Chapter 2of Isa Kamari’s novel, The Throne,has been translated by the author from Malay. We will be running the whole novel as serial through the year. Click hereto read.
A Tiny Piece of Homeland, an autobiographical narrative by Kallol Lahiri in Bengali, has been translated by V. Ramaswamy. Click here to read.
Walking Together, a poem, has been written and translated from Korean by Ihlwha Choi. Click hereto read.
Swopno (Dream), a poem by Tagore, has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click hereto read.
We have started feeling the impact of climate change with a bevy of natural disasters this August. Glacial ice melts, peat fires, haze, rising seas, more storms, warmer climes and fires wiping out greenery are just a few that come to the mind. But, long ago, our ancestors — without the support of technology — survived climate events. Göbekli Tepe (Turkey), an ancient human settlement, more than 11,000 years ago was lush and green. People moved as it turned arid. Humankind was nomadic then. They moved with shifting riverbeds. In Europe, humans survived the last glacial age, about 20,000 years ago. Then, now when we are faced with the reality of climate change, why is it we tremble with trepidation? We even have technology in hand. Ideators and writers like Asimov found solutions. In Caves of Steel (1954), Isaac Asimov had humanity move underground to survive unfriendly surface conditions. He created a huge city underground for humanity while some moved into other planets. Perhaps, the time has come for us to think out of the box. And that is what we hope all of you will join to do in Borderless.
September has thrown up varied content. We have non-fiction which reflects on how changes are a part of human lore and how diverse cultures can co-exist to enrich each other. Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri dwells on this idea while talking of Nazrul’s approach to the Persian Ghazal. He writes, the poet through his adaptation of this form “showed how a culture can absorb another culture without losing itself, and how, in the process, both cultures can become something larger than they were before.” And perhaps from that largeness of thought will emerge a one-world community — that Yatish Kumar S espouses. Maybe from people who think beyond borders, we will find the solution to tackling and adapting to climate change. We have an essay from Charudutta Panigrahi where he attempts to arouse the survival instinct in humans. Young Shruti Keskar writes of how she finds a new lease to life by accepting and adapting to changes while Farouk Guslara philosophises on living and possessions. We have Meredith Stephens adding to the vivacity of non-fiction with a recount of her sailing adventures with wonderful photographs by Alan Noble. And Devraj Singh Kalsi brings in sardonic humour with his piece on art and artists.
A story-poem by Tagore, Swopno (Dream), has also been brought to us in English. An interesting memoir by Kallol Lahiri centring around his childhood in Bengal has been translated by V Ramaswamy. Translations offer fiction from Isa Kamari. He has transcribed in English the second chapter of his Malay novel, The Throne. The novel focussing on psychological torment is being serialised in Borderless.
Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed a rare book-centric memoir by Shanta Gokhale. He tells us, “Of Ancestors and Friends: A Life with Booksis an unusual kind of literary memoir. It is neither a conventional autobiography nor a conventional work of criticism. Instead, it occupies an intimate space between the two, tracing a life’s intellectual and emotional history through books.” Meenakshi Malhotra has discussed the renowned historian Romila Thapar’s memoir, Just Being, a book that reflects not only her own journey but the freedom and outreach that privilege and capability can bestow on women in South Asia. On the other hand, Mudassar Javed Baryar refers to the plight of birongonas, war time widows during the 1971 conflict that birthed Bangladesh, while discussing Saima Begum’s The First Jasmines. He reflects: “Begum’s profound innovation is to turn the narrative back not just to these women’s trauma but to their ‘humanity, resilience and heart’, depicting them as ‘architects of family and community’.” Somdatta Mandal has praised Omair Ahmad’s novel, Homecoming.
We have also featured Kanuprya Dhingra, who has written a book on a unique book bazaar. In a candid exchange, she tells us her non-fiction, The Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, “is for the reader in Singapore, or Mumbai, or London, or Lahore who has their own version of this informal, unruly, necessary space and sees it reflected here. It is a book about books, the people who read them, and the people who make that possible…the book is for everyone.” It’s an interesting read almost inviting you to stroll into the serendipitous democratic reading space full of local colour and stories.
We would like to thank not only Dhingra but all our contributors for their wonderful work. Huge thanks to the fabulous Borderless team for their input and to Sohana Manzoor for her artwork. Thank you all — without all of you and our wonderful readers, it would be difficult to have a journal. In the spirit of ubuntu, heartfelt thanks.
Do pause by our September content’s page. And let’s look forward to the hope for happier climes and times.
Swopno (Dream), a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, can be found in his collection, Kalpana (Imagined, 1900).
Art by Sohana Manzoor
DREAM
Far, far away, In my dreamworld, I travelled to Ujjainipur. I went to the banks of the Shipra River To look for my last life’s first love. Her anklets jingled as she walked Powdered with pollen, holding a lotus, Jasmines in her ears, Jhanti flowers in her hair, dressed in red. I had returned one spring, Finding the path, traveling from afar.
In the temple of Mahakal, Evening prayers were being chanted. The market was deserted. A streak of light Irradiated the darkness above the palace.
A serpentine, narrow, lonely path Led to my beloved’s home. On her doors, framed by two saplings, Were painted a conch and a chakra. On a white marble arch, Sat a statue of an arrogant lion.
My beloved’s pigeons returned home. Her peacocks slept on golden rods. Meanwhile, holding a lamp, Descended my Malavika. Between the staircase and doorway, The evening star peeped in. The fragrance of her body and hair Filled my breath with agitated yearning. Her garments rustled to reveal a motif With sandalwood paste on her left breast. Like a deity she graced the gloaming. The city’s rumour mills stopped silent.
My beloved Placed the lamp slowly by the door. She came to me, held my hand in hers, Silently, asked with melancholic tenderness, “Oh friend! Are you well?” Gazing at her, I wanted to talk but lost my words. I forgot my eloquence as together, We dwelled on each other — I cannot recall— We both longed for togetherness As our speechless tears flowed endlessly.
Together, we pondered by the saplings. I do not know what came to pass but her soft hands hid themselves in my right one like a young bird seeking its nest in the dusk. Her face bowed like a lotus stem on my chest with sad restlessness. Pensively, we met with silent breath.
In the darkness of the night
I lost myself in Ujjaini completely. The lamp by the door Was blown off by a distant breeze. By the banks of the Shipra River, The worship stopped in Shiva’s temple.
This poem has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravartywith editorial input by Sohana Manzoor.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
An conversation with Kanupriya Dhingra with a brief introduction to her book, TheSunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, published by Speaking Tiger Books.
“Most Sundays, I found myself walking alongside hundreds of others for whom Daryaganj was, and continues to be, the primary site of book buying. It was democratic, messy, inclusive, sometimes illegal, often chaotic, but always alive.”
-- Kanupriya Dhingra, Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public
Perhaps, Kanupriya Dhingra’s Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, could be seen as a democratisation of the process of reading. In an ethnographic study of a book bazaar that springs up every Sunday, Dhingra familiarises us with the historicity of the culture of a bazaar, of reading and even locates its roots in the Mughal Faiz Bazaar from the time of Shahjahan (1592-1666).
