Gower Bhat discusses the advent of coaching schools in Kashmir for competitive exams for University exams, which seem to be replacing real schools. Clickhere to read.
In winters, birds migrate. They face no barriers. The sun also shines across fences without any hindrance. Long ago, the late Nirendranath Chakraborty (1924-2018) wrote about a boy, Amalkanti, who wanted to be sunshine. The real world held him back and he became a worker in a dark printing press. Dreams sometimes can come to nought for humanity has enough walls to keep out those who they feel do not ‘belong’ to their way of life or thought. Some even war, kill and violate to secure an exclusive existence. Despite the perpetuation of these fences, people are now forced to emigrate not only to find shelter from the violences of wars but also to find a refuge from climate disasters. These people — the refuge seekers— are referred to as refugees[1]. And yet, there are a few who find it in themselves to waft to new worlds, create with their ideas and redefine norms… for no reason except that they feel a sense of belonging to a culture to which they were not born. These people are often referred to as migrants.
At the close of this year, Keith Lyons brings us one such persona who has found a firm footing in New Zealand. Setting new trends and inspiring others is a writer called Harry Ricketts[2]. He has even shared a poem from his latest collection, Bonfires on the Ice. Ricketts’ poem moves from the personal to the universal as does the poetry of another migrant, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, aspiring to a new, more accepting world. While Tulip Chowdhury — who also moved across oceans — prays for peace in a war torn, weather-worn world:
I plant new seeds of dreams for a peaceful world of tomorrow.
Fiction in this issue reverberates across the world with Marc Rosenberg bringing us a poignant telling centred around childhood, innocence and abuse. Sayan Sarkar gives a witty, captivating, climate-friendly narrative centred around trees. Naramsetti Umamaheswararao weaves a fable set in Southern India.
A story by Nasir Rahim Sohrabi from the dusty landscapes of Balochistan has found its way into our translations too with Fazal Baloch rendering it into English from Balochi. Isa Kamari translates his own Malay poems which echo themes of his powerful novels, A Song of the Wind (2007) and Tweet(2017), both centred around the making of Singapore. Snehaprava Das introduces Odia poems by Satrughna Pandab in English. While Professor Fakrul Alam renders one of Nazrul’s best-loved songs from Bengali to English, Tagore’s translated poem Jatri (Passenger) welcomes prospectives onboard a boat —almost an anti-thesis of his earlier poem ‘Sonar Tori’ (The Golden Boat) where the ferry woman rows off robbing her client.
We have plenty of non-fiction this time starting with a tribute to Jane Austen (1775-1817) by Meenakshi Malhotra. Austen turns 250 this year and continues relevant with remakes in not only films but also reimagined with books around her novels — especially Pride and Prejudice (which has even a zombie version). Bhaskar Parichha pays a tribute to writer Bibhuti Patnaik. Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan explores ancient Sangam Literature from Tamil Nadu and Ratnottama Sengupta revisits an art exhibition that draws bridges across time… an exploration she herself curated.
We have a spray of colours from across almost all the continents in our pages this time. A bumper issue again — for which all of the contributors have our heartfelt thanks. Huge thanks to our fabulous team who pitch in to make a vibrant issue for all of us. A special thanks to Sohana Manzoor for the fabulous artwork. And as our readers continue to grow in numbers by leap and bounds, I would want to thank you all for visiting our content! Introduce your friends too if you like what you find and do remember to pause by this issue’s contents page.
Wish all of you happy reading through the holiday season!
Jatri (Passenger) was a part of Tagore’s collection, Khanika (moments), published in 1900.
Art by Sohana Manzoor
PASSENGER
There’s place on my ferry. You are alone. You have Only one bundle of paddy. It may be a bit crammed, But not that heavily jammed. My ferry could be A bit overloaded — But you don’t have to leave. There’s a place for you!
Come, come to my boat! If your feet are dusty, Let them be mud-coated. Your body is like a creeper. Your eyes are restless. Your garb’s blue-green, Flowing like water — There’ll always be place for you — Come, come to my boat!
There are many passengers. Their destinations are varied. They are all strangers. You’ll also for a while Sit on my ferry Till the end of the ride. A denial will make no difference — If you want to come, join us. There are many passengers.
Where’s your jetty? Where’s the store For your paddy? If you do not state, What will be our fate? I’ll have to ponder At the end of the ride — Where’s your shore, Where’s your home?
*The interesting thing about this poem is that it seems to be complete reversal of the poem Sonar Tori(Golden Boat), published in 1894, with the ferryman welcoming passengers aboard, whereas in the earlier poem, the ferry woman sails off with the bundle of paddy belonging to another, leaving her passenger behind.
