Shaishabshandha(Childhood’s Dusk) was published as a part of Tagore’s poetry collection called Sonar Tori (Golden Boat, 1894).
Art by Sohana Manzoor
CHILDHOOD'S DUSK
Slowly, across all horizons Spreads the weary exhaustion Of darkness like a mother’s anchal*. Standing alone, I gaze steadily At the west, absolutely still. I contemplate fixedly The bottomless abyss, The lonely riverside with a Dusky sky. Dawn weeps, As deep gloom sweeps With tired eyes, compassionately, Silently over the water and land In this gloaming. Suddenly, a song bursts forth From the dark woods, the village paths, Perhaps, from a youth returning home. Uplifting, peaceful, fearless notes Resonate in tune as if sharply Slicing the twilight in two. I cannot see him. I see a village In the southern part. Amidst the lonely Bamboo woods, the sugarcane fields, The betel nut and banana trees, There rests a village. I can see that. Perhaps, it’s a cowherd’s son Singing on his way home. He does not think much Except of a full stomach. He brings back that dusk in my childhood: We talked, played — three friends — While we lay on the bed. That was in the distant past. Has the world not aged? Have we exchanged our childhood, Our games, our toys, our restful slumber for the burden of knowledge? Standing on this lonely field, When silence fills the gloaming, Hearing this song, I recall — The riverbanks, the mango groves, The brass bells ringing in temples, The mustard fields, by the pond, Smiling faces in many homes, Young hearts filled with new hopes, Impossible, beautiful imaginings, Priceless dreams, endless desires And beliefs. Standing in the dark, I see among stars, the infinite universe — Many young at home abed, Their mother’s face lit by the lamp.
*Loose end of a sari
This poem has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravartywith editorial input from Sohana Manzoor.
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Neeman Sobhan, born in the West Pakistan of Pre-1971, continues a citizen of both her cultural home, Bangladesh, and her adopted home, Italy. Her journey took her to US for five years but the majority of times she has lived in Italy – from 1978. What does that make her?
She writes of her compatriots by culture – Bangladeshis — but living often in foreign locales. Her non-fiction, An Abiding City, gives us glimpses of Rome. These musings were written for Daily Star and then made into a book in 2002. Her short stories talk often of the conflicting cultures and the commonality of human emotions that stretch across borders. And yet after living in Rome for 47 years – the longest she has lived in any country – her dilemma as she tells us in this interview – is that she doesn’t know where she belongs, though her heart tugs her towards Bangladesh as she grows older. In this candid interview, Neeman Sobhan shares her life, her dreams and her aspirations.
Where were you born? And where did you grow up?
I was born in Pakistan, rather in the undivided Pakistan of pre-1971: the strange land we had inherited from our grandparents’ and parents’ generation when British colonial India was partitioned in 1947 down the Radcliffe line, creating an entity of two wings positioned a thousand miles apart on either side of India! The eastern wing, or East Pakistan was formerly East Bengal, and my cultural roots are in this part of the region because I come from a Bengali Muslim family. But I was born not there but in West Pakistan, which is culturally and linguistically distinct from Bengal, comprising the regions of Western Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan and the NWFP (North-West Frontier Provinces, bordering Afghanistan), where the official language is Urdu.
So, my birthplace was the cantonment town of Bannu in the NWFP, (now KPK or Khyber Pakhtunkhwa).
Perhaps my life as the eternal migrant, living outside expected geographical boundaries started right there, at birth.
My father’s government job meant being posted in both wings of Pakistan. So, I grew up all over West Pakistan, and in Dhaka, whenever he was posted back to East Pakistan. Much of my childhood and girlhood were spent in Karachi (Sindh), Multan and Kharian (Punjab) and Quetta (Balochistan).
How many years did you spend in Pakistan?
The total number of years I spent in undivided Pakistan (West Pakistan, now Pakistan, and East Pakistan, now Bangladesh) is about two decades, or one year short of twenty years. From my birth in 1954, my growing years, till I left the newly independent Bangladesh in 1973 when I got married and came to the US at the age of nineteen.
What are your memories about your childhood in West Pakistan? I have read your piece where you mention your interactions with fruit pickers in Quetta. Tell us some more about your childhood back there.
I have wonderful memories of growing up in West Pakistan, in Karachi, Multan and Kharian of the late 50’s and early 60’s (despite the era of Martial Law under Field Marshall Ayub Khan, and later his military-controlled civilian government). However, the political environment is invisible and irrelevant to a child’s memories that center around family, school and playmates, till he reaches the teen years and becomes aware of the world of adults. Since, my father’ job entailed us going back and forth between West and East Pakistan, by the time we arrived in Quetta in late 1967, it ended up being my father’s last posting, because by then Ayub Khan’s regime was tottering under protests in both wings of Pakistan; and by the time (I should say in the nick of time) we left for Dhaka, it was already the turbulent year of 1970, which turned Pakistan upside down with General Yahya Khan becoming the new Marshall Law administrator. When we returned to Dhaka, it was the beginning of the end for Pakistan, with preparations for the first democratic general elections, and the blood soaked nine months war of independence for Bangladesh about to be staged.
But as a child, growing up in a Pakistan that was till then my own country, what remains in my treasure trove of memories are only the joys of everyday life, and the friendships (with those whom I never saw again, except one school friend from Quetta with whom I reunited in our middle age in Toronto, Canada!)
Also precious are the road trips with my five siblings and our adventurous mother, as we always accompanied our father on his official tours, across the length and breadth of West Pakistan.
But if I start to recount all my precious memories, I will need to write a thick memoir. And that is exactly what I have been doing over the years: jotting down my recollections of my past in Pakistan, for my book, a novel that is a cross between fact and fiction. The happy parts are all true, but the sad ones relating to the war that my generation underwent in 1971 as teenagers is best dealt with from the distance of fiction.
What I can offer is a kaleidoscopic view of some random memories: the red colonial brick residence of my family in the 60’s in Multan, one of the hottest cities of Punjab, known for its aandhi — dust storms — that would suddenly blow into the courtyard of the inner garden in the middle of the night as my sister and I slept on charpoys laid out in the cool lawn under a starlit sky, and being bundled up in our parents’ arms and rushed indoors; tasting the sweetest plums left to chill in bowls of ice; being cycled to school by the turbaned chowkidar weaving us through colourful bazars to the Parsi run ‘Madam Chahla’s Kindergarten School’ or on horse drawn tanga (carriages); learning to write Urdu calligraphic letters on the wooden takhta (board) with weed Qalam(pens) and a freshly mixed ink from dawaat (ink pots); and to balance this, my mother helping us to write letters in Bengali to grandparents back in East Pakistan on sky-blue letter pads, our tongues lolling as pencils tried to control the Brahmic alphabet-spiders from escaping the page.
In Karachi, returning home on foot from school with friends under a darkening sky that turned out to be swarms of locusts. Learning later that these grain eating insects were harmful only to crops not humans (and Sindhis actually eat them like fried chicken wings) does not take away the thrill of our adventure filled with exaggerated, bloodcurdling shrieks to vie with the screen victims of Hitchcock’s The Birds, viewed later as adults in some US campus. Picnics and camel rides on the seabeaches of Clifton, Sandspit, or Paradise Point. Near our home, standing along Drigh Road (the colonial name later changed to Shahrah-e-Faisal after King Faisal of Arabia, I later heard) waving at the motorcade of Queen Elizabeth II passing by with Ayub Khan beside her in a convertible with its roof down. That was in the 60’s. Later in 1970, embarking with my family on the elegant HMV Shams passenger ship at Karachi port for our memorable week long journey back to Dhaka across the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, with a port of call at Colombo in what was still Ceylon, to disembark at Chittagong port, not knowing then that we were waving goodbye not just to the Karachi of our childhood but a part of our own country that would soon become the ‘enemy’ through its marauding army.
But I reset my memories and bring back the beauty and innocence of childhood with images of my family’s first sight of snowfall in Quetta, the garden silently filling with pristine layers of snowflakes piling into a cloudy kingdom under the freshly tufted pine trees, as we sipped hot sweet ‘kahwa’ tea, and cracked piles of the best chilgoza pine-nuts and dried fruits from Kabul. And since Quetta was our last home in Pakistan, I leave my reminiscences here.