In an earlier article dated 2020, she had written about the bazaar: “Historian Sohail Hashmi says that Akbarabadi Begum, one of Shahjahan’s wives, built this market in its earliest form. Several historical maps of Delhi show the existence of ‘Faiz Bazaar’ in this area. The name, Daryaganj, itself means ‘a market across a river’, where ‘Darya’ refers to a river (here, the river Yamuna) and ‘Ganj’ refers to a site where trade is conducted. It was not always the same product that was traded here; Daryaganj only became synonymous with the sale of used, rare, pirated books in the 1960s. According to locals, Daryaganj started as a consumer goods market, set up adjacent to the walls between Subhash Park and Kasturba Gandhi Hospital. There were vinyl records and hand-mounted record players, radios, transistors, mechanical goods, medical goods and used clothes; books too found their place. After a few minor relocations not significantly far away from the lanes of Daryaganj, a few booksellers moved to the now absent ‘Lohe ka Pul‘ (Iron Bridge), near Golcha Cinema, from where the street market began to expand. Before its recent relocation to a nearby site by the name of Mahila Haat, the bazaar extended till Delite Cinema Hall. The structure of the market appeared like a long ‘L’, with books stacked on the sidewalks of Netaji Subhash Marg and Asaf Ali Road, and more than 250 vendors.”
Dhingra continued spellbound by the ‘magic’ of this bazaar when she visited it as a child and then, as a university student. Coming from a small town, where bookshops that stocked more than textbooks were a rarity, she supported the booksellers when they protested the ‘legalisation’ and the relocation of the bazaar to a newer site in 2019 and wrote of it in Himal Southasian in an article titled, ‘The death of a book bazaar’.
The book gives fascinating glimpses of booksellers and book buyers, of connoisseurs and of students striving for upward economic mobility in the job market. It houses parents, children, old people and young, book lovers, browsers, students, teachers and more. Dhingra asserts: “A republic, in its original sense, is a res publica—a public thing, a commons, something that belongs to everyone who participates in it. Not owned, not curated, not gatekept. The Patri Kitab Bazaar[1] is exactly this: a space where a rickshaw puller and an IAS officer, a first-generation student and a shauqeen[2] collector, a vendor from Uttar Pradesh and a buyer from Assam all have equal claim to the same pile of books.”
One of the most fascinating stories that emerges is of the Om Bookstore — that can be found in major malls across Delhi and many major cities of India — and Om Books International. Dhingra met the founder Om Mago and this is what she wrote: “Om Mago told me that when he first came to Daryaganj, there was no bazaar to speak of—just a few men who had found this way of living. Books that did not belong anywhere, that had potential afterlives, had been discovered as a sellable commodity. ‘There was need in Delhi, and there were books.’ From that simple equation, he learnt the trade, built connections across Delhi and Mumbai, and gradually transformed a pavement enterprise into what Om Books International is today.”
Dhingra has gathered details from booksellers and connoisseurs. Connoisseurs like Sohail Hashmi and Abdul Sattar gave her historic antecedents while bloggers like, Mayank Austen Soofi, who runs the highly coveted The Delhi Walla blog, and claims to idolise Arundhati Roy and have met her in the bazaar, shared more recent perspectives. Soofi “has been passing in and out of the same neighbourhoods for more than a decade, documenting the minutest social and cultural changes” as the New Yorker noted, giving almost a ‘Proustian quality’ to his posts on Delhi.
Dhingra has noticed that selling books is largely confined to men though women buyers are visible. She sees a difference in approach among the genders, which is an interesting observation, given the fact that Delhi is known for its discriminatory attitude towards women.
What I found most fascinating about the book was the capture of local colours, though the focus was more centred on discussions around North Indian languages. It has interesting snippets like a man who operates pirated books out of the dickey of his car, lodging his ware near an ATM. Dhingra tells us: “At the Patri Kitab Bazaar, pirated books are called D ki kitab—where D refers to duplicate and/or digital.” She mentions too, a publisher that brings out ‘Guru Chela’ ( Master- Disciple) booklets. “There were some 100 colourful booklets with miscellaneous titles of useful literature in Hindi, English, and Hinglish.” These were a mix of write- ups on ‘useful’ tips as well as popular jokes and light literature. Along with these, the vendor sold things like “pocketknives, razors, scissors, tiny notebooks, used fountain pens, old wristwatches and their band.” She also found stalls selling old film posters, lyrics and even ancient coins! A copy of the Lolita (1955, written by Vladimir Nabokov in English) translated to Hindi finds mention. “I found a copy of Lolita in the bazaar once—in Hindi. The title only mentioned Lolita in Hindi, and there was nothing else on the cover except a woman’s portrait. There were no copyright claims inside the paratextual pages—no author, no publisher. For a reader or buyer who is not familiar with Nabokov and his works, it is just another novel in Hindi.”
She makes one feel it’s a must to visit the bazaar, perhaps, with a copy of her book in hand! Her style is smooth, evocative and flows well. Dhingra has a passion which translated to a whole book reflecting a community that is unique in the very fact of its existence, tied loosely by the love of books – not necessarily reading. We interviewed her to discuss her journey and here’s how she responded:
Kanupriya Dhingra
“As an ethnographer of the city streets, I am constantly reminded of the transformative power of walking. It allows us to uncover hidden stories, forge unexpected connections, and shape the world around us.” Can you please elaborate on this “transformative power” and how the bazaar forms and unforms every Sunday?
Until 2019, since the 1970s, Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar was set up between two landmark cinema halls in Old Delhi — Golcha Cinema on Netaji Subhash Road and Delite Cinema on Asaf Ali Road. On any other day, this L-shaped part of the street carried the ordinary rhythms of a working city: government offices, shops and traders, food outlets, traffic on the road. On Sundays, those rhythms would change. Iron and cardboard boxes, tarpaulin sheets, and books spread across the footpath, using the closed shutters of offices as their display backdrop. The bazaar did not occupy the street so much as it temporarily rewrote it. What ethnography taught me to pay attention to is precisely this rewriting of the space that is overdetermined during the week, claimed by traffic and routine and competing uses, is briefly re-scripted by the arrival of booksellers and readers. And then, by evening, unscripted again. Books would go back in their boxes, the tarpaulins were folded, and the footpath was simply itself — flat and indifferent. The street would forget entirely what stood on it. But the people remembered.
Can you tell our readers what is ethnography? Why did you feel the need to do an ethnographic study on the Sunday book bazaar? What would be the target readership of your very well researched book?
Ethnography, at its simplest, is the method of sustained and repeated presence in a place and trying to understand a world on its own terms. What it is not is a survey, an archive search, or a one-time interview. It is slow and embodied. It is, also, deeply dependent on the trust of the people who agree to let you into their working lives.
Because the bazaar exists outside the formal structures that usually produce archives, there are no official records of this market. The only way to know it is to go there, repeatedly, over years, and listen. The book is built from those years of fieldnotes, interviews, and observations. While the formal fieldwork for my doctoral thesis happened in 2019, I had been a regular for a while. I continued spending Sundays at the bazaar across seasons, displacements, and a pandemic. With the support of the booksellers, I documented the 2019 protests in urgent media reports as well, to produce an immediate archive of what happened to the bazaar, instead of waiting to revisit my notes only while writing my thesis.
