brown critique: april 2013

april 2013

i.

Nilim Kumar translation (assamese)

Rubi Gupta

The underwear of Rubi Gupta had not dried out
On the day the Jalianwala Bagh massacre took place.
While gathering clothes, hung them out to dry
Up in the concrete roof
She noticed
All of her clothes had dried out
Except her underwear .

Frightened she was
Since evil occurrence there must be
On earth
On the same day
Her underwear
Dried late.

Now and then
I think of Rubi Gupta
Who lived in a novel’s protracted house
Nobody knew about the world tragedies’ link
With this tiny wear.

Even she cannot let others know it.

The underwear of Rubi Gupta had not dried out
On the day of world’s terrible quakes,
Volcanoes, tsunamis and massacres.
She was never at ease without her underwear
Even without a wash.
In her childhood
Her mother taught her
Not to stay sans underwear.

Now she only shivered with apprehension
Was her underwear dry?
She ironed her underwear
On a rainy day.
To save the world
She tried her hardest.

(translated from original Assamese by Avigyan Anurag)

The Woman Who Loves Moonlight

If I don't return home tonight
will you worry too much?
so if, let it be
I will not go home tonight .

You have probably not spared
a thought for me a long time,
if you pass this one night
thinking worrying about me,
let it be.

We have lived together so many years
slept and eaten together
and yet it seems to me
you have not quite seen me for a long time,
if suddenly you discover tonight
that I have not returned home
will you then wish terribly to see me?
so if, let it be .

I will not go home tonight.
Birds that lose their way sometimes
cannot return to their nest
I will lose my way
straight back from office
will reach some other place,
no, don't ever think that
I will go to father's home, I won't
I will not visit my friends either
don't worry, I will not visit any house, any road
belonging to my past.
I will pass the whole evening after leaving office
here and there
and when it will get dark
I will slowly climb up a hill;
last night I saw through the kitchen window
there was a clear moonlight outside,
you were fast asleep as always
I looked on and on
tossed and turned unable to leave the bed
because Majoni was tugging at my breasts,
tonight I will get wet in that moonlight.

Tonight I will get wet in moonlight
I will wet, wet and wet
I will converse with the shadows of trees
may be I won't.

I will ask the wind about something
may be I won't
I will questions myself about my own things,
I will laugh and talk to myself
about too many wordless things.
Moonlight will spread all over
my eyes, face, hair and clothes
I will bathe in moonlight

I will drink handfuls of moonlight . . .
moonlight will then course through my blood
moonlight will trickle through my sweat
moonlight will pass through my bones . . .
I will wriggle in the bosom of moonlight
throughout the night with moonlight
I will lie awake all night
hungry?
no, I don't feel it.
Moonlight will turn my stomach silvery,
but you must no go hungry
promise me -
it burns the inside of your tummy
everything is there in the fridge
just warm it
cook some rice in the cooker
wash the bottle and give some milk to Majoni
taste it on your lips, see that it is tepid;
she won't have milk if you don't add a lot of sugar in it -
do remember this.
Of the several days and nights in our long life together,
won't you do this much just for one night?
I am not going to commit a sin
or err,
won't you do this much for me?
And if nothing untoward happens tonight,
if I don't fall into the hands of terrorists
if no one rapes me
if police don't come looking for me
then you will find me back home
before the cock's crow
and if something should happen,
oh god forbid,
you will not find me.
I will then jump into a well
and turning into smoke I will scale the sky.
I will be cloud
I will be cloud
to douse people's houses
hills, trees and fields
I will descend like a heavy shower of rain
and then you will see everyone will have a good crop

and holding a pail under the eaves
if you collect me to wash the clothes
(as I used to)
I will be then only going back to all of you
back to you
will you know me then?
tell me, will you?
tell me, will you?

(translated from original Assamese by Rupanjali Barua)

ii.
Rinzu Rajan 2 poems

December Moon

I wear the moon in my hair,
as December crowns me the queen
catching its silver in the pout of palms
criss crossed by a curse
when your voice waging a war
with the skeletal tree
in my courtyard
breaks open into my bones.
I cup my fingers around sound
playing hide and seek with shadows,
I make a wish to the star that
will never fall,
as the mist licks my tears
the winter wails with me.

Alienate

A wooden casing
with a wrecked window
wails in front of the house

Two one one,
is the number
in intricate inscription
with black paint
the sun may have shone on its forehead
last summer when the daughter's
stipend application
gave birth to an answer,
its womb weaned in willow
since then, waits for
her blue-inked letter
or a congratulatory message
to an invitation accepted,
she ached for alienation
just like the old mail box
whose name no one remembers
since the e-mail fluttered to fame.

iii.

Barnali Chetia poem
The Last Sight

The green curtain fluttered
a dream-like fragrance
with outstretched hands
She came in . . .
I gently put my hand on hers
She ran her fingers
. . .through my tangled hair
I looked at her kohled eyes
shadowy lines merged into emptiness
reminded me
. . .of the dark forest grove
and the name of Rana Uncle
on the flyleaf of her book
middle parting of the hair
and a tight bun behind
highlighted the broad forehead
I looked out of the window
…a purple haze
lights shone like glow-worms
She came up to me
. . .and stared with helpless eyes
She drew me close
and on my feverish cheeks
put her cold, dry lips
light breeze and her saree trembled
She slept in the next room bed
morning a feigned knock . . .
the maid said . . .
‘your mother passed away last night . . .

iv.

Arturo Desimone                                                                                                                  fiction
Requiem for Ouafa-Hind
(Cafetaria of the Rue de Fourcy hostel in Paris, Aron Jibaro's 128th day without Hind)

Seventy, maybe almost one hundred women in the cafetaria of the Rue de Fourcy motel, some looked my way for an instant. They outnumbered, almost all of them chattered in Swiss German. The light and echoes in the cafe for a moment felt to me as if belonging to one of the rooms I had seen during the foray in Tunisia, in an old house of a rich ex-collaborator family in Lamarsa where parties were held, with a pool of water, lanterns in a fountain. I could not tell these girls apart even though one or two of the hundred had brown skin in this lookalike harem of the emancipated. They laughed and dreamed together, contented without any presence of men. One looked my way with a smile but she was not trying to reach me or to send an inviting signal. It is clear when they do or do not want my attention, and it was clear she saw this man who looks like an urchin, a Mallorcan Ape.

Here in the Fourcy eatery the girls' laughter seemed tuned to the same, equal pitch, their larynxes strums on a harp without sex, they smiled at one another eating artificial vegetarian and pescatarian compots.

It seemed none of these girls had any part of her body the others considered too prominent, neither forward pushed, nor too colorful, no too aggressive or too suggestive clothing; forests of jeans.

An iron super-mechanism of super-democracy and post-ideology had flattened them, made them plane, taking out the dreams, the desire, set them free once they were safe and all the explosive parts that are found in unoperated women, in the larynx and the walk and the voice and the soul, the four hidden hearts and the ass had been deactivated, their hair could be shortened now that there were no medusa snakelets to hide, the slitherers had been removed. All gesticulations were well mannered within their club. I sat alone.

At times, ancestor spirits spoke to me, sat next to me and began to talk, talk. This is what happens when one cannot develop a concept of time, cannot read the Occidental watch that orientates you, the time watch, the toc.

I heard such a voice now, in the marrow of my skull which was only the casing of a Jewish-Arab bat-brain:
“What are you? What's with you? They're all thinking this guy is a homosexual, so macho flamboyanty on his exterior, all this show must mean he's afraid of gaiety, must mean he wants men.”

He was identifiable, firm in my memory: A primitive Sicilian castrated ancestor's voice which inhabited me still. Flea-like it perched on my bones, I recognized this voice, correlated it to the ghost of an ancestor: the Sicilian drunk uncle of my father, who was a non-Jew and in the midst of his alcoholism found reason to be patriotic at least about this — being an exile my father couldn't be patriotic about being Argentinean though he would have preferred it, he could not shout pride in Italian and Roman roots outside as Italians might start talking to him in Italian and he only knew Lumfardo.

Chaquito's face appeared, eyes overshadowed by furrowed brow, lips pressed close together, Mallorcan ape features from immigrants who left the islands for Argentina, that part of the family looked Berber but I had inherited the pallor of my Russian mother's side.

I understood his voice for who and what it was, that of a bitter parasitic shadow who refused to let himself be deported to the afterlife and who secretly envied me, who wanted me to fail, the envy common to the immigrant to Rosario who did not succeed, who did not earn the money nor have the looks to secure the most beautiful Polish smuggled prostitutes in the night-halls where the whorehouse dramas of now-archaic Kilombo music played, the Kilombo which has been replaced with the safe commercial tangos; who died drunk under no star that would represent or protect him in the heaven over the Argentinean field of Mars-red earth, a suicide prey to his own ancestral spirits' persecutions.

At first I ignored him. Food on the tray was cafeteria high school food, without life, soulless, like this unenchanted uncharmed space. The metal of my fork was shiny, the packaged flavors of ravioli dull, artificial.

Well that's what I get for choosing the cafeteria hoping to meet young people my age. I should have stayed happily isolated in my hostel single room which I won't be able to afford soon, I thought to myself — surely this was my inner voice, not the errant Sicilian's.

I saw the black haired one, the girl with thick eyebrows who had given a sly glance, no, I denied my assumption that it was only because this Swiss German wants to smirk at how comical a primate I am, out with negativity. Out with negativity, despite that I am politically against all attempts at exorcism, in casting out devil-fish a self-cleanser can easily throw out all that was best inside him, narrowing the confines of his soul as the techno music plays from the courtyard out the hostel window, shaking the leaves of the green vine-plant from the iron balcony. (I will not eat the vine plant stuffing its leaves into my mouth for no music-causation wine of Arab rebellion drips from this plant.)

No I don't have anything to prove here, but what do I care how they will judge me, the ice in their laughter hurled at me like chewed up like stones — stones are too melodramatic, I should say like pieces of spit-and-cunt-wetted paper propped up and aimed, fired at a young man's necknape. Cold laughter of protected women I once knew — I must finally come to terms with high school.

In the cafeteria a magnetic force grabbed my hand, I wrote a poem that was not mine, I liked it, I had memorized it, by an Indian writer the name (Roy) Chowdury. He was in the journal “Brown Critique” that published my Flowers by Topheth. His poem was Che's Europe: “ Che's Europe . . . no leaders, leaderless. . . 1968 Europe. . . women without deisire. . . Che asked me, “have you buried Mao yet?” were some memorable lines.

They laughed looking at one another, then at me, as I sat seperately with the dish of food-substitutes.

If there is ice in their laughter, I know where to find the sun.