In Front of their home With full family in the snow In Quetta: Photos provided by Neeman Sobhan
There are so many ways to enter the past. Photographs in albums discolor after a time, but words keep our lived lives protected and intact to be accessible to the next generation. I hope my novel-memoir will provide this.
How many countries have you lived in? Where do you feel you belong — Bangladesh, Pakistan, US or Italy — since you have lived in all four countries? Do you see yourself a migrant to one country or do you see yourself torn between many?
I have indeed lived in four countries, for varying lengths of time. In the sense of belonging, each country and stage of my life has left its unique impact. But I have still not figured out where I belong.
Although I lived in Pakistan and Bangladesh from birth till I was nineteen, these were the formative years of my life, and I feel they have coloured who I am fundamentally. The culture and languages of the subcontinent is fundamental to me as a human being. Also, having shared my parent’s experience of being almost foreigners and expats in their own country, trying to speak Urdu to create a Bengali lifestyle at home in a culturally diverse world of Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis or Pathans, I know it made them (and us as a family), different from our compatriots in East Pakistan who never left their region and had only superficial understanding of the West Pakistanis. My introduction to a migrant’s life and its homesickness started there, observing my parents’ life.
When I moved to the US after my marriage in 1973, it was to follow my husband Iqbal, to the Washington-Maryland area, where he had moved earlier as a PhD student after giving up, in 1971, his position in the Pakistani central government where he was an officer of the CSP (Civil Service of Pakistan) cadre. These were the days of being newly married and setting up our first home, albeit in a tiny student’s apartment, because more than as a home maker, I spent 5 years attending the University of Maryland as an undergraduate and then a graduate student. We thought our future might be here in the US, he working as an economist for a UN agency, and I teaching at a university. A classic version of the upwardly mobile American immigrant life.
But before we settled down, we decided to pursue a short adventure, and Iqbal and I came to Italy in 1978, from the US, on a short-term assignment with FAO, a Rome based agency of the UN. The mutual decision was to move here, temporarily! We would keep our options open for returning to the US if we did not like our life in Italy.
Well, that never happened! And given the fact that since then, we have spent the last 47 years in Italy, the Italian phase of my life is the longest period I have ever spent in any country in the last 71 years!
Meanwhile, we slowly disengaged ourselves from the US and it was clear that if we had to choose between two countries as our final homes, it would be between Bangladesh, our original home country, and Italy our adopted home.
Still, living away from ones’ original land, whether as an expatriate or an immigrant, is never easy. Immigrants from the subcontinent to anglophone countries like the US, UK, Canada, Australia etc, do not face the hurdles that migrants to Italy do in mastering the Italian language. I am still constantly trying to improve my language skills. Plus, there is the daily struggle to create a new identity of cultural fusion within the dominant and pervasive culture of a foreign land
So, in all these years, though I love Italy and my Roman home, I do not feel completely Italian even if my lifestyle incorporates much of the Italian way of life. For example, after a week of eating too much pasta and Mediterranean cuisine my husband and I yearn for and indulge in our Bengali comfort food. Although I enjoy the freedom and casual elegance of Italian clothes, I look forward to occasions to drape a sari, feeling my personality transform subtly, softly.
Yet, I cannot conceive of choosing one lifestyle over the other. The liberty to veer between different ways to live one’s life is the gift of living between two or more worlds.
The only incurable malaise, though, is the chronic nostalgia, especially during festivals and special occasions. For example, when Eid falls on a weekday, and one has to organise the celebration a few days later over a weekend, it takes away the spontaneous joy of connecting with one’s community, forcing one instead to spend the actual day as if it were an ordinary one. I miss breaking my fasts during the month of Ramadan with friends and family over the elaborate Iftar parties with special food back in Dhaka or celebrating Pohela Boishakh (Bengali new year) or Ekushey February (21st February, mother language day) in an Italian world that carries on with its everyday business, unaware of your homesickness for your Bengali world. Over the years, when my sons were in school, I made extra efforts for. But you know you cannot celebrate in authentic ways.
Of course, these are minor matters. And I am aware that by virtue of the fact that I have dual nationality (I’m both an Italian citizen, and a Bangladeshi), I cannot consider myself a true and brave immigrant — someone who leaves his familiar world and migrates to another land because he has no other options nor the means to return; rather, I feel lucky to be an ex-patriate and a circumstantial migrant — someone who chooses to make a foreign country her home, with the luxury of being able to revisit her original land, and, perhaps, move back one day.
Meanwhile, I feel equally at home in Italy and in Bangladesh because we are lucky to be able to make annual trips to Dhaka in winter.
Whether I am considered by others to be an Italo-Bangladeshi or a Bangladeshi-Italian, I consider myself to be a writer without borders, a global citizen. I feel, I belong everywhere. My home is wherever I am, wherever my husband and my family are. My roots are not in any soil, but in relationships.
I often quote a line by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz. “Words became my dwelling place.” It resonates with me because for me often, it is neither a tract of land, nor even people, but language, literature and my own writings that are my true sanctuary, my homeland. I feel blessed to have the gift of expressing myself in words and shaping my world through language. My home is etched on the written or printed page. My books are my country. It’s a safe world without borders and limits.
Maybe it’s the conceit of a writer and a migrant, nomadic soul, but I think our inner worlds are more substantial than our external ones.
When I read your writing, I find a world where differences do not seem to exist among people in terms of nationality, economic classes, race or religion. Is it not far removed from the realities of the world we see around us? How do you reconcile the different worlds?
I believe and trust in our common humanity, not the narrowness of nationality, race or religion. Nationality particularly is limiting, dependent on land, and boundaries that can shift due to physical or political exigencies. Nationality by conferring membership also necessarily excludes on the basis of manmade criteria, while humanity is boundless, all encompassing, and inclusive, based on shared natural, biological, and spiritual traits.
In my case, I consider the whole world my family. I say this not just as idealistic hyperbole and wishful thinking, but from the fact that I have a multi-cultural, multi-racial family. Only my husband and I are a homogenous unit being Bengali Muslims by origin, but both my sons are married outside our culture, race and religion. One of my daughters in law is Chinese, the other has an English-French father and a Thai mother. So, through my grandchildren, who are a veritable cocktail, yet my flesh and blood, I am related to so many races. How can I bear malice to any people on the globe? The whole world is my tribe, my backyard, where we share festivals and food and rituals and languages. We celebrate unity in diversity.
Kindness and caring for others are values I hold dear in myself and others. I believe in sharing my good fortune with others, and in peaceful co-existence with my neighbours, wherever I live. I believe in living with responsibility as a good citizen wherever I find myself. And so far, the world that I see around me, perhaps narrow, is peopled with those who invariably reflect my own sense of fraternity. Maybe I am foolish, but I believe in the essential goodness of humanity, and I have rarely been disappointed. Of course, there are exceptions and negative encounters, but then something else happens that restores ones faith.
Love is more powerful than hate and generates goodness and cooperation. Change can happen at the micro level if more people spread awareness where needed. Peace can snowball and conquer violence. The human will is a potent spiritual tool. As is the power of the word, of language.
Literature is about connections, communications, bridges. It can bring the experiences and worlds of others from the margins of silence and unspoken, unexpressed thoughts and emotions into the centre of our attention. It brings people who live in the periphery within our compassionate gaze. Language is one of the most effective tools for healing and building trust. Responsible writers can persuasively break down barriers and make the world a safe home and haven for everyone, every creature.
You have a book of essays on Rome, short stories and poems set in Rome. Yet you call yourself a Bangladeshi writer. You have in my perception written more of Rome than Bangladesh. So which place moves your muse?
Any place on God’s beautiful earth can move my muse. Still, the perception is not completely accurate that I have written more of Rome than Bangladesh. It is true that many of my columns, short fiction or poems are set in Rome, but they are not necessarily just about Italy and Italians. In fact, my columns and poems were written from the perspective of a global citizen, who celebrates whichever place she finds herself in.