This poem has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty with editorial input by Sohana Manzoor
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It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that Jane Austen is a great writer. The world created by her in just six novels continues to regale generations of readers with tales of love, marriage and money, a sentiment which would be reiterated by substantial numbers of her fans all over the globe. We could well echo Evelyn Waugh on the comic writer P. G. Wodehouse: that his (Wodehouse’s) inimitable world could never grow stale….that he has made a world for us (readers) to live in and delight in…
Jane Austen(1775-1817) has acquired a kind of cult status in the last couple of centuries. Such is her reputation that it has helped birth a veritable Jane Austen industry, replete with museums, memorabilia and mementos. There have been numerous novels and films inspired by Pride and Prejudice and Emma and many films (and remakes and adaptations) based on her novels.
16 December 2025 marks her 250th birth anniversary. Many museums in the UK and the USA have showcased exhibits which give viewers delightful glimpses into her life and writing. Her novels, full of wit and satire, provide an insightful commentary on the social hierarchies, as well as the quirks and oddities of her milieu.Their plots and themes are woven around women and the necessity of marriage, money and the determining power of money.With considerable irony and subtlety, she turns the mirror on how manners are a function of morality and good sense and not just a matter of appearances. Rarely didactic or preachy(with Mansfield Park as the only exception), her novels convey in perfectly nuanced and measured prose, how difficult and crucial it is for women to find the right spouse and space.
As the youngest daughter of a poor clergyman, mostly educated at home, Jane Austen was well aware of the value of an independent income and a home of their own. After the death of her father, she, her sister Cassandra and mother, rather like the Dashwood women in her novel Sense and Sensibility, had to move around as they were dependant on the financial support of her brothers, especially her wealthy brother, Edward. The pain of this unequal fortune and frequent shifts, which Jane and her sister Cassandra may have experienced, is expressed by Elinor and Marianne in the novel where they have to practice small economies and learn to scale their expectations according to their situation.
Austen led a largely sheltered and sequestered existence, surrounded by her family, bound to family duties which “might have been the more expected of a dependent spinster aunt such as she was.”[1] Many intelligent women, like Charlotte Lucas, Elizabeth Bennett’s friend in Pride and Prejudice are shown to accept inferior matches to escape from spinsterhood and the expectations of their natal families. The absence of livelihood opportunities for women in her day and the lack of any income of her own would have proved irksome to Austen and provided her with a further impetus to “write her way into some money,” as she wrote in a letter to her brother, Captain Francis Austen, in July 1813. Further, in another letter to her niece Fanny Knight, she writes that “single women have the propensity to be poor which is one very strong inducement for women to marry.”
Her novels often do not always reveal the full measure of Jane Austen’s remarkable achievement: how she, constrained by genteel poverty, “the lack of a room of her own”, and writing materials which had to be put away often to attend to obligatory family commitments, wrote her novels based on such close observation of, and acute insight into contemporary life. Her eye for detail is such that it invites frequent references to her own words: “A little bit of ivory, two inches wide, on which I work with a brush so fine as to produce little effect after much labour.” This modest disclaimer and “little effect” have, however, fascinated generations of readers and inspired hosts of writers.
That Jane Austen’s 250th anniversary is being celebrated and commemorated all over the English-speaking world perhaps comes as no surprise but it still leaves us with some questions. What is the relevance of her novels now? Are her novels relevant to present-day political realities, in addition to their astute observations on graded social hierarchies? Can we view her as a feminist? Does she merit inclusion and study in universities of the global south at a time when there is a strong drive to decolonise English, the language of the erstwhile colonial masters?
In her book Jane Austen: The Secret Radical, Helena Kelly writes of the subversive and radical potential and intent of Jane Austen’s novels. Kelly goes a step beyond Marilyn Butler’s 1987 Jane Austen and the War of Ideas that had suggested that Austen leaned on the conservative Burkean side when challenged by new-fangled Jacobinism with its ideas of equality and brotherhood, coming from France which disturbed hierarchies, ideas and values long held to be sacrosanct in traditional English society. Kelly suggests that far from being conservative, insulated from contemporary political concerns, Jane Austen held radical and possibly subversive views which she did not express openly but which are clearly configured in the world of her novels. In doing so, she made the novel a meaningful art-form and a vehicle for the expression of ideas around love, marriage and additionally also of debates on slavery, female education and emancipation.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in the want of a wife.”[2] This famous ironic opening sentence of Austen’s has captured attention and elicited many critical commentaries. It’s a brilliant masterstroke where Austen underlines the mindset of young women and their anxious mothers on the lookout for eligible bachelors. Articulated like a truism, it seeks to facetiously universalise a partial truth. The omniscient authorial tone and tenor encompasses the dominant themes of Pride and Prejudice in the opening statement itself. Marriage, women’s responses, men’s reactions, social rank and wealth — all the principal subjects of Austen’s writing are near universal themes. In her novels, Austen communicates the constraints within which women function and the limited or literally the only ‘choice’ available to them. Having experienced financial instability and economic dependence, she had a clear understanding of the constraints experienced by women in early nineteenth-century England.
The happy ending that we see where Elizabeth Benett indeed becomes “mistress of Pemberley” symbolises the moment when some women, having acquired a certain status, become custodians of the home and the private sphere. Some feminist historians like Gerda Lerner, however, have pin-pointed this moment as one where the economic marginalisation of women is complete, in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, and they are pushed back from the public sphere.
