Author: borderlesssg1

Categories
Poetry

The Way You Left Me by Fazal Abubakkar Esaf

Fazal Abubakkar Esaf
THE WAY YOU LEFT ME 

the way you left me
still hurts
you said goodbye
like it meant nothing
but it echoed
through every part of me
that once knew
how to smile
i held your name
like a prayer
now it tastes
like ash
on my tongue
i still carry
your silence
like a bruise
that forgot
how to heal
it blooms
beneath my ribs
quietly
without warning
your absence
moves through me
like a ghost
haunting all the places
i once felt safe
i wait
for the day
your memory
stops
knocking
on my chest

Fazal Abubakkar Esaf is a writer, content creator, and educator with experience in community engagement. He’s a quiet soul writing loud feelings in soft words that explore love, loss, and everything we carry but never say aloud.

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Categories
Essay

Nobody Cries at Goodbyes Anymore

By Charudutta Panigrahi

From Public Domain

We are the most connected generation in human history. Is this why does leaving feel so utterly weightless?

There was a ritual. I still remember it distinctly. You probably remember it, or your parents do. The last morning of a visit — to a grandparent’s house, a village cousin’s home, an uncle’s rambling bungalow where the ceiling fans whirred through long afternoons — had a particular texture. Trunks or suitcases were latched. Strolleys hadn’t arrived yet or were on their early novelty days. Bags were piled by the door. And then, invariably, someone wept.

Not a little polite sniffle. Real tears. The kind that came from a grandmother pressing your face into her sari one more time, or an aunt who had spent a week feeding you as though you might never eat again, standing at the gate long after the rickshaw (autorickshaws were not common) or the personal car (Ambassador or Fiat[1] depending on the size of the family mostly) had turned the corner. You waved until you could no longer see her. She stood there until she could no longer see you. That was the goodbye.

Try to find that scene today. Go ahead. You won’t.

Today, the goodbye is punctuated not by tears but by the brisk choreography of the in numerous selfies.

Phones are raised, filters applied in real time, expressions arranged for maximum glow. The image is uploaded before the car has reversed out of the driveway. The caption reads: Such a beautiful time with family. So blessed. Heart emoji. Heart emoji. Heart emoji and a few ummahs thrown in. Thirty-seven likes in the first eight minutes. Nobody cried. Nobody needed to. You’re already on a group chat together.

The old goodbye made sense in its economic context. Distance, in those decades, was not merely geographical — it was temporal. A cousin who lived two states away or a city even in the same state was, in practical terms, a person you saw once a year, twice if there was a wedding or a funeral nudging the universe into action. Letters arrived weeks after they were written, sometimes smelling faintly of the sender’s home. Trunk calls were events, scheduled and anxious and too expensive to linger over. When you left, you genuinely did not know when you would next sit in the same room.

So the tears made sense. They were a rational response to real absence. Grief, after all, is the tax we pay on love, and those goodbyes had genuine grief in them — not theatrical, not performed, not calibrated for an audience. Just the honest acknowledgement that a period of closeness was ending, and the ending mattered.

WhatsApp changed the mathematics of absence. So did video calls, Instagram, the entire chirping infrastructure of perpetual connectivity. Your cousin in Rayagada is now a voice note away. Your village relatives appear on your screen every Diwali whether you want them to or not. The emotional logic of the old goodbye has been quietly dismantled, brick by brick, by the algorithm’s promise that no one ever really has to leave.

But here is the uncomfortable question: has connection replaced closeness, or merely simulated it? The notifications keep flowing, but something in the texture of relationships has changed. We know more about each other’s lives — the holidays, the promotions, the new kitchen tiles — and feel, perhaps, less. The mystery that once made a reunion electric has been replaced by the tepid familiarity of a continuous feed. When you already know what someone had for breakfast, the surprise of seeing them in person is somewhat diminished.