Poetry, in any case, is never just about any place or thing, but a point of departure. It always goes beyond the visual and the immediate and transcends the particular to the philosophical. The sight of a Roman ruin may jumpstart the poem, but what lifts it into the stratosphere of meaningful poetry is the universal, the human. For example, even when my poem speaks of a certain balcony in Verona, the protagonist is not a girl called Juliet but the innocence of first love, in any city, in any era.
My book of short stories, even when located in Rome, actually concern characters that are mostly Bangladeshi. In fact, it is my fiction that makes me a Bangladeshi writer, because my stories are ways for me to preserve my memories of the Bengali world of my past and an ephemeral present. I write to root myself. I often feel that I should write more about the new Italians, the Bangladeshi immigrants generation, rather than the expats of my generation, but my writing stubbornly follows its own compass.
Regarding my book of essays, my original columns for the Daily Star were written about many other cities I travelled to, including Dhaka and places in Bangladesh, and encounters with people in various countries not just Italy. Constrained to select columns from two decades of weekly writing, for a slim volume to be published, I narrowed the field of topics to Italy and Rome. But I had many essays and travel pieces concerning China, Russia, Vietnam, Egypt, Brazil, Spain, Netherlands and many other European cities and Asian capitals. In the end, a handful of columns about Italy became my book An Abiding City: Ruminations from Rome.
However, in the preface I said: “I must remind that the scope of the book, as suggested in the title, is ‘Ruminations FROM Rome’ not ‘Ruminations ON Rome’ with a tacit emphasis on ‘from’ because the writing relates to matters not just concerning ROME but also encompasses reflections of a more general kind. This is a collection of writings from a columnist who, within her journey through the Eternal City, also attempts to share with her readers her passage through life. I wish my fellow travellers a smoothsojourn into my abiding city, the one WITHIN and WITHOUT.”
I know that had I not lived in Rome but, say, Timbuctoo, I would find something to inspire me to write about. Of course, I am privileged to have lived in Rome and Italy, but nature is beautiful everywhere, in its own way, and there are other civilisations with rich cultures, histories, arts, cuisines, poetry and philosophy that can inspire the sensitive observer and writer.
My elder son lives in Jakarta, my younger son in Bangkok and in all the years of visiting them, I am blown away by the culture and beauty of the Indonesian and Thai worlds, and I have a notebook full of unwritten essays. And there is still so much of the world I have not seen, yet every part of this wondrous earth including my backyard is a chapter in the book of human knowledge. So, had I never left Bangladesh I would still have written. Perhaps “Doodlings from Dhaka!”
What inspires you to write?
Many things. A face at a window, a whiff of a familiar perfume, an overheard conversation, a memory, a sublime view…. anything can set the creative machine running. Plus, if I’m angry or sad or joyous or confused, I write. It could become a poem, fiction, or a column.
The writer in me is my inner twin that defines my essential self. I am a contented wife of 52 years of marriage, a mother of two sons, and a grandmother of four grandsons (aged 8-7-6-5). These roles give me joy and help me grow as a human being. But my writer-self continues on its solitary journey of self-actualisation.
Yet, I write not just for myself, I write to communicate with others. I write to transmit the nuances of my Bengali culture and its complex history to my non-Bengali and foreign readers and students, but more importantly to my own sons, born and brought up in Italy, and my grandchildren, whose mothers (my daughters-in-law) are from multi-cultural backgrounds, one a Chinese, and the other a combination of English, French and Thai. I write also for the younger generation of Bengalis, born or raised abroad, who understand and even speak Bangla, but often cannot read the language, yet are curious about their parents’ world and their own cultural heritage.
What started you on your writerly journey? When did you start writing?
I have always written. As an adolescent, I wrote mostly poetry, and also kept a journal, which I enjoyed reading later. It created out of my own life a story, in which I was a character enacting my every day. It clarified my life for me. Interpreted my emotions, explained my fears and joys, reinforced my hopes and desires. Writing about myself helped me grow.
My columnist avatar is connected to this kind of self-referral writing, but in real life it emerged by accident when I was invited to write by the editor of the Daily Star. The act of producing a weekly column was a learning experience, teaching me creative discipline and the ability to marshal my life experiences for an audience. I learnt to sift the relevant from the irrelevant and to edit reality. What better training for fiction writing? For almost two decades my experience as a columnist was invaluable to my writer’s identity.
Soon I concentrated on fiction, especially short stories that were published in various anthologies edited by others in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India. I now realised that while column writing was about my life in the present tense and about the daily world around me, my fiction could finally involve the past. The result was my collection of short stories: Piazza Bangladesh.
Ironically, it was my book of poems, Calligraphy of Wet Leaves that was the last to be published.
Your short stories were recently translated to Italian. Have you found acceptance in Rome as a writer? Or do you have a stronger reader base in Bangladesh? Please elaborate.
Without a doubt, as an anglophone writer, my reader base is better not just in Bangladesh, but wherever there is an English readership. However, books today are sold not in bookshops but online, so these days readers live not in particular cities or countries but in cyberspace.
But living in Italy as a writer of English has not been easy. The problem in Italy is that English is still a foreign and not a global language, so very few people read books in the original English. Every important or best-selling writer is read in translation. This is unlike the Indian subcontinent where most educated people, apart from reading in their mother tongues, read books, magazines and newspapers in English as well.
This is why I was thrilled to finally have at least one of my books translated into Italian, and published by the well-known publishing house, Armando Curcio, who have made my book available at all the important Italian bookstore chains, like Mondadori or Feltrinelli. Also, through reviews and social media promotion by agents and friends, and exposure through book events and literary festivals in Rome, including a well-known book festival in Lucca, it has gained a fair readership.
That’s all I wish for all my books, for all my writing, that they be read. For me, writing or being published is not about earning money or fame but about reaching readers. In that sense, I am so happy that now finally, most of my Italian friends and colleagues understand this important aspect of my life.
You were teaching too in Rome? Tell us a bit about your experience. Have you taught elsewhere. Are the cultures similar or different in the academic circles of different countries?
I taught Bengali and English for almost a decade at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the University of Rome, La Sapienza., till I retired, and it was an enriching experience.
I studied for a year at the University of Dhaka before I got married and came to the US in 1973, where I continued my studies at the University of Maryland, earning my B.A in Comparative Literature and M.A in English Literature. I mention this because these experiences gave me the basis to compare the academic cultures in the Bangladeshi, American and Italian contexts.
I discovered more in common between the Bangladeshi and Italian academic worlds, especially regarding the deferential attitudes of students towards their teachers. In Italy, a teacher is always an object of reverence. In contrast, I recall my shock at the casual relationships in the American context, with students smoking in front of their teachers, or stretching their leg over the desk, shoes facing the professor. Of course, there was positivity in the informality and camaraderie too, between student and teacher. But with our eastern upbringing we cannot disregard our traditional veneration of the Guru and Master by the pupil.
In Italy it was rewarding for me to have received respect as a ‘Professoressa’ while teaching, and even now whenever I meet my old students. However, some of the negative aspects of the academic world in Italy linked to the political policies that affect the way old institutions are run, cause students to take longer to graduate than at universities in the UK or US for example.
Are you planning more books? What’s on the card next?
I have a novel in the pipeline, a fusion of fiction and memoir, that has been in gestation for more than a decade. Provisionally titled ‘The Hidden Names of Things’, it’s about Bangladesh, an interweaving of personal and national history. It’s almost done, and I hope to be looking for a publisher for it soon. Perhaps, it has taken so long to write it because over the years while the human story did not change much, the political history of the country, which is still evolving through political crises kept shifting its goal posts, impacting the plot.
Most of my writings illustrate, consciously or inadvertently, my belief that as against political history our shared humanity provides the most satisfying themes for literature.
To share my stories with a readership beyond the anglophone one, my collection of stories ‘Piazza Bangladesh’ was translated into Italian and published recently in Italy, as ‘Cuore a Metà’ (A Heart in Half) which underlines the dilemma of modern-day global citizens pulled between two worlds, or multiple homes.
