Categories
Poetry

The Sky Salutes

By Shailja Sharma

THE SKY SALUTES

To those who patiently listen behind the stutter
To those who smile at an untended feeling hidden in a tantrum
To those who see the chance of fire in the rub of two stones
Lighting up pathways in a dark forest
The sky salutes 

To those who nod at words spoken from a distant alley
To those who shake hands with the person and not their credentials
To those who drag the sun amidst a hundred clouds
Sparking a hope on the solemn face of Earth
The sky salutes 

The sky salutes by embracing them in a bright-yellow hug 
And by sprinkling confetti around the moon
The sky celebrates them floating orange petals at their sun-set
And covering their heads with eternity
The sky simply salutes

Shailja Sharma is a mental health provider and a multilingual author.  Apart from scholarly publication, her literary writings have been nationally/internationally published. 

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Categories
Stories

The Persistence of Memory

By Vedant Srinivas

Despite rolling the window firmly shut, Dhruv could still feel the dust swivel inside the car and settle on his skin. He could smell the combined whiff of fried pakodas mixed with rotting trash, as if the transparent glass pane was no barrier for the hazardous environment outside to which he had once belonged. Sweat rolled down in beads and collected at the nape of his neck, and he wiped it with a crumpled handkerchief. Small apartment blocks came into view on both sides, with cycle rickshaws parked on either side of the gate. Rusted clotheslines jutted out from the balcony on each floor. They were hung with clothes of varied shapes and colours. A car honked twice, and someone yelled in return.

He eyed the outside proceedings with a strange fervour, his eyes taking in the action that seemed already imprinted in the depths of his memory. It wasn’t so much perception as re-creation; he had, after all, spent his childhood roaming the same streets of north-west Delhi. Remembrances swept to the shore of his mind, summoning up something buried and forgotten inside him. He distracted himself with more practical concerns. What was he to say to Digant’s father? Would he recognise him?

The taxi took meandering turns down narrow lanes. “They all look the same,” the driver remarked, his tall figure bent as he struggled to look through the windshield. Indeed, the roads did look the same — row after row of vehicles were parked in every inch of space available. Yawning over them were emaciated trees providing respite from the excessively harsh sun. Two boys with long rakish hair zoomed past on a motorcycle, their sunburnt faces exuding joy.

The car took a right turn and came upon an apartment gate populated by people in white. Some were on the phone while others were standing together in groups, waiting for instructions to be given. Dhruv paid the taxi and stepped out, smoothening the creases on his white kurta. He felt a strange sensation in the pit of his stomach. He had, since he received the news, thrust it in the back of his mind, refusing to engage with it, and had himself been vaguely surprised by his stoic reaction. Now it was bubbling in his gut, threatening to spill over.

Dhruv exchanged handshakes and condolences with people he assumed were family, and was shown directions to the flat on the first floor. The door was open, and smoke billowed out from the narrow entrance, wafting in tune with the pandit’s recitations. Some of the furniture had been moved and replaced by threaded mats to accommodate the shraddh ceremony ( funeral rites). There was an air of forced busyness inside the flat; people scurried about carrying various things, whispering quietly to each other or into their phones, as if stillness would collapse the facade that had so painstakingly been constructed by everyone present. Without this structured pretence, reality itself would lose its consistency, and make them confront that which perhaps lacked definition.

In one corner of the room, some women sat huddled together, rocking to and fro. Dhruv recognised Digant’s mother amongst them. Her eyes were red and puffy, and her distant gaze seemed to pierce through the opposite wall. A ceiling fan turned lugubriously near to where she sat. Mr. Singh, Digant’s father, sat next to the officiating priest, his fingers locked tightly together as he tried to follow the priest’s sharp intonations. His eyes were glued to the body that lay in front. The flicker of recognition in his eyes upon seeing Dhruv soon transformed into a dull glaze.

 Dhruv moved closer, his hands folded in a namaste-like posture. It was wrapped in a white shroud, with cotton buds placed in the nose. There were dark pouches under the eyes. The skin too had aged; the glowing white of ten years ago had now turned into a sickly yellow. He peered hard at what had once been Digant. Try as he might, Dhruv ​​couldn’t muster anything as complete and engulfing as grief. The pinch of bereavement he felt was for a life snuffed out, a death that had taken place, utterly devoid of particularities.

Dhruv had received the news last night through the school group. More details had emerged, once the initial outpouring of shock and concern had subsided. The rope had been tied to the ceiling fan, and the door locked from inside. No note had been found and no foul play suspected, though he had been known to lead a rough life.

Dhruv glanced around the room and spotted a familiar face at the end of the passage. He walked towards Rohit and they hugged awkwardly, putting one arm sideways around the other’s shoulder. Rohit had been in Digant’s section, and had also been part of the football team with Dhruv. His hair had already started greying; a paunch of considerable size jutted out from his middle. Standing next to him were two other schoolmates whose faces he recognised but whose names he couldn’t recall. They politely nodded at each other. It felt odd to meet under such circumstances.

Leaning against a wall, Dhruv and Rohit observed the proceedings, with hands clasped respectfully at the front. The priest was pouring ghee into the crackling fire while chanting archaic mantras. Their eyes smarted from the smoke of fiery oblations; tears of grief freely mingled with those produced by the stinging fire. Dhruv found his mind wandering. He wondered what view tradition accorded to such an event, and whether the rites would be different in this case. There was an uneasiness in the room that belied even the genuine concern he could see entrenched on faces and eyes. Rohit turned to Dhruv, put a hand around his shoulder, and said in a caressing voice, “I can’t even begin to imagine what you are going through. After all, you guys were best friends.”

Dhruv started, his feet almost giving away under him. Suddenly thirsty, he stumbled towards the kitchen, wading through the ever-increasing number of people. More than concern, it felt like an unbidden accusation. Surely calling them as best friends would be going too far? Yes, they had spent some important years of their childhood together, but that was true for everyone who had lived in the locality and gone to their school. It felt intrusive to think that someone else had formed such an important opinion without bothering to consult him or the facts.