And then there is the paradox of the modern public display of affection. We live in the golden age of the PDA. Couples announce their anniversaries with slide shows. Families post coordinated outfits for festivals. Friendships are commemorated with “appreciation posts” of baroque emotional intensity. The declarations have never been louder or more frequent. The relationships, statistically, have never been more fragile.

Divorce rates climb. Friendships dissolve over a single inflammatory tweet. Families splinter over WhatsApp forwards. The online performance of devotion seems almost inversely proportional to its durability offline. We have, it seems, confused documentation with feeling, reach with depth, and visibility with love.

There is something almost poignant about this — people posting tribute reels for relationships that are already, privately, ending. The Instagram caption lags behind the reality by about three months. The photograph preserves the illusion the way formaldehyde preserves a specimen: perfectly, and without life.

The old woman weeping at the gate was performing nothing. There was no camera to catch the angle of her grief, no audience to validate it, no metric by which to measure its impact. It existed purely because it was true. That is what made it unbearable and unforgettable in equal measure.

This is not, to be fair, entirely a story of decline. Connectivity has genuine gifts. The grandmother who once waited three weeks for a postcard now receives a video of her grandchild’s first steps within minutes. The cousin separated by continents is present — imperfectly, through a pixelated screen, but present — at the birthday party. Something real is preserved by these tools, even if something else is lost.

And it would be sentimental to pretend that all those old tears were purely authentic. Families are complicated. Some of those goodbyes mixed genuine love with relief. Some of the weeping aunts were also, frankly, exhausting. Nostalgia has a well-known tendency to airbrush the difficult parts.

But what does seem genuinely lost is the cultural permission to let a goodbye mean something. To stand at a gate and feel the weight of separation without reaching for a phone. To let the absence be real, just for a moment, before the notifications begin. The old goodbye taught us that love has a physical grammar — it lives in proximity, in the particular smell of someone’s kitchen, in the specific quality of their silence at the dinner table.

The old goodbye taught us that love has a physical grammar. These things do not transmit over Wi-Fi.

Perhaps the most honest thing we can say is this: we have traded depth for frequency, and we are not entirely sure we got the better deal. The feed is always full. The gate is always empty. And somewhere between the two, a particular kind of tenderness — unrehearsed, unselfconscious, and completely without likes — has quietly slipped away.

No one posted about it. No one noticed it go. Gradual but sudden demise.

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[1] Popular brands of cars in India in the late 1900s and early 2000s

Charudutta Panigrahi is an author. He can be reached at charudutta403@gmail.com.

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Categories
Poetry

Deciduous Dreams by Pramod Rastogi

From Public Domain 
DECIDUOUS DREAMS 

My dreams are in free fall.
This year I have not sat beside
My bedroom windowpanes
To watch the autumn winds rise.

Fall is visible along the side lanes;
The winds whip and wound.
The leaves wear a sorrowful look.
Soon they will all drift down

With spasms but without a shriek,
Caught in the currents of the breeze.
My heart skips a beat as it realises
That each leaf was part of its dream.

Soon the leaves will all be gone,
And with them, my dreams.
Like a tree in mourning,
I will have lost my regal allure.

I will be like a tarnished star
That has lost all its shine.
After a pause, though, spring will arrive —
And my dreams will bloom in rose.

Pramod Rastogi is an Emeritus Professor at the EPFL, Switzerland. He is a poet, academician, researcher, author of nine scientific books, and a former Editor-in-chief (1999-2019) of the international scientific journal, Optics and Lasers in Engineering. He was an honorary Professor at the IIT Delhi between 2000 and 2004. He was a guest Professor at the IIT Gandhinagar between 2019 and 2023. He is presently an honorary adjunct Professor at the IIT Jammu.

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Categories
Musings

Conditional Comfort

By Anupriya Pandey

Before anyone can enter my building, I have to approve them. The request arrives on my phone through an app. Name. Photograph. Purpose of visit.

It is strange to have this much authority over a door I do not own.

The security guard knows my face now. By the time the office cab turns toward the entrance, my expression has already arranged itself. Chin level. Eyes steady. Mouth resting in that neutral line that suggests I am expected somewhere. I have learned the angle that prevents questions, the slight narrowing of the eyes that reads as purpose instead of uncertainty.

