Categories
Essay

The Trouble with Cioran

By Satyarth Pandita

Emil Cioran (1911-1995). Photo provided by the author

It was the summer of 2019. The hostels were empty. Vacation had begun, and most students had already left for their hometowns. I was to leave the next day. While packing, I suddenly remembered The House of the Dead by Dostoevsky, which I had lent to a senior months ago.

I walked to his nearly abandoned hostel block and knocked on his half-open door. The room was dark—uncannily dark for the middle of the day. Thick curtains strangled the sunlight, casting the room into a premature night. There he lay on the bed, flat on his back, a laptop balanced on his belly. He handed me my book and resumed the video he had been watching—with monastic focus—from the fifty-sixth minute. It was footage of a man slowly cutting down a giant tree with an axe. He had been watching it, second by second, without skipping. He didn’t pause even when I left.

That was the man who introduced me to Emil Cioran.

It was not until much later that I finally read him. The Trouble with Being Born opens at three o’clock in the morning with Cioran contemplating the futility of existence:

“Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.”

The book proceeds as a collection of aphorisms circling around the nausea of existence and the idea of suicide as both temptation and reprieve.

Before I began to read his work, I tried to prepare myself by reading his biography and interviews. I wanted to understand the man behind the words, as if glimpsing his life might help me endure the weight of his thoughts.  One such childhood story was telling. In an interview, Cioran confessed that when he was a child, one of his favourite pastimes was to play football with human skulls excavated by a gravedigger who was his friend. But little did he know at that time that what seemed like play was the seed of a lifelong fixation, depriving him of sleep, driving him to insomnia, in the hope of a long, never-ending slumber.

For Cioran, suicide was not a prescribed act but an ever-present possibility—a metaphysical escape hatch that bestowed dignity on existence. The mere awareness of this option granted him a strange form of freedom. The power of contemplating death, rather than executing it, was his way of wrestling with life’s meaninglessness. Suicide was philosophical, not prescriptive; a potential that loomed, yet never fully realised.

Yet one question persists: if Cioran saw life as an error and glorified suicide as the only coherent act, why did he never end his own life? His own words reveal the paradox:

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”

According to him, suicide comes too late to undo anything. The damage is already done. You’ve already suffered so much that ending it doesn’t fix anything—it merely ends an already exhausted life. By the time you do it, you’ve already endured the worst. You’ve already been broken, emptied, eroded by suffering. So, what’s the point? The act becomes redundant, even absurd.

At another moment, he offers a different angle, confessing his indecision:

“The energy and virulence of my taedium vitae continue to astound me. So much vigor in a disease so decrepit! To this paradox I owe my present incapacity to choose my final hour.”

Although Cioran ascribes his procrastination for suicide to his extreme weariness and boredom, yet, contrastingly, at another place, for him the power of ending one’s life is the greatest power.

“No autocrat wields a power comparable to that enjoyed by a poor devil planning to kill himself.”

This is the Cioranian condition: every insight undermined by its opposite, every aphorism shadowed by contradiction. He frames suicide as the ultimate sovereignty. The mere thought of being able to end one’s life surpasses the power of kings. And yet, he never exercised it. Instead, he transformed the possibility into philosophy, into aphorism, into art. His writing is not a system but an ongoing quarrel with himself. Instead of answering any particular question, his writings raise towers of new questions.

This tension, of circling but never arriving, defines his thought. He writes with precision, but his precision is not in building arguments―it is in dismantling them. Each aphorism is like a shard of glass: sharp, illuminating, but impossible to piece into a whole. Consider his reflection on sleeplessness:

“If there is so much discomfort and ambiguity in lucidity, it is because lucidity is the result of the poor use to which we have put our sleepless nights.”

Cioran knew the price of insomnia. To be awake at three in the morning is to be exiled from the world of the living, suspended in a state where thoughts spiral without conclusion. For him, insomnia was both torment and revelation. Perhaps, if Cioran had been able to sleep well, he might not have been trapped in this endless dialogue with futility. Instead, he lived in perpetual wakefulness, speaking to his own emptiness:

“No one has lived so close to his skeleton as I have lived to mine: from which results an endless dialogue and certain truths which I manage neither to accept nor to reject.”

“Once we appeal to our most intimate selves, once we begin to labor and to produce, we lay claim to gifts, we become unconscious of our own gaps. No one is in a position to admit that what comes out of his own depths might be worthless. ‘Self-knowledge’? A contradiction in terms.”

If, according to Cioran, true self-knowledge is not possible because we are too attached to our own depths and ego to judge ourselves truly, then there is no way he could have unearthed any truths about himself while living close to his emptiness (skeleton).

Cioran is, however, conscious of his contradictions. They were not accidents; they were his method. But are those contradictions a mirror of the thinkers he admired? In one of his aphorisms, he confesses:

“In the Orient, the oddest, the most idiosyncratic Western thinkers would never have been taken seriously, on account of their contradictions. This is precisely why we are interested in them. We prefer not a mind but the reversals, the biography of a mind, the incompatibilities and aberrations to be found there, in short those thinkers who, unable to conform to the rest of humanity and still less to themselves, cheat as much by whim as by fatality. Their distinctive sign? A touch of fakery in the tragic, a hint of dalliance even in the irremediable.”

Cioran points to that strange quality in writers like Nietzsche, Baudelaire or even himself-deeply tragic, but also stylistic, artful, and aware of the absurdities of their drama. For him, the appeal is not in the polished answers but in the drama of the doubt, in the visible struggle of a mind with itself.

Cioran is always in a perpetual state of perplexity. His thoughts are malleable. What is true for him today becomes obsolete tomorrow. And all this he has tried to betray through words. He knew his thoughts were mercurial, unstable. He confesses his extreme mental variability:

“I may change my opinion on the same subject, the same event, ten, twenty, thirty times in the course of a single day. And to think that each time, like the worst impostor, I dare utter the word “truth”!

Every time he pronounces a new opinion, he does so with the implicit suggestion that this one is right―that this is the truth. He accuses himself of a kind of fraud, i.e. knowing his judgments are volatile, yet he delivers them as if they were true.

Amidst all these contradictions and paradoxes, what, then, did Cioran truly long for? Because what he wishes for in one place, he rejects in the other. But there is one feeling, or a longing, that recurs throughout the book―a longing for a time before time, a time before creation. He speaks of it with yearning, as if for a paradise never lost yet never possessed.

“There was a time when time did not yet exist…. The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.”

“O to have been born before man!”