Even as women were participating in print culture and taking their place as readers and writers, they were increasingly relegated to the private sphere. The tendency to relegate women to the private sphere and making them responsible for the entire range of domestic tasks of nurturing and care-giving and thereby sustaining the edifice of domestic life is something that persists even now. The fact is that women’s participation in the paid economy and public sphere has added to their ‘double’ burden in the 21st century.
Many critical voices have pointed out that Jane Austen’s writings do not directly mention the political situation, philosophical debates or religious discourses of the day centering on questions of social equality, justice, economic questions or the rights of man. Yet her fine crafted depiction of socio-economic relations, the dynamics of human relationships shaped and moulded by the struggle for wealth or power or status exposes the political reality, social hierarchy and the economic structure in society which shaped and informed all social transactions.
While the position of women may have improved in some spheres, there are still glaring gaps when it comes to women’s access to equality or justice. Changes in the last two centuries have gone beyond superficial tokenism. There are still miles to go in our march towards equality. It is in this larger context where there is a grudging acceptance or disavowal of women’s rights that the Jane Austen heroine’s negotiations with patriarchy remain relevant.
They demonstrate a mode of assertion, of agency in the face of inequality and in socially disadvantaged situations, which sustain an illusion of female empowerment and wish-fulfilment. It is this vision of romance, which, informed by a comic and somewhat ironical view of life, consolidates the exercise of female agency and makes the reading and re-reading of Jane Austen’s novels a rewarding and enriching experience. Her astute delineation of human delusion and human folly holds up a mirror to her society that often impels recognition on our part and remains forever relevant. Her perceptive analysis of the warp and weft of her society remains almost unmatched.
…yet he (Byron) cannot match the shock she (Austen) gives me; Beside her, Joyce is as innocent as young grass. I feel truly uneasy, my mind unsettled, Watching the English middle-class spinster describe the power of money to attract love, so plainly and soberly revealing the economic foundations that sustain human society.
W.H.Auden’s lines on Jane Austen and the unlikely comparison with the prince of notoriety, Lord George Byron, never fails to instruct or entertain us. Such is the mark of great literature which leaves its imprint decades and centuries after its inception.
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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What if I crossed the border after 50 springs, summers, falls, and winters? After all the learning, the forgetting, the labour, and lost loves, after all the growing pains, the births, deaths, and family joys and tragedies? What if I returned to the land of my youth, a much older man than the seven-year-old, wide-eyed boy? I will offer the best of me. Who will offer me the best of them? I will have to find a place to call home, a seat at a table where I will have my meals, a place where I could have a conversation with someone other than myself, a room where I could read and write, and most of all sleep. Who will break bread with me, help me decorate the house with books and flowers, with paintings and plants, and share stories, laughter, and wine from time to time? As I write these words, other words are being twisted, designed to make people like me to return to the place of our birth, if we are fortunate enough.
BUCKETFUL OF RAIN
If it is goodbye, I could use a bucketful of rain to drench this fire. Reduce it to smoke before this heart becomes ash.
Even the light trembles and the sun is blushing seeing this conflagration. I should have seen the signs but I hope too much.
Play that violin soft and slow. Speed up the pace as the fire spreads out of control. I can take the heat just a little bit longer.
LIMITS
I climb the branch to the flower; the spider-from-mars’ web-to-the-stars; I flow and fly with the wind further still; through time and newborn worlds; I allow my thoughts to remain on earth; keep the sun and magnifying glass away from me; even an ant has its limits.
Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal was born in Mexico, lives in California, and works in Los Angeles.He has been published in Blue Collar Review, Borderless Journal, Chiron Review, Kendra SteinerEditions, Mad Swirl, and Unlikely Stories. His most recent poems have appeared in Four FeathersPress.
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Last Song Before Home, the English translation of Indira Das’s Bengali memoir Shuru Theke Phera – Mayer Smritikatha[1], emerges as a luminous elegy to the fragility of memory and familial bonds. Translated by Bina Biswas, the book chronicles the author’s mother, Gayatri Das, navigating vascular dementia post-stroke. Through an epistolary structure of imagined letters, Das captures the slow erosion of self, where recollections surface like half-remembered melodies amid Bengal’s partitioned landscapes. The thematic depth and stylistic finesse position it as a vital contribution to South Asian memoir literature.
Central themes orbit memory as both lifeline and tormentor. Dementia strips Gayatri of chronology, yet fragments—rain-soaked courtyards, Partition’s unspoken wounds—resurface as anchors of identity. Das reframes loss as resistance, transforming maternal decline into a testament to resilience. Sisterhood underscores this; bonds with siblings weave a tapestry of shared silences, countering isolation’s void.