The water filter beeped a faint red as water began to drip out of the nozzle. Flashes of the distant past, sieved through his memory, came upon Dhruv — bunking school and spending the day playing pool at one of the shady centers in Pitampura, the regular fights they’d get into, alcohol, rustication… Image after image played successively in the recesses of his mind; he was unable to think of a single school memory that didn’t have Digant in it.

Dhruv suddenly felt swamped by unreality. His current existence — his job as an advertising filmmaker, his daughter and wife back in Bangalore — had nothing to do with the memories that now assuaged him from all sides. He had lost touch with everyone as soon as he entered college, and had somehow managed to do well for himself, despite the odds, proving everyone — including his parents — wrong. He was now fully wedded to a life of ‘upward mobility’ and the sophistication that came with it. Indeed, his entire childhood, including Rohit and the others lounging outside, seemed now like a mythology that had been invented from scratch. To think that he had grown up in this grimy locality of corruption and crime, sharing secrets and confessions, shouting songs of friendship and love, with the same people whom he could barely recognise seemed to him a fiction of the highest order. 

The kitchen window was blowing wind like a furnace, and he found it difficult to breathe. Stepping out, he made his way to the bathroom and locked the fledgling door. The drain cover had mounds of wet hair stuck to it. Sitting on the commode, another hazy image assuaged him, sending shudders through his body. A drunken reverie, teenage angst, him and Digant, valiant and masculine, proclaiming their allegiance to the famous 27 club as a revolt against life, their deaths too enshrined in history …

Later, at the crematorium, the men listlessly shifted their weight and scratched their faces as they stood huddled around the burning pyre. Dhruv had helped with the preparations and now, standing at a distance, watched plumes of smoke merge with the blinding sky. Bereft of its materiality, Digant again existed as he had before, as a submerged and fleeting reminiscence. Dhruv suddenly felt tired and nauseous. A vague feeling of inertia hit him. The present moment curdled in the heat of the afternoon, and he was confronted with lumps of empty time as it stretched across the burial ground, shimmering and undulating like the funeral fire. Unable to stand it, he nudged Rohit on the shoulder and whispered into his ear if he wanted to go have a beer afterwards.

 *

Years later, while directing some extras for an advertising shoot in Himachal, Dhruv would spot a local theatre performer — a dot on the camera monitor — struggling to master the sequence. In exasperation, he would yell out, “Digant, keep to your mark and don’t stray out of the circle.” Non-plussed faces would stare back at him, unsure of who he was talking to. The words that had come crashing out would be swallowed back just as soon, followed by a long period of silence. For the rest of the day, he would walk around in a reeling daze, and try not to stare at the young man who had unwittingly, instantaneously reminded him of what had once been.

Vedant Srinivas studied Philosophy and went on to do a diploma in Filmmaking. His interests fall in the interstices of literature, anthropology, cinema, and poetry.

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Poetry of Jibananda Das

All Afternoon Long

Poetry of Jibananda Das, translated by Fakrul Alam

Courtesy: Creative Commons
ALL AFTERNOON LONG
All afternoon long I saw Bashir inside the paddy field.
All through the afternoon the skeleton of that three-storied red brick building
Besides the paddy field was being set up.
				(Everything is turning urban!)
Who owns that building? Why is it being built?  
	In the minds of the birds perched on this shore in fading evening light, 
		Or unlike the birds, or the boatmen in the boats plying here or the other shore
With their usual outcries,
The blue sky looked on impassively, its mind vacant. 
	In my dream at night, I saw Kolkata’s tram company getting ready to be here as well.
		Bashir’s bullocks twain out in this day’s sun look for a break  
As domesticated quadrupeds of the world will.
		Which country’s what animals’ and which tribes’ sketches will they resemble
		In becoming museum tales for the high-born and in being immortalised?
						The truths about them will be lost steadily!
			And yet in this land of museums, in the soundless but open room of one of them,
Could it be they would go up in flames without making civilisation any poorer
				Despite its stupendous piston?
Here the only story everyone still knows is of the jackdaw and the fairy tale princess, Shankhamala!
There are innumerable bird, nests and eggs on treetops here but still they haven’t been able to build
 this day a scientific poultry shop!

(These translations are from Jibanananda Das: Selected Poems with an Introduction, Chronology and Glossary, translated by Fakrul Alam, published by The University Press Limited, Dhaka, 1999. Republished with permission from the original publisher.)

Jibonanada Das (1899-1954) was a Bengali writer, who now is named as one of the greats. During his life he wrote beautiful poetry, novels, essays and more. He believed: “Poetry and life are two different outpouring of the same thing; life as we usually conceive it contains what we normally accept as reality, but the spectacle of this incoherent and disorderly life can satisfy neither the poet’s talent nor the reader’s imagination … poetry does not contain a complete reconstruction of what we call reality; we have entered a new world.”

Fakrul Alam is an academic, translator and writer from Bangladesh. He has translated works of Jibanananda Das and Rabindranath Tagore into English and is the recipient of Bangla Academy Literary Award (2012) for translation and SAARC Literary Award (2012).

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Categories
Stories

A Balochi Folktale: The Precious Pearl

Translated from the Balochi retelling* by Fazal Baloch

Courtesy: Creative Commons

Once there lived a poor man who made his living by selling firewood. One day he was chopping a tree in a forest when suddenly his axe got stuck in a log. Despite all his efforts, he could not pull out the axe.

A bird perching on the tree asked: “Who are you? Why are you chopping the tree?”

“I’m a poor man. I sell firewood to feed my family,” replied the man.

The bird gave him a pearl and said: “It’s the most precious pearl in the world. Sell it out and live the rest of your life in prosperity. And listen, never come to the forest to split trees again”.

The man took the pearl and strolled back home. When his wife saw him coming with empty hands, she shouted at him and said: “Where is the wood? What will our children eat today?”

The poor man held her the pearl and said: “Take this and sell it.”

The woman carried the pearl to a shop and said: “I’ve a pearl to sell.”