Meanwhile, my short stories, poems and columns will be translated into Bengali to be published in Dhaka, hopefully, in time for the famous book fair in February, Ekushey Boimela. Then my journey as an itinerant Italian-Bangladeshi writer will come full circle and return home.
Nazrul’s Lyrics translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam
Born in united Bengal, long before the Partition, Kazi Nazrul Islam(1899-1976) was known as the Bidrohi Kobi, or “rebel poet”. Nazrul is now regarded as the national poet of Bangladesh though he continues a revered name in the Indian subcontinent. In addition to his prose and poetry, Nazrul wrote about 4000 songs. Pictures from Public Domain
Generations after generations I’ve trod the path of hope. Yet, O desert wayfarer, there seems to be no border in sight. Year after year have come and gone for someone like me. When I tried quenching my thirst even as my eyes watered Lighting up hope’s lamp futilely, mirages crowded my vision. Hundreds of songs seemed to sing out of desert groves Which once upon a time must have been part of the ocean. Desert wayfarer that I am, I see its watery expanse in dreams And think of the ocean’s bottom, where my craft had sunk— A craft I was in with my mate whom I keep looking for now!
A Bengali rendition of the song by Feroza Begum (1930-2014)
Let me be honest enough. When I received this book for review penned by a Sri Lankan author, I expected it to be a debut novel written by a person who is one of the many new voices that keep on emerging in sub-continental English fiction every other day. But the unusual name of the author made me enquire a little further to find out that he was half Tibetan and half English, educated at Eton and Durham in England, and has been managing an international school in Sri Lanka for thirty years. All these issues account for and contribute to the background of the novel’s setting. More surprise was in store when I found that Chhimi Tenduf-La has been writing fiction for the past ten years and his first novel, The Amazing Racist, was published way back in 2015. Since then, he has penned two more books and now his fourth book, A Hiding to Nothing, is what he himself defines as his “first domestic thriller.”
Such background information therefore definitely helps the reader to understand the nature of this present novel, which is set in Colombo’s manicured gardens owned by rich, elite and sometimes dicey people, and simultaneously moves to the activities set in England in Durham’s cobblestone streets.
The central issue of the story revolves around the miscarriage of Neja Pinto after she marries Ramesh in England and her subsequent inability to conceive which results in taking recourse to surrogacy. Believing in the stigma of South Asian sensibilities when a woman is looked down upon if she cannot give birth to her own off-spring, they want to keep the entire matter as secretive as possible so that they can come back from England to Sri Lanka and claim the child, Devin, as their own biologically born offspring till a point when the child is kidnapped by unknown people. From this point begins a lot of questions like who would dare take Devin – and why? As the incidents of the story march forward at electronic speed, creating the right atmosphere of a well-devised whodunit, the novel is crowded with innumerable characters, some unique, others quite stereotypical, but none out of suspicion. Is it the swimming coach Neja gets too close to? Could it be the ghosts of their past – the ruthless creditors Ramesh deceived in a Ponzi scheme, now back for blood? Or is it the enigmatic Dr Haksar who helped them have a child? And what of the mysterious woman from the British High Commission, whose probing questions hint at knowledge she shouldn’t possess? As the whispers grow louder, one name resurfaces with terrifying weight: Satya Basu, who actually bears the child in lieu of money. Is she back to settle an old score?
As mentioned earlier, at the centre of the story are the protagonists Neja and Ramesh Pinto, who are now husband and wife, but are also portrayed in their pre-marital days in England. Then there is Ramesh’s mother Loku Madam who is a stern and powerful woman with complete control over her son, which results in a sort of mother fixation. Loku Madam is planning a fourth marriage with a rich tea garden owner.
There is a swimming pool trainer called Johnny Dias with whom Neja has a fling resulting in several complications in the plot; the child Devin who disappears after he is kidnapped and from where many more eventful activities take place in the story; then there is Mercy Mbangwa who works at the British High Commission but also takes too much of an interest in the affairs of Neja and Ramesh Pinto. The Pintos take on names as Nita and Ravi Ponniah when they live in Durham because they want to remain incognito and take possession of a surrogate child in the making by another character called Satya Basu ( I am surprised because though ending with an ‘a’, in Bengali Satya is usually a male name and not a female one), Dr. Haksar and several other characters, all of whom are illegal immigrants in England. There are bartenders, hustlers and many other minor characters that crowd the scene too.
Chhimi Tenduf-La unravels a suspenseful tale where the truth is elusive – and the cost of uncovering it may be too high to bear. He brings in all possible locations and situations with very intense visual details which makes us feel it to be the right ambience for a Netflix movie. The novel is architecturally very carefully set through fifty-six chapters (some as short as one and a half pages) to others slightly longer, and the chapters are very carefully juxtaposed by alternating between Sri Lanka, 2024 and London/England 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018. In fact, the last chapter brings us to the present Sri Lanka in 2025 where finally all the mysteries are unravelled and the author hints at a positive and optimistic note where all the sound and fury is resolved to a quiet ending.
The racy speed at which the author takes the readers through this 310 page-turner mystery at times makes one confused and it seems that since he is attempting a new sub-genre of what he calls a first attempt at a ‘domestic thriller’, he has attempted to put in as many things as possible. Some of that could probably have been avoided. But his innovative style and deft handling of the English language needs special mention, and this reviewer strongly recommends everyone to read and appreciate the novel.
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Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a former Professor of English at Visva Bharati, Santiniketan.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Tinkinswood Burial Chamber from Neolithic times. From Public Domain
TINKINSWOOD BURIAL CHAMBER
Frost shells the pitted stone glittering like winter stars. The early sun warms knees of rock, the slabs that hold the past in place. In spring warm rain will crack the seeds of life: tangled roots will grow free again. The dying echo of long ago alone will stay the same. But when the year is middle-aged balding on top and tired below though the leaves wither and die this echo will remain.
VALE OF GLAMORGAN
On the coast of the Vale it avails us not to think a lot about passing time.
The towering cliffs are gracious hosts to the fossils of species that never failed to endure in stone.
Ammonite spirals no longer turn like bicycle wheels: the past is real. Chains of Time were frozen when ancient brakes applied.
The tone of eternity is a broken drone: our minutes, our hours are petrified flowers in the littoral garden of prehistory.
They die: we harden, embedded for certain in mineral infinity.
Vale of Glamorgan where Rhys Hughes grew up. From Public Domain
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Lin Yuan-Kai strode past the basketball courts, flanked by two prison officers, when a basketball suddenly flew toward him, striking his left hip. Though unhurt, the impact startled him. Laughter erupted from the players on the court—it was no accident.
Without hesitation, he picked up the ball and gestured his intent to join them. The officers didn’t interfere. The inmates, momentarily caught off guard, watched as he lined up a shot. He missed, but his confidence and performance impressed them.
For the next seven minutes, they played. Two inmates stepped forward as his teammates for a mano a mano match. Together, they seized victory, defeating their opponents 12 to 8. When the game ended, the officers resumed their duty, escorting Lin Yuan-Kai away, as if nothing had happened.
The sun hung mercilessly overhead, its heat absorbed and magnified by the endless concrete walls stretching in every direction. The prison yard of cracked pavement and sun-bleached barriers offered little relief. The air shimmered above the surface, thick with dust and the scent of stone baking in the heat. A few trees, sparse and struggling, clung to life along the far edge of the yard, their thin, brittle leaves barely moving in the stagnant air. The little tree shades were claimed by the few inmates lucky enough to lean against their trunks, eyes squinted against the glare.
Most others had no such luxury. They paced in the open, sweat slicking their skin. Conversations were short and clipped, words drowned out by the hum of cicadas whining from somewhere beyond the towering perimeter walls. The walls themselves, reinforced with layers of thick concrete, absorbed the heat like a furnace, turning corridors into suffocating tunnels of stifling air.
Two years ago, Lin Yuan-Kai was commissioned by the Archives Bureau to conduct the analysis of political archives and the gaps left behind after multiple rounds of legal document collection. The task was immense, and many researchers had approached it by pinpointing missing records and overlooked events. However, that method lacked structure and rarely led to meaningful conclusions.