Partition looms subtly, not as a historical spectacle but an intimate scar—displaced homes echo in Gayatri’s fading queries: “Where is home?” This mirrors postcolonial Bengal’s flux, where personal trauma intersects collective upheaval. Dignity persists through ritual: songs hummed off-key, hands folding faded saris. Das elevates the mundane, critiquing modernity’s erasure of oral legacies. Resilience triumphs, not via triumph, but quiet defiance—memory’s “last song” before oblivion. The memoir critiques gendered aging in India, where women’s stories dissolve unspoken, urging reclamation.
A practicing gynaecologist, Das’s prose, via Biswas’s fluid translation, mimics dementia’s rhythm: elliptical sentences drift, loop, and fracture like synapses firing erratically. “The courtyard bloomed once, or was it twice? Rain came, carrying voices from across the river.” This stream-of-consciousness narrative eschews linear plot for associative flow, evoking Woolfian interiority fused with Bengali lyricism—sensory motifs—jasmine perfume, monsoon mud—ground abstraction, rendering emotion tactile.
In the translator’s note, Biswas, who is a poet and academician, says: “This book is not simply a narrative-it is a mosaic of survival, and the search for belonging. As John Berger once wrote, ‘Never again will a single story be told as though it is the only one.’ The protagonist’s journey is part of a greater collective-a shared history of migration, exile, and emotional displacement. Her voice rises in a chorus of the grieving, each thread woven with shared loss and a fierce resolve to cling to identity.
“She is a figure many will recognize: a woman who, though exiled by circumstance, carries the remnants of home in every gesture and memory. Her story becomes a vessel for inherited struggle, for resilience passed from one generation to the next. As Milan Kundera so memorably stated, ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’”
Epistolary form innovates: letters to an absent self-blur authorial voice, fostering intimacy without sentimentality. Repetition (“Remember? No, forget.”) mirrors cognitive loops, building hypnotic cadence. Das avoids melodrama; understatement amplifies pathos— a single, misplaced utensil evokes existential ache. Cultural bilingualism enriches: Bengali idioms, untranslated, preserve authenticity, challenging monolingual readers. Pacing accelerates in crescendo passages, where songs bridge eras, culminating in cathartic release.
Last Song Before Home transcends memoir, becoming a philosophical meditation on impermanence. Its strengths—haunting style, layered themes—outweigh minor translation hiccups, like occasional stiffness. Essential for readers of Partition literature or aging narratives, it earns four stars for profound humanity. Das not only mourns but hymns endurance, leaving echoes that linger.
[1] Translates to: Returning from the Beginning: Memories of Mother
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Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Cyclones in Odisha: Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience, Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.
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The world changes. Yet, the memories captured and frozen in time, moments that one never thought would come to pass, remain. In my child’s eyes I still see and recall a world that has gone by, the space and the people and all in it that I still love. Brickfields was no remote Indian enclave even in the 1960s. It was about 5 miles from Kuala Lumpur, the capital town. The outside world would soon collide with my small space called Thambapillai Kampung[1] in Brickfields amidst 13th May 1969 race riots and my childhood world would become the past.
We were a small community, a kampung of about 100 households. We were all tenants to a lawyer landlord who charged a small rent to occupy a small portion of his land. It was home to many Indians who were barely scaping for a living above the poverty line. What we lacked in the material world, was made up with a sense of community. It was not perfect, but we co-existed amicably and often looked out for each other.
Thambapillai Kampung composed a good mix of Hindu and Christian families, mostly of Tamil ethnicity, both Indian and Sri Lankan. Mine was a Christian childhood here. The Methodist Tamil Church was a ten-minute walk away from our home. The Hindu temple, Sri Kandaswamy Kovil, at the end of Scott Road was even closer. The kampung is now replaced by condominiums none of us could have afforded, except the lawyer who sold his land for the gentrification of this place. The church and temple still remain.
The Days Before Christmas
Christmas Palagaram-Making
Our house was often the hive of Christmas palagaram making activities. My mother and her group of women friends, Hindu and Christian, all housewives, would plan a schedule on making traditional Indian palagaram[2] like muruku, achimuruku, chippi, neiyi orrundai, monturikottu and sometimes even kalu oorundai (almost as hard as cricket balls). They would take great care to get all the ingredients and make the palagaram from scratch.
Kalu oorundaiAchimurukuFrom Public Domain
Below is an excerpt from my poem ‘A Brickfields Christmas’ that narrates my childhood experience of witnessing this activity over several years:
December descends on us. Womenfolk, friends of Amma, Sithi and Paati, all aunties to us arrive. Palagaram-making begins. Muruku, achimuruku, chippi and neiyee oorundai – South Indian festive fare. We wait at the side lines like cats for scraps.
My elder sisters put their culinary skills to work. The fragrance of freshly baked cookies and cakes waft through the house, giving a sweetness over the usual aroma of curries in our home. A festive air spreads and seeps through the house.