 The shopkeeper after examining the pearl and said: “It’s a very precious pearl. I’m afraid I can’t pay you its price even if I continue paying through my my lifetime.”

The woman said: “First give us some ration. I’ll leave the pearl with you. Sell it out in the market and pay us the reminder of the money.”

The shopkeeper agreed.

The woman returned home and asked her husband to go catch the bird and bring it home. She said: “When we have the bird in our possession we will soon run into enormous wealth. The money we are going to obtain from this one pearl is like stagnant water which will soon dry out and we will become poor again.”

But the husband replied: “How can I go to the jungle again? I made a promise to the bird that I would never turn up there again”.

“It doesn’t matter. Go and strike the tree with your axe. When the bird addresses you, pretend to be deaf. Eventually, it will alight on your shoulder and draw its beak close to your ear. That is the time to capture it.”

The husband did exactly what the wife had told him. When the bird perched on his shoulder, he caught hold of him and carried it home. They made a beautiful cage for it. It was a pretty bird. His both sons always played with it.

The shopkeeper, who actually was a wizard, assumed that it was perhaps the magical bird about whom he had heard many stories. Whoever should eat the bird’s meat would become a king. Whoever ate the liver, would find a pearl under his pillow every morning. He yearned to possess the bird.

The shopkeeper had also started seducing women. A woman fell in love with him inasmuch as that she killed her husband to marry her new lover.

A month after their marriage one day the shopkeeper asked his wife: “How much do you love me?”

“I love you more than my own life.”

“Can you kill the bird for me?” asked the husband.

“Of course.”

The wife stole the bird and killed it.

Then the husband advised the wife thus: “Cook its meat, liver and skull in three separate pots.”

The wife followed her husband’s instructions and cooked the bird in three different pots and retired to her room for a nap. When his wife’s sons from her first marriage returned home, their old maidservant who had heard the conversation of the couple, told them everything about their mother’s relationship with their stepfather and the secret about consuming the bird’s meat and liver. Then she asked the boys to eat the bird’s meat and liver and leave immediately. She feared their stepfather would kill them if he learnt that they had devoured the bird. The elder brother ate the meat while the younger one consumed the liver quickly and they left the house.

The maidservant buried the bird’s skull, tore her dress, smeared her hair with dust and began wailing. The woman came out to see what was going on. The maidservant said: “Your sons assaulted me. They consumed the bird and left. I called you out for help but you didn’t listen”.

When his husband came to know about this, he shouted in rage: “I’ll not leave the boys alive. I’ll find them wherever they have gone.”

After wandering for almost a whole day, the two brothers reached a jungle in the evening and decided to spend the night under a tree. Off in the distance, they noticed a spiralling dust approaching them. They knew it was the wizard following them.

The two brothers shot at the dust with their arrows. As a result, the wizard was wounded and could not proceed forth. Both brothers decided that when one brother slept, the other would stand guard there to keep a watch for wild animals. The elder brother slept first.

The younger brother noticed the presence of a bird on the tree. Since they were hungry, he shot the bird. It fell on the ground. He needed fire to roast the bird but he did not have any matchstick on him. Far in the distance he noticed the flames of a fire. So, he hurried towards it. But the more he went forward, the farther the fire moved. At last, he gave up and took returned to his brother.

Meanwhile, when the elder brother woke up and did not find his brother, he thought he might have been killed by a wild beast. Thus, with a heavy heart he resumed his journey. He reached a city and found a huge crowd had gathered. He enquired what was happening of one person. The man told him that their king had died and as per their custom the queen would release a bird, and whosoever the bird perched on, would be appointed the king. He stood at a corner to see how things would unfold. The queen released the bird, everyone held his breath, the bird soared high and then perched on the boy’s shoulder. Everybody was surprised!

As he was a stranger in the city, the elders decided to release the bird again. Not the second but the third trail also brought the same result. Hence, he was conducted to the palace, where he was crowned as the new king of the land. Since he was worried about his younger brother, he made a proclamation saying that whosoever saw a stranger in the city, should produce him before the king.

When the younger brother reached back to the tree, there was no trace of his elder brother. He assumed his elder brother had left and it was perhaps not destined they would cross paths again. Thus, with a heavy heart he resumed his journey.

At dawn he reached the frontiers of a city. Soldiers apprehended him and asked him who he was and where he was heading. He told them: “I’m a stranger and am looking for my lost brother.”

The soldiers started beating him till he became unconscious. All of a sudden, one of the soldiers remembered the proclamation of the king about a stranger. To avoid the king’s wrath, they secretly threw the boy into a well. In the morning, a washerman came to draw water.

He found the bucket unusually heavy. Thus he pleaded: “O, whether you are a human, a jinn or an angel, please leave my bucket. I have to wash huge piles of cloth to feed my family”.

The boy replied from beneath the well saying:

“I’m a human being. Pray draw me out. From today onward, I’ll be like your son and you will be like my father.”

The washerman at last drew him out of the well. When he was unconscious, water had coursed into his belly. He vomited out a huge sum of the pearls. The washerman was astonished. He gathered the pearls in the bucket and took the boy home. Now every morning, a pearl would show up under the boy’s pillow.

One day the boy, now known as the “washerman’s son” was walking outside, when vizier’s daughter saw him. She immediately fell for him and expressed her desire to marry him to her mother. The next day, her mother sent for the boy. When the boy came, she asked him to marry her daughter, but the boy refused. She offered him enormous wealth and riches, but he turned down her proposal. The woman decided to teach the boy a lesson for his ‘misdemeanour’.

One day, the king prepared a boat and dispatched it to the sea in search of pearls. When vizier’s wife got the news, she secretly summoned the captain and hatched with him a plot to murder the boy.

The captain secretly tied a rope to the boat and the other end of the rope he tied to a huge boulder buried beneath the boat. When they tried to drag forth the boat to the water, it would not move.

The captain said: “We must seek the help of the astrologer.”

The king summoned the astrologer. Since he was the part of the conspiracy, he said: “The boat needs the offerings of the blood of the washerman’s boy”.