Given the limited timeframe, Lin Yuan-Kai devised an approach that combined institutional records, yearbooks, and interdepartmental meeting minutes to identify relevant agencies involved in political documentation. Not every agency maintained comprehensive records, and many yearbooks only covered relatively recent years, which complicated the search. Another method involved a quantitative breakdown of archival cases and items.
With these comparisons and insights gained from studying archives and conducting interviews, Lin Yuan-Kai suspected that there were unfound prison archives that might have been hidden, abandoned, or destroyed. Traditionally, archives had been collected by searching institutional catalogs through keyword and classification code queries. But that process had two major flaws—some documents were not indexed due to oversight, and institutional catalogs were often incomplete or poorly organised. The true scope of political archives lay not only in recorded files but also in the unindexed stacks of storage, filled with materials that had never been officially recognized as archives.
Determining which institutional catalogs to consult was another challenge. For instance, searching for prison records during martial law meant looking beyond the former Garrison Command and into its subordinate and sub-subordinate agencies that had been dismissed after the abolishment of martial law. Despite the obstacles, direct access to storage rooms was the most effective solution. That required perfect timing, coordination, and support from the right people. Fortunately, the Archives Bureau’s careful planning made it possible, allowing as much as possible access to the storage rooms where records had long been buried. Several times, young staff members had initially claimed that certain archives did not exist, only to uncover them once inside.
It was a rare opportunity, shaped by luck and determination, and it offered a glimpse into the missing history hidden in forgotten shelves.
Nevertheless, bureaucracy was a major obstacle of Lin Yuan-Kai’s mission. Authorities were never eager to be scrutinized, in the past as well as at the present. As he arrived at the former Alapawan prison, now a correctional institute, Lin Yuan-Kai felt the old walls, though renovated, still carried the weight of their history. Inside the building, the scent of disinfectant and old settings filled the air as he approached the front desk. A stern clerk barely glanced up from his files when Lin Yuan-Kai introduced himself and explained his purpose, citing his authorization letter from the Archives Bureau. The clerk took his paper, skimmed it for a brief moment, then sighed.
“The records you’re looking for don’t exist.”
Lin Yuan-Kai had anticipated resistance. Bureaucracy had a way of stalling progress, and Alapawan’s past was no exception. He tried to reason with the clerk. “These events happened only fifty years ago. Surely there are still some transcripts or reports? Can I enter your archive room and look for myself?”
Half a century ago, political prisoners in Alapawan attempted to seize weapons and ammunition from the prison guards, hoping to break free and ignite a large-scale revolt across the island—ultimately aiming to establish the Republic of Taiwan. But they failed.
Following the prison break, a Joint Command was formed, consisting of the Garrison Command, an army corps, and the police force, tasked with tracking down the fugitives. Within days, five chief conspirators were captured, and within months, these rebels previously imprisoned for separatism, disrupting social harmony, or sympathizing with communists were sentenced to death. This time, the charges were far graver: instigation of social disorder, treason, and espionage.
This chapter of the insurgence had been thoroughly investigated and studied. Lin Yuan-Kai had pored over nearly all available historical materials, including the official reports on its suppression and subsequent rehabilitation. To him, their plan had always seemed doomed from the start—too few participants, none of whom had ever been trained in combat, armed or unarmed.
Even if many sympathized with their idealism, organizing them into a unified force, let alone securing enough supplies to sustain an uprising, was nearly impossible.
What pressed on Lin Yuan-Kai’s mind, however, was not how they had failed—but what followed. How many more were purged in the aftermath?
Determined, he waited for the clerk’s response.
The man’s lips pressed into a thin line. “You’ll need an official request submitted through proper channels. A paper from the Archives Bureau can’t order us to upheaval our archive.”
Upheaval, Lin Yuan-Kai thought, that’s how they saw a search of the archive, it means the documentation must be in very bad condition. “Is there anyone I can speak to in person? Former officers, anyone who might have firsthand knowledge?”
The clerk shrugged.
“What about inmate logs? Medical reports?”
The man hesitated. “Accessing them requires approval from the warden’s office. But the documents don’t include materials from fifty years ago.”
Lin Yuan-Kai saw his chance. “Let me speak to the warden, please.”
After several more rounds of procedural explanations and lingering doubt from the clerk, Lin Yuan-Kai was finally escorted to the warden’s office. Warden Liu, an aging man with years of institutional experience behind him, sat at a desk cluttered with paperwork. His eyes held neither warmth nor hostility, just the weariness of a man accustomed to endless trivial administrative tasks.
“I understand you’re seeking records on the insurgents,” Liu said, leaning back in his chair. “Officially, we have no ties to the former Alapawan prison, and our institute does not comment on past political events.”
Lin Yuan-Kai sat forward. “I’m not here to stir controversy, only to understand what happened. The prisoners’ perspective, the conditions, their treatment during the conflict, those details are crucial to preserving history.”
What he withheld was the conversation with a relative of one of the cellmates. She had approached him upon learning about the Alapawan prison project.
“Dr. Lin, my granduncle disappeared after the prison insurgence, after the sentencing and execution of the five chief conspirators. We never found out why or what happened. There is no governmental paper detailing his release, or his death.”
The young woman, Hsiao Yi-Chun, retrieved a worn photograph: a man in a white shirt, his hair neatly trimmed in a business cut. “This is the only photo we have of our granduncle.”
Lin Yuan-Kai, who had spent years studying the White Terror, had seen countless images of its victims. Each one struck him deeply. In the faded photograph, the man’s dark eyes stared back at him—he was likely around his own age.
What would happen to his own family if he were to vanish?
Carefully, Lin Yuan-Kai wrote down the man’s name, his charge, the year he was sent to Alapawan prison, and snapped a picture of the worn portrait with his smartphone.
After their meeting, Lin Yuan-Kai tried to edit the portrait with his phone—unblurring it, brightening it a little, strengthening the contrast 20%, and testing almost all special effects. But, at last, he saved the original without keeping any edited image. Hsiao Yi-Chun said they were told that her granduncle was the “sixth man”, but no one knew what it meant.
Standing in the warden’s office, Lin Yuan-Kai wondered if there was any clue that could lead him to the “sixth man”. The air was thick with the scent of stale paper and old ink, the kind that lingered on documents left untouched for years.
A single overhead lamp flickered, casting erratic shadows over the cluttered desk, its surface scarred by decades of use. Forgotten files lay in disarray, stacked haphazardly, their edges curling from time and neglect. The blinds were drawn, shutting out daylight, trapping the room in a suffocating stillness.
Officer Liu studied Lin Yuan-Kai for a long moment. Then, instead of responding, he rose from his chair and crossed the room to an old, rusted cabinet. With a quiet click, he unlocked a drawer and pulled out a worn box of folders.
“These are the only personnel notes from that time, kept by a former officer,” Liu said. “Unofficial and very incomplete, but if you want insight, this might be your best chance.”
Lin Yuan-Kai wiped the dust from his sleeves as he leaned over the crate, its brittle edges crumbling under his fingers. The box, long forgotten in the corner of the archive, promised secrets. But so far, it had yielded nothing but empty envelopes, rusted paper clips, and a cracked ceramic cup with faded initials no one could recognize.
Lin Yuan-Kai stood by the desk, flipping through the box’s contents with growing frustration. Bent clips, drawing pins, a hardened eraser, outdated requisition forms, a dust-coated key, each item more useless than the last. But the warden said nothing. He sat slumped in his chair, fingers laced together, watching the archivist with weary indifference. His gaze held neither curiosity nor concern, just the detached patience of a man accustomed to fruitless searches. The dim light caught in the deep lines of his face, revealing decades of service worn into his skin.
Lin Yuan-Kai kept searching, brushing aside brittle folders until his fingers found something different—a single slip of paper, folded with deliberate care. Slowly, he unfolded it, scanning its brief message.
“Documents regarding Deng Tse-Shan must be burned before May, together with this note.”
Obviously, it was a secret order but was not obeyed. The recipient had neither destroyed the note nor, perhaps, the documents it referenced.