This longing resonates the idea of what the Portuguese call saudade, a longing for something that never was or will never be attainable. Unlike nostalgia, which mourns a past that once existed, saudade is a longing for an unattainable ideal, a sense of melancholic absence that can only be evoked in poetry and art. This yearning captures the profound melancholy that saturates Cioran’s philosophy—a feeling that seeps like a grey mist into a distant blue sky. And yet he admits the impossibility of feeling it:

“It is impossible to feel that there was a time when we did not exist. Hence our attachment to the personage we were before being born.”

We cannot experience absence, so we cannot truly imagine our non-being before birth. In our memory and awareness, we’ve always been — we cannot step outside ourselves to picture a time when we were nothing. This is not a metaphysical claim, but a psychological one.

If Cioran were a simple nihilist, one who believed in nothing and cared for nothing, why would he write at all? Why invest thought and feeling into a world he found so painfully absurd? The answer lies in his profound sensitivity. Cioran was a nihilist who felt too much. He was wounded by life. Writing, for him, was both a compulsion and a failure. Cioran was a master of paradox. He despised life yet wrote nine books about it. He dismissed language as futile yet clung to words as his only tool. He longed for silence yet confessed:

“We write books because we are ashamed of not having been able to remain silent.”

Writing was a failure to keep still in the face of futility. Yet silence was a greater failure, an impossibility. Thus, he turned his torment into words. For him, each book was a kind of reprieve. Perhaps, his most telling aphorism is this:

“A book is postponed suicide.”

For him, writing a book symbolised a form of delayed self-destruction or self-sacrifice, where the author channels inner turmoil into the work and thus postpones an existential “death”.

On a similar note, he explains the need for language, the need for writing.

“The more injured you are by time, the more you seek to escape it. To write a faultless page, or only a sentence, raises you above becoming and its corruptions. You transcend death by the pursuit of the indestructible in speech, in the very symbol of nullity.”

Language itself, for Cioran, is paradoxical. It is both empty (words are mere signs, lacking substance) and the only tool we have to approach the eternal. So even while writing may seem futile or illusory, it’s also the only space where something indestructible can be momentarily glimpsed.

The Cioranian paradox yet again comes into the picture, where he proclaims:

“One must be mad or drunk,” the Abbe Sieyès said, to speak well in the known languages. One must be drunk or mad, I should add, to dare, still, to use words, anyword….”

In his earlier aphorisms, he advocates for the meaning or use of writing, but then in the following aphorisms, he expresses the futility of writing, or words, of language itself. To use language sincerely is itself madness. If words distort, then every attempt to write is a betrayal. And yet he could not stop writing. This was the paradox that sustained him.

In the book, Cioran traces this disposition back to his family:

“Every family has its own philosophy. One of my cousins, who died young, once wrote me: ‘It’s all the way it’s always been and probably always will be until there’s nothing left any more.’”

Whereas my mother ended the last note she ever sent me with this testamentary sentence: “Whatever people try to do, they’ll regret it sooner or later.

“Nor can I even boast of having acquired this vice of regret by my own setbacks. It precedes me, it participates in the patrimony of my tribe. What a legacy, such unfitness for illusion!”

Cioran interjects with irony: he can’t even take credit for being regret-prone as a result of his own failures. It’s not just personal experience that made him this way—regret runs deeper; it’s not biographical but ancestral.

Yet Cioran was not only drawn to grand despair. He had a peculiar love for the banal, the ordinary, and the infinitesimal things in our everyday life. Like Georges Perec’s concept of the “infraordinary”―the unnoticed texture of daily life―Cioran wrote:

“The intrinsic value of a book does not depend on the importance of its subject (else the theologians would prevail, and mightily), but on the manner of approaching the accidental and the insignificant, of mastering the infinitesimal. The essential has never required the least talent.”

“No true art without a strong dose of banality. The constant employment of the unaccustomed readily wearies us, nothing being more unendurable than the uniformity of the exceptional.”

For him, the ordinary was not a distraction from philosophy but its truest field.Emil Cioran was also deeply influenced by the Eastern philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism. He often returned to the idea of renunciation and detachment:

“It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even ‘realities’; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a ‘solitary elephant’.”

“I am enraptured by Hindu philosophy, whose essential endeavor is to surmount the self; and everything I do, everything I think is only myself and the self’s humiliations.”

And yet, while he admired Buddha’s teachings on suffering, he could not detach himself from his own disappointments:

“My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.”

Cioran is the kind of person who is aware of his suffering, knows the cure, but won’t take the medicine because the illness has become who he is. For him, disappointment is instinctive, all-consuming and more intimate than thought itself. Since Buddha taught that life is marked with Dukha (suffering/disappointment), Cioran feels connected to Buddhist philosophy, but he cannot follow that path because to follow Buddha requires detachment, letting go of even disappointment, which Cioran cannot do.

Cioran also reflects on a peculiar way to cope with life’s anxieties. He says:

“In order to conquer panic or some tenacious anxiety, there is nothing like imagining your own burial. An effective method, readily available to all…”

This aphorism resonates directly with the Hindu practices, as especially embodied in Banaras (Varanasi), where the city itself is a living memento mori, where cremation fires at Manikarnika Ghat never extinguish, and death is not hidden away but displayed as part of life. In Varanasi, the pilgrims are encouraged to watch the burning pyres, not to indulge morbidity but to confront impermanence directly. But even here, he reminds us of the futility of origins:

“The emphasis on birth is no more than the craving for the insoluble carried to the point of insanity.”

He knows that obsessing over the question of birth, of life, is futile, insoluble and unanswerable. To take this obsession with origins, with life’s beginning, so seriously — to revere it, to found ideologies or hope on it — is, for Cioran, madness. It means you are so committed to wrestling with the unanswerable that you’ve abandoned sanity. It’s a form of spiritual masochism: continually turning to the one question — Why was I born? — that has no satisfying answer.

A man who spent all his life thinking about the tragedy of birth, the futility of life and the meaning of death confesses at one point in the book that he has known nothing new in all his later years that he knew when he was young. All his thinking, the sleepless nights, the anxiety and the dread have contributed nothing to further his knowledge. In his own words:

“What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labour of verification.”

Despite all of Cioran’s nihilistic or dark thoughts, he granted failure a strange dignity:

“This is how we recognize the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest: he will set failure above any success, he will even seek it out, unconsciously of course. This is because failure, always essential, reveals us to ourselves, permits us to see ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything.”