The sun of sensuality, in Tunisia, before or even under, despite its Islamism — regime-change *(and not the bourgeois proto-feminist counterrevolution — these last two, together I fear could ruin everything that was genuine and strong and weak and human and good.)

There I met a woman, Hind Ouafa, who had been born in the desert farmlands not far from a wel'ah oasis, there we were lovers. I drew her, I wrote of her; she was not some silly concubine of Flaubert's sex tourism, she was an artist who made her modern equivalent of Persian miniatures. In her miniatures she showed naked men turned into leaping antelopes as if the paintings were animated. She had a secret name that I kept recorded, a name that was that of the geography of paradise in the Koran, the name given by Mhmd to a river in Paradise. We lived together, held each other during the military curfews at night; Chopin “Revolutionary Etude” played from my folding computer, no mosquito netting, the breeze, the call to prayer awakening us, her face, her dark eyelashes asleep shining in the moonlight, in the nour-al-kamraa.

During this time I was not well, a foreigner. I overreacted when men in market stands guessed my nationality, “German? Portuguese? Turki? Italiano, Spanolo? Want cocaine?” whispering the last question as they tripled the prices of every pair of sandals or clothes for me and not for her because I was foreign, I got angry about this when we were visiting Hammamet. We stepped out into the old city streets, the sun bright orange-gelatin setting, smell of the blue sea clearing my lungs; I cursed as we tried to find a good place for eating tastira.

Then I overreacted a hundred times worse when I saw the colonist I hated, the type: a fat-paunched German or Yankee with a Hawaii shirt, suntan nose and rolex, smoking his cigar as his guide showed him the way to young Tunisian prostitutes, his coins would buy them, their amber eyes, it was his right as owner of the world, as imperialist, this had been his Habana before the Cuban revolution, only it was in Tunisia after a revolution and he was coming to reclaim when he found out in sneering Time or Newsweek or Zeitung magazine that the revolution was a farcical regime change without gun shots. A revolution could not survive without applause and withheld tears out of beautiful cruelty to the fallen collaborators, for the fallen bureaucrat. Yo no lloro para burgueses caidos, I withhold all tears for fallen bourgeois, went the Cuban poem by Nicolas Guillen.

“Do I look like this to you? They talk to me as if I'm this son a bitch, this colonizing piece of shit,” I shouted pointing at the paunch of the tourist. Hind and I were having a discussion because I took it too personally when the swimshorts-salesmen asked me if I was German or Italian and tried out some German words.

“No, you don't look like him. You finished, you? Let's we go,” she said; she was not in a hurry or fearing the panic of the tourist, his confidence of a line of cocaine with viagra and rum and having been a good manager back home were slightly rumpled now. He stood looking at his guide, paused in his green moccasins as Hind led me along the sidewalk in the Medina's shadow. He would probably find relaxation from his fear I gave him the same night when empty his come full of anxiety into the thickets of eyebrows of one or the other Hammamedian girl paying off her high school studies, one he had previously had seen only in 19th century oil paintings (but not one by Jean Leon Gerome who was clearly homosexual.)

We went to eat at a restaurant overlooking the sea as Hind calmed me by telling me the mythologized love story surrounding Hamma Hammammi, the Tunisian communist leader who emerged from hiding during the revolution, and his girlfriend the lawyer Radia who gave birth to his child in a prison cell, for which he also came out of his hiding place under the earth. The teenage population of Tunis city's left wing youth were especially won by this myth of a man Persephone and a woman Orpheus, and wrote the names of these lovers on their school backpacks.

“It is very romantic story. Hemma was an activist who was persecuted. But he did not flee to Paris like others, not to Lebanon. He stayed here, in Tunisia; he lived under the ground, literally. In sewers, for ten years. Once they caught him. Radia, his beautiful wife,” Oufa-Hind was suddenly speaking more freely in English to me; the waiter had filled our wine glasses and served fried octopus with lemons as the sun entered the windows from all sides and her chest heaved, she spoke quickly, breathily; I blinked and for a moment almost hallucinated that she was wearing braces in her mouth, which made her more beautiful. “Radia was a lawyer for prisoners' rights. She fought even for Islamists that were persecuted. She visited him in the prison cell and they make love, he make her there pregnant. He continued to live underground, and, during the revolution, after she partir baby, she was in the streets and he came up from the catacombs and they meet at demonstration outside Casbah,” Casbah, the Palace of the Court of Justice, which was occupied in that decisive January of the humiliation of the ruler-coke-dealer Benali-Bey kings: I was in Tunis a month later, in the long boulevard of violet trees, pinkish-violet the color of the RCD party, covered in red flags, shouts in the street more powerful than any shahada call to prayer at the morning of light and flowers: Thauwra, thauwra! Horra horra! Words for 'revolution revolution, rise up rise up.'

The fish-pieces crunched in my mouth, bathed in wine as I watched Oufa Hind, my inti rouhi become like a teenage girl, like how I loved her, telling her stories that were my winged-ferry-barges to the fable-moon out of misery. Wine, girls and myths, all three were conducive to sanity —revolution also in the long term led to sanity. There were the short and long roads to love — there was no revolution without alcohol, myths, girls, a girl telling her lies that become real, utopia of dreams made flesh.

We went back to her home next to the jemma mosque in Tunis city to rest from eating tastira. I along with the teenagers now loved the story of Hemma and Radia and the Netherworld. I did not care that these were illusions; I'd rather die for illusions and tall tales than for bald and austere illuminations like simple oats instead of crazy rebellion-flowers of lies. I'd rather die for the most beautiful illusion of all in this fabulous world of shams, the illusion that she loved me, run from the illumination that I was just one of her daydreams, to be wrapped in her fables and set on fire on a beach for the amusement of a Tunisian 30-year-old teenager from a wel'ah farm-city.

Shadows filled the cup of shadows that was my head at night, and when I told her I was afraid I am going crazy she kissed me, whispered untranslatables and sat me down.

We sat down in the kitchen. At 3 AM she opened a Koran. She was naked. The alien noises of gecko-throat and scarab-beetle came in from the window, the noises that because the makers are concealed lead you to think these are the creaking cric-crics and winnows of the stars that are mating and coupling.

Hind-Ouafa read aloud to me a passage and translated in the English I taught her, how Mohammed in Mecca was arguing with the salesmen about his belief, at Mecca that first stock exchange of idols and poetic jousting.

He, Mohammed, argued and won but they, the traders and brokers of the Mecca exchange of idols, put their fingers in their ears, so as not to hear, not hear Gabriel's, sick wounded Gabriel's manifesto, written on sweet breeze where no one could efface it. Then Mohammed had to disprove the accusation that he was enchanted.
           He finally passed a test in the arena proving that he was not enchanted.

“What does this mean, enchanted?” I asked “Why wouldn't he want to be enchanted? Charmed?” Doesn't everyone want enchantment?

She lowered the book and I saw the two dark moons o, the Arabic circle-letters with a little tail, on her breasts. Her eyes were dark brown and amber and bloodshot. Eyes of the bather, the flower-gatherer of the wel'ah. “No, enchanted, it is hard to say in English, it means something like Insane, but not exactly, he had not been yet made insane. Crazy,” she searched a word through the shadows; I was teaching her English, the imperial tongue, so that she might have a chance when she left Tunis to go somewhere other than the former colonizer, other than Paris the capital of cowardly and conventional touristic loves (Paris was as Amsterdam, where I had been stranded for three years, Amsterdam was similarly the capital of cowardly and conventional consumptive sins, sins made safe and therefore uninteresting and useless unalive sins, which were the only immorality other than walking around an extinct sun.)

Then I knew I was both not enchanted, disenchanted yet filled with magical anima and electricity; I pressed my cold eyelids closed and I could see, all I could think of under the holy book in Arabic letters — letter-signs like many severed lion-tails arranged in different sleeping positions on the pages of the book of cave-sleep — all I could think of were her, Hind-Ouafa's brown thighs, so soft under the Quran chant-book, and her naked buttocks pressing against the dark rosewood chair, the hairs between them.
           I think of the nocturnal Koran schooling, of the Arabic lesson when it will help to remember the pleasures of a body under my body, when I need to fight off the fear of becoming again enchanted. The memory of the Koran school would keep me from slipping into phantom worlds where I met the cruel ancestor-spirits and their commentary, and the much crueler memories.

Ouafa-Hind turned the pages of her older brother Amor's Koran; something was in her eyes.

“This story, you will love: before Islamic times, before Mohammed born, ArRahman is angry at people living in Mecca, who were selling, a city of money and market. Capitalist, like the new Islamists.

God sent giant birds to drop flaming rocks at Mecca and destroyed the city.”

Giant birds dropping flaming rocks! Never before had I known the Koran had such stories; it was one of the better of book-acropolises of tricks and wonders ever built or written.

She closed the book of Koran and no further progress was made that night in my Islamic intellectual education. I had only the opportunity to learn a few more words that were not religious, like the word ser al gnss.

There was another time when we drove to Mehdia after a protest in Tunis. The demonstration had been against the Ennahda; a judge had sentenced two adolescents to prison for public indecency — the couple was seen kissing in public. More than a thousand Tunisians gathered outside the tribunals of the Casbah, in late afternoon they started kissing violently as police watched, violet trees stirred with envy and magical hatred now that no one feared the colors of Benali or the plastic gray scepter of the Ennahda Islamocapitalist bully. The Tunisian youths kissed, fingers through long black hair that haunts me like an obsidian demon; lovers embracing, not a Western camera to cover this vast violent feat of sensuality, this unusual pornography that did not let go of the soul or of magical love.

Hind Ouafa stood by me during the protest but did not want to kiss in public. We watched. I wondered if the non-participation would be interpreted as us being spies, political police — no, people knew exactly who was the political police in Tunis; no one would suspect us.

As we drove in Mehdia we heard some angry Salafi boys sitting at a curb, heads shaved and big black beards in which a bird or fruitbats could hide from the lunar police. Three of them sat together singing.
         “Idiots,” Hind said. “Imbeciles!”
         “What are they singing?”
         “The salafi poem. It's not a bad one. 'We are strangers, in a wrong time, misunderstood'
         “They are Emo,” I concluded. “Salafis are Emo, postmodern.”
         “They are very Emo” she laughed. She knew because they got French radio here with emo. “Salafis are boys usually, who society saw as misfit, they smoked marijuana, drugs, not working, then they join salafi, they can wear hats and beard and wave black flag and sing emo,” she explained. “And threaten artist with lawyer.”