Lin Yuan-Kai’s pulse quickened. He scanned the note again, absorbing its implications. If the files had been moved rather than burned, then someone had deemed them worth preserving, just not in the way history had dictated. His grip tightened. He glanced at the warden, searching for any reaction. None came. Silently, Lin Yuan-Kai tucked the paper into his pocket.
Back at the AirBnB, Lin Yuan-Kai let the cold shower wash away both the sweat and the lingering excitement. He reminded himself that he might not find anything beyond the note.
Later, in the shared living room, he settled into a chair, sipping the icy beer he had stored in the fridge earlier.
A westerner with a ponytail walked in. Seeing Lin Yuan-Kai, he asked politely, “Are you Dr. Lin Yuan-Kai?”
“Yes, I am,” Lin Yuan-Kai replied, surprised. How did a foreigner know him?
The man extended his hand. “I’m Dr. Morris. They told me you’re an archive expert.”
Lin Yuan-Kai shook his hand. In this isolated place, any outsider stood out, especially one visiting the prison, the largest institution in the region.
He gestured toward the beer. “Want one?”
They moved to a high table with their beers. Dr. Morris, an American sinologist, studied the inscriptions on headstones to trace the tempo-spatial patterns of migration to Taiwan from different regions of the world.
“They told me there are many headstones that might be of interest, so I came to see for myself,” he said. “I walked around and found graves with inscriptions suggesting that people from diverse backgrounds lived here from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Some came from China, some from Southeast Asia, others from Taiwan’s west coast, and some relocated from the mountains to farm.” Lin Yuan-Kai was amazed that one could re-establish such a history through headstones.
Dr. Morris continued, “I copied down some of the names carved into the stones, at least the ones still legible. Some graves bear only a name, with no other details. Tomorrow, I am going to check out the old village office, hoping some documents have survived. The neighbourhood chief, Mr. Huang, agreed to take me.”
“What is in the village office?”
“They said the office kept tons of unattended documents, and I might find some matching the names on the headstones.”
“Can I go with you?” Lin Yuan-Kai asked, as an archive expert, the prospect of an unknown collection set his pulse racing.
“Of course, that’s what I intend to do.”
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Around 7 o’clock next morning, they met in front of the dilapidated village office, and Mr. Huang brought a key to carefully open the door. Lin Yuan-Kai thought it was just a gesture, for the door was so unhinged, anyone could just kick it open.
The archive room was in the deepest side of the building, lying in stillness, untouched and forgotten. As the pale morning rays filtered through its dust-streaked high windows, shadows stretched long across the floor, tracing the outlines of scattered folders and crumbling stacks of paper that had surrendered to time.
Metal filing cabinets, their surfaces pockmarked with rust, stood in rows like sentinels guarding history’s remnants. Some drawers hung open, revealing brittle documents curled at the edges, their ink faded. The air smelled of damp paper and aged furniture, memories soaked into the very walls, lingering long after the last searcher had departed.
A single overhead light flickered weakly, its bulb on the verge of surrender. In the corner, a toppled chair lay beside a desk strewn with yellowed index cards, each inscribed in careful, long-forgotten handwriting. The room exuded a quiet decay—a blend of dust, brittle paper, and the faint musk of fraying linen threads that once bound volumes now crumbling with age. The air carried a musty dampness, heavy from years without ventilation, tinged with the metallic trace of ink that had long since bled into the paper’s grain.
They stood uncertainly, unsure where to begin. Then, a sharp shriek from a bird outside the window cut through the silence, startling them. A single leaf fluttered in through the broken screen and landed atop a half-open drawer. Lin Yuan-Kai took it as a sign, so he would start there.
Dr. Morris unfolded the papers where he had recorded names over the past few days, studying them as he tried to decipher the document arrangement. The records were categorized roughly by the number of strokes in the characters of family names: Wong, with four strokes, was placed first; Wu, with seven, followed after; and Lin, with eight, came next in the sequence.
While Dr. Morris remained buried in the worn-out documents, Lin Yuan-Kai turned his attention to the files of surnames with the most strokes. He examined those for Yen but found little of note, only a handful of records for the name. The files of Tsai were similar.
The documentation was inconsistent; some individuals had more detailed records, including birthplaces, occupations, marriages, and even death dates, while others had nothing beyond a name. Women, in particular, were often documented solely in relation to their husbands—identified, for instance, as Madam Tsai when married, and again only when widowed.
Lin Yuan-Kai thought of Hsiao Yi-Chun’s granduncle as he sifted through the files under the Hsiao surname. Unsurprisingly, he found nothing; the man had disappeared in 1970, while these records dated back only to the late 19th century through the mid-20th century.
Still, experience had taught him that archives always held something—hidden traces, faint echoes of the past, as if the ghosts of those denied closure lingered, guiding his search.
Political prisoners of that era were often in their twenties or thirties. If some had been locals born in the 1930s or 1940s, their names might still be buried in these files.
He retrieved the note he had secretly pocketed the day before—Deng Tse-Shan, the man the authorities had tried to erase.
At first, the documents of the Deng families revealed nothing. But as Lin Yuan-Kai scanned names that might be connected, Dr. Morris unfolded his own notes and pointed to an entry—a name containing Deng and Shan, though the middle character was unrecognisable
“Could they be the same person?”
“Very likely,” Lin Yuan-Kai said, leaning in. “Where did you find this name?”
“In the mass grave. He might be the ‘sixth man.’”
Sixth man. It was the second time Lin Yuan-Kai had heard that phrase.
Dr. Morris explained that, according to Prof. Jiang Ming-Shun, after the five chief conspirators for Taiwan’s independence were arrested and sentenced to death, the national leader Chiang Kai-Shek remained convinced that a sixth man had played a role in the prison break and ordered that he be found at all costs.
No one knew how Chiang had obtained this information, given that he lived and governed from Taipei, far from the prison in Taitung. But his word carried unquestioned authority. His judgment was treated as truth, and his directive was followed without hesitation.
The result was a wave of arrests and executions carried out with little to no evidence, culminating in the mass grave near the prison.
“So, there were more than one ‘sixth man’?”
“Based on what we counted in the mass grave, there were likely eight to twelve. Some mounds might not be graves at all, and others may have disappeared over time, lost to floods or landslides.”
Lin Yuan-Kai took over Dr. Morris’s notes, searching for Hsiao Yi-Chun’s granduncle. One name shared a matching character, but it wasn’t enough to confirm whether it was the same man, or if Hsiao Yi-Chun’s granduncle was among the “sixth man.”
A clearer picture has begun to emerge beyond the well-studied prison insurgence. In addition to the five chief conspirators, eight to twelve other men were accused of being accomplices and executed on the spot—without trial, without due process. The scale of this slaughter exceeded even that of the major trials. Each of these men—who may or may not have been involved in the uprising, who may or may not have supported Taiwanese independence, who may or may not have identified as Chinese or Taiwanese—was killed as the “sixth man”.
To their families, they simply vanished. To history, they became little more than unmarked remains, whose existence were left to be debated as part of Taiwan’s sovereignty decades later.
C. J. ANDERSON-WU (吳介禎) is a Taiwanese writer who has published fiction collections about Taiwan’s military dictatorship (1949–1987), known as White Terror:Impossible to Swallow(2017) and The Surveillance (2021). Her third book Endangered Youth—Taiwan, Hong Kong, Ukraine has been launched in April 2025. Her works have been shortlisted for a number of international literary awards, including the International Human Rights Art Festival and the 2024 Flying Island Poetry Manuscript Competition. She also won the Strands Lit International Flash Fiction Competition, the Invisible City Blurred Genre Literature Competition, and the Wordweavers Literature Contest.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
The wind is an old friend. We meet on Wednesday afternoons to catch up over a coffee.
Some days she’s late, held up by work in the Gulf Coast or Ireland, somewhere more interesting than the corn-plained fields of southern Michigan.
I never mind because her stories about broken quartz shattered into a thousand stars against limestone cliffs remind me that even destruction can be beautiful.