The astrologer summoned the washerman and the boy. He told him that the boat needed the blood of his son. The boy had no choice but to give the offering of his blood. The astrologer said that he would give him enormous wealth which would never be exhausted for many generations in exchange of the boy’s blood. The poor washerman left the boy with the astrologer and walked back home with a grief-stricken heart.

The boy was taken to the shore. The boy turned to the astrologer and said: “Does the boat need me or my blood?”

“It’s your blood, “replied the astrologer.

The next moment, the boy cut his fingertips and smeared the boat with blood.

When the vizier’s wife got the news of the failure of her plot, she was disappointed. However, she racked her evil brain and asked the captain to take the boy along and throw him into the sea. The captain requested the king to accompany such a wise boy on the expedition. Thus, the boy was summoned and taken along.

One morning, one of the crew members found a pearl on the spot where the boy had slept during the night. He took the pearl to the captain. The captain asked him to be on guard to see where the pearl would come from. The crew member secretly kept an eye on the boy. He noticed that the pearl was produced by the sweat of the boy. He told the captain. Since they were in the quest for pearls, and the source of the pearl was with them on the boat, they exposed the boy to the fire, scratched his body and gathered a huge amount of the pearl from his body. This continued for many days until the boy turned pale and frail.

One day the boy noticed a tree in the middle of the sea. It was all green till midnight and turned yellow after midnight. The boy was curious to know the mystery behind it. At late hours of the night, the boy noticed a horse with forty foals nibbling its tender branches. He seized hold of the horse. The horse pleaded to let go of it. He gave a bit of its hair and said:

“Whenever you are in trouble and need my help, just show a fire to the hair I will arrive”. The boy took the hair and let the horse vanish.

After journeying for many days, they finally reached a city by the shore. The captain anchored the boat on the shore, and they strolled towards the city. They walked into a jeweller’s shop. The boy turned to the jeweller and said the gold he was selling was blended with impurities. The boy’s words did not sit well with the jeweller, and they started to argue.

The jeweller said: “If you prove the impurities in my gold, I will give my daughter to you as your wife”.

The boy said: “If I’m proved wrong, I’m ready to be beheaded”.

The boy continued: “Bring a hammer and let me strike on a piece of a gold. If it shatters apart, you will see the traces of impurities”.

The jeweller brought him the hammer. When he struck the gold, it shattered into many pieces.

The jeweller was embarrassed and admitted the error of his ways. He married off his daughter to the boy. After staying for a few days with his wife, the boy along with the other crew members proceeded ahead. Since they were to take the same route upon their return, he left his wife at home.

After sailing for a few more days, they reached a city which resembled Bombay. A huge crowd had gathered on the ground. The boy asked someone what was going on there.

“A horse race”, he replied. “The winner will be married to vizier’s daughter and the losers will lose their life as they will be beheaded”.

The boy approached the king and expressed his desire to take part in the race. Away from the sight of the crowd, he exposed the hair to the fire and the horse emerged before him. It was a very frail and weak horse, and everybody sneered at it. When the race began all swift horses ran out of the sight and the boy with his frail horse was left behind. When they were away from the crowd’s sight, the horse soared ahead and flew past the horses running on the ground and reached the destination.

Everyone in the crowd stood astonished at how such a frail and weak horse could beat all the fastest horses in the race. Hence the boy was married to the vizier’s daughter. After staying for a few days with his wife, the boy along with the other crew members went their way. Since they were to take the same route upon their return, he left his wife at home.

This time around they sailed over to another coastal city. Its streets were deserted. They asked a passer-by why there was nobody out on the street. He told them that the king had arranged a feast to pick a groom for his daughter.

They went to the feast. The king along with his courtiers, viziers and emissaries had gathered there. Whosoever wanted to marry the princess, had to defeat the wrestler. He was such an ugly, fierce man that just a glimpse of him was enough to send ripples of fear in people’s hearts. But the boy walked over and accepted the challenge. Before stepping into the ring, away from the sight of the crowd, he secretly exposed the hair to the fire. The horse emerged. The boy told him that he had challenged the king’s wrestler, and now he needed his help to defeat him. The horse said, “Just hold your arms around his waist, I will kick him so hard that it will soar in the air. Nobody will be able to see me”.

When the boy walked into the ring, the wrestler laughed at him. The boy held his arms around his waist and pretended to lift him up. In the very moment the horse kicked him so hard that he swung in the air and with a huge thud fell on the ground. Everybody, including the king, was amazed to see how the boy overcame their otherwise undefeated wrestler. Since he had won the fight, the king married his daughter to him.

After staying for a few days with his wife, the boy was told by the captain to prepare for his return. The king said farewell to his daughter. He gave an entourage of one hundred folks including servants and soldiers to accompany his daughter. In the next city, the boy took his second wife, the vizier’s daughter. He too gave her a group of one hundred soldiers and servants to accompany her. Then they went to jeweller’s city, where the young wife took his third wife along. The boy told his wives the everything about himself and his brother.

He also cautioned them that the captain wanted to throw him into the sea. He told his wives to tie him with a rope so that, if he was thrown into the sea, they could save him by pulling the rope. At night, he along with his wives, pretended to be asleep, the captain quietly picked him up and threw him into the sea. The wives immediately pulled him out. He told them to lock him inside the giant wooden box they had with them. In the morning, the captain told the women that since their husband had drowned, he was going to marry them.

One of the wife said: “We are ready to marry you, but marriage can’t be solemnised in the boat. Let’s reach offshore first”. The captain agreed.

After journeying for many days, they finally reached their destination. The king presented the pearls to the king and asked him to solemnise their marriage with the three women.

One of the women turned to the king and said: “Before performing the marriage ritual, let me tell you a tale first”.

“Go ahead”, said the king.

She started it with the tale of the bird which gave a pearl to the king’s father. Then she told the audience how the wood cutter’s wife persuaded his husband to catch the bird. When she said: “The two brothers ate the bird’s meat and liver and left their home”, the king thought how that story resembled their own but he did not interfere and continued listening.