So the salafis were a politically correct, Western, postmodern phenomenon; they were Emo, strangers in a strange land. No one understood them. “I blame it on the post-ideological society,” I said. “I am the one born in the wrong century. They are typical of now. Fucking emo salafism. Punks, goths, skateboarders, emo, salafi. I hope they don't beat me to death with their skateboards inscribed in Koran verses!”

At a desolate place we stopped driving and walked. Far from the Salafites song, their emo filtered through post-adolescent beards and marijuanacaine charred voice-chords reaching on the wind through the palm trees: “We are strangers, we are strangers in this time.”

We strolled along the balustrade. Ouafa complained that it was getting dark and chilly, but I insisted on continuing, commanding.
        “You are the master?” she was angry.
        “Yes. I am the master. I am Italian, a macho. The Tunisian men do what their Queen Dido of Carthage says. Then they get angry at me, the arrogant, pompous Italian asshole; first Italy tries to conquer Libya and Libyans beat them, now they come here wanting to steal our women. They say it, and it's true, I stole one of their women already.”

She was still upset, I wanted to take her to a quiet rock formation I had found, made of pre-human volcanic activity; there were trilobytes in the stones, the sea struck and broke into tidal pools.

We sat there as the sun drowned. On the way back into the populated area of Bizerte we saw a car with two young people kissing on the reclined seat; the girl's leopardspot-printed hijab was tied around the car's headseat and blew like a flag of animal spirituality in the breeze, flag announcing the triumph of carnival-flesh-kiss, the activity of brothel.
         “Islamism,” I said, smiling and guiding her gaze with my pointing nose at the sexy hijab-banner.
         “Tunisian Islam,” she laughed. “The North of Tunis, here this can happen. This happen in the South you think? Where I from?” she walked. “Never!”

She envied her girlfriends from leftist bohemian middle-class families, the freedom they were raised with, to be wild and passionate and experiment with little evils that explored electric-blue Carthago pirate night of fun. Fun, the elusive mystic blue antelope of the heretics, she had been denied it, chased it; she was from a small oasis-town not far from the region where the revolution started, between Sahara and Regueb, where her people fought a war against the French that the Northern acolytes did not notice transpire despite blood in the valley. Closer to hilly farmlands of Regueb, though I dreamt her closer to Sahara, of course, her Orientalist lover, love-colonizing her anatomy with empty and light hands and eyes torturing her samra-skin that delighted and sickened me in the mouth.

I stopped us and pointed to a rock formation with small caves and crevices on the beach where only some old street dog with hanging teats and baldness burnmarked wandered, scouring piles of seaweed for some edible garbage.
         “What?”
          “Let's get a nice discrete cave and make love as the sun goes, to the sea-sound.”
          “Crazy? Hayawen!”
          “Why not?”
          “You watched too many films, you!”

Funny for her to say, she liked watching French and Italian movies, we saw the whole collections of Truffaut and Godard together.
           “Then we compromise: let's just sit in the cave-mouth, maybe salafees wrote their names over the ancient Berber inscriptions in the cave, or more Emo poems.”
           “If you want,” she shrugged.
            We held hands. I entered the cave and called to her.

She kept a distance and smiled. “The little assad,[1] the lion cub in his lair! Maybe I should leave him here,” she threatened, as I gestured for her to enter, though not beckoning. I returned to the precipice, fierce-toothed chin of the cavern (the snout of Anubis, I named it, some crazy esoteric-mutter voice in me named it this way.)

I had filled Hind's head with stories about the Netherlands, the postmodern society, my frustration at this correct and anti-human prison, filled her with lies I knew were true and which she respected as my experiences and that of other men in her surroundings; she had known France and judged for herself. These were the lies of my heart that I hold on to and will die for my illusions than live for the empirical and well-organized, well-structured misery that had tried to damage my spirit, that had persecuted me into wandering for being what that post-baroque state most hated and wanted to destroy, islander, half-Mallorcan Arubian, Semite, vague, feudal remnant, warrior-poet, nomadic, a noble ignoble savage who believed in such dirty words as spirit and would not accept a clear illuminated prison and would not kneel in gratitude of a heated room at 19 degrees in tupperware. Tupperware straight prison with Mondrian-souvenir colors and MC Escher deceptions and shadow tricks. I recited a poem to her, her arms wrapped around mine (which of us resembled a parasitic tree or vine? Parasite is paramour, from what corruption and state thievery pours spiritual and sexual wine — no, not those non-verses)

The poem was about the prison of the prison of my body, making fun of the motto of Foucault, “the soul is the prison of the body” which inverted Plotinus “body is the tomb of the soul”

The two prisons in the end cancel and nullify each other. With the same sundown-flavored sea-wind of reciting my snake-like poem to her I inhaled some moment of freedom, better, more inspiring than Salafi's cocaine and emo.

She took me by my hand into the cave; we lay down together, sleeping in an invisible egg next to each other but with clothes sadly remaining on despite the coolness.

Her lips, maybe animated by the sea-wind and its saltine energy, started moving, telling, as I stared at her black hair and she, at the mechanical wind up crab that moved across a pool. She told me a story from the Koran.

I didn't know if it was a Sura: There were three brothers, who lived in mediocre, superficial and melancholy times. The three brothers were alienated. They were aliens, strangers in a world of consumerism, shopping, mediocrity, ambitious security-seeking and opportunism.

The three brothers decided to find a good, dry cave and to go to sleep for several centuries, but not yet a thousand years — their idea was to wake up in a better era in history.

They woke up, but found themselves in a lonely and alien world. They recognized little and knew not the language. Where they went, all was beautiful, fantastic and weird, like nocturnal buildings in the shape of jellyfish and of trilobytes, but hi-tech; weird hairdos. She admitted she was adding details to color in the more abstract and mysterious Koranic language that didn't specify what was so foreign of the new land unfolding before the six troubled yet talented eyes of the siblings. Maybe there were five eyes, or four, as those days even more than among her parent's days in Tunis men often got their eyes stabbed out in ridiculous macho fights outside bars.

In short, the brothers chose to not be afraid, they rejected fear but accepted a beautiful horror and terror which was constantly with them. They were happy, also with their decision about the cave-sleep cure.

I reminded Oufa-raouia that she was not my sister and definitely not my brother. I knew one of her cousins had the name Abdel ben Amor. She had made sure I was hid well from the sight of her siblings this year and maybe would want to murder me to totally cover up the scandal. Hind, her long black obsidian threads from her head in the damp cave earth, her hand twirling around my thumb like a baby chimpanzee-girl . . ..

Walking in the sunfaded street on the way to the old Fiat, the sun was out but the sky still clear. A flock of flamingos — African swans, I concluded cheesily, my secret language of cheesy thoughts belied the poems — overhead cast a shadow. Along the road, hermit crabs in a procession, for every stretch of white paint on the grayed asphalt there crawled the eight-legged horned beast, they had left the Sea, perhaps too full of garbage thrown by Salafis (maybe the barbues were as ordinary contemptuous and hateful of Berber goddesses and gods of the sea, scorning the saints who had burnt themselves into invisibility on this equal shore, auto-incinerating more poetically and centuries before Bouazzizi did the same not far from Hind's hometown that was nowhere near this coast.) The ishaq-line of crustaceans, sea-spiders contrived until we were almost near the car by a tree. The Fiat's radio announced a military curfew due to Salafite violence on art galleries and tourist souvenir shops; EnNahda reassured they were not behind the latest outbursts of The Salafite.

We were now in a hurry. She almost ran over a fat lady in hijab; I shouted at her and quoted a line of Tagore: the lotus in a hurry opened to the sun of winter, crushed by snow she was buried alive.” I quoted it badly, nervous from the near-murder-by-Arab-girl-road rage, and she started to hysterically defend her driving skills.

We left the Mehdia-Bizerte area and returned to Tunis. The night was quiet; we were running thirty minutes late for the military curfew after the salafi attack on an art gallery. Sneakily we made it on the empty road; we were the ones protected, gods-supervised solitude in a badly driven car. On the way Ouafa almost ran over two or three different species of animals not including a sexy-hijab lady in bright mauve RCD-fashion gear who leaped like an antelope across the highway (Hayawen, beema, schnawa the blameless driver emptied the literary Arabic treasure-hoard of curse-words.
         “No wonder Arabs don't improve their strategies in wars with Israel and America,” I joked.
         “Very funny! You think you are funny ha ha?” almost an accident, we swerved.)

At least no crabs were ill-fated enough to be on our car route back to Tunis; they had only guided us out of that place of primordial windblasts, caverns like dog-mouths and the ancient story of three brothers decided they were in the wrong spatio-temporal coordinates of the post-magical times, and who rationally chose to sleep for centuries but not a thousand years.

Now in the Cafeteria I had obeyed the Sicilian ancestor-spirit - thinking I was inspired to war-like defiance against the cold elite feminists in Chowdury's poetry. I had already asked if I could sit at the Swiss Young Women Ruler's Association's table; one shrugged, nervous, scared-to-angel-less death by men,
         “OK,” she shrugged, looked downcast eyes demure, her hair shorn short in one part long in another length, branded here or there, a sense of rumor, relaxed attitude, my generation, open.
           I sat down, the girls all unnerved like some wheat disorganized by a wind, dismayed in disarray like I brought autumnal gases. I asked them if they were speaking German. “Yes, Swiss German.”
         “You are from Zurich?” I asked.
          “No, nearby. And you, where are you from?”
         “I was born on an island near the Colombian coast. But I am an Argentinean citizen. Je suis Argentin, mais je suis nee sur un isle proche de la Colombie” I switched to French.
         “OK, I see of course” the dark haired one nodded. She looked down at her saucer of food minerals without smiling and refusing further contact, waiting for something, maybe a teacher to come and tell me to go outside; the teacher never came of course.

Her two friends facing me rose up and left the table.

I finished the food substitute, threw the tray angrily at the Algerian cafeteria boy who signaled me and left, having lost all respect again for this Northern world of gray rain and of pacifist aggression without soul, only moralists with careers and degrees walking around, proud provincials in their business shirts of emancipated long-necked birds of financial paradise.

These girls at the eatery: seeking a world of postmodernity and progress without fearing, having no love or passion to suffer during military curfews. For them there were only the curfews they supported against public acts of love, or schedules for special sublimation-hours of political anger and spectacle, a world where everything worked efficiently, OK and on time. I wanted to surrender and collapse before a we'lah, to end my suffering; there maybe a bird hopping that was sent by the force that sent me the wind that brought me to the legs of Ouafa-Hind.

In this Europe, in this mechanical garden they, the new women and men without desire walked around with their welah-sun extinct inside and busy trying but failing at putting out the sun in the last of the old Mallorcan-like race of demon-possessed men.