As for who the book is for — I resisted writing a book that only scholars could read. The Sunday Book Bazaar is for the student who recognises Usha with her handwritten list of textbooks — one that has scope for a few other ‘finds’ because her pocket money allows for it, here, at the bazaar. It is for the shauqeen who recognises their own Sunday morning in these pages. It is for the Delhi reader who has been going to the bazaar for years without quite knowing why. It is for the reader in Singapore, or Mumbai, or London, or Lahore who has their own version of this informal, unruly, necessary space and sees it reflected here. It is a book about books, the people who read them, and the people who make that possible. The research is rigorous, I hope. But the book is for everyone.
You have mentioned the absence of women among the sellers. The few that are there do not even see themselves as sellers but as temporary fixtures in lieu of their husbands. Can you tell us why in the twenty-first century women are still being segregated in the bazaar? Is it justified?
The question of women at the bazaar is more nuanced than it first appears. Women vendors are not absent. Quite a few have been running stalls at Daryaganj for years, some for decades, even if it means supporting their brother or husband or son. What is more important, and what my fieldwork revealed, is that many of them do not claim the identity of bookseller. When I asked directly, the answers were careful, deflective, or simply negative. One vendor, who had been managing her late husband’s stall with evident expertise for decades, told me that this work belongs to men because women cannot “lift heavy books”. Another, who had joined the bazaar more recently, had also lost her husband. She was selling the stock he had gathered over the years, keeping the stall going until her son was old enough to take over. But it was more than that, she said, “He passed away on a Sunday, after selling books at the bazaar. That has to mean something.”
Cities give women this kind of ironic independence. The bazaar is one of its more interesting examples. Anonymity in the crowd, the freedom to occupy public space on their own terms, the economic agency that comes from handling money and stock and customers without anyone particularly watching. And yet the identity, the word bookseller, with its history and its community and its authority, remains something many women at the bazaar do not claim for themselves. The crowd hides them, and that hiding is simultaneously a form of freedom and a form of erasure.
You have also noticed that women buyers are different from men. How and why? Please elaborate. Is this a reflection of the culture/ accepted norm of the city/ the sellers and visitors?
Women’s time in public spaces, especially in Delhi, is measured differently. They negotiate with surveillance and scrutiny. Their purposefulness is driven by necessity. They arrive with clearer lists and are less likely to linger without a specific destination in mind. A woman spending two hours browsing a pavement book market on a Sunday morning is doing something that requires more social permission than the equivalent activity does for a man.
And yet the bazaar’s openness, its visibility from the street, and the absence of walls and thresholds made it more accessible to women than many other public spaces in the city. Even Mahila Haat[3] tends to offer an interior that might feel safer, allowing a new scope for purposeless wandering. Moreover, on a public footpath or inside a gated haat, among other people, that openness is precisely what makes the bazaar feel usable for many women readers. What they do with that openness reflects the social conditions they navigate to get there, not their relationship to books, which is as varied and as shauqeen as anyone else’s.
One of the things that your book makes me wonder is — is book piracy justified? What do you think?
I want to be clear first: I do not support piracy, and it is illegal. That is not a complicated position for me. What is complicated is the context in which piracy at Daryaganj exists and the questions that context raises.
After the March 2026 raid by the Crime Branch in Rohini, in which over twenty thousand books were seized — titles by Arundhati Roy, Yuval Noah Harari, Haruki Murakami, James Clear, among others — Penguin India posted about it on social media. The comments were quite instructive. Readers responded not with sympathy for the publisher but with a straightforward observation: books are not affordable. The original editions of the seized titles cost several hundred rupees each. The pirated edition costs a fraction of that.
I am not using this to justify piracy. I am using it to point to the structural failure that makes piracy legible to so many people as a reasonable response. The formal publishing market has not solved the affordability problem. The bazaar, in its informal and sometimes illegal way, tends to fill that gap, albeit partially. The more interesting question is not whether piracy is right or wrong but what its persistence tells us about the gaps the formal book economy has created and, at the moment, cannot fulfil. A reading public that cannot afford books is not served by enforcement alone.
You have written of “a densely competitive educational ecosystem shaped by chronic state underfunding, unequal infrastructure, and the relentless neoliberal promise of upward mobility through credentialism. In this context, the bazaar does more than sell books: it acts as an unofficial welfare infrastructure, absorbing and responding to gaps produced by shrinking public support and rising private costs.” Please elaborate how the bazaar supports aspirants of upward mobility. Does it help close the gaping gaps we notice among different socio-economic, ethnic groups that exist within the given polity?
The phrase unofficial welfare infrastructure came out of a specific observation: that the buyers I met at Daryaganj were not, in the main, casual browsers. They were people for whom the price of a book at a formal bookshop was a genuine obstacle. Students preparing for competitive examinations. First-generation readers with no family library to draw on. Aspirants using books as tools for a different life.
The state has not solved the problem of access to books. School libraries are underfunded. Public libraries are underused and often inaccessible. The formal book market serves readers who can afford it. The bazaar, entirely without subsidy or policy support, has for six decades been doing what the state has not: putting books within reach of people who need them.
Does it close socio-economic gaps? Partially, and imperfectly. It reduces the cost of access. It creates a space where the student with fifty rupees and the collector with five hundred rupees stand at the same stall. But it does not solve the structural problems that create those gaps — underfunding, unequal infrastructure, the credentialism that makes books feel like necessities rather than pleasures. What it does is something more modest and more important: it refuses to accept that books should only be available to those who can afford them at full price.
What has been your most interesting experience in this bazaar? Please share it with us.
There is one moment I return to often. It was 28 July 2019, a Sunday, a few weeks into my formal fieldwork. I was walking from Delhi Gate Metro Station toward the bazaar, headphones on, no music, mentally preparing for the day’s interviews. My phone rang. It was Qamar Saeed, the vendor I had come to know as the ‘King of Daryaganj’, “Madamji, bazaar uth gaya hai. Aap jaldi aaiye.” Madamji, the bazaar has been lifted. Come quickly.
I walked faster. My mind had gone quiet. No fieldwork instincts, no questions forming. Just the turn onto Netaji Subhash Marg, and then the footpath. It looked the same. That was the first thing I noticed: how completely the same it looked. The shutters were where they always were. The traffic moved. A guard sat outside the closed bank, reading his phone. And then I looked at the footpath, and it was just a footpath. No iron boxes. No tarpaulin sheets. No one crouching. No one haggling. Just concrete, flat and indifferent, as though six decades of a particular kind of Sunday morning had been lifted along with the stalls and taken somewhere I could not see.
I understood something that morning that I had known intellectually but not yet felt, that how fragile and contingent this world was. How much it depended on permissions and invisibilities, on the stubbornness and resilience of people who showed up every Sunday and arranged their books and waited. That day shaped this book more than any other.
Do you think this bazaar will continue to thrive/survive given the online market of books? Please elaborate.
The bazaar has already survived things more threatening than the online market. It has survived displacement orders, pandemic lockdowns, municipal raids, and sixty years of operating without official sanction. The online market is a pressure, but it is not a new kind of pressure.
What the online market cannot replicate is serendipity. You cannot search for a book you do not know exists. You cannot stumble upon a 1978 Penguin edition with someone else’s marginalia on an algorithm. You cannot haggle, or sit on the vendor’s side of the stall and hear a story that changes how you read. The shauqeen will keep coming for precisely these reasons. The students will keep coming because the price point remains unbeatable. The families will keep coming because it is still, on a Sunday morning in Old Delhi, one of the most alive places in the city.