However, when she told the audience that the boy was thrown to the sea, the king couldn’t help but shouted: “Where is the boy? He’s my brother”.

“I don’t know anything about him. I’m just telling you a tale”, said the woman.

But when the king insisted, she pointed towards the giant box and said: “Open the box”.

The box was opened and out came his younger brother. They hugged each other with tears of happiness. The king punished the astrologer, vizier’s wife and captain.

Both the brothers lived happily ever after.

(*This folktale was originally published in Balochi in Gauhar Qeemati, an anthology of Balochi folktales, compiled by Rahim Mehr and published by Higher Education Commission Pakistan in 2012. Fazal Baloch has the translation rights to this piece.)

Fazal Baloch is a Balochi writer and translator. He has translated many Balochi poems and short stories into English. His translations have been featured in Pakistani Literature published by Pakistan Academy of Letters and in the form of books and anthologies.

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Categories
Poetry

Asandhimitra

Poetry by Mini Babu

King Asoka with his queens. Sanchi. 3rd Century BC. Courtesy: Creative Commons
ASANDHIMITRA

I am the wife
of his perfect years,
the most favoured,
I have evidenced
that which others were
fortunate not to view.
His nights were sorrowful,
remorse preoccupied
his dreams,
100,000 put to death
and 150,000 deported.
His head was a never-ceasing
battlefield, he asked for 
measures to undo a war,
that was long waging
since Kalinga !
How could one unmake deaths ?
He turned a Buddha-Bhikshu
and preached.
It was erroneous to kill an ant,
his subjects heeded
and dispersed.

Many more Asokas
will burn in sleep,
and many more Asandhimitras
will lose sleep.

I am Asandhimitra,
Agramahisi to 
Asoka the Great.

*Agramahisi – chief queen.
Asoka the Great was an Indian Emperor of the Maurya Dynasty, after the war of Kalinga he was aggrieved over the bloodshed and vowed never to fight again. He patronized Buddhism during his reign.

Mini Babu is working as Associate Professor of English with the Dept. of Collegiate Education,Govt. of Kerala. Her poems have been featured in anthologies, journals and magazines. Her collections of poems are Kaleidoscope (2020), Shorelines (2021) and Memory Cells (2022).

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Categories
Musings

Ruleman Ngwenya and Johannesburg

By G Venkatesh

Johannesberg Skyline. Courtesy: Creative Commons

Johannesburg or Jozi. This was the first city I visited outside my country at the age of thirty-two. Quite late for someone to embark on a foreign trip. Of course, my parents had never been abroad, but I was comparing myself with coevals here. And what a sojourn that was! Quite like a debut test for a cricketer where he gets into his own and looks forward to more stints at the crease or more overs to bowl. And there are many names which stand out in my mind’s eye – Rhoda (Anglicised version of Radha), Richard, Ruleman…Interestingly, the people I interacted most with during my short stay in the city, have names beginning with the letter ’R’!  

Before I embarked on my journey, and even after I arrived there, I was told that Johannesburg was notorious for the rampancy of crime – car thefts, knifings, muggings, rapes, daylight robberies and what have you. I was told:

“Never take any valuables with you when you go out.”

“Well, man, even if you do that, they will put a knife on you and ask you to give them your short and trousers and the ordinary footwear you would be wearing…these are guys who need to sell things to get money for their drugs, you see.”

“Take care, friend, your first visit to our country should not leave behind bad impressions on your mind. We want you to take back good memories and share them with your folks and friends in India.”

The Westerners and Indians in the city were concerned. I would hear these words of advice from almost every South African and Indian I would meet during my stay there. They cared and never let me venture out alone anywhere. Many offered to drive me down wherever I wished to go. I felt protected…a kind of informal Z security, unasked for. But perhaps I felt safe, perhaps imprisoned and fettered. It is hard to say.

I arrived in the city with the intention of meeting a publisher who was keen to employ me if it would be possible to obtain a work permit for me from the Government of South Africa – a gargantuan task even now. I wanted to get away from India, experience different working cultures and live a fuller life – professionally. It was at this magazine-publishing office that I met Richard and Ruleman. Richard of Dutch and English parentage, working as the editor of a mining magazine, and Ruleman of Zimbabwean origin, was employed as the office-boy.

While every minute of my stay in Jozi was memorable, considering that this was my first sojourn outside India, the last two days left a lasting impact on my mind. The dreams of obtaining a work permit were shattered, and I started making plans to wend my way back to India. I had purchased a return ticket and would have travelled back in any case – of course to return in case the work permit was granted.  On the last day but one, I was working late in the office, in order to do full justice to the project which has been assigned to me, even though I knew I had no future in the outfit or the city.

Only Ruleman was waiting, sensing that I should not be left to work alone in the office – burglars had broken into this office as well, I was told, a few months ago, and taken away some of the computers. Ruleman came into my room and assured me that he was waiting downstairs and that I could call him if I needed anything. At around 5.00 pm (work normally was wound up in Jozi at around 3.30 pm…they started work at 7.30 am) – which by Johannesburgish standards was late, I wound up, and walked down the stairs. Ruleman nodded, smiled, went around running a last-minute check of the doors and the lights and fans, and then escorted me out of the office. I used to walk back home – it was a 20 minute walk. Ruleman’s house was on the way. As we walked down, he asked me how I liked my stay here and felt sad that I would be leaving. He asked about India, and said he had always considered India as the ‘Land of Mahatma Gandhi’. I recalled that the African cabbie who had driven me down from the Jan Smuts International Airport two months ago, also told me the same thing. We reached his house.  He told me that his parents would be delighted to meet me, if I could come over for tea the next day. I smiled and said that I would love to. I thought that he would bid goodbye for the evening.