They would fail, for exorcisms only works on the subjects who want to be set free of those essentials that make men human and make them men; the devils who play their trumpet inside.

1. Assad: Arabic for lion, which eats animals like arnab, rabbit. No reference to political leaders.

v.

Basu Maan 2 poems
Soldier

Braving cold winds
from the snowy mountains,
with a finger on the trigger,
the soldier guards the border terrains.
Cannot even have a nap
when his country people sleep;
with sleepless eyes wide open,
he remains awake with his troop.
All his near and dear ones –
far away - in his village,
only exchanging mails
continuing this practice for an age.
To kill or get killed,
he waits there, in the trench,
ready to save his nation –
even at his own expense.
Some day, one inch of metal
might end his story –
death can wipe him away
but cannot ever erase his glory.

(1997)

Night-bird

Living the grim sky vacant,
the virgin moon is hidden
under the wraps of fluffy clouds –
let her be forgiven
for she knows not
just for her sake
the night-bird does wait
in silence, by the still lake.

(2010)

vi.

K.S.Subramanian 5 poems
God's particle

A cubbyhole from which eases out

with a gurgling sound, gleaming

crystalline stream swaying across

the stone-cut plains; beaming

in swelling pride is the mighty river.

Pure water crystals spawn a settlement,

lingo and mien beyond the ions of memory.

The first drop in cubbyhole nebulous, extinct.

its latent mystery hazier than the cloud.

The eye alive to the throbs of the Present,

its digressions, ugliness, endless pain.

The first drop never knew what'd unfold.

...........

An uncanny Bang it was, from which

wafted the elixir, spawning the Cosmos,

then life forms defying all but death;

Yet it nested deep in the shadows.

An icon of fear, love and surrender.

It charted the mind, also led it astray;

(Un)truths meshed in labyrynths of grief

until Galileo, Einstein winnowed the way.

Self ever in a cocoon, eye in a squint.

The icon unsteady, hallow down to a strip;

Will mind step into a higher pedestal

when it's unmasked as Matter’s warp?

Nature’s Missive
My balcony is a window to the eyeful.

As I sat to recoup my tired bones,
soft dusk wind blowing across my face
I was awakened by Nature’s tones.

Just a crumb of the unexplored scenario
that left a stunning, unrealized missive;
Shadows had rung the arrival of the dark.
Tired crows were searching for a grove
on swaying branches to rest their wings
necking each other out in a hurry,
lest Nature leave them no niche to sleep,
their crowing subsiding in a jiffy.

I was snapped out by a sobering thought.
Nature mimicking the human lot.

The Past Is Gone

*Chennai’s landscape is changing faster
beyond the raising of the brows;
A fusion of time zones where the Past
has disappeared into the shadows.
A jaded glimmer of luscious green
lurks like a tree in the maze of mist;
roads cry for a fresh coat of life
as wheels rip through clouds of dust.
New alleys of hope swim into view –
farmlands giving way to pigeonholes,
where the old seek salubrious wind,
the young questing for defined roles.
The Past is only a dust-blown wall paper.
Uncover new vistas in the day’s layer.

Aging and What It Means . . .

Years pass without a whiff of murmur,
clouds dissipating in the sky;
If happiness is a whirlpool in the river
Pain too is a fading scar on memory.
Voices jar on the wavelength,
a perpetual melee daunting to the ear.
Once the cacophony peters out
emerges the calm cadence of order.
Life is never a bouquet to the living
a surprise always on the fringe;
Beyond the rim of stinging chaos hope beckons, a distant rose?

Julie

Some leer, a few jeer

the rest cheer at Julie,

Circus girl, flexing her

sinewy frame; acrobatics

done, she awaits her turn

- all for a scrap of coins

to feed kin at home.

In between she gazed

blankly at days past

- the palm fringed village

where she grew with the birds.

From town to town

she flew with her troupe,

Like Bedouins of yore,

counting the fall of years

with long repressed tears;

The day would come, she knew

when the troupe would go on,

age leave her behind.

She wished for the days

when she grew with the birds.

vii.

Subhorup Dasgupta 2 poems

Zero Sum (Mount Despair)

Come sit with me and rest a while, come drink my salted tea.
Smell the hills, the open skies in every thread of me.
Take off your bunting, your hurt, your creed; what good has come from these?
Wash your hands in the silent warmth of our samovar of grief.

The Bugloss flowers brightest blue; its roots are red as blood.
The lotus stem holds forth the truth from ancient beds of mud.
Paisley prints the stolen beats of witness protected lives.
My valley is but twice cooked meat for your sharpened carving knives.

9 March, 2013
Hyderabad

Million Magi

Climbing dirty rough hewn stairs at the end of a dimly lit yet busy alley
I reach road number one, bauble-shiny, filled with fresh flowers and cars
In an urban cool mannequined window I see my huddled hoodied self
And know in an instant the magic of being an anthology, the very best of.

I am the spirit of my times, anonymous and numberless, I am occupy, I am love
Seeing the cheer of the festive season and the despairing faceless alleyways
I am suddenly more than, more real than, more people than I ever have been
And I hear the earth calling, the bodhisattvas of the earth calling, a million magi.

I am revulsion and compassion, I am the frenzy of the possible, silent and unmoving
An unwashed child nagging at the stop light, intent that someone stops, drops a coin,
Watching cold cars go by leaving warm trails of light in the sodium vapor of the night
I am the face at every stoplight, the face that haunts you every time you close your eyes.

I take a turn at Midtown Mall to head back home, where the garbage bins overflow
The mother, the Empress, the Ram and Rahim, too old to play games anymore
Fidgety, enduring, the you that you do not know, I am the dawn to the darkest of nights
The divine gold, my time is now, I am the countless that has become one, one million magi.

Hyderabad,
December 2012

viii.

Usha Palat 5 poems

Habit

It went out of the window

like everything else.
It began well
and reached the pitch
of a well-oiled machine.
Soon it fell by the wayside
like everything else.
It began again in earnest,
but fell into
the patterns of everyday
like everything else.
It soon fell off,
a dried up scab,
and another took its place.
The new one became the old,
replacing it greedily--
the fire was stoked once again --
and it fell into step --
like everything else.

Track Encounters

Bulldog like she strode

the winding path,
way ahead of the others.
You tried to match her
stride for stride
but she chugged along
untiringly.
Her face puckered,
the effort of a steam engine,
puffing along.

Her bright orange T-shirt

hairband all askew,
strands of hair sticking out,
sweaty, black.
You smiled.
Her gaze piercing yours,
she looked unwaveringly
ahead:
you could have been
the next tree,
the breathless jogger,
the mud track,
imprints of soles,
deep grooves gone dry
from a rainy day.

Sea

I hear its roar every night.

The waves lash the shore and draw back.
The violence is unmistakable.
A lake, a river, so calm, not salty,
not torn by tides.
The moon stands in the night sky.
Master of tides, it pulls.
Moonlight streaks the waves, lights up the shore.
The moon makes its journey through the dark sky.
The sea calms, the tides low.
A glimmer in the East and the sun rises up.
A fiery red, it befriends the sea, meets it on the horizon.
No pulls mark its comradeship.
The surface of the water glimmers with another light.
The sun strides through the sky, paler, but stronger.
The sea laps up its rays, reflects the blue of the sky,
The sun sets, the moon rises.
Friendship of two kinds, the sea remains, hostile, tranquil,
all in a day.

Driving Test

Crawling into first gear,

sputtering, stopping.
The inspector rudely
barked instructions,
‘Get out of the car,
She must drive alone!’
Shocked, you turned away
at the brusqueness of dismissal.
The blue car, dented by traffic,
edged forward.
Making a U-turn,
it nudged the road
for space.

‘I didn’t see you driving!’

‘But I just drove…’
‘Do it again!’
Voices both defensive,
apathetic;
Choice less, the car
jerked forward.

He signed without looking up.

Birthday

Today is my birthday.

The sun rises and I breakfast on peanut butter and marmalade.
It feels no different from any other day.
Phone calls come to remind me of this special day.
I am alone today.
It feels no different from any other day.

I am forty-two.

The sun rose and set on every day of my birth.
It felt no different on any other birthday.

ix.

Swakkhyar Deka short fiction
Reign of Silence

I cannot be at this place right now. What am I doing here? Why on earth I am sleeping in this ramshackle room with a broken ceiling? I thought to myself as I looked around the shabby, dingy room. The old worn out ceiling fan is revolving with a weird cringing sound.

I looked at my clothes. The jeans and T-shirt I wore yesterday evening. My leather shoes are a little away in the corner.

I could remember the bits and pieces of last night now. The drunken brawl with the pimp of this whore house to bed Shilpa who was already “booked” by another customer, the fisticuffs with the customer himself, the smashing of a whiskey bottle on his head (my hand was still paining from bruises and cuts by glasses).

A sly smile passed me. Shilpa was nice. Her hair in ponytail smelled of a cheap shampoo, big eyes were defined by kohl and her skin was delightfully soft. Last night’s rendezvous flashed back in a series of images.

“Bloody heck. This incompetence. Impotence. I am bloody sick of it.” I remembered my inability to perform again last night. Why can’t I do it? It has become so normal now that it is frightening.

I splashed water on my face and drank water from the bottle kept on the corner table. Flicked a cigarette from the packet and put the lighter to it. Put my shoes on and came downstairs to the counter. Nobody was there. It was 11 o’clock in the morning and people were still sleeping in the tiny rooms. These places come alive only in the night, I thought.

The street was filled with people, hawkers and roadside vendors of different cheap items, few shady looking pan-chewing pimps (planning for the day ahead). Few eunuchs were chatting in a corner and I saw a reed-thin frail looking man walking holding the hand of a little boy who is pointing towards the gumti shop for a candy.

Even he can perform in bed. I thought. A feeling of disgust engulfed me again.

What’s wrong with me? Why cant’t I do something which seemingly all other people are doing so easily? Pills, treatments, meditation – nothing seems to work. I just can’t get the hardness when it is required most. A rage fills me sometimes and I want to break everything around into pieces. I feel helpless.

“Oh! You have come. Where were you last night?” Reema asked disinterestedly. I was so lost in thoughts that I did not even notice her on entering the house.

“I was at Ramen’s house. It got late. So stayed back.” Reema was least interested in my answer. She had only asked it for courtesy’s sake. She picked the clothes to put them in the washing machine and moved to next room.

I picked up a glass of water from the kitchen and drank. Reema is my wife of four years. We fell in love when I was in the last semester of my Masters in English Literature in the university and she was an MBA student a year junior to me. We were so madly in love those days.

But it raised a few eyebrows as well. She was everything that I was not – smart, intelligent, go-getter and pleasantly beautiful. On the other hand, I was the shy, introvert, shabbily dressed student of literature who would sit alone in the corners and daydream.