Annual House Spring Cleaning
The days before Christmas fell during the school holidays and we the children were homebound. It was also the time for our big-time annual spring cleaning of our house as part of the preparation for Christmas and new year. All the children were involved in various tasks to clean and repaint the whole house. This is re-counted in the extracts from my poem ‘A Brickfields Christmas’:
It’s November and school’s out. We are all home-bound. There’s an excitement despite the work at hand. Paint brushes appear and paint pails sit next to Appa’s bicycle. The yearly routine is set to begin in our house. …
The house waits like a patient giant its coat slowly scraped away and its nakedness to be clothed by an eight-sibling work team.
Chores allocated according to seniority and skills. I am happy to scrape last year’s peeling paint.
Limestone white for personal living spaces ICI blue paint just for the hall. The worn-down white planks over the months are slowly lapped up by paint-laden brushes.
Large black spiders once secure in crevices now scuttle about. Plank by plank whiteness emerges. A new brightness which in time will wear off once more. The house smells fresh and a lightness caresses us.
Annual Christmas Shopping
Mutabak. From Public Domain
Our family practice was that all the children would get clothes for the festive season. Three set of clothes one for Christmas eve, Christmas day and New Year’s Day. Amma was the prime mover in all our activities. We would set out to Batu Road (now Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman) to Globe Silk Store and Kishu’s Departmental Stall, for their affordable prices, to buy our shirts. Along the way, we would stop at Central Shoe Shop or Bata to buy our shoes. Taking a break from shopping, we would be treated to murtabak at the famous Kassim Restaurant which was also situated among these shops.
It was also the time of year for buying gifts. For this, my eldest brother, Annan, would accompany us and we would go to Deen’s to buy our board games, toys for building and construction sets and even musical instruments. All these would be gift wrapped and placed under our Christmas tree. Besides our choice of gifts, there would some surprise gifts too.
Appa[3] was busy with his work and left this work to Amma[4]. Being a newsvendor, he had no holidays. He worked every day if newspapers were printed and needed to be delivered to his customers. Yet, he still found time to take the boys to the tailor near our house in Scott Road to get our short pants sewn.
Christmas Decorations for Our Home
The last few weeks, the postman would have brought tens of Christmas cards for the family and individuals who were of card-sending/receiving age. We used to look out for who would get the most greeting cards besides our parents. In the last few Christmases in Brickfields, I was among those assigned to write the greetings and addresses on the Christmas cards before they were sent off to the nearby Brickfields post office. I can remember the many times I wrote: To, Mr & Mrs xxx and fly … Best wishes from Mr & Mrs N Vethamani & fly (short form for family).
A few days before Christmas we would begin putting up the decorations. The cards we received would be strung and hanged on the living room walls using a string to hold them. Balloons were blown and hung in the corners and sides of the living room walls. Finally, the Christmas tree that had been stored away after last year’s celebration would be brought and decorated:
Last year’s Christmas tree is uncovered from its yearlong dust. My younger brother and I hang the glittering trinkets fearing a drop could shatter the fragile bells and baubles. Our friend Ahmad is cutting out crepe paper and making streamers.
A golden star crowns our tree. Annan places the lights A final touch, Akka sprays the snow. For the first time that night the lights come on again. The multi-coloured twinkling bulbs complete the advent of Christmas into our kampung home.
Christmas Eve
Christmas eve marked the height of the festivities for us children. It was a day of giving and sharing. Christmas cheer through palagaram, Christmas goodies. Around five in evening, as the day grew slightly cooler, we would begin the palagaram-giving to our neighbours, both Hindu and Christian. Amma, Paati[5]and my elder sisters would arrange our homemade palagaram on trays. They would be covered with a tray lace.
It was a joyous occasion, carrying trays of goodwill to our neighbours’ homes. We were warmly greeted. Often, the mothers in the neighbours’ houses would receive our gift. They would then take our gift and often leave a small gift, one Ringgit or five Ringgit note even. These cash gifts often thrilled us to no end as it meant more spending money during Christmas. Seeing my elder siblings, even as a child, I knew that I best enjoy what I had as with each passing year the younger ones would take my place. What I didn’t know was how quickly this world would come to an end.
The Christmas tree would be lit in the evening, and our presents lay on the floor below the branches. Annan[6] would be playing Christmas carols on the gramophone. The day would end with playing with crackers and fireworks with my cousins who lived a few doors away. We would wait anxiously for the evening to pass and soon it would be Christmas. We seldom stayed awake till midnight. The excitement through the day wore us out and we were soon in our beds.
Some Christmas eves, our Sittappa[7] would butcher a young goat in his garden. We, children, we were not allowed to see the actual killing of the goat but once it was done, we would watch Sittappa cut and clean the carcass. On Christmas day and the next few days, we would have mutton curry along with mutton tripe, mutton dalcha and other mutton delicacies.
Christmas Day
On Christmas morning, the air was filled with everything fresh and new, the house with its freshly coated paint and all of us in our new clothes. Morning would have started early for Amma, Paati and my elder sisters. They would have started to cook the food for us and our guests who would arrive for our Christmas lunch. Amma was a good cook and all of us and our guests looked forward to her biryani and dishes. Often, we had turkey kurma curry for Christmas lunch. For breakfast we had fruitcake, jam tarts and other palagaram.