“Failure, even repeated, always seems fresh; whereas success, multiplied, loses all interest, all attraction.”

In this sense, he inverts conventional wisdom: failure is not defeat but a revelation, a mirror of the self, stripped of illusion.

The Trouble with Being Born is not an easy read. The book is a constant rumination and meditation on the bliss of nonexistence, the deep nostalgia for a state before being, before consciousness, before identity. There is an uneasiness, an anxiety, a restlessness and an unknown dread that creeps in and grows with every sentence one reads. It has the potential to scratch the old wounds of one’s soul, which one has forgotten. Yet, if one reads and analyses the aphorisms from a distance with a particular perspective, it can also provoke laughter―the laughter of someone who has stared too long at the abyss and found it absurd.

Emil Cioran is like a chess master, and each of his aphorisms is a calculated move. For every aphorism that he mentions, he has already anticipated the reader’s move. He has anticipated every question, especially the most obvious one, why he did not kill himself and his reply is already there.

Reading Cioran is like walking into a fog. Every sentence brings a chill of recognition, but also a deeper uncertainty. He lived next to his emptiness, befriended it, argued with it, laughed at it—and wrote it down. He is frustrating. He contradicts himself. He writes aphorisms that sound like suicide notes, only to retract them with a smirk. But that is the trouble with Cioran. He lived. He wrote. He suffered. And somehow, he made it all sound beautiful.

And perhaps that’s the final paradox: the man most disillusioned with life gave us one of its most enduring voices.

After reading him, I’ve come to admire Cioran because, to me, he is like a mathematician devoted to solving the equation of life and death. Every variable, every permutation and combination, has passed through his mind; the possibilities now stand exposed on the blackboard, supporting and undermining one another in turn. The solution, if it exists, hovers just within sight—yet he chooses to work through it endlessly, not in pursuit of an answer, but in devotion to the act itself. He is a modern Sisyphus, who has not merely accepted his fate, but learned to love the rolling of the boulder, again and again, to the mountain’s top.

Satyarth Pandita is a PhD student at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru.  He completed his dual degree, a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Biological Sciences (major) and Humanities and Social Sciences (minor), at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal (IISERB). His works have appeared in various newspapers and periodicals, including The Quint, Outlook India, The Wire, Madras Courier, Borderless, and Kitaab, among others.

Links to Satyarth’s published works, email address and social media handles can be found here.

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Categories
Poetry

Two Poems by John Grey

From Public Domain 
EVICTED

There’s a slowness to packing boxes
when there’s nowhere to take them.
It’s the deliberation that surrounds
every item of clothing 
as it’s neatly folded,
placed gently with the others.

With the child, there’s an even 
greater sluggishness when it 
comes to the dolls and stuffed animals,
an unwillingness even 
for fear that 
there won’t be enough room
to fit them all.

For haste in that apartment house,
you’d need to look to 
the landlord’s first floor apartment,
the tapping of his fingers on the kitchen table,
like tiny impatient jackhammers.

For mother and child,
the sidewalk awaits.
It’s both leisurely and brisk…
and indifferent,
which is not a speed at all.


KISS AND MAKE UP, THE LATEST ITERATION

Your words slap my face around.
Now you have me where you want me –
an effigy of everything you hate.

My response is a prison-riot
of old angers.

Pain doesn’t travel well
so hurting others is our go-to.

We learned it from our parents.
We were taught it in school.

To be cruel is a mega-aspirin,
a vein-load of morphine.

But we love each other.
Our harshness knows this.
Our rages are intrinsically aware.

So our voices soften.
Red cheeks whiten.
Flaming eyes are doused by tears.

Then it’s kiss and makeup time.
Our mouths are like tunnels in a mountainside.
Tongues collide 
but there’s little collateral damage.

.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Shift, River And South and Flights. His latest books Bittersweet, Subject Matters and Between Two Fires are available through Amazon. He has upcoming work in Rush, Spotlong Review and Trampoline.

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Categories
Review

‘A Story of Moral Contradictions and Human Cost’

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: India in the Second World War: An Emotional History

Author: Diya Gupta

Publisher: Rupa Publications

When we think of the Second World War, the images that most often come to mind are those of Europe’s ruin — the Blitz in London, the camps in Poland, the victory parades in Paris. India, though one of the largest contributors of men and material to the Allied cause, usually slips to the margins of that global story.

Diya Gupta’s India in the Second World War: An Emotional History sets out to correct that imbalance — and does so not by recounting battles or strategies, but by uncovering the feelings, memories, and private sufferings that shaped India’s wartime experience.

In this groundbreaking work, Gupta turns away from generals and governments to listen instead to soldiers, families, poets, and activists. Through letters, diaries, photographs, memoirs, and literary texts in both English and Bengali, she reconstructs the emotional life of a country caught in the contradictions of fighting for freedom while serving an empire. Her book is as much about the inner weather of a people at war as it is about history itself.

The story begins with the strange binary of India’s position in the 1940s. The British declared India a participant in the war without consulting its leaders. While nationalist politics in the country were reaching their boiling point, over two million Indian men were dispatched to fight on foreign fronts — from North Africa to Burma — under the Union Jack. They fought for a cause that was not their own, for a government that denied them liberty.

Gupta’s focus on emotion allows her to expose this moral paradox with nuance. The letters of sepoys from the Middle East reveal homesickness, confusion, and occasional pride; families back home are haunted by anxiety, caught between imperial propaganda and the whisper of rebellion. The result is a portrait of divided loyalties — of men and women who inhabited both the empire’s war and the nationalist struggle at once.

But it was the Bengal Famine of 1943 that made the war’s cost most brutally visible. Triggered by colonial economic mismanagement and wartime policies, it claimed nearly three million lives. Gupta’s chapter, ‘Every Day I Witness Nightmares’, captures this catastrophe through eyewitness accounts and literature that tried to make sense of it. Hunger, she suggests, became not only a physical condition but an emotional state — an emblem of the moral starvation of empire.

In poems and essays by writers such as Sukanta Bhattacharya and Mulk Raj Anand, the famine appears as a mirror held up to civilisation’s collapse. Tagore’s haunting late work, ‘Crisis in Civilisation’, forms a central thread in Gupta’s narrative — the poet’s disillusionment with humanity, his grief at the world’s descent into barbarism, and his call for renewal through compassion.