The question is not whether the bazaar will survive but what form it will take. It has always been good at taking new forms — from the footpaths of Jama Masjid to the stretch between Golcha and Delite to Mahila Haat. Each relocation changes something and preserves something. That capacity for reinvention, for showing up in a new place with the same iron boxes and the same stubbornness, is what I mean when I call this a story of resilience. The bazaar has never needed the formal economy’s permission to exist. It is unlikely to start now.
Thank you for your fabulous book and wonderful answers.
Nazrul’s lyricsof Mor Ghumogore Elo Monohor (In my sleep, came the one who won my heart) have been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam.
From Public Domain
Enchanting one, I was deep asleep when you came I saluted you then, reverentially, again and again. In Sravan’s monsoonal cloud, the great Dancer danced Torrentially. From up above, you caressed my eyes softly Possessed by the touch of the beauteous, charming one, My whole body bloomed. For you, my Lord, I filled my tray with flowers blooming in my garden. But alas, and what a shame, you wouldn’t take any! What you did was undo my bun and take from it a flower. How could you leave for what I said in my dream? Now that I’m fully awake, I weep and weep and keep calling you— Oh dear, dear one!
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.
Shantanu Ray Chaudhuriexplores how Nazrul transformed a Persian musical form into a distinctly Bengali expression of love, devotion and cultural coexistence
Nazrul (1899-1976) teaching Nazrul Sangeet. From Public Domain
The journey of the ghazal into Bengal is, in many ways, the story of India itself: a form travelling across languages, faiths, courts and cultures, losing something of itself at every crossing and acquiring something new in return. Born in Arabic poetry, refined in Persian, transformed in the Hindustani world and eventually absorbed into several Indian languages, the ghazal was never a form that remained untouched by the cultures through which it passed.
In Bengal, its most remarkable transformation came through Kazi Nazrul Islam.
Nazrul did not merely introduce the ghazal into Bengali. He made it feel as though it had always belonged there. That achievement becomes all the more remarkable when we remember that Bengali already possessed a rich and deeply individual musical-literary tradition. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had produced the great poet-composers who came to be remembered collectively as the Panchakabis[1]: Dwijendralal Roy, Rajanikanta Sen, Rabindranath Tagore, Atulprasad Sen and, the youngest of them, Nazrul. They wrote their own lyrics and generally composed their own melodies, creating a modern Bengali song tradition that combined literary sophistication with music. Unlike the privileged urban backgrounds of most of his predecessors, however, Nazrul came from poverty and rural Bengal. His childhood and youth exposed him to worlds that the emerging Bengali middle class often experienced as separate: Islamic learning, Persian literature, Hindu mythology, Vaishnava poetry, folk theatre and the songs of rural Bengal. This plurality was not an intellectual position Nazrul adopted later in life. It was the atmosphere in which his imagination was formed.
The ghazal itself had already travelled an extraordinary distance before reaching him. Its origins lay in Arabic poetry, but it acquired much of its classical identity in Persian literature. Persian poets such as Hafiz, Rumi and Saadi gave the form its characteristic world of desire, intoxication, separation, beauty and mystical longing. When the ghazal entered the Indian Subcontinent, it encountered local languages and traditions and changed again. Amir Khusrau and, later, Wali Daccani were among those who helped transform the Persian form into something increasingly Hindustani. In India, the ghazal acquired new vocabularies, new images and new musical possibilities.
At its simplest, the ghazal consists of a series of couplets, each capable of standing independently while being held together by a common metre, rhyme and refrain. Yet the formal structure is only half the story. The real unity of the ghazal is emotional. Its verses circle around longing, often without resolving it. The beloved may be a woman, a man, God, beauty itself, an absent homeland or an impossible ideal. In the Sufi imagination, earthly and divine love can become indistinguishable.
That ambiguity was perfectly suited to Nazrul.
Bengal had experimented with the form before him. Atulprasad Sen is generally credited with the first substantial Bengali experiments with the ghazal. But Nazrul took the experiment much further, turning it into a popular musical form. He did not approach the ghazal merely as a literary structure to be reproduced in another language. He understood that it had to be made to breathe in Bengali.
His preparation for this was unusually rich. He learnt Urdu from his uncle Bazle Kareem and encountered Persian more deeply during his years with the Bengal Regiment in Karachi, where he studied the language with a Punjabi maulavi. He read Omar Khayyam, Rumi and Hafiz, and the attraction was immediate. The Persian poets gave him a vocabulary of intoxication, rebellion, sensuality and mystical desire that seemed to correspond naturally with his own temperament. In the early 1920s, he translated and adapted Persian and Urdu material into Bengali. But it was towards the end of the decade, with greater maturity as both poet and composer, that he began creating original Bengali ghazals in earnest. These compositions were published with musical notation and eventually travelled through gramophone records and radio.
That technological development is important. The Bengali ghazal might have remained an interesting literary experiment had it been confined to printed pages. Gramophone and radio changed its destiny. Nazrul’s songs entered homes, tea shops, theatre halls and public gatherings. A form associated with the Persian and Urdu world could now be heard in Bengali by listeners who might never have encountered its literary ancestry. The ghazal became something to sing and listen to before it became something to analyse.
Nazrul’s great innovation was to make the Persian inheritance sound Bengali without stripping it of its Persian character. Listen to the vocabulary of his songs. Words such as ishq, dil, mahfil, gulshan, bulbuli and gulbahar enter the Bengali lyric naturally. They do not sit there like foreign ornaments. They become part of the emotional vocabulary of the song. The Persian garden begins to coexist with the Bengali landscape.
This is one of the most fascinating aspects of Nazrul’s ghazals. He could summon the rose garden of Persian poetry and, almost in the same breath, evoke Bengal’s rivers, spring winds, flowering trees and muddy pathways. The imported image does not erase the local one. They inhabit the same poem. Consider the rose and the nightingale, perhaps the most familiar pair in Persian and Sufi poetry. Nazrul gives them an intimacy that is unmistakably his:
Mohammad naam jopchhili bulbuli tui aage, Tai kire tor konthe aaji emon modhur raage. Ore golap niribili, bujhi Nobir kodom chhuye chhili, Tai tar kodomer khoshbu aajo tor atore jaage.
*
O nightingale, surely you once whispered the name of Muhammad Is that why such sweetness dwells within your song? O rose, perhaps, in secret, you once touched the Prophet’s feet; That is why, even today, the fragrance of his footsteps lingers in your attar.
The rose and nightingale are ancient Persian symbols. But Nazrul does something wonderfully intimate with them. The Prophet is not invoked through theological abstraction. His presence survives as fragrance, birdsong and touch. Devotion becomes sensory. The sacred enters the ordinary world through things one can smell and hear. This ability to make different traditions converse is at the heart of Nazrul’s art.
Nazrul was writing at a time when Bengal’s cultural life was being increasingly marked by communal anxieties. The Bengali Muslim community, despite its demographic importance, often found itself culturally marginalised within a literary establishment shaped substantially by the Hindu bhadralok[2]. Nazrul’s Bengali ghazals offered Bengali Muslims a literary and musical vocabulary drawn from their own Islamic and Persian inheritance while simultaneously keeping them within the larger Bengali cultural world. That is why his Persianised diction matters. It was not merely decorative exoticism. It helped create a cultural space in which Bengali Muslim listeners could hear themselves without having to abandon Bengali identity.