This week, I tell her over the hushed babble of other café-goers about my cat’s death. She promises to scatter its ashes over ancient pine forests in the upper peninsula. She pays
for my coffee. She offers two kisses on each cheek and a sincere ciao before returning to the world. It’d be nice
to be able to do the same.
Dustin P Brown is a US-born, Spain-based author of poetry, prose, and the occasional drama. His work has appeared in other journals like Lit Shark and Bacopa Literary Review.
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How often have we, as fully realised human beings, found ourselves in the ironic situation of proving our human status to a computer programme? We have ticked boxes to identify zebra crossings, traffic lights, and buses, only to be told we were wrong, as if we did not know what a bus was. It is as if our fingers were too stubby to press the right keys or too daft to understand. And now, we are deciphering distorted words, as only a human could read wavy or cursive writing.
Now we understand. The verification exercises did not just stop automatons from spying on our data. They were meant to aid computers in digitising old books[1]. Computers sometimes struggle with old pages when converting physical books into digital versions. Due to wear and tear and fading caused by oxidation, the text may appear distorted. Computers use this mundane verification process by making humans interpret these unreadable texts. We play a crucial role in this process, creating a training module to help identify issues and errors to improve digitisation.
While CAPTCHA[2] (acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) was initially designed to prevent bot attacks and spam, it is now used by computers to distinguish between humans and bots among users. Alan Turing, the father of theoretical computer science, proposed a test[3] which was later named after him to evaluate a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from a human. Although many machines and AI programmes have passed this test, humans now face a reverse Turing Test to prove our organic status.
The funny thing is, while all this is happening, with automation and the diminishing need for human interaction, humans are gradually losing their humanity. We have lost the ability to look into each other’s eyes and start a conversation just for fun. Suppose Alan Turing proposed the test to gauge machine intelligence, and modern computers give a reverse Turing Test[4] to exclude unwanted chatbots. In that case, humans perhaps need a Turing-like test to confirm they still have some grey cells. We are increasingly losing our capacity for idle chats. We are all just prisoners, best left to our own devices.
Talking about looking into each other’s eyes and melting into the passion of each other’s aura, the dating scene these days is no longer like that. Enter any dimly-lit romantic restaurant, couples are not lost looking at one another but lost in the abyss of cyberspace, looking at the digital restaurant menu or perhaps into each other’s social media or Tinder hits to see what the other half has been up to.
While it is true that automation is changing the job market, it’s also creating new opportunities. My son, for instance, worries about his job, but I remind him that the world has created jobs that were non-existent just half a century ago. Who has heard of social media managers, cloud architects, or veterinary psychologists? My mother told me that my grandfather worked in a printing press. He used to come back smelling of turpentine, which he used to clean off the ink that stuck on his body. Nowadays, printing is done at home with a button, a slight whirring and a whooshing, and out comes a printed document at one’s convenience.
My grandfather later became a chauffeur to a successful business magnate. Once we have sorted out the finer points of bringing self-driving cars to market, we may not need drivers in the future. Now, many self-proclaimed gig entrepreneurs give up their full-time paying jobs to become delivery boys. Do we have news for these boys? Drones are dying to get up and replace you.
If one were to think that only the blue-collar job is at risk, think again. Conveyancing jobs currently carried out by paralegals can be taken over by an AI programme to churn out beautiful Sales and Purchase Agreements[5].
These programmes have also learnt to say the appropriate words during grief and crises. Increasingly, call-in helplines are ‘manned’ by AIs. The field of psychiatry may be at risk of not needing doctors. Even as we speak, we may already be conversing with chatbots about our bank transactions without realising it. This raises ethical questions about the role of AI in sensitive areas of human life and the potential loss of human connection in these interactions.
I remember a time in mid-1990 when the Malaysian civil society expressed concern over Malaysia’s uncontrolled influx of foreigners and our overdependence on the foreign labour force[6]. Someone suggested automation and mechanisation as a possible way to avert this. Still, apparently, the financiers were not too keen to increase business expenses, which would possibly reduce foreign investment. The general acceptance was that third-world nations were not ready to fully automate. They had not been able to provide universal employment to their citizens. This historical perspective highlights the complex relationship between automation, economic development, and social equity.
Moving forward, we sometimes find ourselves in zombie states, clicking reel after reel on social media as if we have so much time. Examples of children turning violent against the hands that feed them when their demand to go online is denied are not uncommon. Have we not heard of spouses immersed in full-blown affairs living under the same roof with the other half with ease, with a bit of help from the need for data privacy? A husband does not know what the wife does behind his back because access to devices is guarded by passwords.
Rock bands once thought using synthesisers on their songs was sacrilegious. The legendary British rock band, Queen, proudly boasted that they never used synthesisers to maintain a traditional, raw, organic feel to their sounds. Now, we must be happy with the digital manipulation of music and voice. Even though AI can compose music at a philharmonic level, music connoisseurs are far from contented. They say it lacks emotion, probably because great music comes from lived experience[7].
What started as automation, where machines aided humans to ease work, has now evolved to something which can learn and mimic human actions. It has come to be called intelligence, albeit artificially developed by the human mind. Like a student surpassing his teacher, the real fear now is that AI is evolving consciousness. If AI is the future, the person who controls the future will be King. Does that not mean that tech entrepreneurs will be the world’s future leaders? The world will indeed be borderless, only determined by digital connectivity.
We already long for the good old days when talking to customer service did not start with, “press 1 for English and this conversation will be recorded for self-improvement.” What they mean is that it will be used against you. Dealing with a computer chatbot already feels Kafkaesque. It feels like talking to a wall without recourse to “talking to the manager!”
Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Mountains are baked into the earth, caked with mud, green grass, rocks and dirt.
Somewhere between trees and brushes, howling wolves belt out nature’s blues.
Blades of grass, smooth, and rough pebbles, lead to the edge of the mountain’s
peak. In the fog, in the pines, a lone wolf keeps to itself as birds
sing all day long, far from the towns, cities, in the baked mountainside.
FINEST PAINTBRUSH
Unfold your finest paintbrush to night’s blackboard, with gentle strokes fill the darkness with starlit skies. In the morning clean your paintbrush, dip it in orange, red, and yellow colors to paint the blue skies for the amusement of lovers and friends, even strangers.
Do not languish in apathy. Bring that paintbrush around and cover every square inch of the canvas that surrounds us. Unleash your Leonardo, your Michaelangelo, and your Vincent. Splash the skies like Jackson, spread out like Diego and Frida. Make the roses blush and open.
PULL THE BLINDS
Pull the blinds, outside our illusions live as birds, their monotonous song
fill the skies. I love them. They are fragile. With their wings they are safe.
I pull the blinds. It is like taking masks off. For days I close the blinds. For days I leave them open. For all I know, I just pretend
there are no blinds. I do not care about what happens outside in the light or darkness.
I pull the blinds for the last time.
Born in Mexico, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal lives in California and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles. His poetry has been featured in Blue Collar Review, Borderless Journal, Mad Swirl, Rusty Truck, and Unlikely Stories.
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His name was “Nandu”. He was a servant in our neighbour’s house, where he did all of the household chores. He was a smallish boy. Who knows what his actual name was. Everyone just called him Nandu.
Sometimes he would finish his work in the afternoon and would come sit with me. Although he was from Garhwal, he spoke Punjabi well, albeit haltingly. His face always made it appear as though he were laughing. We gave him the nickname “Laughing Man.”
“Nandu, how many brothers and sisters do you have?”
“Four sisters and three brothers. All of the sisters are older than I am, and the brothers are younger.”
Then Nandu fell silent. It was as if he were thinking that if his brothers were older, they would be working, and Nandu would not have cuts on his hands from washing vessels all day at such a young age. Nor would he have been forced to leave his small house nestled in the mountains.
“Nandu, how did you manage to leave your parents and everyone else to come here?”
Then he smiled, and his lips spread out. “Who knows why?” he smiled, but it seemed as if the smile was trying to convince me that it doesn’t matter whether you want to or don’t want to do all of this work, you still have to do it. Right?