Turkey Kurma Curry. From Public Domain
Soon it was time to get ready for church. My poem ‘One Christmas Morning’ captures how the day began on a Christmas morning while we lived in Brickfields:
One Christmas Morning
The smell of curries and familiar kitchen sounds of Paati, Amma and my sisters have awakened me.
My younger brother already about caught up with his presents opened at midnight by the Christmas tree has no time for me.
Annan has switched on the gramophone and Pat Boone sings carols that he’d be home for Christmas though not my sister, away in a distant land.
The smells of curries and ghee rice waft through the house guests will arrive, but not yet.
Appa’s come back, his bicycle still laden with the day’s newspapers offices closed for the holiday deliveries can wait another day.
A brother’s in the bathroom, another awaits his turn, soon we’d all have bathed and dressed in our Christmas best.
Ready for church, a quick walk away.
Now dressed in our Christmas best, we make our way to Church which is a few minutes’ walk. Amma, Paati and my elder sisters in their new sarees, Appa in his new vesti and shirt and we the sons in our new shirts, shorts and shoes. The church would be decorated in festive Christmas colours and among the congregation there was a general sense of joy celebrating Jesus’ birth.
Once the Church service is over and we are back home, the busy hours in our home begins. Our family friends begin to make their way to our home for lunch. We would have gone to their homes for Deepavali and other occasions. We, the children, would have invited some of our friends too and we get to play hosts to them. Annan’s and Akka[8]’s friends and work colleagues and our classmates come calling.
Going to friends’ homes during festive occasions is very much a thing of a past. Malaysians used to invite friends from different races and religions to their homes. Unfortunately, the practice of ‘open house’ slowly declined and has mostly faded. There are no more closely knit communities as when we were in Thambapillai Kampung, Brickfields. Most people seem quite happy to celebrate in neutral places like restaurants where there is no fear of offending religious sensibilities. Muslims want halal food and Hindus should not be served beef. Then there are the vegetarians and the vegans. The spirit of coming together is lost by that which divide us and not celebrate our diversity.
All my Christmases have changed over the decades. Now many years on since the Brickfields Christmases, with our parents having passed away there is no family home Christmases. My siblings have their own families and my sons all grown up and with their own families do not celebrate Christmas either. So, I’m left with the happy memories of my childhood Christmases. Still, it is a happy occasion.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Family photo for Christmas in our Brickfields home. Circa 1967Tharumaraj Annan (eldest brother) standing in front of our attap-roof kampung house. Circa 1968.Photos provided by Malachi Edwin Vethamani
Malachi Edwin Vethamani is a Malaysian Indian poet, writer, editor, critic, bibliographer and academic. He is Emeritus Professor with University of Nottingham. More details at : www.malachiedwinvethamani.com
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Columns stand on columns, the high arch flares light like white torchfire illuminates the marble hill, you transform the enclosure, you filigree clear sleeves of imagined air to gather camellias the winter sky emptied, bled in ashes on the snow.
Winter. Photo Courtesy by John Swain
John Swain lives in Le Perreux-sur-Marne, France. His most recent chapbook, The Daymark, was published by the Origami Poems Project. Additional information may be found at www.john-swain.com.
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Keith Lyons in conversation with Harry Ricketts, a writer and mentor who found himself across continents and oceans
Harry Ricketts has authored thirty books and mentored many writers, including Keith Lyons. Photo Courtesy: Robert Cross
Harry Ricketts is a New Zealand poet, essayist, and literary biographer whose work has gained recognition for its wit, lyricism, and insight into memory, identity, and everyday life. He has published widely across poetry, biography, and literary criticism, and his writing blends formal elegance with accessibility. After studying at Oxford University, he taught in the UK and Hong Kong before moving to New Zealand in the early 1980s. A respected teacher and mentor, Ricketts has shaped both the literary culture of New Zealand and the broader English-language literary world through his poetry, essays, and guidance to emerging writers. His works include a major biography of the British India-born journalist, novelist, poet, and short-story writer Rudyard Kipling, The Unforgiving Minute, Strange Meetings: The Poets of the Great War, and his most recent books, the memoir First Things, and the poetry collection Bonfires on the Ice. His How to Live Elsewhere (2004) is one of twelve titles in the Montana Estates essay series published by Four Winds Press. The press was established by Lloyd Jones to encourage and develop the essay genre in New Zealand. In his essay, Ricketts reflects on his move from England to New Zealand. In this interview, he brings to us not only on his writerly life but also his journey as a mentor for other writers.
KL: Tell us about your early life?
HR: My father was a British army officer, and we moved every two years till I was ten: England, Malaysia, two different parts of England, Hong Kong, England. My first words were probably Malay. From eight to eighteen, I went to boarding schools in England; apart from the cricket and one or two teachers, this was not a positive experience.