He did not. ‘I shall drop you at your doorstep. You see, this is not a safe time to be walking around in this city…I do not want anything to happen to you just when you are about to leave Jozi.’ I was thankful, though I would not really have bothered about walking down alone. ‘My father talks a lot about India. He had a lot of good Indian friends when he was working in East Africa in his younger days. You should come over tomorrow. He would be very pleased, and so would I.’ Ruleman dropped me off at the gate of the house I stayed in as a tenant and bid me goodnight.

Next day, when it was time to leave, I remembered Ruleman’s invitation. However, till the day I had walked down with Ruleman back home, Richard used to drive me down to my place of residence before turning right and heading home. This being my last day, Richard wanted to drive me down at 4.00 pm, for one last time. Ruleman said that he wanted me to visit him, as decided on the previous day. I did not know what to say or do. If I had told Richard that I would visit Ruleman, perhaps, it would not have been appropriate. Turning down Ruleman’s invitation would also not have been a very nice thing to do. And clearly there was no via media.

Richard drove me down eventually. I rued my decision. I may possibly never see that ever-smiling, do-gooder Zimbabwean again. I sent Ruleman a card from India on my return and Richard wrote to me conveying Ruleman’s thanks for the same. Small consolation perhaps. Man often talks about looking for the via media – the middle path – the path or course of action which would leave none the worse for it. There are occasions where a middle path does not exist at all.  A take it or leave it situation stares one in the face…just to remind man that no matter how hard he tries, there are many things beyond his control.

On a different note, when one sees goodness around, and care and concern for strangers who one would possibly not see again, one’s faith in God’s kindness being expressed through human agents gets reinforced. Jozi taught me a lot of lessons, which changed my perspectives towards life immensely. I was a totally different person on my return to India – calmer, spiritually aware, more respectful towards my parents, and in a nutshell – ‘grown-up’!  I realised that deep down, we are all connected to the Super Soul….and a desire to do good and a willingness to help, resides in all human hearts.

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G Venkatesh (50) is a Chennai-born, Mumbai-bred ‘global citizen’ who currently serves as Associate Professor at Karlstad University in Sweden. He has published 4 volumes of poetry and 4 e-textbooks, inter alia. 

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Categories
Poetry

The Colour of Time

Poetry & translation from Korean by Ihlwha Choi

Courtesy: Creative Commons
THE COLOUR OF TIME

Every tree colours with their own colour.
Chestnut trees have their own tint.
Oak trees revel in their unique hues.
When I was young, was my colour quite green?
My first love seemed like a magnolia.
My job, where I worked all my life,
My native village -- a variety of flowers, cicadas
and the crust of overcooked rice – each were distinct in their colouration.

Becoming old ripens one's own nature.
The passion of red roses transform to autumn colours,
The farmers assume the colour of earth on autumnal mornings
and a poet’s character matures. 
Love and hatred, meeting and departing,
Sweet temptation and bitter betrayal,
and the dialects like the barley buds of old playmates
are all turning to the colour of the early winter.

Ihlwha Choi is a South Korean poet. He has published multiple poetry collections, such as Until the Time, When Our Love will Flourish, The Colour of Time, His Song and The Last Rehearsal.

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A Special Tribute

Jean Claude Carriere: A writer for all directors

Ratnottama Sengupta pays a homage during the 27th Kolkata Film Festival to Jean Claude Carriere, the legendary screenwriter of Peter Brook’s Mahabharata, first performed on stage in 1985 and then released as a film

Jean Claude Carriere (1931-2021). Courtesy: Creative Commons

A Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for someone decorated with a Padmashri? One easily understands the Oscar when you spell out that the awardee had written the screenplay of a hundred and more films for the Who’s Who of World Cinema – starting with Luis Bunuel, and going on to Volker Schloendorff, Milos Forman, Pierre Etaix, Jacques Tati, Andrzej Wajda, Nagisa Oshima, Louis Malle, Abbas Kiarostami, Philip Kaufman, Jean Paul Rappaneu, Jacques Deray… not necessarily in that order. The Padmashri also falls in place the minute you hear it was for the writer of Peter Brook’s Mahabharata. Indeed, how many names have bridged the inner core of two extreme cultures of the East and the West, so smoothly as Jean Claude Carriere?

This French writer-actor’s equation with the land of Kauravas and Pandavas was way beyond that of any tourist who may’ve visited India twenty-five times.  For, this was the man theatre legend Peter Brook had zeroed in on to play his Ganesha. Meaning, act in the play? No, he was to write the nine-hour magnum opus that would ensue after sunset and end at sunrise at the theatre annual that identifies Avignon in France. Who could’ve imagined his interpretation that the five sons sired by different deities — Yama, Vayu, Indra, the Ashvins — could be cast as men from different races, leading to Yudhistira being blonde and Bhima an African? This, remember, was three years before Doordarshan started airing the B R Chopra epic that continues to enthral.

A scene from Peter Brook’s Mahabharata. Courtesy: Creative Commons

But why am I comparing Carriere – whom I had the good fortune to meet on one of his visits to Delhi – to Ganesha? Simple: Siddhi Vinayak, the God of Fulfilment, was the ‘scribe’ Vyasa approached to pen down his magnum opus – and he laid the condition that Vyasa should not pause in his narration of the events even once. Vyasa agreed on the condition that Ganesha would not pen down the words without comprehending their depth, their emotion, their implication… Carriere had done just that for Peter Brook.  And the mythology had stayed within the writer. Hence, three decades later, he wrote a lyrical text for Sujata Bajaj when the Paris-based Indian artist from Kolkata exhibited her iridescent body of work titled Ganapati.

At least eight years of reading and researching had gone into Mahabharata, 1974 onwards, before Carriere’s forays to India started in 1982. And four years later, it mesmerised viewers in the desolate quarry outside Avignon. For the two following years, the play was performed in French and English, it toured the world for four years, it was adapted for television as a six-hour series, it was shortened to a three-half hour film screened in India, Carriere wrote Battlefield based on it, and published a book sketching his India tours… The 25 actors seen in Avignon 1987 came from 16 countries – and the only Indian was Mallika Sarabhai who played Draupadi!