One of Gupta’s greatest achievements lies in her ability to braid together the intimate and the historical. The war years, she shows, were also years of reflection and redefinition. In the chapter named ‘The Thing That Was Lost’, she explores how the idea of “home” was transformed by displacement — whether through the departure of men to distant fronts or through the forced migrations caused by famine and air raids. Home, once a site of safety, became a space of longing and loss.

Another chapter, ‘Close to Me as My Very Own Brother”, turns the spotlight on male friendships in Indian war writing. Here, Gupta uncovers the tenderness that often underpinned comradeship — relationships that blurred the lines between duty and affection, and that offered emotional sustenance amid violence and uncertainty. In these pages, she challenges the stereotypes of stoic masculinity, showing that vulnerability and empathy were also part of the soldier’s story.

While the battlefield has long been the focus of war history, Gupta gives equal weight to those who remained behind. The women who waited, worked, and wrote — often in silence — emerge as witnesses in their own right.

Activists such as Tara Ali Baig, nurses and doctors on the Burma front, and countless unnamed mothers and wives populate the emotional landscape she paints. Through their letters and memoirs, we see how war invaded domestic spaces, transforming everyday life into a theatre of endurance.

Gupta writes of “anguished hearts” not as metaphor but as historical evidence. The fear of air raids, the sight of hungry children, the absence of loved ones — these, too, were the realities of India’s war. By restoring emotion to the historical record, she argues that feelings are not soft data but vital clues to understanding how societies survive crisis.

What makes the book so compelling is its insistence on looking at the global war from the Indian perspective. For Britain, the war was a fight for democracy and civilisation; for India, it was also a confrontation with the hypocrisy of those ideals. As Gupta notes, the same empire that called for liberty in Europe jailed Gandhi and suppressed the Quit India movement at home.

Seen from Calcutta rather than London, the war ceases to be a heroic narrative of Allied victory and becomes instead a story of moral contradictions and human cost. Gupta’s intervention is both historiographical and ethical: she reminds us that global history must include the emotions of those who bore its burdens without sharing in its glory.

A historian with literary sensibility, Gupta writes with precision, empathy, and grace. Her prose balances academic rigour with narrative warmth, allowing the reader to move effortlessly between archival fragments and the larger questions they evoke. Each chapter unfolds like a story, yet the cumulative effect is that of a symphony — voices rising and blending, carrying echoes of pain, pride, and endurance.

Gupta’s work has been widely celebrated for its originality and emotional depth. Shortlisted for the 2024 Gladstone Book Prize, it has drawn praise from scholars and critics alike for its fresh approach to war history. What distinguishes her study is not only its range of sources but its refusal to treat emotion as peripheral. For Gupta, feelings are the connective tissue of history — the invisible threads binding individuals to events, memory to nationhood.

The book is  more than the  war. It is about the human capacity to feel in times of fracture — to love, mourn, and imagine even amid devastation. It shows that the emotional life of a people can illuminate their political choices, their artistic expressions, and their vision of freedom.

By reassembling scattered memories and forgotten emotions, Diya Gupta offers a new way of reading both India and the world in the 1940s. Her India is not a passive colony swept along by imperial tides, but a living, feeling community navigating grief and hope in equal measure. The war, as she reminds us, did not just redraw maps; it reshaped minds and hearts.

In giving voice to those who seldom found one in history books — the sepoy writing from the desert, the poet confronting famine, the mother waiting for news — Gupta transforms statistics into stories, and stories into testimony. Her book stands as a reminder that history is not only written in treaties or timelines but in tears, silences, and the fragile language of feeling.

It ensures that those emotional histories, too long buried under the dust of archives, are heard again — quietly, insistently, and with the full weight of their truth.

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Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Cyclones in Odisha: Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience, Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.

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Categories
Poetry

Belonging by Usha Kishore

BELONGING

I don’t belong here, you tell me.
I don’t belong here where the monsoons
drain the sky of all water? This darkness
is not cloud covering the sky in layers
of collyrium dust. This darkness is the 
darkness of your heart staining the air. 
Can you wipe clean the slate of memory,
my smile etched on fond photographs, 
the family fables, the tangle of feuds 
and the look in your eyes, when I, 
your unwanted daughter, walk in
demanding my dues? I may not belong 
here anymore, but I demand the song 
of every cuckoo that sang on the thatch,
the footprints of every squirrel that scuttled
across the courtyard, and the cries of every 
dark goddess you deified in false myths.
Usha Kishore

Usha Kishore is an Indian-born British poet, editor and translator. The author of three collections of poetry, her work has been widely published.     www.ushakishore.co.uk

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Categories
Stories

After the Gherkin

Deborah Blenkhorn

A Mrs Tadpole Mystery by Deborah Blenkhorn

Parry Lines was an ordinary fellow, so much so that even his friends couldn’t be bothered to find out his actual name and were content to call him “Parallel,” his nickname since childhood.  Regular, indeed nondescript features were surmounted by his trademark bald pate; the most you could say was that occasionally he wore a bright plaid shirt in neon pastels to liven things up a bit.

Ten weeks A.G. (After Gherkin)

Yet his death (by gherkin) caused a butterfly effect that changed the world.  Until the incident with the gherkin, the most notable thing that had ever happened to Parry was when his surprisingly dashing teenaged son had consumed an entire teacup full of gravy during Thanksgiving dinner.  Honoured guests had watched in horror as Parry Jr. (PJ for short), notable for his twinkling hazel eyes and flowing chestnut hair, gulped down the rich, brown fluid–though they should have expected something of the kind when he poured the gravy from the pitcher on the table into the China cup ready at his place setting for after-dinner tea.

Present at that event, and at the gherkin incident as well, was Mrs. Honoria Tadpole, English professor and amateur sleuth.  Her demure, conservative appearance (she always wore a smart, tailored suit–or at least the best the local thrift shop could provide–and had her silver-blonde hair cut in a perky, short bob) and her self-effacing manner and diminutive (if plump) stature belied the sharpest mind north of California. It would fall to her to unravel the complicated mystery that the local paper dubbed “Gherkingate.” 

Interviewed by the features’ editor, as the criminal trial of the alleged murderer dragged on, Mrs. Tadpole was asked the inevitable question of how it had all started. The interview took place in Mrs. Tadpole’s well-appointed parlour, a room replete with Victorian bric-a-brac.  With characteristic hospitality, she poured out a strong brew of  BC Bold to accompany the delicate sandwiches (ham, egg, and cucumber) and homemade oatmeal cookies that were her signature “high tea,” known to local islanders as a four o’clock tradition at the old manse where Mrs. Tadpole rented a small suite.