“Madam, back there, we barely eat twice a day. We cooked once a day, and we ate the leftovers for a second meal. Moreover, I was not free there at all. I would take the cows outside for grazing. I also bathed them sometimes. I would also feed them fodder. When my mother would milk the cows, I wanted to drink the milk fresh from the bucket. But madam…if we don’t sell the milk, then maybe we won’t even be able to cook one meal.
“And there, people must have their own lands?”
“What kind of lands, Madam? Just small parcels. And then you have to pay land tax and interest on the loan.”
When Nandu spoke like this, it seemed to me that this child was a fifty-year-old man. Yet he was hardly thirteen years old. He was eight or nine when he ran away from his village to come here. Perhaps, he couldn’t tolerate hunger. There had been a time when he had been self-respecting. He would go on saying, “Where I used to work before, the old woman was angry with me one day. And I left.”
I was astonished that now he is verbally abused all day long, but he has gone nowhere. The reason may be that he had grown accustomed to it.
Nandu only spoke Punjabi. He would say that he had forgotten Garhwali. And he never posted letters to his family. He would say that he only knew his father’s name and the name of his village. Nothing else. And the villages in Garhwal had such long addresses. Sometimes he would become very sad thinking of his mother and father. Once, I saw him outside, wiping his eyes with his dirty Ludhiana shirt. But usually, he would try to hide his pain in a smile from which his broad lips would stretch wide. He said carelessly, “According to them, I died long ago.”
Our neighbors were Sikhs. And Nandu bought a gutka[1] with his salary, even though he was completely illiterate. (He only took that part of his salary that he needed for necessities.) He also bought a picture of Guru Gobind Singh Ji and wrapped it in his spare shirt to keep it safe. When the shirt he is wearing gets dirty, he washes it, wraps the picture of Guru Gobind Singh in it, and wears the other shirt.
Over time, he began imitating the children of his boss, a Sikh man, and began wearing a turban. He also got the worn-out turban of his boss’s youngest son. For two annas, he bought some grey dye and dyed the turban. He also acquired a small kirpan[2], which he did not remove while bathing or sleeping. He went from Nandu to Nand Singh.
One time, a man from his village came to find him.
“Does someone by the name of Nandu live here? “There’s no one here by that time. You’ve come here by mistake,” Nandu said with deliberation. He was already afraid that if some man from the village recognised him, he would have to send money home. And maybe he would have to return to that place, where, after caring for the cows all day, he got only one meal, and for the second meal, he was given dried pieces of roti. Here, he could satisfy his hunger at least twice a day. He didn’t need to worry a bit about work. And what about scolding and abuse? Ultimately, a person learns to tolerate these things.
Even though Nandu’s face had completely changed, seeing his wide laughing lips, the man from his village recognised him. He said something to Nandu in Garhwali. Nandu began to say somewhat angrily, “I don’t understand what you are saying. Don’t talk nonsense. Speak correctly.”
And the next day in the afternoon, when he told me that he no longer understood Garhwali, I suddenly let out a sigh. Maybe I sighed because Nandu had forgotten his mother tongue, which must have been the first words he heard when God threw him on this planet, thinking him to be disposable.
“What did he say to you, Nandu?”
“Nothing. He said only that ‘your mother is missing you a lot.’ But I know no one is crying for me. She must be thankful that there is one less hungry mouth to feed. She used to always say to me, ‘May you die.’”
But that man from Nandu’s village kept coming around. Over time, Nandu’s heart softened. Nandu remembered his mother, he remembered his elderly father, who must no longer be able to work the fields. And Nandu remembered his small, dirt shack, whose outside wall was plastered with rocks. The fragrance of fresh soil and paste made of cow dung and mud floated to his mind. And now Nandu was constantly sad. In the end, he was still a child, all of thirteen years old.
Then one day, who knows what happened, but cysts appeared near his ear. The boss, the Sikh, was charry of the illness, thinking no one would keep a sick man in his house. He tossed Nandu out. While leaving, Nandu cried copiously! He gave me the gutka and the picture of Guru Gobind Singh. He was going back to his village. He said he would take them back when he returned from his village.
So much time had passed without hearing from him. On several occasions, my eyes would well up looking at his things. Poor Nandu.
Then one day, there was a knock at my door. It was the afternoon. I opened the door. A smallish boy was standing there wearing a dirty hat and a filthy shirt, and in his hands was a smallish bundle. I thought someone must have come to meet our servant. But seeing those wide lips smiling in his laughter, I immediately recognised him. It was him. Nandu.
Nandu had cut his long hair. Now his name was Anand Ram. I asked him how he was doing and gave him some water. He spoke haltingly. While speaking, he said some words that I had difficulty understanding. In the end, embarrassed, he began to explain that due to living in his village, it was hard for him not to speak Garhwali. In the end, he was still Nandu, who had come to me in the afternoon and to tell me all of his sorrows.
“Your things are still with me, Nandu.”
“You keep them.” It seemed as if words were not coming to him. He didn’t know what to say, “I have another photo.” He began to open his bundle. There were a few pieces of clothing from which Nandu withdrew a picture. It was a picture of Lord Krishna.
I kept on thinking that hunger knows no religion. Wherever one gets food, one adopts that religion and that language. Then what is the essence of a person? A cog that has to fit into every machine because a cog outside of a machine doesn’t get oil, and it becomes rusty. And Nandu? What was Nandu? A thing without life? He was a ball rolling down the mountainside, which, moving very quickly down the hill, would get stuck on a rock momentarily, then again begin rolling. Maybe Nandu was like that same wind-up doll that my little brother has. The only difference is that the wind-up doll is fat, whereas every one of Nandu’s ribs could be counted.
After two years, Nandu came yesterday. There was barely any difference in his build. I recognised him immediately. But he could not recognise my little brother. In those two years, he had grown a lot. The wheels of time leave different marks on different people.
Now Nandu spoke Hindi. He spoke some words very quickly, which I had difficulty understanding.
“So Nandu, where are you these days?”
“I’m working for a woman from Madras. She’s terrible. She harasses me a lot. Otherwise, everything is fine. Initially, I couldn’t eat their food, but now I can.”
Then I thought he was doing this just to keep his belly full, just like sparrows and crows who eat to keep their bellies full. Just like wild dogs roaming the streets to fill their bellies. What is a meal? Whatever you get, you eat, whether it’s leftover food or something else. Something just to fill one’s stomach. But to feed himself, one has to sell himself.
I had thought that Nandu had sometimes become Nand Singh and sometimes Anand Ram. There was a time when he kept a picture of Guru Gobind and a gutka. Now he keeps a picture of Krishna. Sometimes he spoke Garhwali, sometimes Punjabi, and now Hindi. But Nandu kept on washing dishes. Nandu kept on sweeping. He kept on washing clothes. He went on cooking. And he continued to be scolded. Still, he’s a child. Poor Nandu!
“Sister, are you still writing stories?”
“Yes, Nandu. I’m writing now.”
“And you were saying that you were going to write my story?”
I smiled. Feeling demoralized, he began to ask, “But who will read it?”
Then it occurred to me that Nandu couldnot read his story himself, but many others would read it.
“Nandu, the people of future generations will read about Nandu and thousands of Nandus, just like the Bible. And these stories will be worshiped just like you worship these pictures. Because you all strengthen the foundations of the new world.”
Who knows whether he understood what I was saying, but he smiled.
[2] Small dagger, a ritualistic thing carried by Sikh men
Ajit Cour
Ajeet Cour (born 1934) is an Indian writer who writes in Punjabi. She is a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian award by the Government of India. She is the author of twenty-two books, including novels, novellas, short stories, biographical sketches, and translations. Her novellas include Dhup Wala Shehar (The town with Sunshine) and Post Mortem. Her novel, Gauri, was made into a film, while her short story Na Maaro (Don’t Beat) was serialised for television. Her works have been translated into English, Hindi, and several other languages.
C. Christine Fair (born 1968) did her Ph.D. in South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She is currently a professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University. Her translations have appeared in Muse India, Orientalia Suecana, The Bangalore Review, Borderless, The Punch Magazine, The Bombay Literary Magazine, and The Bombay Review.
Borderless 