“I compare India to Draupadi in the dice game – she keeps unfolding,” Carriere famously said later. Elsewhere he said he felt that India was a mansion where one room leads to another, that to yet another, and that to some more rooms… In India, Carriere observed a unique continuity since the antiquity now lost in time — one he did not find in either Greece or Egypt. That is distilled in the book, In Search of the Mahabharata that chronicles the three initial years of his journeys in diary-like jottings and numerous sketches. “They have more immediacy, more intimacy, greater feeling than camera,” he told the book’s Delhi-based translator, Aruna Vasudev.

Carriere of course was a seasoned hand at adaptation. Long before the curtain fell on his 91 years, he had adapted the German novelist Gunter Grass (The Tin Drum, 1979) and French Marcel Proust (Swann in Love, 1984) for Volker Shloendorf; the Russian Dostoevsky for the Polish Andrzej Wajda (The Possessed, 1988), the French journalist Joseph Kessel (Belle de Jour, 1967) and French poet Pierre Louys (That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977) for the Spanish Bunuel, French dramatist Edmond Rostand (Cyrano de Bergerac, 1990) for Jean-Paul Rappaneu, Czech Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1988) for the American Philip Kaufman… And what was the key to this success? It lay in Carriere’s belief that “a scenario is created when you and the director establish a near telepathic communication. This requires on both sides a receptiveness and a trust which can never be taken for granted. The writer must submerge his ego since, ultimately, it is the director’s film and you are there only to facilitate him.”

My first experience of this ‘facilitating’ was Happy Anniversary (1962) that won director Pierre Etaix – who co-produced it with writer Carriere – the Oscar for Best Short. Half-a-century after its viewing the 15-minute short remains vividly etched in memory. A woman is preparing a romantic dinner to celebrate their wedding anniversary while the husband is running around and making stops to pick up gifts for his wife. But the Paris traffic is against him, and by the time he reaches home the flowers for his wife have wilted, and his drunken wife has finished dinner and fallen asleep. What a captivating comment on urban realities!

Carriere’s most abiding partnership — his 20-year-tie with Buñuel – had started in 1963 when the Spanish director was looking for a French co-writer to adapt The Diary of a Chambermaid by Octave Mirbeau. The maid who exposes the sexual, religious and social repressions of the middle class provincial French families set the keynote – social satire – that Buñuel would repeat in Belle de Jour. Its erotic narrative with subversive wit exposed bourgeoise hypocrisy through a respectable doctor’s wife who enjoys her afternoons as an inmate of a high-class brothel. Buñuel’s absurdist humour not only alerts viewers to the failings of the French bourgeoisie, but it also sets the tone for his constant anti-establishment ire. In The Milky Way (1968), two tramps set off from Paris to make a pilgrimage to a Spanish shrine and on the way meet characters who expound on the six central ‘mysteries’ of Catholic dogma. Another amusing anti-clergy film, it reveals Buñuel’s target shifts from the church to the military, to the state — that is, only within the different faces of establishment. This influenced Carriere to later state, “In art a certain anti-conformism is necessary.”

Jean Claude Carriere was a remarkable storyteller, it is clear, just as it is that he had no dogma. Effortlessly he could move from one world to another. One of ideals and spirituality, to that of warfare and political spoils. As one reviewer noted, “he had the knack of entering the dream world not on the wings of some abstract imagination but on the legs of reality – with absolute groundedness.”

Carrier knew what he wrote was not for publishing, it was written not to be read but to be transformed into a film. He is known to have said: “If you want fame, and a beautiful statue made of yourself, don’t be a screenwriter. The writer disappears. He works in the shade.” It was absolutely essential to be forgotten. His art exemplified this, though not the writer who also acted in some films. He knew, if not forgotten, very often screenwriters are ignored. That is why, in his Honorary Oscar acceptance speech in 2014, he expressed his happiness that such an award was given to a screenwriter. For, “they are like shadows passing through the history of cinema. Their names do not appear in reviews, but still they are filmmakers,” he asserted sharing his Oscar with screen writers around the world.

Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and write books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award. Ratnottama Sengupta has the rights to translate her father, Nabendu Ghosh.

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Poetry

This Grey Morning

By Marianne Tefft

THIS GREY MORNING

This grey morning
I get to study the ceiling bemused
Hoping the long-awaited repair
Has stemmed the active leak at last
I do not have to scan the terrible clouds 
Praying what rains from the grim sky
Will not drown me and my daughter today

This grey morning
I get to pause Saturday’s Long Read
Set my warm cup in its saucer
And push up from my table
Heeding the scraping of my hungry dog at the door
I do not have to raise a broken chair from the rubble
Against those who want the putrid scraps
I have made my own 

This grey morning
I get to wallow in bed
Nursing my broken heart
I do not have to lie on frozen earth
Hands pressed to my chest
Sticky and red
Bravely sighing this is how love ends

Marianne Tefft, born in the U.S. and raised in Canada, is a poet, lyricist, teacher and voiceover artist on the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten. Her first poetry collection, Full Moon Fire, is slated to appear in Summer 2022.

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Excerpt

The Refugee and the Other

Title: Ever Since I Did Not Die

Author: Ramy Al-Asheq

Translator: Isis Nusair Editor: Levi Thompson

Publisher: Seagull Books

The Refugee and the Other,

the Other Refugee

War is vast. It reaches across the horizon, loftier and older than peace. Killing came before war, but it might also be that refuge preceded war. It got attached to war like a child holding on to its mother’s dress with one hand, the other waving to those it does not know. The refugee: a flute weeping over its original image before there was a camp. The camp: ginger on the back of humanity’s infected throat. The camp is necessary, sometimes, for remembering that the lands across the river dropped off the face of the map when we weren’t looking. The map: geography on paper, its borders drawn by the tank and the mortar shell for eternity. The mortar: a tiny cosmic explosion that re-arranges habitats by the whims of whoever launches it. One night, the mortar launcher awakened superstition from its sleep and dragged it away with an F-16 saying, ‘I cannot exist . . . unless there is a refugee.’