“Now, Mrs. Catchpole, I understand you were part of the original party that travelled to Moany Bay,” the interviewer began.

“Tadpole,” Mrs. Tadpole corrected.  A veteran instructor of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds, she was used to misspellings and mispronunciations. Marpole, Rumpole, Toadpole: she had heard and seen it all, and could make the necessary correction without even flinching anymore.  She cast her mind back almost three months to a mid-summer weekend off British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast.

She began with an allusion to classic culture: “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip…”

Sadly, the features’ editor of the Island Gleaner failed to catch the reference to Gilligan’s Island, one of the best sit-coms of the 1960s.  Mrs. Tadpole had been a toddler when the series was first aired, but its popularity throughout her childhood made it a touchstone for, really, almost everything in life, according to her observations.  She knew that some people accorded such a status to the iconic, original Star Trek, but what did Captain Kirk have that “the Skipper” did not?  Not much, thought Mrs. Tadpole.

The premise of Gilligan’s Island was classic: a small number of people, randomly-assorted, stranded on an island together with no real prospect of deliverance.  After all, wasn’t that just the paradigm of human existence?  You didn’t need to be an English proffessor (though Mrs. Tadpole was one, of course) to figure that out. 

That fateful weekend, when the seeds of the gherkin incident was sown, had been rife with undertones of Gilligan’s Isle.

Breathing deeply of the fresh Pacific breeze, the passengers sat out on the deck of the vessel as it hugged the rugged BC coastline. The rushing water behind the Skirmish flumed out into a fan of spray, while the murky depths offshore spat out seals and sealions–even the occasional humpback whale–with random irregularity.  Black bears hid among the rocks and evergreens in the uninhabited areas; cabins dotted the beaches in the populated areas of cottage country.  On the way up the coast, the party of friends and family had composed their own version of the theme song, with each member of the group assigned to a role from the original cast.  Mrs. Tadpole was the Professor, of course.  Never mind that the community college where Mrs. Tadpole worked had opted not to accord academic titles to their teachers, or that the original Professor in the TV series was a man.  (As Mrs. Tadpole had been known to say to her first-year college students, we live in a post-gender, post-glass-ceiling world. And if we don’t, we should).

Aboard the Bayliner, Skirmish, Parry Lines was the Skipper, and his hapless, gravy-drinking son was typecast as the irrepressible Gilligan, full of mischief and ridiculous ideas. Mrs. Tadpole could only hope that her adorable niece, Mary Anne (same name as her Gilligan’s Island counterpart!), was immune to his sauce-swilling charms.

The Millionaire role was assumed by the reclusive entrepreneur Deadhead, Mickey Garcia (if that were in fact his real name), accompanied by his charming wife, Penelope, a voluptuous brunette. Together they had built an empire founded on tribute bands and biopics.  The rumour mill had it that there was trouble in paradise, but no one outside his immediate family had seen Mickey for years, so it was difficult to substantiate the gossip.

The cast was fleshed out (so to speak) with a bona fide movie star, the internet sensation who began as one of the central figures in a YouTube series called Project Man Child (“For the price of a cup of coffee… you can buy this underemployed househusband a cup of coffee!”) and had gone on to a viral barrage of TikToks under the sobriquet of “The Naked Gardener”.  Mrs. Tadpole was relieved (as no doubt were the others) to note that all the passengers aboard the Skirmish, including this one, appeared to be fully clothed. 

At least, all whom she could see wore conventional travelling attire:  Mr Garcia, recovering from surgery and groggy with heavy opiates, was shrouded in a blanket and wearing dark glasses. He slumped a little to the side, and his heavy breathing attested to a well-earned reputation for napping as a pretense in order to ignore his surroundings.

As Mrs Tadpole later told the Gleaner interviewer, the real concern of the trip quickly emerged: not the rapprochement of Mary Anne and Parallel Jr., but the burgeoning, even violent antagonism between Parry Sr. and Penelope Garcia, whom the latter insisted on calling “Cherry” with a suggestive leer while her husband languished in his bunk.  “Is he grateful? Or just dead?” quipped Lines. One night, Penelope went so far as to brandish a knife in Lines’ general direction and had to be restrained by Mrs Tadpole and Mary Anne in tandem.

Although Madame Garcia was the only one to meet his taunts with open animosity, no one was spared the self-proclaimed wit of Parallel Lines.

He had the nerve to call Mrs Tadpole’s beloved niece, whose sunny disposition was outshone only by the sweet, fair face that perched above her perfect figure, “Mistress Mary, Quite Contrary” –nothing could have been further from the truth!  Of course, Mary Anne merely smiled and shrugged it off, as if no insult could penetrate her cheerful exterior … but others were less armour-clad.

The bully referred mercilessly to the Naked Gardener as “Jamie Oliver, the Naked Chef” (whom he slightly resembled) a slur that obviously got under the man’s skin (“I couldn’t boil an egg to save my life!” he protested angrily.  “That’s not my brand at all! He’d better watch his back…”).

Even Mrs. Tadpole (surprisingly resilient after having been bullied through her shy youth as resembling a chubby little toad) came in for her share of abuse, rechristened as “Mrs Toad” after making her one of specialties, toad-in-the-hole, for her shipmates. (Once she discovered that the galley of the Bayliner was stocked with a potato ricer and La Ratte potatoes, there was no holding her back.  A ring of caramelized onions surrounded each serving dish, with two nut-brown sausage-ends sticking out of the centre, for all the world like a couple of froggy eyes.) “No one calls me Toad,” she intoned ominously.

Cruelly and unaccountably, Parallel Lines saved his worst tirade for his own son.  Recalling that terrible moment of youthful folly, that mind-gripping shame that only time could heal, the father saluted the son like a champion hog-caller summoning his prize sow. “Sooooo-Eeeeee! Want some gravy with that?” Alternatively, he would break into song to the tune of ‘Hey, Jude’:

"Au jus,
Just make it fat,
Take some gravy
And make it wetter..."

It was pitiful to see the boy’s response, especially in front of Mary Anne. His pale face was suffused with a ruddy glow beneath his chestnut fringe, and hot, angry tears rose in his sensitive, hazel eyes.

“I’ll kill him,” PJ muttered under his breath.

And now the tranquil Mary Anne, who couldn’t have cared less about any vitriol directed her way, was at last roused to fury in defense of her maligned and helpless friend.  “I’ll do it for you!” she offered.  “By G—!”