The guard notices before I stop. His back straightens. The chair shifts behind him. For a second we look at each other through glass and distance. Then the small salute. A nod.

I return it without smiling too much.

It gives me an unreasonable amount of happiness. For those few seconds, I feel official. Important. As though I sign documents that matter.

The gate opens without delay.

Bougainvillea spill over the compound wall in disciplined pink. The buildings are painted a respectable beige, the kind that promises longevity. Children cycle in slow circles in the evening. There is a fountain that works on weekends.

I live here.

On paper, it sounds like arrival.

The apartment is on the thirteenth floor. Rented. I correct myself even in my head, as if the walls might overhear arrogance and respond by peeling faster.

My job is stable. The salary comes on time. Most of it leaves on time too. Rent. Loan. Groceries. Wi Fi. Electricity. The arithmetic of adulthood. There is no emergency fund. There is, instead, faith in continuity.

Nothing dramatic must happen.

Before I open my banking app to check the balance, I make a guess. I calculate what should be there. I add a little extra, just in case the universe appreciates optimism. For half a second, before the real number appears, I inhabit that slightly larger life. 

My phone buzzes before my eyes are fully open. Emails. Calendars. Deadlines. Proof that I am employable, that I am responsible, that I am, by most standards, doing well.

Doing well is a cage with good lighting.

The fridge is full in a quiet way. Vegetables in transparent boxes. Protein measured. I hit my daily intake. I hydrate. I function. There is a bed that does not sink in the middle.

Doing well is not the same as being free, but it photographs better.

Some days, I am careless. If the milk smells slightly wrong, I throw it away without boiling it into submission. If the coriander wilts, I don’t resurrect it in water. I have, on occasions, ordered cute ceramic coasters because they made the table look like someone more relaxed lives here. When things arrive at this house, I check my account immediately.

In the evenings, when the light falls softly against the balcony grill, I look at the corners of the house and imagine painting them a color that would surprise someone. A blue that does not apologize. A yellow that refuses subtlety. Instead, I search for renter friendly tape. I press frames against the wall gently, as if the plaster is a sleeping animal I must not wake.

There are rules to inhabiting what is not yours.

I was born into caution, into a home where nothing was extravagant, but everything was accounted for. The lights stayed on because someone calculated and paid for the electricity> Dreams were allowed, but only the practical ones. It had to be something with benefits.

I learned early that comfort is rented. That it can be revoked.

Even here, in a gated society with biometric entry and a clubhouse I have never used, I remove my shoes carefully. I wipe the kitchen counter twice. I do not drill without permission. The idea of permanence feels like an overstep.

Sometimes, at night, I stand at the window and look at the other towers — so many lit rectangles, so many people paying on the first. The sameness is almost tender.

I think about the education loan tenure the way some people think about weather forecasts. Eight years if nothing goes wrong. Fewer, if I am stricter with myself. More, if life decides to experiment.

I lower my voice when discussing money, as if the currency might overhear and leave.

I was raised to believe in floors, not wings.

At work, someone talks about buying land on the outskirts of the city. Another mentions investing in something volatile and exciting. I nod. I calculate my remaining EMI[1]. I imagine the first of next month waiting patiently, already hungry.

In the apartment, I light a candle — lavender and patchouli, balance it in a jar. The flame makes the beige walls look intentional. I curate softness because chaos would be irresponsible. I call exhaustion discipline.

The melatonin waits on the nightstand, a small excuse to stop thinking about the math, about parents who age in percentages, about the way one emergency could rearrange everything.

I take it.

In the dark, I do not think about failure. I have met failure. We are acquainted. Failure is loud. It has witnesses. What unsettles me is the possibility of sliding backward quietly. Of losing the salute at the gate, the lift.

I stand in a house that is not mine, eating measured protein, watering plants I cannot root into the ground.

Still, there is a quiet rage — a grief for the woman I could have been if survival had not been my full-time job.