Is it our instinct to always blame the victim? Is it customary for the victim to keep playing this role even after the decided time has passed? The victim might even like it and consider it a privilege. That way the Other—but not every Other—will have reason to regard the victim as a scapegoat. The victim sees the Other as a potential enemy, a current friend who is ready to attack at any moment. This has become an essential existential component of the dualities of the universe that are always, as they say, subject to unilateral rule. Good is sometimes evil, and wrong is right. A supporter could be an opponent on another side, and night might be day. The Other is not an Other elsewhere. ‘There’ is only ‘there’ here. Likewise, the refugee could become the Other someday, and responds to another who has become a refugee just like them. Dualities are suspended in conflict and change. Absolute unilateralism lies at the root of this conflict as creator and caretaker and is one of the main reasons for its persistence.

The Other asks the long-time refugee, ‘Do the people in the camp really live in tents?’ The refugee doesn’t respond. Instead, the refugee camp responds, ‘Nothing has anything to do with its name!’

How?

The tents tricked time and stretched their necks until they blocked out the sun. People came to me for pilgrimage from every corner of the earth. They were crowded, since the ‘earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’

So, why are you still called a ‘camp’?

How would the Other recognize me if I were to change my name?

The Other branded them and marked their pictures in red: ‘You have no place here in the long run.’ Others contributed by adding features in bright oil on their foreheads, so the Other named them. They liked the new name—at least, they liked it until it didn’t please them any longer. It became as ordinary as death in this vast war. The Other did not tell them anything. They did not know the place or the time when yet another Other would rename them. They made a point of not asking. Perhaps fewer questions mean less pain.

One of them says, ‘I’m a refugee who was born here, the son of a refugee who was born here. We know nothing but “here”. Fifty years of my dad living “here” were not enough to change what he was called. My mother’s nationality wasn’t enough for me to change what I’m called! That’s why I hate children—my children, not those of others—because I do not want them to be refugees.’ He does not want them to be like him: different! Even in revolution, the Other wins when he turns those who are alike into Others from themselves.

The refugee opens the door of his tent (his palace) to the Other (the non-refugee). The Other becomes part of this camp that was destroyed except for its name. The Other grows up saying, ‘I am from there,’ and the refugee says, ‘I am from “here” and from another “there”. I am from my temporary “here”, and my original “there” until the day I return!’ Should things get hard one day, the Other will scream in the face of the refugee, ‘You are not from “here”. You are from “there”. You and your camp are in the “here” that belongs to me, so leave!’

So, he leaves, and not much leaves with him. When he remains, nothing will be left of him. The fiasco does not stop here. Indeed, the Other, who used to be a brother, becomes an informant, an enemy. The refugee goes back to repeating the story and playing the role of the victim. The victim is another victim, and the criminal is, of course, an Other!

Everything changes. Nothing remains fixed except for the refugee. Even a temporary homeland becomes a prison, borders surrounded with barbed wire tightly connected to the sea on one side, and to stolen electrical lines on the other. This homeland-prison becomes more merciful than the neighbour-prison. The next camp becomes a real, not metaphorical, prison. The escapee becomes a wanted man, accused of infiltrating paradise. They are tossed into the hell of war seventy times. He ages like fruit. The newspapers sleep on his story through day and night. The people of the land, the sky, and those in-between ignore him because of a royal decree.

Several long-time refugees were rescued along with some Others. They sang the anthem of death to sea and land. The weather picked up, and only those who were already buried could be saved without the camp. The partners of refugee and tent were separated, but they were allowed to return if the Other approved. The Others were called refugees. The long-time refugees are now called ‘without’. This is not about nothingness or nihilism but about a death verdict. He carried many names, as many as his migrations. They put them all to death with another Universal Declaration. The ‘without’ remained nameless, just like they will always be!

With this separation and change in the structure of dualities, some refugees received a nationality and became citizens. They might not want to admit that they are half-citizens or second-class citizens. The original defence mechanism of denial always wins out over confirmation. Having gained their nationality, they were considered to be part of the Other, and they practiced their Otherness on Others. Whenever war smiled, they screamed at them. As they were transformed, they forgot their past: ‘O Refugees!’

This is how one refugee killed another when the first became an Other. The second had to hold onto the title to avoid turning into nothing.

About Ever Since I Did Not Die:

“I gathered these texts like someone collecting body parts. Here are the pieces of my body, haphazardly brought together in a paper bag. It looks like me with all my madness and sickness—how the revolution made me grow up, what the war broke inside me, and what exile chipped away.”

The texts gathered in Ever Since I Did Not Die by Syrian-Palestinian poet Ramy Al-Asheq are a poignant record of a fateful journey. Having grown up in a refugee camp in Damascus, Al-Asheq was imprisoned and persecuted by the regime in 2011 during the Syrian Revolution. He was released from jail, only to be recaptured and imprisoned in Jordan. After escaping from prison, he spent two years in Jordan under a fake name and passport, during which he won a literary fellowship that allowed him to travel to Germany in 2014, where he now lives and writes in exile.

Through seventeen powerful testimonies, Ever Since I Did Not Die vividly depicts what it means to live through war. Exquisitely weaving the past with the present and fond memories with brutal realities, this volume celebrates resistance through words that refuse to surrender and continue to create beauty amidst destruction—one of the most potent ways to survive in the darkest of hours.

About Ramy Al-Asheq (Author):

Ramy Al-Asheq is a Berlin-based Syrian-Palestinian poet, journalist and curator. He has published five poetry collections in Arabic, and many of his texts have been translated into Bosnian, Czech, English, French, German, Kurdish, Polish and Spanish. He launched the German-Arabic magazine FANN in 2017, and was recently selected as a fellow at the Academy of Arts in Berlin and Academy Schloss Solitude.

About Isis Nusair (Translator):

Isis Nusair is associate professor of women’s and gender studies and international studies at Denison University, Ohio.

About Levi Thompson (Editor)

Levi Thompson is assistant professor of Persian and Arabic literature at the University of Texas at Austin.

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