Two Hours B.G. (Before Gherkin)

Suffice it to say, no one was all that distressed when Parallel Lines failed to return to the Skirmish after an afternoon in the seaside village of Egmont (pronounced with an “egg” and not an “edge”).

Penelope had steered Mickey off in a collapsable wheelchair they had stowed on the boat; “the millionaire and his wife” were off for lunch al fresco, heading for a picnic table in an accessible, though private, spot.  Roast beef sandwiches and condiments, along with champagne and a couple of plastic flutes, had been assembled into a decorative yet sturdy straw basket which the amazon-like Penelope slung easily over one arm as she manouevred the wheelchair down the forest path.

The movie star had gone in search of Egmont’s famous cream cheese cinnamon buns, hoping to be recognised at the Forest Cafe by someone who would do a double take and exclaim, “Hey!  Wait!  Aren’t you that man child?”

Mrs Tadpole and her niece decided to go for a refreshing swim in the brisk waters of the bay, washing off the grime of shipboard life before stopping at the Village Green Room for a bowl of veggie curry soup and some fresh, hot rolls.

As for PJ, he declared himself too upset to leave the Skirmish, and was hoping to curl up with a graphic novel, a diet soda, and a bag of Doritos, to forget all his cares for a few hours while the rest of the party looked around Egmont Village.

But where was Parallel? It was time to cast off. If they didn’t leave soon, they wouldn’t make it to the Coastal Lodge before dark.  And–not to mention–P. Lines was the skipper!

“I’m perfectly capable of getting us there,” insisted PJ, fortified by his power nap.  “I’ll bet you anything, dad’s holed up at the Drifter Pub, and he’ll crash at the hotel there. I’m sure he’s as tired of us as we are of him.  Let’s just go.  We’ll all have cooled off by tomorrow morning, and I’ll swing back and get him then, bring him up to the Lodge for the rest of the weekend.”

The plan sounded good, and all agreed to it willingly.  Off they set for the rustic cabin someone had dubbed the Coastal Lodge in hopes (quite justified, as it turned out) of charging a tidy sum in AirBnB rates.  Never mind that it featured a remote outhouse and a camp kitchen; the setting was beyond beautiful, and the (now) congenial group looked forward to beach and forest walks, blazing bonfires, and midnight swims.  Mrs Tadpole insisted on taking charge of the outdoor kitchen: she had brought the ingredients for her famous moussaka and looked forward to the challenge of cooking it in a casserole dish on the barbecue.  PJ and Maryanne diced feta, tomatoes, onions and cucumbers for a Greek salad, while the movie star tried in vain to get a cell signal and the millionaires played cribbage by the big bay window in the cabin. 

Parallel Lines could cool his heels at the Drifter until morning, thought PJ and crew.

G.T. (Gherkin Time)

“So,” said Mrs. Tadpole to her interviewer, “Can you guess who did it?”

“Uh,” said the Features editor.  “Nope.”

“I’ll give you a hint: don’t ask who was the perpetrator. Ask who was the victim!”

“Well, that would be Mr. Lines, would it not?”

“Would it?  What if the wheelchair-bound invalid, Mr. Garcia, was really Parallel Lines in disguise?”

“But–”

“He was wrapped in a blanket, wearing dark glasses and a mask, slumped in his chair.  And there was a switcheroo.”

“A what?”

“A switch.  In the forest.”

“Well, I’ll be jiggered. Why haven’t you said anything?”

“Blackmail.”

“You’re blackmailing the unlikely lovers? Parry Lines and Madame G?”

“No, they’ve been blackmailing me.  But it’s time to come out. My trans-formation is at hand!”

“Mrs Tadpole!  What a story for the Gleaner–and for the world!  May I be the first to congratulate you?”

“You may.”        


Deborah Blenkhorn is a poet, essayist, and storyteller living in Canada’s Pacific Northwest.  Her work fuses memoir and imagination, and has been featured in over 40 literary magazines and anthologies in Canada, the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Brazil, India, and Indonesia.

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

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Categories
Poetry

Endlessly Lost by Rex Tan

Rex Tan
endlessly lost

again, I’m at a loss 

lost in the rain 

lost in the chain of burnt cigarettes 

lost in the lines of empty verses

lost in the torn pages of calendars

lost at the day’s end


only to remember — there’s still tomorrow

Rex Tan is a journalist by trade and a poet at heart. As a Malaysian, he is fluent in English, Mandarin, and Malay yet calls none his first language.

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

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Categories
Essay

Once a Student — Once a Teacher

Odbayar Dorj writes of celebrating the start of the new school year on September 1st in Mongolia and of their festivals around teaching and learning…

A school in Mongolia
Inside the classroom…
From Public Domain

Mongolians are a people who celebrate festivals wholeheartedly and work with the same kind of enthusiasm. Among our many traditions, one of the most beautiful and meaningful to me is the way we welcome each new school year. In Mongolia, September 1st is not just the beginning of classes—it is a joyful national celebration for teachers and students. On this day, schools across the country hold ceremonies to mark the opening of the academic year. Students eagerly wait for this day, dressed in clean uniforms, their faces full of excitement. Traditionally, the new school year officially begins with a special lesson taught by the President of Mongolia, often about Mongolian script or history, which symbolises the importance of education and cultural heritage.

My own memories of this day are filled with music, excitement, and warmth. Unlike in many countries, Mongolian schools do not separate students into different buildings for primary, lower secondary, and upper secondary levels. Instead, everyone studies in the same school building, simply moving from classroom to classroom as they grow older. This creates a strong sense of community—older students and younger students share the same space, the same celebrations, and the same traditions. The ceremony usually begins with a speech from the school principal, followed by short performances by younger students. Songs about schools and teachers are sung, and the gentle melodies of the morin khuur—the traditional horsehead fiddle—fill the air. We sing, dance, and perform music to welcome the new academic year. Sometimes, I wonder how many other nations celebrate the start of school with such joy and artistry.

A man holding a morin khuur, whose music has been named as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. From Public Domain

One of the most touching parts of the ceremony is the first bell ringing. This moment marks the official opening of the school year. First graders who are starting school for the very first time are given the honor of ringing a small handbell, while teachers line up their classes and lead them ceremoniously into the building. To ring the bell is considered a great honor, both for the child and their family. I will never forget the day my daughter entered first grade. She was chosen, together with a little boy, to represent all first graders and ring the bell. It was a chilly September morning, as it usually is in Mongolia. With one hand tucked into her uniform pocket to keep warm, she raised her other hand high to match the boy’s height and rang the bell. She was one of the smallest children in her class, but in that moment she seemed so brave and proud. That image remains clear in my mind even now—such memories stay with us forever.