But, as they say, opposites attract. We came closer and closer during the days just before I was about to leave University. We decided to marry once she completed her PG and settle down. It was still one year away. Her rich Dad was against the match and conflicts were inevitable.

But then something great happened. My novel got picked up by a publisher and I was paid a substantial amount for the rights. When it came out it became an instant rage and the royalties were good enough to enable me to buy a small cozy house in a posh city locality and a car. Insecurities thus removed, our marriage took place without any obstacles. She got herself a plush job in the bank nearby.

But problems started soon after. I discovered my inability to perform in bed. Though she never complained or made me feel like a loser, I knew she missed the happiness and completeness that a wife so rightfully deserves. Life went on but I was being torn apart by my weakness. I became cold and aloof. She tried to make me feel at ease but I could not be helped. Eventually she also gave up. Now there is silence everywhere. The house and its two residents are engulfed by a killer silence.

She must have guessed that I was not at Ramen’s place last night. But she did not say anything. In fact she never says anything. She goes about her routine like a robot – preparing breakfast, going to office, taking care of all my needs – but all without a word. I found the towel neatly placed on my bed as I prepared to take a shower.

“Why does she have to be so caring?” I thought as I stood under the shower. “I have ruined her life. I can’t even fulfill her bare minimum desires.”

Something took my attention. As I came out of the bath toweling my hair I noticed a small gift- wrapped rectangular box on the dressing table.

“Happy Birthday Mohan” was written on the sticker on it. It struck me that it was my birthday yesterday. I opened it and found a Swiss wrist watch.

Pangs of guilt and shame took over me. All my frustrations, angers, disappointments came out rolling down in tears. The pain in my heart grew more intense.

This is not fair. I do not deserve so much of love. I will change. I will change for her. I will give her so much happiness that it will outweigh what I cannot give. I will become the husband she deserves. Not this pathetic loser of a man. I will help her adopt a child from the orphanage. She loves children. Yes I know. Though she never says I know she desires the joys of motherhood.

I heard the sound of her car leaving. I came downstairs. Lunch was there on the table – served and covered. The wall clock struck twice. 2 PM. Today’s Sunday. She must have gone to the city orphanage to be among the kids.

I noticed a piece of paper on the dining table as I sat down eat. I picked up the paper and it was a letter.

“Dear Mohan,

I am leaving. I am leaving the house forever. It’s been quite a while since we talked. So could not gather the courage to talk today. That’s why this letter. I know you suffer terribly because of your sexual inability and feel guilty. But what pains me most is your lack commitment to the marriage and our relationship. There is something more than physical intimacy that is required to make a marriage work. That is love and that is what I sought from you. So I am moving on. This house is suffocating me and I cannot even breathe here. I am going to make a fresh start with Ramen and have a normal life.

Take good care of yourself and come out of your shell. Life has so much more to give you.

Yours
Reema”

Shruti Sareen 4 poems
My Heart Is a Poor Student

For perhaps the 50th time in two weeks
I pick up my heart. Open it. explain to it.
The same words I have repeated
the evening before, I have gone through
the same arguments, the same reasoning.
But my heart is stupid. It is a fool.
... It forgets it all, and I have to explain it
all over again. My heart is stubborn. It asks
too many questions. It disbelieves. It does not
accept. My heart is too soft. That is its biggest
failing. It whimpers with a scolding. It cries
when beaten with a stick. My heart
is a poor student. An easy teacher may have
felt sorry for it. But perhaps you need
to be strict with this heart to the point
of sadism. Or sadomasochism. Banish it
from the classroom. Imprison it within walls.
Sting-slap it. Make it submit. Scream at it
until it is ready to learn. Until it is
pliable. Until it admits its faults. Until
it is willing to work hard. Until it learns
strength. Then the heart will be re-admitted
back into the classroom. With weak students
like my heart, you may sometimes
have to use force.

Drama

It is dialogic like a debate. It has
two sets of choruses. They present opposing
points of view with great melodrama and
emotion. The stage of the theatre is me.
Chorus one is Guilt and Chrous two is
Desire. Chrous two speaks first, it is more
... impatient. It begins with you, it ends
with you, it seems to like talking about you
in the middle too somehow. It seems to think
it the most natural thing. It does not realise
that something is wrong. Chorus two desires
and desires and rails against its punishment,
it cannot wait for it to end. Then,
Over to Guilt, Chorus One. This one
eats into you slowly like a worm does
into an apple. It chastises and
castigates the self, it labels you wicked,
evil, criminal- and leaves you squirming
like the vile worm. It makes you regret
who you are. That is its biggest weapon.
and everything you've ever done.
It makes you rot in hell. This
is the moment of anagnorisis. This
is where the hamartia turns into
peripeteia. Without the fatal flaw,
there would be no play, no hero,
no epiphany either. This is the end
of Act 4. The curtain drops.

Some day, there will be an Act 5
of peace, resolution and hope.

Birthing

A tender newborn green
they emerge from knotted nodes
and nodules that protrude a trifle
crooked from the tall, straight bark
their crown tops high in the sky. The barks,
by and large, are weathered old
... bare browns, except for the birthings.
The new from the old. It must be
so painful. It must hurt so much,
I think, for the green to emerge
from the brown. And for the green
to grow, covering the brown.
The brown would have this concealed
grief, and this submerged heartache
and so much courage, to give
birth to spring.

Hypocrisy

We are the bhadralog. We
the middle class. We, the marxists
we the elite, we the educated.
We are the leftists-ah!
We sit in AC seminar rooms and have
dalit conferences. with biscuits and cakes
and endless streaming cups of coffee.
Sitting in our armchairs, we
denounce the corporates and valourise
the proletariat. We clap, we
back-pat, we volunteer too.
We also take out time for our classic look-
my kajal, my kurta- hey, I'm not your
lip-gloss wearing girl, no way! and he?
His beard is a sign of intellect, can't you see?
The conference ends at 5pm and on our way
back home we see: a woman cleaning a toilet,
a beggar counting coins, some newspaper
flashing some dalit suicide. and we
retreat into bhadralog respectability.
We return to our cleansed and comfortable worlds
'Oh dear, oh dear, so terrible', we say
but what can we do after all? We are tired.
We have done so much all day.

xi.

Rajiv Ghoshal 2 poems
Womb of Life

This wandering imagination, this birth of a conscience;
This awakening of a dream; this insanity breathing stormy passions;
This dark side of the moon turning into refreshing saffron light, this ignorance transforming into knowledge;
This brown dust turning into soothing greenery; this vision drowned in a whirlpool of fresh spring water,
This bloodied body gushing out from the depths of a fiery volcano, this minute infinity emerging from a pregnant deity;
This memory seeking roots in form, this intoxicating curiosity thirsting for the ultimate fantasy: truth;
This wave of thought producing wild shrieks in the dense chambers of the third eye;
This purpose stubbornly pushing its way through time, space and matter to meet a stranger called life!

Mirrors of Eternity

Every disturbing thought has a calming pause;
Every painful step a comforting stop;
Every nightmare has a sweet awakening;
Every dark attic a small flicker of light somewhere;
Every hurting crawl has a desire to stand tall;
Every despairing a hope;
Every sorrow has a relieving joy;
Every tear a desire for laughter;
Every finite horizon has an endless origin, every decaying body an eternal soul;
Every end has a beginning, every death a life...

xii.

Aditya Pandit poem

The Blame

Blinding lights of distant cries
Future agrees, past denies
Wondering with a lonely mind
What I got being so kind?

What I lost, what I gained
Tears, washed away as it rained
Sadness remained promising to be back
Women of joy lightened the sack

Fearing joy, what I know now
Cold, was the rain, as if snow
Kindness, didn’t reflect, so profound
The ball fell short, didn’t rebound
Rumors ruling past, unaware
Distant murmurs, I didn’t care
Now I know, why I felt

The ship never came back, just sailed away
I would have strained my back
Every day, every night moving along
Through dusty roads, when the heart went,
Crack!! Wondering, to whom did the blame belong. . . .

xiii.

Mithun Dey interview

"Reflections on My India"
(Interview With Maitreyee B Chowdhury)

Maitreyee B. Chowdhury was born in Assam and is now based in Bangalore. She is a poet, creative writer and columnist. She writes in different journals and works on cinema, social issues, art and environment besides poetry. She is co-author of bi-lingual book of poems- 'Ichhe Holo Tai' and has been featured in an anthology of Indian writers - 'Celebrating India' her writings have been published in various forums like 'Contemporary Literary Review', 'Brown Critique' and others. Maitreyee has also been an educator in different capacities. Mrs. Chowdhury is a member of Indian environmental journalists. Her latest book ‘Reflections on my India’, a book on Indian traditions and spirituality which was released in Germany and is being distributed in stores all over Europe.

Mithun Dey interviewed Maitreyee B Chowdhury and firmly believes that her thoughts and insights will inspire and benefit our readers & writers community immensely.

Mithun Dey: Good to know facts about you. Tell us about your first job and the inspiration about your writings.

Maitreyee B. Chowdhury: My first job was that of a web content writer in Calcutta. It was a good learning experience.

Dey: How did you start writing?

Chowdhury: I was writing since college days, I became a part of college literary clubs and wrote for the college magazine and also for some local newspapers.

Dey: Can you tell us a bit about your latest book ‘Reflections on my India’, a book on Indian traditions and spirituality?

Chowdhury: Reflections on My India is a book about Indian traditions and spirituality in parts, all put together in very easy language and with quirky examples. The aim of the book is to bring tradition and spirituality to the younger generations and make them understand that traditions and spirituality is not always boring. People have greatly appreciated instances where I compare a sofa set to the class barrier, a sort of divide in the minds of Indians.

Dey: What have been your experiences as the member of environmental journalists? Do tell us more about this milieu?

Chowdhury: The Environmentalist journalist’s forum brings together like minded people who write about environment and have done so in different forums. Environment is a subject I am sensitive about and I have through my writings tried to show how there is much to learn from the environment and how we can tackle different problems by learning from environment.

Dey: Being a co-author of bi-lingual book of poems, ‘Ichhe holo Tai’, can you tell us something about the book?

Chowdhury: Ichhe holo Tai is a book of poems in Bengali and English. It is a collaborative effort and also has paintings. Most forms of art complement each other and in today’s world any kind of creativity need not be seen in isolation. The paintings complement the verses and vice versa. It’s a very interesting project.

Dey: What was the book that most influenced your life and why? If any.