KL: How do you think moving around affected you, and your sense of self and being in the world? Does that transience shape your perspective and writing now?
HR: I think constantly moving around gave me a very equivocal sense of belonging anywhere and also a strong sense of needing to adapt (up to a point) to wherever I found myself. I was an only child, and friendship became and remains incredibly important to me. Perhaps this hard-wired sense of temporariness has contributed to my trying to produce as many different kinds of books as possible, but eventually you discover what you can and can’t do: I can’t write novels.
KL: How has your sense of ‘home’ evolved in your work over the years?
HR: As above, but I’ve lived in New Zealand for more than forty years, so that must count for something. My second wife, Belinda, was a Kiwi; for thirty years, she was a lovely person to share the world with. I’d say I like to live slightly at an angle to whatever community I’m in.
KL: How did books and poems come into your life, and what do you think have been influences on your later work?
HR: My mother was a great reader and read me Beatrix Potter, A.A. Milne etc as a child. When I was seven, I had measles and had to stay in bed for a fortnight. I read Arthur Ransome’s Peter Duck and then I couldn’t stop. Books were a protection and a passion at boarding school. As for poetry, at school we had to learn poems by heart which I enjoyed and later recited them in class which was nerve-wracking. When I was fifteen – like many others – I fell in love with Keats, then a few years later it was Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, T.S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, C.P. Cavafy ….. I was also listening to a lot of music, particularly singer songwriters like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Richard Thompson, Joni Mitchell.
Everything you read and listen to is an influence. My mind is a lumber-room of things I’ve read and listened to, things other people have said, things that have happened to me and to others, places I’ve been, love and friendship – and all that crops up in my poems in one way or another. Plath and Hughes were a wrong trail. It took me a while to work that out. Well into my twenties, I couldn’t stand Philip Larkin, but not now. I like witty, melancholy poets.
KL: Your first book, People Like Us: Sketches of Hong Kong was published when you were 27. How did that come about.? What satisfaction did you get from seeing your name in print?
HR: People Like Us is a mixture of short stories and song lyrics. Hong Kong, as I experienced it in the 1970s, (still very much a British colony) was a heterogeneous mishmash of styles, and I tried to mimic that mishmash in the pieces I wrote. I was pleased when it got published but it wasn’t much good.
KL: Can you describe your writing space?
HR: I have a small study, but since Belinda died two years ago, I’ve shifted to the kitchen table. She wouldn’t have approved, but the kitchen is light and airy and the stove-top coffee-maker close by.
KL: What is your writing process from start to finish?
HR: I do a lot of drafts. First thoughts can almost always be improved. A friend likes to say, ‘It’s not the writing; it’s the rewriting’, and I agree. But some poems have come quite quickly. When I’m writing prose, I often play music, but not when I’m working on a poem.
KL: What usually sparks a new poem for you: an image, a phrase, or a rhythm?
HR: It can be anything really. I’m usually doing something else entirely – writing an email or some piece of prose or just walking around – and something will interrupt me. It’s often a phrase which for some reason acts like a magnet, attracting another phrase or an images or an idea. It might be something I’m reading; this has happened with English poets like Edward Thomas, Philip Larkin, James Fenton, Hugo Williams and Wendy Cope and New Zealand poets like Bill Manhire, Fleur Adcock and Nick Ascroft. Occasionally, I’ve written a commissioned poem: for a friend’s wedding, say.
KL: How do you balance experimentation with accessibility in your work?
HR: I don’t think like that, but I do try not to repeat myself if I can help it. However, several poems of mine have had successors; so I wrote a poem in the mid-1980s about my six-year-old daughter Jessie called ‘Your Secret Life’, imagining her as a teenager and me waiting up late for her to return home, and my latest collection contains a ‘Your Secret Life 5’, written when she was forty. I’ve found myself writing a few poem-sequences recently, including one about an imaginary New Zealand woman poet. That was quite new for me.
KL: How do your roles as poet, biographer, and critic feed into each other?
HR: Constructively, I hope. I think you can always get prose out of yourself if you sit there long enough (fiction writers might disagree), but not poems. Some initial reverberation/interruption has to happen, some ‘spark’, as you put it. It’s all writing, of course, and writing is a habit. You have to keep doing it, otherwise that part of you switches itself off or attends to other things.
KL: Looking back across more than thirty books, what evolution do you see in your writing life, and what themes do you keep on coming back to?
HR: I think lots of writers (except the very vain ones) suffer from versions of ‘imposter syndrome’ and have problems with their personal myth — that they are a writer. I’ve got a bit more confident that I am a writer and in particular that I can write poems. Getting published helps a lot with the personal myth: something you’ve done is now out in the world. Once you publish a book, though, you lose any control you had over it. People may love it, hate or, worst of all, ignore it. But that’s just the deal.
I prefer the term preoccupations to themes. I’m preoccupied with people, places, trying to make sense of the past, happiness, the role of luck, life’s oddities, incongruities and ambiguities….