For Mongolians, bells carry deep meaning. We even call our graduation ceremonies “Bell Ceremonies”. These are held for students finishing 5th grade (primary), 9th grade (lower secondary), and 12th grade (upper secondary). For 12th graders, the final bell has special significance: it is the last time they will hear the school bell as students before moving on to university or the adult world. That sound marks both an ending and a new beginning.

For teachers, September 1st is a day of joy. It is the moment we reunite with our students after the long summer break and see how much they’ve grown and changed in just three months. For students, it’s the thrill of seeing their classmates again. The entire month of September is a period of readjustment to school life, and it is followed in early October by Teacher’s Day, one of the few days in the year when teachers can celebrate their profession. Another beloved tradition in Mongolia is “Student Day.” On this day, graduating students—or, if the class is small, students from other classes too—take on the role of teachers for one day, while teachers become students. It’s a playful and meaningful role reversal that leaves deep impressions on both sides.

I still remember my first Student Day vividly. I was in 9th grade when my Mongolian language and literature teacher selected me to become a teacher for the day. It was the first time a lower secondary student had been chosen. I was nervous, especially standing alongside the older students from upper secondary school. I spent the entire night preparing, determined not to let my teacher down. On that day, I taught a 9th grade literature class. I was frightened at first, but the time passed in a flash, leaving me exhilarated.

The following years, I was chosen again—first as a biology teacher in 10th grade, then as a Russian language teacher in 11th grade. I participated as a student-teacher for three consecutive years. I especially remember the biology lesson; that day, I felt a special joy and excitement, a spark that would later lead me to choose teaching as my profession.

Years later, after graduating from university, I returned to school as a real teacher. During my first year at a public school, Student Day came again—this time, from the teacher’s side. My 12th

grade students drew lots to choose teachers, and a sweet girl named Khulan was selected to teach English in my place. She told me with a smile, “Teacher, you probably don’t have a student uniform anymore, so you can borrow mine tomorrow and join our class as a 12th grader.” The next day, the 12th graders handed us invitations, asking us to come to their class as students. Attached to each invitation was a class schedule for the day. When I put on the school uniform again, it truly felt as if I had traveled back in time to my childhood.

As a student, I used to think, “I can’t wait to grow up and start working. I’m tired of wearing this uniform.” But as a teacher, wearing it again brought back a wave of nostalgia. Returning to the classroom as a student for one day became one of the most unforgettable experiences of my life. On Student Day, everyone—teachers, administrators, and staff—puts on uniforms and attends classes together as “students.” The day is filled with laughter and playful mischief. Some pretend to be naughty students: interrupting class, asking silly questions, teasing each other. We laugh and call each other “bad students”.

At the end of the day, both the student-teachers and teacher-students gather to share their thoughts. This is always a moving moment. Older students often talk about how difficult it is to teach large classes and apologise for times when they had been troublesome. They express a newfound respect for their teachers, having experienced the challenges themselves. For us teachers, hearing this is incredibly rewarding. If there were a train that could take us back to our childhood, I think everyone would want to ride it. For teachers, Student Day is exactly that—a once-a-year chance to return to childhood.

For the past three years, I have spent September 1st, Student Day, and Teacher’s Day far away from Mongolia. At first, when I saw my friends’ photos and posts on social media, I felt a quiet envy. But at the same time, remembering these traditions filled me with warmth, pride, and a deep love for my profession. Throughout my life, I have met many wonderful teachers. Thanks to them, I have continued to learn and grow, always inspired by their example. These traditions, these bells, these memories—they are not just part of my past. They are part of who I am, both as a former student and as a teacher.

No matter where I am in the world, once a student, once a teacher—those identities live within me, carrying the echoes of September bells wherever I go.

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Odbayar Dorj is an international student from Mongolia currently studying in Japan. Her writing reflects on cultural identity, personal memory, and the power of connection across borders and generations.

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Categories
Poetry

A Thousand Small Sorrows of Night

By Debadrita Paul

The sky is dressed in the metaphors of dark.
Two orbs of mine have seen a lark sleeping with its young, beneath the moonlight's spark.

There's a man who tiptoes from the day's rush, unlocking the gate, keys jingle in the stillness. 
With a fixed gaze, he fears the sound will awaken his beloved and their children.

A grandma sews by the window, threads glinting beneath the lamplight, 
Weaving old summers into the hush of the night,
Fingers still tremble where small hands once lay, 
Stitching the ache that won't fade away.

On roads, finally quiet after day's business, 
A drunk man argues softly with none in particular, 
Words slurring into the dust, unheard and familiar.
Street dogs curl under a bench, their ribs show faintly.

A mason pauses, smoke curling from his weary lips, 
Sits at the edge of a half-constructed skeleton of a building.
The moonlight seeps through hollow beams, 
Sketching his struggle upon the concrete bones of the city.

Beneath the murky sky, there also lies a mother, with her little son, 
Ragged, curled up with no blanket, warming up instead with dust.

The smuggler waits where no one will see.
Money trades hands, but freedom flees.

Somewhere far away, I hear the hiss of streetlamps flicker, 
Refusing to die, softly illuminating lonely streets where lost footsteps lie.
In one of the dwellings, I see a loud TV with no one watching.
Loneliness grapples man.

I see an old woman caressing old photos in the album, kept beneath the bed's gloom. 
Pages of laughter, now agony and yearning, shatters the room.

At the dusty city walls, by the lane, a young alluring woman 
Drunk with the wine of youth, has her saree tied loosely.
She waits for the night’s business, selling her sorrow, wrapped in skin.
Eyes once dreaming of soft daylight, 
Now learn to fade behind the night.

Yet somewhere a window still glows in the gloom,
A hint of tomorrow lies buried in the city's tomb.
These streets hold onto the stories no daylight recalls.
Whispers of lives resonate in the dark, silence fading into the walls.
I keep their secrets, their grief, their light. 
I am the witness as they call me Night.

Debadrita Paul is an upcoming voice in poetry. 

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Categories
Musings

On a Dark Autumnal Evening…

By Ahmad Rayees

From Public Domain

That evening was a Friday in autumn. I was sitting by the window pane and looking at the meadows beneath the mountain. The plot and idea for my new story changed colours as I watched the evening sky. The sun was vehemently trying to emerge from behind dense clouds that were outlined in silver. At a glance, it looked like a Renaissance painting, with a line of birds flying hurriedly towards an unknown destination.