Chowdhury: At different levels different books affect us in different ways and contribute to making us who we are, so it is with me, as such it is unfair probably to name any one book. But nevertheless, if one had to do that it would be ‘The little prince’ by French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. To me it will remain a classic always because its wisdom crosses all barriers of time and every time you read it you learn something new that you didn’t notice before.

Dey: You also write on cinema. Do you think that Bollywood encroaches on sensibilities of regional cinema?

Chowdhury: Yes I think it does. Perhaps it is inevitable, since even some foreign films are affected by the Bollywood sensibilities. And yet in certain ways I wish regional cinema with its local flavor would flourish more. Cinema especially regional needs to go back to literature like it was in the 50 s and 60 s when film stories were based on good stories/novels and even had poetry from very good writers. I believe this will make regional people take more pride and interest in regional films too.

Dey: What advice do you have for the new writers?

Chowdhury: If there is something I find lacking in today’s and especially contemporary Indian literature, it is the lack of thinkers. Writing is not only about picking a pen, one has to learn to be worthy of it first. Write not because it will make you famous, (it doesn’t anyway, there are just too many writers in the scene), write for the love of literature and because it is your existence.

Dey: Are you currently working on a new book? If so, what book are you working on?

Chowdhury: Yes I’m in the last stages of a new book on regional cinema and Bengali matinee idols Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen. It will be the first book in English on the duo.

Dey: How do you see the internet changing the way writing works?

Chowdhury: Oh . . . it has changed so many things both for the good and the better. Today thanks to the Internet you have on the one hand a huge amount of information but there is of course a flip side to it too. Thanks to social media platforms you have an instant audience. So while anything anyone writes has an audience, which is good. It is also dangerous because praise can go to people’s head and make them stop the process of learning and improving on one’s technique, which is extremely necessary for any writer.

Dey: Which is better: Online, print and digital publishing? Tell us more about the publications.

Chowdhury: There is no good, better and worse in this. Publishing is primarily a means to reach out to more readers and that can be done through any medium these days. Though Indians still prefer traditional publishing, there is a huge boom in online publishing through various mediums and many a times it works very well too. If the standard of publishing can be maintained to publishing good work, any medium works, in fact self publishing is great for new writers.

Mithun Dey: What is the best feedback you received about your work?

Chowdhury: I have been extremely lucky in my readers. It brings a smile to my face, all this generosity. Most of it has especially comes for poetry and the prose poetry (a form I write in very often). I remember a gentleman who once wrote to me saying that he was sitting all alone in a part of frozen

Canada

, away from home and family and my lines had given him comfort. Another time a mother wrote in to say that after a whole day of work and being tired, my lines gave her comfort to be herself and brought her realization. There have been so many more..I feel blessed with so much love.

Dey: It is seen that the biggest problems are faced by poets when trying to get their works published. Need your tips for budding poets to shun the most common pitfalls?

Chowdhury: Poetry is indeed difficult to publish. Most poets still face that and I have been continuously fighting this notion that poetry does not sell. I wish that publishers would realize that if marketed well, poetry would definitely sell. Story writing can be cultivated but gifted poets have natural talent, which is like a miracle. It is my personal belief that poetry is like song, the very essence of man, you cannot ignore it.

Dey: Besides being a poet, you are also a columnist and creative writer for various niches Indian magazines. Any tips on how exactly does one go about bagging these assignments?

Chowdhury: There is not straight cut formula for that really and competition is fierce. But first create a niche for yourself. You should be the expert in your area. Read different magazines, see how the articles are written, their style and content. Once you have achieved that send in your write ups to different magazines. These days social media helps, write for blogs. These are ways to get noticed.

xiv.

Bipin Patsani poem
Poetry on Wheels

Watching the relics of the Sun Temple

At Konark and rediscovering the self

Is a wonderful experience.

It is, as it were, enjoying the lyric grace

Of fulfillment and alienation

In a lovely book of verse.

Its sensuous stones, lively,

Deftly designed in the divine splendour

Of a chariot, seem to be telling

The fascinating tale of a people

Who passionately longed to see

The wheels of a great culture moving.

Though the magnetic main temple

Has lost its trunk and visage

By malicious tampering of time,

What yet remains is a clear message;

The dancing damsels, the horses and wheels

Immortalizing its poetry of the sublime.

xv.

Anikendu Ghosh 2 poems
Absent

Chronicle fantasies relook

Upon my cursed soul.
Objects that surround us
Beyond our life
Beyond our beats
Beyond ourselves.
I wish I was a vestibule of a metro rail,
Where two lovers reside before they part.

I wish I was windshield of an old car,

Standing under the sun, alone, all day long.
I wish I was the heroin syringe of a fresh born addict,
Kept me trying, trying till she started dying.
I wish I was the entire stack of chips,
That a poker lover won in a fierce pursuit.
I wish I was an old gramophone record,
Which only beholds memories for a melancholic individual.
I wish I was a white collared school shirt,
Worn on the last day by a dead friend.
I wish I was congenial music,
Repeating myself on mute mode.
I wish I were several fragmented illusions,
Speaking beyond bloody revolutions.

Leaving aside home,

Leaving aside journeys.
Leaving aside an unimportant date
Leaving aside a so called soul mate
I wish I imbibed life to unspoken things,
Things, that were inanimate.

Lost

Over the Halloween fields of desire,

I feel her.
Over the cyclopean rush to venture out,
I remember her.
Over the quiescent passions gone mute,
I reform her.
Over the volumes of tears dropped,
I rebuke her.
Over the patience spilled over melancholy,
I miss her.
Over the obdurate curtains of faith,
I curse her.

Over the diamond ring gone missing,

She harasses me.
Over the snapshot of her favorite pet,
She ridicules me.
Over the black and white disc broken,
She taunts me.
Over the radium studded watch she wore,
She beckons me.
Over the old movie tickets in her purse,
She reminds me.
Over the scribbled last page of a diary,
She reads me.

Such was an intended start,

Such proved to be a incidental end.

Through the path that was travelled,

In between the happenings that were lived.

Under the oath of love,

that would not cost.

Over the blood spilt above

I remain lost.

xvi.

Kritvi Methi poem

Untitled

Strangulated by your crude words
around my neck, my own bloody veins
cuffed around my hands
tears sizzle on the bruises on my face
as in an airless cell i land.
nailed to the wall of memories
knives piercing through my dreary thoughts

arrested by my own fears and truths
crucified, as my broken heart lays array
wishing dead, yet captivated i lay.

but then suddenly my own illuminance blinded me

deafened by the angels serenading

prison bars melted into a bed of roses

joy shimmered down and filled in my wounds

broken pieces of my heart magnetised

as butterflies fluttered by

though the wings remain disfigured

gloriously i fly.

xvii.

Dr. M. Rajaram article

Arundhati Roy: A Shakespeare’s Sister?
(written in association with Dr. A. Vasudevan)

“A Shakespeare’s sister” is the term to define a woman writer by the norms prescribed by Virginia Woolf in her A Room of One’s Own. The two key terms Woolf uses and appeals to the aspiring woman writers to possess are “the androgynous mind” (103) and “the incandescent mind” (65). She defines “the androgynous mind” as the fusion of “male-female brain” for a writer to produce great literature. And she defines “the incandescent mind” as the mind which transcends personal grudges, hurts, grievances, anger and displeasure and remains immune to criticism. In addition, when she offers her peroration to the aspiring writers, she insists that the women writers should attempt to explore the psyche of men, to be sensitive to the limitations of women and acknowledge them, to avoid too much of sexual quality, to employ new narrative and linguistic techniques and to write about all fields of knowledge. The present paper attempts to see if Arundhati has these two kinds of mind as revealed in her Booker prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things and if she can be called “a Shakespeare’s sister.” The interesting aspect of this search is that the answer to the question raised here traverses between yes and no.

Arundhati Roy undoubtedly explores the psyche of men through the characters chiefly Shri Benaan John Ipe, mostly referred in the novel as “Pappachi” (Estha’s and Rahel’s grandfather), Chacko (their maternal uncle) and the frustrated husband of Ammu. She presents Benaan’s frustration over the indifference of his fellow entomologists to his discovery of a new species of moth, which was recognized as a new species only after his retirement, and his bouts of violence caused by his jealousy over his wife’s (Soshamma’s) sudden fame the pickle business got her. Chacko, the son of Benaan and the uncle of Estha and Rahel, is a Rhodes Scholar. Arundhati presents his anglophile tendencies and his flirtation with the women working in his pickle factory under the pretext of practising Marxist ideas. Then, Ammu’s husband, an assistant manager of a tea estate in Assam, given to drinking, beats Ammu and her children. He is about to lose his job. To avoid it, he consents to proposition his wife to please Hollick, the English manager of the estate. Arundhati’s characterization of Benaan, Chacko and Ammu’s husband shows how impeccably she has felt the pulse of men and brought out their real nature. And most importantly, through the characters of Estha (one of the two eggs, the other being Rahel, his sister) and the untouchable Velutha, Arundhati maps out the sexuality of men. She enters the subconscious of Estha and traces the causes of his abnormal love and calmness. The haunting of the Orangedrink Lemondrink man in the Abilash Talkies, his escapade with Rahel in a boat on the river and his incestuous relationship with Rahel forces one to conclude that Arundhati has met the standard set by Woolf – women writing about the sexuality of men. And Velutha’s adventurous love–making with Ammu, despite his awareness of the consequences, shows the degree of Arundhati’s understanding of the sexuality of men, who would go any extent to gain carnal pleasure.

Second, Arundhati’s comment on the political parties of Kerala – CPI (Communist Party of India and CPI (M)) (Communist Party of India (Marxist)) and on the nation’s wars against China and Pakistan show her interest in other matters such as politics. Her novel satirizes the defence system such as police force to maintain law and order, the educational system and social inequality. She uses the victimization of Velutha to voice against the caste‑infested, caste‑conscious society. Hence, Arundhati Roy is not just interested in presenting and shaping the characters and emotions mainly domestic. She touches issues – regional, national and international. She truly satisfies the standard of Woolf that women writers should also write about all issues without confining themselves to domestic issues.

Third, Roy satisfies Woolf’s emphasis on women writers searching for new themes. Roy’s presentation of the incestuous relationship between “the two eggs” (Estha and Rahel) is not something new to literature. Yet, the reason for such kind of relationship is very new. They are twins – not monozygotic but dizygotic (developed from two eggs). One has felt the warmth of the other even before birth. They have “Siamese soul” (41). Arundhati describes how Ammu (their mother) views the twins, when they are born: “She counted four eyes, four ears, two mouths, two noses, twenty fingers and twenty perfect toe‑nails. She didn’t notice the single Siamese soul. She was glad to have them” (41). These two characters break the laws of love – “[t]he laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much” (33). Another inventive forbidden relationship Roy tries to portray is Estha’s strange longing or his feeling of a desperate need for his father’s name. He sadly writes “Esthappan unknown.” However, when he is sent to his father in Calcutta, he is unhappy, not that he leaves his mother but he will miss his sister. This treatment of incest satisfies Woolf’s demand from the aspiring women writers for new themes.