At the same time, Nazrul was introducing the Hindu listener to an Islamic world that Bengali literature had often treated as something outside the mainstream of its cultural imagination. His ghazals therefore worked in both directions. They gave Bengali Muslims a sense of cultural recognition while inviting Bengali Hindus into an unfamiliar but deeply embedded part of Bengal’s history.
The scholar Dr Pushpita Mitra identifies three broad tendencies in Nazrul’s Bengali ghazals, and this distinction helps us understand the extraordinary range of his achievement. In some compositions, he brought Urdu words and phrases directly into Bengali, creating an idiom that consciously mediated between the two languages. In a second group, he used Persian imagery – gulbahar, gulbagicha, bulbuli, gardens, flowers, seasons – to evoke the landscape of Persian poetry while allowing it to overlap with Bengali nature. In a later phase, his ghazals became less dependent on obviously Persian or North Indian vocabulary and forms and increasingly absorbed his own mature musical and lyrical personality.
One of the most delightful examples of the first tendency is a song that moves between Bengali and Hindustani with a playful sensuality:
Alga koro go khopar bandhan Dil wahin mera phans gayi Binod benir zareen fitay andha ishq mera kas gayi. Tomar kesher gandho kokhon Lukaiye ashilo lobhi amar mon, Behosh hokar gir pari haath mein, Baaju-band mein bas gayi.
*
Undo the knot of your hair My heart is caught there still. In the golden ribbon of your braid, My blind love has tightened its hold. When did the fragrance of your hair Slip secretly into my heart? Before I knew it, drunk and helpless, I fell into your hands And made my home in your armlet.
What makes the song so charming is not simply its sensuality. It is the linguistic play. Bengali and Hindustani rub against each other, creating something that sounds at once theatrical, folkish and unmistakably Nazrul. The Persian vocabulary is not being displayed; it is being lived.
The second tendency in his ghazals is equally revealing, as Dr Mitra points out. Consider his evocation of spring:
The poem begins in the Bengali spring – the season of phagun, flowers, southern winds and the stirring of the heart – but Persian imagery soon enters the frame:
Spring has come, the season of flowers, And every grove is suddenly awake. The southern breeze moves through the blossoms, And the heart begins to sing and dance. The rose-garden spills its colours Over the branches and vines; The cuckoo calls from somewhere within, And sleep and languor open their doors.
The Persian garden has entered Bengal, but Bengal has not been Persianised. The two landscapes overlap. That is perhaps the most important thing Nazrul achieved with the ghazal: he did not translate one culture into another. He allowed them to meet.
And the emotion was never confined to romantic love. Nazrul could move from sensuality to devotion, from devotion to rebellion, from rebellion to loneliness. His ghazals contain lovers, mystics, intoxicated wanderers, flowers, nightingales and gods. Their beloved is often deliberately elusive. Is it a woman? God? Memory? Death? Desire itself? The uncertainty is part of the pleasure. This is where Nazrul’s Islamic inheritance meets the Bengali Vaishnava tradition of biraha, the spiritualized ache of separation. In both traditions, absence can become more powerful than presence. The beloved’s physical absence intensifies his or her presence within the imagination. Nazrul understood this instinctively. His songs rarely hurry towards resolution. Longing is allowed to remain longing.
Consider this:
Bagichay, bulbuli tui phul shakhate disne aji dol, Ajo tar phul-kolider ghum tuteni, tandraate bilol. Ajo hay rikto shakhay uttori bay jhurche nishi-din, Asheni dakhine hawa, ghazal-gawa moumachi bibhol. Kobe se phul-kumari ghomta chiri, ashbe bahire re, Shishirer sparsha-sukhe bhangbe re ghum, rangbe re kapol. Phaguner mukul-jaga dukul-bhanga ashbe fulel ban, Kurider ostho-pute lutbe hashi, phutbe gale dol. Kobi tui gandhe bhule dubli jole, kul peline ar, Phule tor buk bhorechis, ajke jole bhar re aankhir kol.
*
In the garden, O bulbul, do not set the flowers swaying on their branches today; The buds still sleep, their slumber has not yet been broken from their drowsy dreams. Alas, even now, the empty branches tremble day and night in the northern wind; The southern breeze has not yet arrived, nor the honeybees, intoxicated with the ghazal of flowers. When will she come, the flower-maiden, tearing apart her veil and stepping outside? When will the touch of dew awaken her from sleep and paint her cheeks with colour? When spring comes, when buds awaken and the banks overflow, a flood of flowers will arrive; Laughter will spill from the little buds’ lips, and dimples will blossom upon their cheeks. O poet, bewildered by fragrance, you have plunged into the waters and can find no shore; You have filled your heart with flowers, but today, fill the hollows of your eyes with tears.
This ghazal unfolds as a delicate allegory of waiting, awakening and loss. At first, its world seems entirely pastoral: the garden, the bulbul, sleeping buds, empty branches, dew, the southern breeze and intoxicated bees. Yet beneath these images lies a deeply human longing. Spring has not arrived; the flowers remain asleep, the branches shiver in the cold northern wind, and even the bees that will eventually turn the garden into music are absent.
The ‘flower-maiden’ becomes the central image of this anticipated awakening. Her emergence from behind her veil, her cheeks coloured by dew, and the laughter and dimples appearing on the buds transform nature into a living feminine presence. Spring is imagined not merely as a season but as a moment of emotional and sensual renewal.
The final couplet dramatically changes the mood. The poet, intoxicated by fragrance, has plunged into the waters and lost the shore. The flowers that once represented joy now coexist with tears. This movement from expectation to intoxication and finally to sorrow gives the ghazal its poignancy. The poem’s greatest beauty lies in this tension: spring promises fullness, yet the poet discovers that beauty and grief are inseparable. The garden blooms outside while the heart fills with tears within.
In another ghazal, the poet says:
Bosiya bijone keno eka mone Paniya bharone cholo lo gori Cholo jole cholo kande banatal Dake chholchhol jol-lahori. Diba chale jay bolaka-pakhay Bihoger buke bihogi lukay. Kende chokha-chakhi magiche biday Barowa-r sure jhure banshori. Ogo be-dordi o ranga paye Mala hoye ke go gelo joraye. Tobo sathe kobi porilo daye, Paye rakhi tare na gole pori.
*
Sitting alone in solitude, Why do you linger there by yourself? Come, fair one, come to fetch the water; Come, let us go to the water. The forest floor weeps; the rippling waves call out to us. The day slips away on the wings of the cranes; within the bird’s breast the female bird hides. The chokha-chakhi, the loving pair, weeps and bids farewell; To the plaintive strains of Barowa, the flute languishes. O heartless one, at your red feet, who has gone and entwined herself like a garland? The poet, bound to you, is caught in a dilemma: shall I place her at your feet, or wear her around my neck?
This lyric unfolds as a gradual movement from invitation to longing, and finally to surrender. Its opening image, a young woman sitting alone and being invited to fetch water, places desire within the familiar pastoral world of Bengali song. Water becomes both a literal destination and an emotional metaphor: ‘come to the water’ suggests movement from solitude towards intimacy.