KL: You often talk about ‘gaps’, doubt, and ambiguity as central to your work. How do these function in your poetry today?
HR: To measure gaps, to be in doubt, to see the ambiguity in things: that just seems to me to be human. Poems can be acts of discovery or at least partial clarification. They can also simply preserve something: an experience, a moment, a realisation, some sense of those we love.
KL: You describe teaching as a kind of midwifery: helping writers bring out what is already within them. How did you arrive at that approach?
HR: Decades of teaching suggest to me that encouragement is more likely to help someone tell the stories they have it in them to tell rather than giving them a hard time. Writing can be a bit like giving birth and, for some, having support and encouragement is more helpful than trying to do it all on your own. Of course, in the end you do have to do most of it on your own.
KL: What advice did you find yourself giving students most often, and does it still hold true for you?
HR: I have taught poetry courses, but over the last twenty-five years I’ve mostly taught creative non-fiction. I often quote Lytton Strachey’s comment that ‘Discretion is not the better part of biography’ and then add: ‘Nor the better part of autobiography.’ I also suggest that mixed feelings are more interesting to write out of and about than clearcut ones. If you’re writing about someone else, pure admiration tends to produce hagiography, pure dislike a vindictive portrait – all warts, rather than warts and all. Serious doesn’t mean earnest; you can be serious and funny at the same time.
KL: What is the best advice you’ve received as a writer?
HR: The best advice it would have been helpful to be given (but no one did) would have been: ‘Don’t eat your heart out trying to be a kind of writer you aren’t (say, a novelist). Try to find out what kind of writer you are and pursue that as hard as you can.’ Chaucer knew: ‘The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.’
KL: Which authors do you most often recommend to students or emerging poets?
HR: I mostly suggest they should read as widely as they can and that they should read as a writer.
KL: What writers are you returning to most these days?
HR: I often go back to Montaigne’s essays and Orwell’s and Virginia Woolf’s. Poets I often reread include: Derek Mahon, Hugo Williams, Thomas Gray, Wendy Cope, Fleur Adcock, Edward Thomas, Andrew Marvell, Seamus Heaney, Lauris Edmond, Anne French, Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin …
KL: What responsibilities do reviewers have to writers, and what responsibilities do they have to readers?
HR: Reviewers have an obligation to be fair-minded towards their subject and to write something as worth reading (ie well-written and enjoyable) as any other piece of prose.
KL: How can reviewers give criticism that is honest yet constructive?
HR: They should try to understand what the writer was aiming at (rather than the thing they think the writer should have been aiming at) and judge the work accordingly. This is easier said than done. Writers rarely remember the positives reviewers say, and rarely forget the negatives. Reviewing is hard, if you’re trying to do a good job. In a small country like New Zealand, there’s only one-and-a-half degrees of separation, which makes puffing and pulling your punches a tempting prospect.
KL: What kind of legacy do you hope to leave through your poetry and teaching?
HR: Whatever legacy you might leave (and few writers or teachers in the scale of things leave any) is not up to you. But of course writers hope people will positively remember something they’ve written and that their work will continue to be read after their death. When I think of the teachers who have matter to me, I think of them with immense gratitude and I hope some of my pupils might feel something of that, too.
KL: Is there a question about your work that you wish people asked more often?
HR: Interesting question, but I don’t really have an answer. Perhaps ‘Why, given that you also write plenty of poems in free verse, do you still think that there are possibilities in fixed poetic forms like the sonnet, villanelle and triolet?’ I could talk about that for a long time.
KL: If your life was a movie, what would the audience be screaming out to you now?
HR: Keep going! Well, I’d like to think they might.
KL: What’s next for you? What are you working on now?
HR: I’m threequarters of the way through a second volume of memoirs and about to write about a particularly difficult part of my life. I want to finish that and then a third volume, if I can. And write more poems.
*This interview has been conducted through emails.
Here’s your voice from across the world, the kind of time you tend to call. Still magic: “Hi Dad! How are you?”
You’re walking to the train. It’s cold. Your voice breaks up, reassembles, breaks up, reassembles again.
“Something important to tell you.” As you talk, thirty years roll back, telling my father the same thing.
“Are you quite sure?” I hear him ask. Oh yes, quite sure. Sure then and now. But you’ve missed your train; it must’ve left
early for once. That’s all you need. You protest to the official, prepare for coffee and your book.
No, here is your train, after all – running late (leaves on the line?). You’re aboard. You’ve started to move.
(Excerpted from Bonfires on the Ice, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025).
Harry Ricketts is a poet and scholar who has published around 30 books. He has lived in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, since 1981. Until his retirement in 2022, he was a professor in the English Programme at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. His books include the internationally acclaimed The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (1999) and Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War (2010). His recent books include the poetry collections, Winter Eyes (2018) and Selected Poems (2021) and the memoir, First Things (2024). With historian David Kynaston, he is the co-author of Richie Benaud’s BlueSuede Shoes: The Story of an Ashes Classic (Bloomsbury, 2024).
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