Though Arundhati presents the prejudices of men, she is sensitive to the limitations of women too, which is one of the requests of Woolf to the women writers to acknowledge the limitations of women. Roy uses mainly two women characters in the novel to serve this purpose – Baby Kochamma and Kochu Maria. Baby Kochamma’s affair with Father Mulligan and her tricks to attract the attention of Father Mulligan such as bathing children near the well and raising “bogus doubts” in the scriptures are clear signs of her cleopatran criminality. Her hatred towards Estha and Rahel, though understandable, makes every reader hate her. Kochu Maria’s unkind words constantly reminding Estha and Rahel that Ayemenem’s house is not theirs show what evil in women is capable of doing to the already-very-much-puzzled children.

All these features undoubtedly place Arundhati Roy among the galaxy of Sisters of Shakespeare.

However, Arundhati Roy possesses the qualities of which Woolf urges the aspiring writers to purify themselves. For instance, the obnoxiously explicit presentation of intimate moments, the excessive dose of sexual quality, stale linguistic devices, the expression of personal grudges, hatred and displeasure, etc. The presentation of Estha’s experience with the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man in the Abhilash Theatre is really obnoxious. Her close–up description of lovemaking between Ammu and Velutha, which ends the novel, is unnecessary, except to create an open endedness. The writers who present such private moments invariably ignore a trap into which they all fall. The shallow readers may not mind the “objectionable descriptions” or may just take them as the frankest expressions of the writer or may find a justification from the writer with the ruse of “naturalism.” However, a keen reader will not miss the self–trap of the writers when he or she analyzes where exactly the writers place themselves, when they describe those private moments. The psychological problem which the writers can be assumed to possess is their secret enjoyment of a sort of voyeurism with their explicit description of such private moments. There are many ways to present them. For instance, Roy herself does not present the lovemaking of Estha and Rahel as explicitly as that of Ammu and Velutha in the final chapter and yet, it is very powerful. Had Roy adopted the same strategy to describe other such moments in the novel, she would have been undoubtedly called “a Shakespeare’s sister.”

Arundhati’s narrative technique and linguistic devices, as many claim, are not inventive, though her diction can be. The stream of consciousness as a narrative technique has become stale and has become unpopular for its back and forth shifts and a deliberate, forced mystification. Moreover, the technique itself is fallacious in the sense that it just presents the “stream”of the writer not the characters. It cannot be just accepted as spontaneous or natural course of mind. The back and forth narration and its sudden shifts have some order and restraint, which are disguised beyond recognition. The choice of events and their (dis)placement are decided very consciously by the writer. For instance, Roy presents suggestively all through the novel the two events which end the novel – the incestuous lovemaking between Estha and Rahel and the illegal lovemaking between Ammu and Velutha. When she indicates these events earlier in her novel, her mind would naturally think of the act itself. Then, why is it that she reserved these two events till the end? This deliberate postponement cannot be called “a natural course of the mind.” It is this point which forces one to call “the stream of consciousness” “fallacious.” The mind has a thought, but the writer overpowers it and makes her own choices of events and her own places to present them. Therefore, the narrative technique cannot be called “a device” to imitate the workings of the mind. Her linguistic devices such as fragments, phrases conjoined as words, word-patterns, repetition, inversion, reversal, unusual split, etc. can be termed clichés. However, the transliteration of expressions in Malayalam gives the novel a local colour, which is a strong feature of the novel to be identified as “post-modern.”

The last thing which questions her claim for the title of “a Shakespeare’s sister” is her deliberate, though inescapable, narrowness of feminism. That is, Roy’s feminism, like most of the Indian women writers, suffers from this defect of having a narrow outlook. Her feminism concerns only one issue – the incompatibility between husband and wife not between men and women. She presents chiefly four couples and none of them is presented as a happy couple. There is only one couple – Pappachi and Mammachi (Shri Benaan John Ipe and Soshamma) – who live together despite a total absence of love between them. Other couples comprise Ammu and her husband, Rahel and Larry McCaslin and Chacko and Margaret. All women leave their husband. Yet, Rahel gets well with Chacko, her uncle and Estha, her brother; Ammu is not cross with Chacko, though she argues vehemently sometimes over political stand of her brother, and with Velutha, with whom she has an illegal relationship; Chacko for Mammachi is a proud “brilliant son made of prime ministerial material” (56). In other words, the relationship between Rahel and Estha, Ammu and Velutha and Mammachi and Chacko are smooth, because they are not wives and husbands. This conclusion is drawn from the implication of the novel.

For these reasons Arundhati Roy cannot be called “a sister of Shakespeare.” Hence, the answer to the question if Roy is a Shakespeare’s sister or not meets not “yes” or “no” but another description. That is, Arundhati Roy is definitely the “half–sister” of Shakespeare.

Works cited:

Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New Delhi: Penguin Books India Ltd., 2002.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Ed. Jenifer Smith. New Delhi: Foundation Books, 1998.

xviii.

Butterfly Folded in a Rainbow & the Dismemberment of Orpheus

Anindya S. Purakayasth book review

The encrypton of the ontic and the quotidian, the rudimentary and the apocalyptic – these are the stuff that one encounters in the poetology of Bishnupada Ray. The present book under review, Discarded Self & Selected Poems, Hyphen Publication, 2012, unclinches the rarefied moments or the detritus from the upheavals of the soul or from the silent corridors of dasein. Ray has already carved a niche for him as this book is his fourth successful poetic venture in a creative career which is marked by laurels like the 2009 Pushcart Prize nominations and an illustrious collection of poetic output. He is widely published and his poetry has appeared in flagship journals like Indian Literature, New Quest, Makata, A Hudson View, Sabdaaguchha and Revival. Three volumes of his poetry have already been published by Writers Workshop, Kolkata, and he also writes poetry in Bangla. Chakar Niche Prajapati is the first collection of his Bangla poetry. If language is really the house of Being and poetry is the desired unconcealment or aletheia, then the talisman of the poematic and the singularity of the redeeming other voice, which is poetry gets a sustained and nuanced worlding in the words of Ray who seeks to enframe the existential blues and its aligned dememberment in an arresting lexicon of the ennui and ontological subterfuge.

“A butterfly folded in a rainbow

A collective from the old curio shop

Fading towards the vastness of nothing

Between the pages of a notebook

The crisp layers of the unconscious

The uncreated creating the created

from the infinite singularity

moulding finite matter, space and time

With waves eternally branching out

like forked paths of a labyrinth

before the big bang it was silence

irrepressible life wrapped in dream

from which the universe emerged

like the irresistible cry of a newborn”

The exiled self as captured in Ray`s pages smacks of the Prufrockean yellowish fog of dejection and anxiety that renders the lost harmony seems almost irretrievable. Ray`s poems are abuzz with nightmares, with the blank visitations of dead soul, silence, albino death and lost illusion, “Dead soul again/all over the place/complete silence/in the background/frozen lake of still water/ and not a soul stirred”, and amidst these footfalls of the dead soul or the encircling grimace of apocalypse,

“the calendar looks emaciated

like the waning of the moon

days drop one by one

before my eyes

covering my path

like fallen leaves

in the winter of life”

The complete dismemberment of Orpheus, the erasure of the divine figment, the testament of the cactus land and the frightening shadow of the dark horse get a Picassoesque articulation as witnessed in the throbbing agony of Guernica,

“Dead field

some hands or legs

are still twitching

at the golden sun

till death invincible”

Given this bleak horizon, what remains at hand? What are the straws to clutch? Holderlin perhaps had in mind such blankness of heart when he zeroed in to characterize the present times as destitute times or Arnold had similar memories of a iron time, a time, desacralised. Holderlin assigned poetry the task to retrieve the trace of the departing angels, to restore the divine trace. But the depleting grounds for Ray, confers only a consolation of wait,

“We are waiting

for the spirits to return

from the island

where they were banished

where the sea speaks

under a rainbow arch”

Prolonged wait for the rainbow arch generates a reversal effect and one realizes that although, “to hold it/to feel it in the heart/ is the power and joy/ and the ideology of love… but the snail withdraws/ and shrinks back to its own world.” This encocoonment in the enclosed fortification of one`s own creative labenswelt is the only poetic refuge or the only redeeming strength to forge one`s very own weltanschauung,

“Words are hungry jaws

They bite sharp and cheer

They have lost their meaning

There is nowhere to go

The rugged terrain all around

Imprisons the time and space

There is nowhere to hide

Except the mental globe”

But Ray`s poetic sojourn halts and quivers only to gather strength from the precipice, the asymmetrical abyss is defied to script a counter poetics of mobility or a worldedeness in primordial dynamics. As “the whiteness of subliminal pain/scrolled down the painted veil/and covered the butterfly bones/throwing back life where it began/it eternally tended to go back/and merge into the coil of things/as a directive against closure”, one constitutes an azure touch of reassuredness and the neurosis of discarded self is transmuted in the smithy of hope, in the defiance against closure. The shooting stars of new narratives descend to retrace the dwindling divine grace,

“The reaching radius

Of a new age radar

Works through veils

Of extreme suffering”

In times of sporadic killings and broad daylight brutalities, Ray encodes the graffiti of challenge, scripts the strength of words and in spite of the hard suns of life, Ray dares the destitute times, as “a frail insect on frail wings/flies over the mountains/to catch the clouds.” The brazen words of the drunken soldiers, the slouching thighs of pouncing death recede as a new horizon of gushing bliss unfolds,

“The night is flooded with rivers

The oipen doors are arms

Of a beloved passionately flung

Towards the metaphysics of rain

The closet brims with greetings

Here beauty has a face

And a bliss from heaven

Here memory falls like rain

On the wings of desire

The rain falls across the days

Across the rib cage to the heart.”

The metaphysics of rain summarises Ray`s reassuring chronicle of butterfly bones and gossamer painted veils when the tidings of Orpheus` dismemberment seems complete. The universal ontology of renascence, the strength of the everyday, the eulogy of the frail, and the gestalt of Being, all these get recoronated in Ray`s poetic uncocealment.