Someone has been living my life overnight and leaving me with the bill — not a crushing debt, just the lifelong payment plan of being almost comfortable.

The gate will open for me tomorrow.

The rent will leave on the first.

The loan will leave on the first.

The job will still be there.

I sign the receipt. Not because I want to, but because I don’t want to know what happens when you do not pay.

[1] Equated Monthly Installment

Anupriya Pandey is a writer from India. Her work wanders between tragedy and comedy, with a voice that is equal parts self-deprecating and sincere. Her writing has been previously published in Belladonna Comedy, Little Old Lady Magazine, 5 on the Fifth, and more.

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Categories
Poetry

The Everyday by Debra Elisa

Debra Elisa
THE EVERYDAY 

to break one’s arm in three places
to lie each day awaiting the drip
to feel one’s hair falling out after years of brushing

when the soul lies down in the grass
when i hear those words whirl in my mind and ask them to rest
when your lips curl into a smile and it’s as if blooms come early

out beyond harp music
out beyond the morning’s breaking news
out beyond the flutter on our front porch 

     tiniest wings broken through that immense barrier  
            hatched after 16 days of steady tending

out beyond when the soul lies down	to break beyond
to breath 	pulse 	
                     and lie down in that grass


Debra Elisa believes story can save lives and co-hosts a monthly open-mic. When not playing with words, she enjoys wandering shores and trails with her husband and Cattle Dog. 

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Categories
Review

In Your Eyes A River by Radha Chakravarty

Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra

Title: In Your Eyes A River: Poems

Author: Radha Chakravarty

Publisher: Hawakal Publishers

 Radha Chakravarty is a writer, critic and translator and has now added poetry to her already considerable oeuvre. Her achievements as an academic are impressive. She has co-edited The Essential Tagore and edited Shades of Difference: Selected Writings of Rabindranath Tagore (Social Science Press, 2015). She is the author of Feminism and Contemporary Women Writers (Routledge, 2008) and Novelist Tagore: Gender and Modernity in Selected Texts (Routledge, 2013). She has translated a wide range of literary works by Rabindranath Tagore and works by Bankimchandra  Chatterjee  and Mahasweta Devi. She has edited Bodymaps: Stories by South Asian Women and co-edited Writing Feminism: South Asian Voices and Writing Freedom: South Asian Voices. She has published poetry widely online and in print.

Professor Chakravarty’s second book of poems, In Your Eyes A River, brings together poems which evoke both real, travelled to  and imagined worlds, aiming to bracket and highlight traces of the extraordinary within the ordinary aspects of human experience. They demonstrate a keen and keenly documented awareness of the profound realities that lie beneath the  fabric of our daily lives.

The poems in In Your Eyes A River are replete with memories and infused with traces of nostalgia. Particularly moving is the seemingly autobiographical poem about her father, the titular poem: You never left Shyamsiddhi./In your heart you carried a home, / in your eyes a river, in the soles of your feet,/ the swing and shift of a bamboo sanko,/ narrow bridge of precarious crossings/…..the lost ground of your birth,/forsaken foundations of your fast-transforming self, the absent source of mine.”The poem moves towards a sense of closure as she writes: “I stand face to face with your impossible story,/ and find at last the missing opening lines of mine.” The poem is suffused by a sense of nostalgia for a place hardly visited except through the act of imaginative recreation, the mind’s eye.

Some of the poems in this collection demonstrate the poet’s experimentation with some short haiku-like forms and even single-word lines occasionally to create a sharper focus and emphasis. A lot of poems are ample evidence of her meticulous attention to details of the art and craft of poetry. Thus her poem, ‘Blue Gold’ on indigo not only unfolds not only contrapuntally[1] but also encapsulates within itself  the dark history of colonialism, slave labour and human suffering. 

