently lives in Delhi. Her works have been published at Asia Writes, Nether Magazine, Ultra Violet, Out of Print, Pyrta, Nth Position, Kavikala, Green Light Dhaba among others.
Ankur Betageri (b.1983) is a poet and fiction writer based in New Delhi. He holds a Masters in Clinical Psychology and is the Assistant Editor of Indian Literature, the literary journal published by Sahitya Akademi, the National Academy of Letters. His collection of short stories, Bhog and Other Stories was published in 2010.
Born in Bikaner on 18 August 1965, educated in Kolkata and Baroda, Vinita Agarwal has an M.A. in political science. She has been researching and writing freelance for over 20 years. A poet at heart she says there are times she has more ink in her veins than blood. She has been published in several magazines, journals, newspapers and websites. She participated at the SAARC Literature Festival 2010 and has also taken part in various other spoken word events. She lives in Delh, India.
Kabir Arora is based in Mumbai.
Mousumi Roy is born in Kolkata and lived there mostly. Presently living in Muscat, Middle East. An ardent lover of poetry and literature; profession: teaching.
Kurang Mehta is an amateur artist located in Gujarat, Ahmedabad. He has also been writing poems and short stories for a while now.
Shivani Mutneja straddles between Delhi and Ghaziabad in a normal week. She teaches English Literature at Delhi University. She holds a degree in Cinema Studies from School of Arts & Aesthetics in JNU and is thinking about pursuing a PhD.
US-based poet, Sunil P. Narayan's work has been a long, enriching journey that absorbed the world's eccentricities to create a masterpiece of color, surrealism and human emotion. The past two years witnessed a climatic moment in which his writing churned out emotionally - inducing poems. It is his intent to help people access feelings they rarely get to experience.
Tahera Mannan is a Nagpur-based poet.
Insia Fatima is an amateur writer who has been living and working in Mumbai since 2007. She has tasted life in a variety of cultures - Lucknow, Saudi Arabia, IIT, IT corporates, and wildlife tourism start-ups - and likes to delve deep into what moves people. She dabbles into all forms of creativity, whether it comes to life in the form of a C++ code, or a poem.(serenityinmind.blogspot.com)
Mradul Sharma was born and brought up in Gwalior and currently lives in Noida. He is an engineer and has done B-Tech (Varanasi - BHU). He has been writing poetry for some years and has an interest in literature. He has also written a few articles and book reviews. He likes to travel and has travelled a lot across India.
Paramjeet Singh Berwal is a lawyer advocate based in New Delhi. Besides writing poetry, he is also interested in photography.
Tapas Ranjan Mohanty works as an engineer at a manufacturing firm in Hyderabad. Besides writing he also has an inclination towards photography.
Swati Singh is M.Tech (Energy and Environmental Engineering) final year student from VIT University, Vellore. Writing has always been her passion, or first love because whatever she does, penning down her thoughts has always given her profound solace. She has been actively involved in writing scripts, dramatics and other literary events during her B.tech in Delhi.
Having a taste for the exotic, Kim Farleigh has worked for aid agencies in three conflicts: Kosovo, Iraq and Palestine. He takes risks to get the experience required for writing. His stories have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Whiskey Island, Southerly, Island, Mudjob, Write From Wrong, Sleet, Negative Suck, The Red Fez, Red Ochre Lit, Haggard & Halloo, Down in the Dirt, The Camel Saloon, Feathertale, Descant, The Houston Literary Review, The Sand Journal, Full of Crow, The Mad Hatter's Review, This Literary Magazine, Nap Magazine, The Single Hound and Unlikely Stories.
Poet, painter, an architect, Rajendra Nagdev Born 1941 Ujjain (MP) Lived in Delhi 1967 till 2010. Retired from central government service in 2001 he settled in Bhopal recently. He has been writing for five decades in Hindi and English, mostly poetry. His poems and articles have been published in reputed Hindi and English journals as well as his sketches. His six collections of poetry and a travelogue have been published in Hindi.
Susheel Kumar Sharma is professor of English at the University of Allahabad
Rudra Naryan Chatterjee is a graduate student pursuing a PhD in Geosciences. He has been actively writing close to an year now and mostly writes poems. He has been published in two anthologies, both by the publishing house "The Fourth Dimension" based in India. Besides, he publishes most of his works in a writing website, http://www.writerscafe.org/, which fosters an active community of young and old poets from across the world. He is currently based in Austin, Texas.
Subhorup Dasgupta is a Hyderabad-based writer, fine artist and musician. A student of Literatures from Jadavpur University, his pursuits have been diverse and include Eastern mysticism, interfaith studies, photography, linguistics, artificial intelligence, alternative medicine, healing sciences, and food. Having spent his early working years with the terminally ill and their families after training with global thought leaders in the healing arts, he moved on to become one of the country’s most respected domain experts in healthcare documentation. After spending “a third of my life” pursuing a corporate career, he recently chose to give up his job to return to his first love, the creative arts. He presently describes himself as a self-employed tea drinker. The slow trickle of poetry that he has published in the past, though critically well-received, is often dark and cynical, and all his work, including those self published by him, are tagged as unpublished, “a joke lost to all but myself.” It takes a while to realize that the more lighthearted writings of his are those that, at the end of the day, speak of his deepest anguish. A self-declared atheist, his prose (which is more forthcoming in the various blogs that he posts on) delves deep into the common well of spirituality and brings forth the universality of the human condition in the context of present day culture and civility, or as he puts it, “lack of it.”
Sunil Chandra Majumdar (1929-1999) was born in Dhaka. Later, his entire family moved to Kolkata during the 1947 Partition years. Majumdar was a 1957 IPS office (West Bengal cadre). In 1987, he retired as Inspector General (Police) Civil Service (again from West Bengal). During the time he travelled a great deal around India from the mountanious Leh to the jungles of Sunderbans. Majumdar has varied interests ranging films (especially that of Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurusawa to Oliver Stone); literature (the peotry of Alexander Pushkin to Emily Dickenson); music (Paul Robson to Rabindrasangeet); sports (soccer to lawn tennis) to culinary flavors (of Dhaka, Bangladesh - where he grew up and Chittagong - where his wife hailed from). He wrote Last Duel Near Broken Bridge in 1997, a couple of years before his death.
Gayatri Majumdar lives and works in New Delhi.

the brown critique

july 2011

iv. Tapas Bandyopadhyaya four poems

Forest Dreams

May 2011

iv.
Tapas Bandyopadhyaya
four poems