Discarded Self & Selected Poems, Bishnupada Ray, Hyphen Publications, Shimla, India, 2012, pp

xviii.

books
tbc recommends

1.

banalata sen
Jibananda Das
translated and edited by Sunandan Roy Chowdhury

Earth

(shyamali)

Earth, your face is yesterday's power
Those days when youth would float their ships
With the belief that there was gold in far new land,
Realising the metal bright in the woman's genius
They would drown in wine, milk and peacock-bed
And get drowned in blistering morning sun, boundless.

I see your face today
I see the planet's blue
The empty melancholy ports at noon,
The seagull in the afternooon
Stars, night's water, youth wailing, all -
O Earth, I have felt all.

banalata sen by Jibananda Das translated (from the original Bengali) and edited by Sunandan Roy Chowdhury is priced at Rs 200. Copies can be ordered from 'books@samparkpublishing.com'

2.

Blue Vessel
Nabina Das

Nabina Das's beautiful poems is a daring blend of modern times avant-garde and traditional motives that sets her as a leading voice among today's Indian poetry scene. Named one of the best books of poetry of 2012 in the Sunday Express section of the new Indian Standard. Foreword by the internationally established poet Peg Boyers. Buy the book here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/nabina-das/blue-vessel/paperback/product-20604822.html

vix.

book launch

Taking Sides: Reservation Quotas and Minority Rights in India
Rudolf C. Heredia

Rudolf Heredia (right) and Anjum Katyal (center) at the launch of Taking Sides at
Oxford Bookstore, Kolkata (13 April, 2013)

"One of the biggest challenges facing India today is the question of reservation for the nation's minority communities. Although the Constitution of India affirms equal justice for all, the manner in which legislatures and courts operate often compromise these rights in the name of political pragmatism. As a result, the voiceless and vulnerable members of society Dalits, tribals, women and religious minorities continue to be excluded and marginalized.

Taking Sides outlines a credible road map to aid the quest for an inclusive and just society. Examining this churning debate from several points of view, Rudolf Heredia makes a persuasive argument for justice premised on liberty, tempered by equality and moderated by fraternity a justice beyond politics."

About the Author

Rudolf C. Heredia took his doctorate in Sociology from the University of Chicago (1979), and taught sociology at St Xavier s College, Mumbai. He is the author of Changing Gods: Rethinking Conversion in India.

xx.

poetry group
(hyderabad)

"Red Leaf" is a poetry appreciation group based out of Hyderabad. It meets at 5 pm on second Saturdays of the month at Landmark Bookstore Somajiguda. It started out with about 5 to 7 attendees, and now it has grown to 25 to 30 members attending. It has a guest speaker and a theme at each meeting, and this is followed by activities like prompt based writing, haiku workshops, merging poetry and photography, etc. It also has time for participants to read and share their own poetry. Do drop by if you're in Hyderabad. And you can also get in touch with Subhorup Dasgupta (subhorup@gmail.com) if you want more information.

contributors

Born in Pathsala, Barpeta district, Assam, Nilim Kumar is one of the most popular poets of contemporary Assamese literature. He has published a total of 17 collections of poems, and some of them are Achinar Akhukh (1985); Bari Kunwar (1988); Swapnar Relgaari (1991); Seluoi Gadhuli (1992); Topanir Baagicha (1994); Panit Dhou Dhoubor Mach (1990); Narakashur; Atmakatha. He has also authored a number of novels — Matit Uri Phura Chitrakar; Akash Apartment; Athkhon Premar Uppannyas. He is the President of The Call of the Brahmaputra, a socio-cultural literary organization of Assam. He received awards like Raja Foundation award, 2009, Uday Bharati National award, 1994.
Rinzu Rajan writes in an attempt to sear away from the boundaries of cliche. Her work has been featured in The Penwood review, The Red River review, The Ottawa arts review, Muse India and elsewhere. She is reading and writing fiction nowadays and is the content editor for Kalyani magazine. She lives in New Delhi and does research to earn her bread and butter and blogs at www.rinzurajan.blogspot.in.

Barnali Chetia, pursuing PhD in linguistics, JNU, New Delhi, (a guest lecturer, freelancer). Her poem has been previously featured in Brown Critique.
Arturo Desimone was born and raised in Aruba (Dutch Caribbean) to parents of immigrant origins foreign to the island (an Argentinean father and Russian-Polish mother). When he was 20 he emigrated from Aruba to the Netherlands, where he lived for 6 years, then left to lead a nomadic way of life better enabling writing fiction, poetry and making drawings. Now he is based in Buenos Aires Argentina, his grandparents' home town. His poetry and fiction have been in Horror Sleaze Trash, Small Axe Salon, Hinchas de Poesia Unlikely Stories and at the blog A Tunisian Girl .
Basu Maan was born in 1973 in Guwahati in Assam, in Northeast India. He was forcefully schooled, but he continued studies and did M.Sc. with NET and B.Ed., and diplomas in Higher Education and Management. His poems have always been symbolic and thoughtful in nature, and are regularly published in college and university magazines and the Assam Tribune. He is sometimes criticized and sometimes praised for his old-fashioned knack to write in rhythm. His book of thematic poems Oasis: A Far Cry had seen light in 2009 after a continuous struggle to improve as a poet since the late 80’s.
K.S.Subramanian has published two volumes of poetry – Ragpickers and Treading on Gnarled Sand – through the Writers Workshop, Kolkata. His poems have appeared in several anthologies brought out at home and abroad and also in Web sites notably poetrymagazine.com, museindia.com, unesco.it, Asian Age, Poets International ( a Bangalore-based poetry journal).
Subhorup Dasgupta is a Hyderabad-based writer, fine artist and musician. A student of Literature 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.”
Usha Palat currently live in Chennai and travels a fair bit, both within and outside the country. In the recent past she has taught English in schools, especially to senior classes. She has also dabbled in a bit of writing, mostly for a Website. She enjoys natural and clean spaces, birdwatching and cats.
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, His work has been previously featured in Brown Critique.
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.
Shruti Sareen, born and brought up in Varanasi, studied in Rajghat Besant School, a Krishnamurti Foundation Institution. Moving to Delhi,she did her BA and MA in English from Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. Having now completed an Mphil in English literature with a dissertation on "the Imagined and the Inhabited City in the poetry of Arundhathi Subramaniam, Anjum Hasan, CP Surendran,
and Tabish Khair", she is currently looking at Emerging Feminist Trends in Indian Poetry in English, as part of her doctoral project from the University of Delhi. She has earlier had poetry published in The Little Magazine, Muse India, Reading Hour, The Seven Sisters Post, The Chay Magazine, the Ultra Violet Website, Kritya, and Vayavya. An avid poetry lover, she blogs at www.shrutanne-heartstrings.blogspot.com. She hopes to go into teaching, research, and of course, more poetry!
Rajib Goshal was born in 1969 and lived much of his childhood in Guwahati. His parents enrolled him in a boarding school in Darjeeling at the tender age of six. He studied for a Bachelor’s degree in International Studies in the US and a Master’s degree in International Relations from the UK. Since he was no taller than summer grass, I dreamed of working in the area of social and economic development. He took up jobs with NGOs and international development agencies, including the United Nations and the Asian Development Bank. His permanent home is now in Kolkata, but he lives in New Delhi with my wife and six-year-old daughter.
Aditya Pandit is a young poet based out of Kolkata, India.
Mithun Dey is a freelance writer, poet, essayist, translator, storywriter from Bongaigaon, Assam . He writes for India News and Feature Alliance (INFA), New Delhi, India Press Agency (IPA)Service, New Delhi, The Organiser Weekly, New Delhi, The Assam Tribune, Guwahati, The Sentinel, Guwahati, The Kashmir Times, Daily Excelsior, Jammu, The Shillong Times, The Arunachal Times, STAYFIT Magazine from Bangalore and other publications.
Bipin Patsani has published poems in Indian literature, JIWE, Kavaya Bharti, Chandrabhaga and Brown Critique etc. He has three poetry collections to his credit and two more are ready for the press. Some of his poems have been translated into Spanish and Portuguese.
Anikendu Ghosh was born and raised in the city of joy, Calcutta, but currently residing in Pune. Though he earns his living as an IT professional, he has always had his interest in creative thoughts and creative writing. He have been writing poetry since the age of 15, and his works have been published in a few online social networking and corporate e-magazines. A few of my other works are available at http://anikendughosh.wordpress.com.
For 15-year-old Kritvi Methi poetry has been a part of her life "as long as I can remember." She loves writing to a great extent "that it is beyond compare!" She is a grade-6 acting skills student as well. She firmly believes that she can bring about a very positive change in this world, as they say the pen is mightier than the sword.
Dr. M. Rajaram is an Assistant professor in the Department of English at Government Arts College (Autonomous), Karur. Tamilnadu. He received his doctoral degree with specialization in African American poetry in 2005 in Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai. He is a Master Trainer in the English Language Fellow Programme conducted by the Directorate of Collegiate Education, Chennai in association with U.S State Department of Washington D.C. A number of his research papers have been published in books and journals. He has presented many research papers in International, National and State Level conferences and seminars. He has published 3 volumes of his poetry so far. His wife is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry in G.T.N. Arts College, Dindigul, Tamilnadu. His area of interest is African American literature, Indian Writing in English, New Literatures and ELT. He lives in Dindigul, Tamilnadu which is situated near Madurai.
Dr.A.Vasudevan is an Associate professor and Head of the Department of English at Government Arts College, Udumalpet, Tamilnadu. He studied at Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, to get a Master’s degree and an M.Phil degree in English Language Studies. He was chosen for the University Stipendiary Research Fellowship by Madurai Kamaraj University to do his doctoral research in English language teaching. Before he could complete his research, he was recruited by the Government of Tamilnadu for the collegiate educational service in 1998. He received his doctorate in deconstruction, a branch of literary criticism, from Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai in 2006. He has presented research papers at the regional, national and international conferences. His areas of interests include postmodernism, poststructuralism, feminism, psychoanalysis, postcolonial literature and creative writing. He along with his wife, a teacher in a higher secondary school, and his son, an eleven-year old boy, live in Udumalpet, a cool place near the Western Ghats.
Dr. Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha was formerly Assistant Professor, Department of English, Central University of Orissa, India. Currently, he is Assistant Professor, Department of English, S K B University, Purulia, West Bengal, India. He holds his Ph.D. in Critical Theory and Postcolonial Politics from IIT Kharagpur. He has contributed in journals like, History and Sociology of South Asia, Economic and Political Weekly, Indian Literature, the Central Sahitya Akademy Journal, JICPR, Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research and IUP Journal of English Studies, etc. He was the recipient of United States Department of State Research Visit Grant in 2010 for academic and research visit to the University of Louisville, Kentucky, University of California Berkeley, University of Albuquarq, New Mexico and University of Washington.

brown critique

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april 2013

april 2013

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