One poem which particularly resonated with me is about the slowing down of the frenetic pace of life, presumably after years of active service: “no setting the alarm for crack of dawn/no scanning the TV for breaking news /no boiling water for morning tea/ no opening curtains, shaking out sheets/no tidying, dusting, cleaning up/no ironing creases, putting out trash/no catching the train, no rushing to work,/no chasing the tight deadline/no putting on a public mask/to face the measuring gaze.” By the next stanza, the idea of change between two different phases of life acquires an existential dimension. In a changed routine, the poetic persona  finds herself  moulting and changing, facing and acknowledging her ever changing, unpredictable self, “the mutating stranger that is me.”

In yet another poem, the poetic persona assumes the voice of a renowned female scholar from ancient India, Gargi ,who “thirsts to know” about the “weave of life and the warp that holds all forms of being,/ from the remotest  realms of  abstract divinity to the limit of human knowing ” muses about posing “the impossible question.”

The figure of the transgressive, rebellious and recalcitrant woman who breaks the mould re-appears in  the next poem as well. It draws from a women’s retelling of the Ramayana, that  poses a counter narrative to  dominant narratives of the epic. In this  powerfully and poignantly reimagined poem, ‘Another Story’, the poet  draws on the narrative of the 16th century poet  Chandrabati, who “questions the unquestionable”, thereby interrogating  the hegemonic narrative of Valmiki and the Tulsidas Ramayana.  The story narrated by Chandrabati centres around the figure of Sita, telling the reader about  Sita’s miraculous birth and later story, instead. Sita’s story is not for “the men in royal courts” “but a “folk song for women in six brief parts.” a song which “shuns the epic scale.” In this version of the epic, Rama is not a divine hero, but a fallible man and a “jealous husband.” Chandrabati’s narrative questions where heroism really lies, whether in warfare and violence or the sustenance of everyday life. Moreover, even if women’s voices have been erased from history, there are women’s songs where “my version of Sita’s story lives on.” Chandrabati’s “unfinished song” also arouses the “critics’ ire” who dismiss it as a fragment, since the male critics police the boundaries of the  literary establishment and often  become (self-appointed)  custodians of it.

Additionally, there are poems of tourism and travel, some of them set in Italy. Tourist spots are visited and reflected on, often providing fuel to fire the imagination. From sunrise in the hills of Kanchenjunga to her visit to Darjeeling, to the volcanoes of Etna and Vesuvius, are all skilfully assimilated into Chakravarty’s poetry.

Chakravarty’s poetic persona is also a witness to history and its outrages. In the poem ‘Wounded Walls’,  “scarred walls remember the shots/that brought down the dead.” Yet, it does not “quite go as planned” since a the past resurfaces as a commemorative “unwelcome ghost” who rises from the dead to “haunt the present with/undead questions.” Elsewhere, the poetic persona , battle scarred but resilient, documents “lingering inscriptions/on memory’s skin”, of “battles fought/wounds that healed.” Questions pertinent to the present time are raised as in the poem ‘Ceasefire’: “If captives walk free, will our hearts still/hold us hostage in wild tunnels of hate? If bombs stop dropping, will the shrapnel/of memory vanish, from festering wounds? If the bloodbath halts, will it staunch the grief/that oozes from hearts lately bereaved?”

Sensitively written and meticulously crafted, Radha Chakravarty’s collection of poems is sure to resonate with all those who have struggled, suffered loss and displacement. Her poems help define that which is essentially and indubitably human, in the middle of climate chaos and war, tumult and change. Attentive to history and mindful of its excesses, the poems assert a vision of sanity and of shared humanity, much needed at this point when the global order has descended into chaos and seems to be teetering on the verge of immeasurable destruction.     

[1] A contrapuntal poem is one  which can be read individually and together, vertically or horizontally simultaneously as a single harmonious or dissonant piece.

Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition  to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory.  Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.