The second stanza deepens the mood through nature. Day departing on the wings of the balaka, birds seeking one another, and the chokha-chakhi bidding farewell create an atmosphere of separation. The mention of Barowa and the languishing flute introduces the classical-romantic vocabulary of Indian music, where melody itself becomes an expression of yearning.
The final stanza transforms pastoral romance into personal devotion. The mysterious figure who ‘entwines’ herself around the beloved’s red feet as a garland evokes both surrender and erotic attachment. The poet’s dilemma, whether to place the garland at her feet or wear it, is deliberately paradoxical. Love has erased the distinction between worship and possession. What begins as a simple invitation to the water thus becomes a meditation on desire, separation, devotion and the inability to decide whether love is an act of surrender or an act of embrace.
His later work makes this even more poignant. The death of his young son, the illness of his wife Pramila and the devastating illness that eventually silenced Nazrul himself cast a shadow over the later part of his creative life. The rebellious energy never entirely disappeared, but the songs increasingly turned towards loss, memory, mortality and mystical yearning.
My heart is full; I listen for a song Perhaps today my beloved will come. Dreams are folded into golden wings, And some restless bird of the heart flies away into the sky.
The poem then moves towards the riverbank, the muddy path, the approaching beloved and the drifting scent of the wind. Who is coming? Nazrul never tells us. That is precisely its power. The beloved may be a lover remembered, a divine presence, an apparition from the past, even death itself. The song does not close the door on any possibility. It leaves us waiting on that riverbank.
This late Nazrul is very different from the young ‘Bidrohi Kobi’, the Rebel Poet who thundered against empire, oppression and communal divisions. Yet the two poets are not really different. The same refusal to accept boundaries lies beneath both. The poet who would not accept the separation of Hindu and Muslim traditions would not accept the separation of love from devotion, the sensual from the spiritual, or beauty from sorrow.
This is also why his use of Hindu and Islamic imagery could be so radical without being merely provocative. Nazrul could write of Krishna, Shiva, Kali and Durga with the same intensity with which he invoked Islamic devotional imagery. His Hindu devotional songs, particularly his Shyamasangeet, became an important part of Bengal’s musical heritage. His ghazals, meanwhile, brought Persian and Islamic imagery into Bengali popular music. His artistic universe was not a collection of separate compartments; it was a single, restless landscape.
There were critics who found this troubling. Some conservative Muslims objected to his Hindu imagery; some Hindu critics were uncomfortable with his Persianised diction. Nazrul belonged fully to neither camp because he refused the premise on which both positions rested: that cultures preserve themselves by remaining apart. For him, Bengal had never been culturally pure. Its languages, music, metaphors and religious traditions had been meeting one another for centuries. The Bengali ghazal is perhaps the most beautiful evidence of that history.
What Nazrul finally created was not a Bengali imitation of an Urdu form. Nor was it Persian poetry dressed in Bengali clothes. It was something new: a musical-literary language in which Persian imagery, Arabic devotional vocabulary, Bengali lyricism, folk symbolism, Vaishnava emotionalism and Hindustani musical traditions could exist together without apologising for one another.
And this is where his importance extends beyond the history of the ghazal. Nazrul’s Bengali ghazals were part of a larger cultural intervention. In the Bengal of the 1920s and 1930s, when communal identities were hardening and the colonial political order was encouraging competing claims of belonging, he offered another possibility. A culture could be Muslim and Bengali. It could draw from Persia without ceasing to be Bengali. It could invoke Krishna and Muhammad without treating the two as mutually exclusive. It could be modern without severing itself from folk memory.
The political message was sometimes explicit in Nazrul’s journalism and poetry. In the ghazals it was often quieter. It resided in the very sound of the songs – in their vocabulary, their imagery, their musical forms and their refusal to remain inside a single cultural enclosure. The effect could be political without the song ever becoming a political slogan. Perhaps this is why Nazrul’s ghazals continue to feel so alive. Nearly a century later, his Bengali ghazals remain part of the musical lives of Bengal and Bangladesh. They continue to be sung, recorded and reinterpreted. Their survival is testimony not simply to the durability of Nazrul’s melodies but to the emotional generosity of the world he imagined.
A rose can belong to Persia and Bengal at the same time. A nightingale can sing the name of Muhammad in a Bengali song. A river boat can carry an Islamic prayer. A spring garden can be simultaneously gulbahar and Bengal. A lover can be human, divine or simply remembered. Nazrul understood that these were not contradictions. They were the truth of Bengal. And perhaps that is his greatest gift to the Bengali ghazal: he did not merely give Bengal a new musical form. He showed how a culture can absorb another culture without losing itself, and how, in the process, both cultures can become something larger than they were before. The ghazal arrived in Bengal as an inheritance from elsewhere. Nazrul brought it home.
Shantanu Ray Chaudhuriis a film buff, editor, publisher, film critic and writer. Books commissioned and edited by him have won the National Award for Best Book on Cinema twice and the inaugural MAMI (Mumbai Academy of Moving Images) Award for Best Writing on Cinema. In 2017, he was named Editor of the Year by the apex publishing body, Publishing Next. He has contributed to a number of magazines and websites like The Daily Eye, Cinemaazi, Film Companion, The Wire, Outlook, The Taj, and others. He is the author of two books: Whims – A Book of Poems (published by Writers Workshop) and Icons from Bollywood (published by Penguin/Puffin).
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
There are ghosts all along the coast of Wales, where the shingle spits reach out to sea, and the tide comes in with aquamarine tales of the living, the dead, and those in between.
At Sarn Gynfelyn, when the water’s low, a girl in a vintage gown once walked on the rippling, shimmering, shallow flow: you’d think her a spirit, if you stopped to look, a character from a ghostly book.
That was Emily, who loved the place, who crossed the shingle at a methodical pace, her hem on the water, her mind at rest, no stress in her motion, no tingle of death.
One evening she waded half a mile or more and as the daylight was dying she turned for the shore. But an old man stood watching with wide, staring eyes, then he shattered the dusk with his terrified cries.
“It’s a ghost!” he screamed in authentic surprise and then his screams turned into sighs and it’s easy to see why.
She glided! She floated! She walked on the waves! It was the same dress, the same face and she had the same hair! Just like the girl he once saw in a grave! But Emily was living: she was right there.
Back to the shore she continued to wade. She soothed him, she helped him, she bade him farewell, she smiled to herself at the curious scene, a strange anecdote she now had to tell, of an old man undone by a gown and a dream.
She stopped at a pub on the corner of town, told the bald barman her curious tale, but his moustache went rigid, his complexion went pale. “The screaming man?” he whispered. “But he is long gone! He faded away as all ghosts do and hasn’t been seen for a decade or two.”
Emily blinked, her cider turned sour, and she walked quickly home with a bewildered glower. Everything was spooky, the moonlight was strange, the ideas in her head were all rearranged.
Yes, there are ghosts all along the coast of Wales where the shingle spits reach out to sea, and the tide comes in with its unholy hosts and this very poem is another lost soul. It’s also a ghost. Can’t you tell?
The text will grow fainter and fainter and the words will thin out like water in a lake during a drought or echoes in a bell rung long ago. You thought it was a living poem, just a simple song, but when you return to re-read it it will already be gone.