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Categories
Poetry

Carlos by Tony Dawson

Tony Dawson
                 CARLOS

My friend Carlos is an artist of some renown.
He is well-known locally for his sculptures
and life drawings. A star of the Faculty 
of Fine Art, his work is sought after
in Seville where he exhibits frequently.
He is also a character with an impish grin
that reflects his saucy sense of humour.
Janet and I consider him a lovable rogue.
He is obviously enamoured of my wife,
although he presents no threat at all
because he’s queer and is just teasing me.
Every time we run across each other,
he promises to leave me a piece of his art
with one of his shopkeeper friends
as a token of his esteem. I’m still waiting…

Tony Dawson, an 89-year-old English writer, lives in Seville and has published widely in the USA, UK, Canada and Australia since he took up writing during the pandemic.

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Categories
Stories

Stale Flatbread by Sangeetha G

Chapati or Indian Flatbread. From Public Domain

After shivering for some time in the winter morning, she mustered courage to pour cold water all over her body.  She finished her bath quickly and was out within minutes. Sitting in front of the dressing table she filled the parting-line of her hair with vermillion, moving her hands softly not to make the red and white bangles jingle. She was not supposed to wake up the man who was lying asleep on the bed. The man who was a stranger till the previous day had become the most important person in her life — her husband. She looked at her sleeping husband and smiled coyly. She thought that she had fallen in love with him. In some of the Bollywood films she had watched, the heroines had smiled the same way when they were in love. 

Before stepping out of her room, she adjusted the tip of her saree over the head so as to cover the face fully. A woman is not supposed to show her face to her in-laws and the people around. They would only see her bangled hands and her feet. Rest of her body, including her face, would always stay hidden in the complex wraps of the saree. 

She walked towards the kitchen with butterflies in her stomach. It was her first day in the house and she had to prove herself to be a traditional daughter-in-law, worthy enough to belong to the house. For years, her mother kept on reminding her that her most important task in life was to become a dutiful daughter-in-law in her husband’s household. 

Her aunt had brought the marriage proposal as the groom’s party was known to her. “The groom’s parents are not as greedy as many others in our community. They won’t keep pestering with demands apart from the dowry given at the time of wedding. They have agreed to take her in with a small dowry and haven’t demanded a car. Even the groom does not smoke or drink. Your daughter is the luckiest girl in the community.” The virtues of the groom and his parents lay in things they did not do and not in what they did. 

In the kitchen, the mother-in-law was waiting for her. “This is your world now. I have asked the maidservant to stop coming from today onwards. Now that you are here, she is not needed,” she said. She did not acknowledge how good a deal that was — a maidservant who comes with a dowry and works for free lifelong.  

“You can make flat bread for noon with vegetables and cooked lentils. Now that it is your first day, we are waiting to enjoy a sweetmeat made by you. If you have any doubt, you can ask me. I will be there in my room,” her mother-in-law said. 

Her head covered by the anchal[1] moved in a nod. “How kind is my mother-in-law! She did not talk to me rudely,” she heaved a sigh of relief. 

For the next couple of hours, she moved within the kitchen, searching for spices and utensils, kneading the flour, cooking the flatbreads and cutting vegetables. She kept the food ready on the table and informed her mother-in-law. Her husband and father-in-law ate the food without any comments and the father-in-law left a 100 rupee note on the table for her as per the custom of doling out a tip for the first food she cooked. He never had given away that big tip in any restaurant.

After they finished their meal, her mother-in-law ate hers. While she was doing the dishes, mother-in-law told her: “We do not waste food. We are quite strict about it. Whatever food is left from the previous meal, I keep aside in the refrigerator for the maid. She used to happily take them home. But she is not coming now.”

“Don’t worry mom. I will eat them,” she told her mother-in-law, who then retired to her room. She looked at the refrigerator. It was a relic from the century when refrigerators were invented. It was a matter of debate whether the paint or the rust owned the exterior more. The interior was the cheapest mode of having a glimpse of Himalayas as the icicles hung from the roof and glaciers had formed in the corners. The refrigerator had the unique quality of turning any food item into the most unpalatable substance.    

She looked into the casserole. There were a few flatbreads left, which were sufficient for her. But as per the instructions, she had to finish those in the refrigerator. She took out the flatbreads from the previous day. They were hard and tasteless like dry wood and when she heated them, they became harder and she could barely chew them. The curries kept in the refrigerator did not even remotely taste like them.