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.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Title: Of Ancestors and Friends: A Life with Books
Author: Shanta Gokhale
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
Shanta Gokhale’s Of Ancestors and Friends: A Life with Books is an unusual kind of literary memoir. It is neither a conventional autobiography nor a conventional work of criticism. Instead, it occupies an intimate space between the two, tracing a life’s intellectual and emotional history through books. For Gokhale, reading is not merely a habit or a professional necessity; it is a way of living, thinking, and making sense of the world. The result is a book that is at once personal, erudite, playful and deeply reflective.
Gokhale begins with a simple but revealing confession: reading has been the strongest and longest thread running through her eighty-five years. She began reading at seven, reading seriously at twelve, and over the decades discovered, as she puts it, “ancestors and friends”. The distinction is important.
Some books become intellectual ancestors, shaping how we think and see; others become friends, returning at different stages of life and revealing something new each time. The Covid lockdown, which provided her with the time and solitude to reread many of these works, becomes the immediate occasion for this literary journey.
Gokhale brings together criticism and memory. She writes about writers as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jane Austen, Naguib Mahfouz, Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro, alongside major Indian writers such as Shri Na. Pendse, Kiran Nagarkar, U.R. Ananthamurthy and Alka Saraogi. Yet these are not detached academic exercises. Gokhale approaches literature as a living experience. She asks what these books mean to her now, what they meant when she first encountered them, and what they reveal about society, politics, human relationships and the changing world.
Her perspective as an Indian reader gives the discussions an additional dimension. Familiar works are viewed from a location that is neither wholly Western nor narrowly Indian. This enables her to make connections across cultures and literary traditions without reducing one to the other. Her reading is comparative, but never mechanical. The books are allowed to speak in their own voices while being placed within the larger questions of history and contemporary life.
Translation and the craft of writing form another important strand of the memoir. Gokhale’s reflections on the translator’s responsibility demonstrate her sensitivity to language, context, and cultural nuance. Translation, in her understanding, is not simply the transfer of words from one language to another. It involves interpretation, empathy and difficult choices about voice and meaning. Her experience as a writer, critic and translator gives these observations the authority of practice rather than theory.
What makes Of Ancestors and Friends particularly engaging is its refusal to behave like a conventional critical book. Gokhale deliberately calls it a “ramble”. She announces that she does not want to hear the “sound of those shackles” of deadlines, word counts and imposed structures that have accompanied her sixty years of writing. She wants to digress, follow anecdotes, abandon order when necessary and write simply for the pleasure of writing. That freedom becomes part of the book’s charm.
The anecdotes about her reading life are among its most delightful passages. The excitement of finding a long-sought book in a dusty second-hand bookstore, the mystery contained in inscriptions in old books, and the affectionate possessiveness of a true bibliophile are described with wit and warmth.
Her encounters with writers and playwrights from Maharashtra bring another personal dimension to the narrative. These episodes prevent the book from becoming overly cerebral and remind us that literature is ultimately connected with people, places, friendships and lived experience.
There is also an implicit philosophy of reading here. Gokhale demonstrates that rereading is not repetition. We change, and therefore the books change with us. A novel encountered in youth may acquire an entirely different significance in old age. Characters once admired may become troubling; passages once overlooked may suddenly appear profound. In this sense, it is as much about the changing reader as it is about the books being read.
The book’s intellectual richness never entirely overwhelms its humaneness. Gokhale writes with the confidence of a seasoned literary practitioner but also with the curiosity of someone who has never lost the pleasure of discovering a book. Her prose combines critical sharpness with humour, anecdote with analysis, and scholarship with accessibility.
The book, in a nutshell, is a celebration of the life of the mind—and of the enduring companionship that books can offer. It reminds us that reading is not an escape from life but one of the ways in which life becomes more intelligible. Gokhale’s literary ancestors have shaped her, her fictional friends have accompanied her, and rereading has allowed her to meet them again. In sharing those encounters, she invites readers to look back at their own bookshelves and remember the books that, in one way or another, made them who they are.
.
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.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Egyptologists through the sand fast as busy beetles, looking for curse rock kings with faces of apple crumble that fall apart like the plots of ham-fisted detective novels on the rack; scratch-and-sniff femme fatales that smell like bubble gum in amber. Perspiration from the sweat houses and bait shop wrigglers on the hook. Infusions of blood libel and spoons of flustered custard, that darning needle way you nose through traffic. Machine gun nests moonlighting as electrical boxes and broken beer bottles in the ramshackle gutter. “The findings, collect the findings!” I hear a surprise party voice demand. Sounds like razor blade soup, so I refuse. Ants have hills they die on, I see it every day. On my way to corner convenience, bellowing out the hits like some shoelace god in a world of knots. And what is left behind is a hoarder’s reminiscence, clutter to a less-seasoned mind. You become a part of it whether you are careful or not, which is reason enough to take your clumsy chances.
From Public Domain
Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Borderless Journal, GloMag, Red Fez and Lothlorien Poetry Journal.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
My name is Arthur. I’m a metal artist, and a lot of my inspiration including my raw materials come from wandering through old automobile salvage yards. I was scrounging around for pieces for a new project when I spotted a beat-up little red wagon, an iconic model named “Radio Flyer” wedged between the rusted shells of two old cars.
The Radio Flyer was founded by an American company in 1917 and became an American cultural symbol. Its mangled condition wedged between cars made overseas was a strong metaphor for simpler times, manufacturing jobs lost forever, the American rustbelt, and something much more profound to me.
The wagon had been in a collision of its own. Twisted up inside the shards of rusting red metal was a tattered notebook. I paid five dollars but would soon discover my purchase was more than artistic, the contents of the notebook were a repayment of my small investment beyond measure.
One rainy evening in front of the warm glow of a fireplace with a glass of brandy, I opened the notebook and realised it had been written by a little boy who was just learning to write.
I want to share the original contents, but found it necessary to fix a child’s misspelling, no grammar, and lack of punctuation so his observations are understandable. The rest I left alone, because every now and then an old junkyard gives back something that shouldn’t have been lost, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that this little notebook was all that was left of one small boy’s adventure and the long walk through a short life he took with his red wagon.
THURSDAY
I am Tommy.
I am four.
Mommy gave me this notebook.
She said if I write in it every day, I will be smart.
I have a red wagon.
Gramps gave it to me for my birthday.
He said red things are easy to find if you lose them.
Today I found a bird.
It was under the old oak tree in the park.
I thought it was a leaf because it was jumpy.
Then I saw it was a red robin.
It had a red tummy.
Its wing was all funny.
I asked, “Your wing broke?”
The bird looked at me.
It was sad.
Then I put my sweater on him and put him in my wagon.
Mommy says we help with little things, even scary insects if they are outside.Inside, they go to insect heaven.
Mommy and daddy weren’t home, so I took the robin to the animal doctor.
The lady said, “Doc Ross is sick.”
I said, “My bird is sicker.”
She said, “Maybe the hospital can help?”
I said, “For birds?”
She shrugged.
Grownups shrug when they don’t know what to say.
The hospital was across Sycamore Road.
Mommy and daddy say, “Don’t cross Sycamore Road.”
Grampa says some people forgot how to be happy “down there”.
I don’t know what that means.
I know what pancakes mean.
I know what hugs mean.
I know that I’m not happy when I am sick.
The bird made a little peep.