The next day, she made fewer flatbreads. Her father-in-law opened the casserole, looked in and stood up and left for his room without uttering anything. An anxious mother-in-law opened the casserole and hurried towards her in the kitchen. “Did you make fewer flatbreads today?” she asked.

She was horrified to see her mother-in-law looking anxious. “Yes, I had a few old flatbreads in the refrigerator. So I made less,” she stammered. 

“What did you do? Your father-in-law wants to see the casserole full of flatbreads. Else, he would sulk and leave without eating,” she said. “Quickly make a few more. I will pacify him and bring him back to the table,” mother-in-law said. 

She hurriedly made the extra flatbreads and filled up the casserole. Like the previous day, she ate the old ones and kept the fresh flatbreads in the refrigerator for the next day.  

Her days were fully engaged in cooking, washing and cleaning. She was happy that nobody had complaints about her. 

At night, she applied kohl in her eyes and adjusted the vermillion and looked at herself in the mirror. She wanted to look her best when her husband would see her without the veil. She wanted him to feel lucky to have got her as his wife and expected a few nice words in return for the day-long work. 

As soon as he entered the room, he closed the door behind him and switched off the light. After a few days, she realised that he was not interested in seeing her face. In that house, she moved about cooking, cleaning and washing clothes, without a face. They did not see her hands either. Chopping vegetables and scrubbing vessels were turning them rough and dark and the red and white bangles had lost their sheen.

They did not notice her feet nor her saree. She was nourishing them, providing them clean clothes to wear, keeping their toilets clean and tidying up their rooms. She was everywhere. But, like the air they breathed, she was invisible to them. She stopped applying kohl in her eyes and adorning herself. After some time, she became quite disinterested in seeing herself in the mirror. 

She started falling sick quite often. Most days she would have stomach aches, sometimes the belly would bloat up and then at times she would throw up. Most days she did not want to eat. The plate of hard, dry flatbread and stale curries were nauseating. But she would force the food down her throat so as to not throw them in the bin. Dark circles had formed around her eyes and her skin was looking pale and lifeless. Nobody knew anything about what was happening to her until one day she collapsed on the floor. 

They took her to the hospital and the doctor asked her husband about her food. “She eats what we eat,” he said. Unsatisfied by that reply, he turned to her and asked: “what do you eat? You seem to be having stomach problems for quite some time.”

“I usually eat stale flatbreads and curries from the previous day,” she said. 

“Her stomach is terribly upset. Give her something fresh to eat before taking the medicines,” doctor ordered.

Her husband bought fresh flatbread and lentils. The aroma of the lavishly buttered flatbread and spiced lentils filled the room. She broke a tiny piece of flatbread, dipped it in the lentil curry and chewed it. But the body did not accept that unfamiliar food. It threw up all that went inside.

[1] Free end of the sari

Sangeetha G is a journalist in India. Her flash fiction and short stories have appeared in Orange Blossom Review, Decolonial Passage, Sky Island Journal, Down in the Dirt, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Kitaab International, Borderless Journal and Indian Review. Her stories have won the Himalayan Writing Retreat Flash Fiction contest and the Strands International Flash Fiction contest. Her debut novel, Drop of the Last Cloud, was published in May 2023.

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Categories
Poetry

Sorrow as a Blanket

By Ananya Sarkar 

SORROW AS A BLANKET

Sorrow is a blanket
That sits in my closet in the dark
On some nights
I pull it out
And wrap myself in its folds
Outside, the stars twinkle in my eyes
Blinking pain and hope
I blink back the tears
And snuggle tighter
But with time
The blanket has begun to fray
And as I lay
The weight became just a bit lighter.

Ananya Sarkar is a creative writer from Kolkata currently living in Bangalore. Her work has been published in various ezines. She loves to go on long walks, cloud gaze and ponder upon miracles. She can be found on Instagram @just_1ananya and reached at ananya7891@gmail.com

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL. 

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Categories
Slices from Life

A Fishy Story

By Jun A. Alindogan

I grew up surrounded by fish. My mom’s hobby was fishing with her relatives in our coastal hometown. The districts near our town’s fishport had small wet markets filled with a variety of fish common in our area. My mom enjoyed fishing early in the morning or near sundown, bringing home the catch for our meals. Some fish ended up on our breakfast or lunch table. While I never learned how to fish, I love eating all types of fish, except for the bony ones.

I no longer live in my hometown because our family has decided to sell our ancestral home due to perennial flooding. Since I now live in the foothills, I miss the kinds of fish I grew up with, as fish are scarce where I currently reside.

Our mother had to learn how to prepare delectable fish dishes for us, since we were carnivorous as children. She also had to devise unique ways to present the food in a manner that was both attractive and nutritious, without overpowering its traditional flavor.

The types of fish common in my hometown include talimusak (needlefish), biya (gizzard shad), sapsap (silverbelly), bisugo (threadfin bream), bangus (milkfish), and bidbid (ladyfish). I clearly remember them because they were cooked in different dishes using basic ingredients such as vinegar, soy sauce, tomatoes, ginger, coconut milk, chili leaves, Chinese cabbage, regular cabbage, bitter gourd, eggplants, potatoes, guavas, sweet potato leaves, and eggs. Nothing fancy.

I have never learned how to cook any fish dishes, although I tried once when I was on my own many years ago after my siblings resettled in a southern province and abroad. I think the preparation is relatively tedious. However, I can usually tell if the fish used in a dish is fresh, even if it has been frozen.

One of my favourite dishes is ladyfish balls in sweet-and-sour sauce, or simply fried in a wheat-flour batter, served with noodle soup and sprinkled with fried garlic and leeks—a hearty soup, typically enjoyed in rainy weather.

Another dish I enjoy is bisugo (threadfin bream) simply prepared in vinegar, water, ginger, eggplant, and bottle gourd. While a few Filipino traditional fish dishes have recently become fusion, I still prefer the basic dish with which I am familiar.

Talimusak (needlefish) is usually dried in the sun for a few hours, then fried and placed on small barbecue sticks, and served with a vinegar dip of chopped chilies and red onions for a healthy snack.

One common dish is milkfish steak in lemon juice, soy sauce, and onion rings. Boneless milkfish was uncommon in my growing-up years.

The fish are not raised on farms, but they grow naturally upstream in rivers and bays. Perhaps this is one of the reasons for their diminishing size and numbers. I never knew of other types of fish farms besides milkfish when I was younger. Technological advances and community encroachment may be crucial factors in each fish story.

In my province, there is a lake called Laguna de Bay, famous for ayungin (silver perch), which is flavorful in a tamarind-based soup. Two years ago, when my youngest brother and his family returned on holiday, he asked me to buy dried silver perch for him to carry with him to his home in North America. Unfortunately, overfishing is a major concern.

Laguna De Bay. From Public Domain

Another issue facing Laguna de Bay is the proliferation of water hyacinth, which adversely affects aquatic life and navigation. Although some community-based NGOs collect the plants and convert them into slippers, this commendable effort is insufficient, given that Laguna de Bay is the Philippines’ largest lake, spanning roughly 911–949 square kilometers (km²).

With the passage of time and the advancement of exploration, we may discover new species of fish that have not been a part of our traditional food sources. The continuous quest to identify new fish that can be consumed is a means of ensuring that there is a sufficient supply to satisfy the nutritional requirements of our population.

Laguna de Bay. From Public Domain

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Manuel A. Alindogan, Jr. or Jun A. Alindogan is the Academic Director of the Expanded Alternative Learning Program of Empowered East, a Rizal-province based NGO in the Philippines and is also the founder of Speechsmart Online that specializes in English test preparation courses. He is a freelance writer and a member of the Freelance Writers’ Guild of the Philippines (FWGP).

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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