I think he wants me to pull.
So, I pulled.
The wagon made a squeaky noise.
I like that sound.
It sounds like a mousy with boots.
I got to Sycamore Road.
Nothing happened.
No monsters.
No dragons.
Just a busy road.
So, I crossed.
A nice man was smelly and pushed a market cart.
He helped me cross the street.
He held my hand while I pulled my cart and he pushed his cart.
He said, “Wait for the green sign to say, ‘WALK’. Green says it’s safe to cross but look both ways anyhow, okay? We live in a world where everything doesn’t mean what it’s supposed to, young man. Keep pullin’ your way through life and I’ll keep pushin’.”
He went away with his cart full of his closet like mine at home.
I waved goodbye.
I think he was nice.
I crossed Sycamore Road for the first time.
The houses have gotten old.
There was broken glass.
Lots of trash lying around.
One house had flowers.
One had no windows.
One had a chair on the roof.
I don’t know why?
Maybe somebody wanted to sit high.
A dog barked at me.
I barked back.
Then I remembered I must be brave because the bird was little and hurt.
If I was little, I would want somebody to pull me too.
I think I got lost.
I cried a tiny bit.
Not a lot.
A girl found me.
She had black hair.
She said, “What’s that bird doing in your wagon?”
I said, “A robin needs to go to the bird hospital.”
She said, “You’re not from here.”
I said, “No. I’m from my house.”
She laughed.
I liked her laugh.
It sounds like gumdrops falling on the floor.
“My name is Lily”, she said.
“My name is Tommy.”
Lily said, “My momma works at the hospital.”
I was happy.
I almost hugged her.
But I don’t know if she liked hugs.
She held my hand.
Her hand was warm.
I wasn’t lost anymore.
The hospital was big.
It smelled like soap and dirty laundry.
A man had a hurt foot.
The baby was loud.
A nurse came.
She had tired eyes.
Lily hollered, “Momma!”
The nurse kissed Lily.
Lily said, “Tommy has a sick bird, but doc Ross is sick.”
“Oh dear,” she said.
She picked up the robin like it was a bubble which can pop.
“My name is Beatrice.”
I said, “I’m Tommy.”
She took us to a little room.
Then a doc came.
He said, “The wing is injured but not broken. He needs somebody to love him for a little while. I know a ‘bird lady’ who will take care of your friend.”
Hospital wasn’t happy.
People are scared.
People are hurt.
Everyone wearing white and green ran around in a hurry.
Then a lady came in.
She had white hair.
When she saw Lily and Beatrice, they all hugged like they loved each other, like Grampa when he looks at the moon and thinks about Grandma who died.
Then she looked inside my wagon.
“My,” she said.
“I had a wagon just like this.”
I asked her if she lost it.
“No, sweetheart. I lost being little.”
I didn’t know you could lose that?
“My name is Mrs. Willow.”
She lifted the bird up and put him on the table.
The bird liked Miss Willow.
“I can fix this wing with a simple soft gauze bandage to keep the wing close to the chest and immobile. You can come and visit every day.”
I asked, “Do you live below Sycamore Road?”
“Yes, Tommy.
“I have a big house with happy birds, trees, and a kitchen with milk and cookies for you and Lily when you visit.”
I forgot I wasn’t going to pass Sycamore Road anymore.
I cried a tiny bit again.
Lily and Miss Willow asked why?
I said, “Daddy and mommy gonna’ be mad.”
“I’ll try and help them understand, dear.
“You were being compassionate and a steward of nature.”
Miss Willow took Lily and me into her clown car.
It was painted with flowers.
Lily said, “Miss Willow drives a hippie car.”
I liked the hippie car.
When I got home mommy and daddy were on the porch.
Mommy hugged me so hard my nose got squished.
Daddy asked me, “Where did you go?”
“The hospital with my hurt red robin,” I said.
“You crossed Sycamore Road?”
“I guess so.”
He shut his eyes and shook his head. Daddy does that instead of yelling at me.
Mommy asked, “Were you scared?”
I thought about my day.
I remembered the dog.
I remembered getting lost.
I remembered Lily.
I remembered Beatrice.
I remembered Mrs. Willow.
I said, “It is not good to cross a road unless the green lite says ‘WALK’. No, mommy. I wasn’t scared.”
“Then why did you cross against our rules?”
“Because my sick robin would die under the oak tree.”
I told them Miss Willow was a bird doc who drove a hippie car. Mommy hugged Miss Willow for bringing me home.
SUNDAY
Miss Willow, Lily and her Beatrice came to my house with the robin.
Miss Willow made cookies.
Beatrice brought soup because Grampa had a cough.
Lily picked flowers for mommy.
We all sat on the porch.
Miss Willow sat close to Beatrice on the porch.
They smiled at each other.
Like they had a secret.
Grampa smiled too.
Later I asked him.
Are they friends?
He said, “I think maybe they always were.”
The robin got better.
He jumped and flapped.
Miss Willow said the bird needs more rest at her house and we can visit.
Mommy said, “Okay”.
Daddy went golfing before they came over.
I don’t know why.
WEDNESDAY
We went to Miss Willow’s house.
Lily lived there with her mommy and Miss Willow.
Lily said she has no daddy.
Lily said she was happy with her mommy and Miss Willow.
It was an old house but happy.
I saw birds.
Dogs.
Sleeping cats.
I smelled cookies.
Miss Willow had a party for the bird.
Everybody was there.
Me.
Mommy.
Grampa.
Lily.
Beatrice.
Mrs. Willow.
Lots of people I don’t know came to the party, but Daddy was playing golf. He likes golf very much.
Beatrice and Miss Willow don’t know golf. I like that.
I picked up the robin.
I told the robin, “You don’t have to be scared.”
I opened my hand.
He fell.
Then he jumped
He flied out the window.
He flied over the house.
He flied over Sycamore Road.
Miss Willow said, “Birds know how to get home.”
I think people do, too.
Gramps said, “Birds don’t know where people make lines they won’t cross.”
I think that is smart.
Mommy says I must write what I learned.
I learned birds are little.
I learned wagons squeak.
I learned hospitals are good.
I learned Lily is my friend.
I learned Mrs. Willow smiles with her eyes.
I learned Beatrice does too.
I learned Daddys can fear things they don’t understand.
I learned mommy’s and daddies are different.
I learned robins don’t care what side of Sycamore you live on.
I learned don’t trust signs even if they are green.
I learned we meet nice people anywhere.
SATURDAY
I miss the red robin, so mommy made a trip to a national park to see if he was there.
Maybee, he has a friend like my friend Lily?
Mommy says I will see lots of birds.
Daddy says it will be a long drive in the car and won’t want to make any stops to save time.
I hope I see my red robin and he’ll know it’s me when he hears my wagon wheels.
I’m tired and need to sleep in the car until we get to the national park.
From Public Domain
Jonathan Ferrini is the author of nearly 100 short fiction stories, poems, and screenplays. A partial collection of his short fiction may be found inside “Hearts Without Sleeves-Twenty Three Stories” available at Amazon. Jonathan is the writer/host of the Razor’s Ink Podcast nearing 90 weekly episodes where he discusses film, television, and music. Jonathan received his MFA in motion picture and television production from UCLA and is a candidate for the undergraduate diploma in Creative Writing at Oxford University.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