I was engrossed by the beauty of the evening. Suddenly, the sun disappeared into the smoky oblivion of the phantom clouds. When the last rays of the embers reflected feebly on the heavily darkened sky, I could hear the shepherds shouting from the vast mountain peaks to their fellow men to hurry back to the tents. The bleating of the sheep and the clip-clop of their hooves on the rocky mountain echoed as they hurried to return to their dwellings. I felt a strange sadness without any obvious reason. Maybe I was overwhelmed with a sense of loss and abandonment.

I was still standing near the glass window, gazing at the sky. I could feel the northern wind pass through me, chilling my entire body. The dark night shrouded the valley with its creased onyx veil. Slowly, everything was immersed in a sea of darkness.

Yes, I needed to start. I was very keen to begin writing that very night and finish it as quickly as possible for a journal. I looked at my writing table—the blank white paper placed on the dark walnut surface seemed to be calling out to me. I could feel the pages waiting for words bleeding blue ink of pain and tears.

I have this irresistible urge to speak for those who have forgotten how to talk, who have forgotten how to cry, who have forgotten how to live. Maybe I will be the voice of the unheard. And maybe I am blessed to be a journalist and storyteller. But now, I feel lethargic, restless, and disturbed. I could feel the autumn creeping in with a deathly coldness hovering over the fallen leaves on this frosty night. Unlike previous years, this year autumn had arrived hurriedly with a cold vengeance. The rustling of dead leaves crumbling in the wind was unsettling, and I felt uneasy. I tried my best to calm the anxious spirit within me, to connect with the purity of those white sheets.

Time was ticking faster. Once again, I returned to my table and took the pen…

But—did I hear something?

Yes, I heard it again. I was distracted by noises from the distant forest. From the deep wilderness of the bushes, the haunting cries of wolves echoed, as if they had been left lonely and abandoned. I looked outside my window, then back at myself. Was I just imagining it? Was I hallucinating?

Suddenly, I was there—in front of them. I could see them clearly in the darkness, silhouetted against the white snow. When they saw me, they stopped howling and stared with shimmering red eyes.

Was I dreaming? Did I walk to them?

No… no…

I returned to my senses—to my reality! I was still sitting in my room. Just as I was trying to write the first line of my story, again I heard it. A faint sound of rustling leaves. The hollow whistle of the chilly wind gushed through the woods. It seemed as though autumn had conquered summer, pushing all living beings to their deathbed. The dried flowers were scattered by the wind. The buds had withered before they could bloom, ruthlessly destroyed—unable to spread fragrance and fill the valley with charm. Now everything had changed. Autumn was lashing wildly through the air with the howling wind, leaving grief and sorrow to linger on the withered branches.

The chilly wind blew fiercely, making the trees and their branches shiver. The cold night rendered everyone helpless and powerless. Humans stayed inside their homes, just like the animals in their burrows.

Did I hear an unnatural voice?

I sharpened my ears and listened.

Yes—I did hear a strange voice! It came from the nearby woods, from the bushes behind my house. It sounded like the voice of a mysterious person, filled with loss and sorrow. It wasn’t just a voice—it was more like a wail. I tried to ignore it, but it seemed to plead for help—something I couldn’t quite understand. No matter how hard I tried to focus on my story and look away, the voice disturbed my soul and compelled me to go out and uncover the truth.

The voice grew louder. It seemed like someone was standing in front of my house, knocking on the door. I waited for it to repeat, but the noise stopped.

Confused and tired, I turned back to my room. But something urged me on. With a compelling curiosity, I slowly opened the door and stood on the lawn. It was empty. There was no one.

With fear and uncertainty, I began walking in the direction of the voice. As I started moving, the invisible voice faded—but I continued to try to find it. I wanted to follow it. It was not only alluring, but terrifying. I wondered if it was just an illusion, leading me nowhere. Yet, the voice carried pain and helplessness that pushed me beyond imagination. I followed it through the narrow, bushy lanes of the forest in the dark of night.

The sky was starless, gloomy. The night was filled with ghostly noises from every direction. A waning crescent hid behind the clouds. I was aware of the danger, but I continued—driven by something deep inside me.

The lanes were lined with cold, dew-covered plants. The withered branches stood lifeless. Autumn hovered above them like a deadly witch. I reached the upper edge of the field where the forest met the mountain. The huge mountain stood like a dark phantom before me.

I stood under the walnut tree near the channel. The voice became faint. I crossed a small bridge to climb the hill, glancing at the dark water. It flowed from the river Jhelum, nourishing the upper mountain crops and connecting many villages like veins in a body. The clear glacier water flowed endlessly, season after season. It never stopped—an eternal source of hope.

And I remembered that day—the day we fought for that channel. How we went to the water authority office after sending so many applications which remained unanswered. We marched through town—fifty of us. Near the army camp, we had to walk one by one. Danish and I led with the petition signed by 500 villagers. Afnan and Usman chanted slogans, while Faris and Mujib carried placards. I had to calm them down to behave in the office…

Lost in thought, I didn’t realise how far I had gone. The voice still called—haunting and surreal.

Then, I heard laughter—children laughing.

By the stream, children were swimming and splashing, shrieking and giggling. They looked like marble statues come to life in the moonlight. I was stunned. How could they be playing on such a frosty night?

As I approached, my feet suddenly froze. I couldn’t move. I stood there, watching.

And once again—the mysterious voice.

The same voice that had pulled me from my home now called from close by. I turned and saw a woman in a long veil, her hair loose, her figure merging with the darkness. She gestured for me to leave the children and follow her.

Her blurred presence held me spellbound. I walked hurriedly, determined to stop her and see her face. I followed her along the channel until we reached a graveyard.

She turned to me and said, “I just want you to know that my children have disappeared and are buried in this unknown graveyard. I came here to take their blood-soaked clothes as our last memory.”

She cried, then added, “They will remain lost until the truth is unveiled.”

I tried to ask her who she was.

She replied, “We are the unknown truth.”

And then—she disappeared.

I screamed, “Hey… stop! For God’s sake, who are you?”

Suddenly—I woke up!

The alarm clock on the opposite wall read 3:00 a.m.

It was a dream.

As I tried to piece together the events, the haunting imagery still lingered. It felt so real—as if I had already known them, in another phase of my life, long ago.

Maybe I was one of them?

Why do I always walk among the dead in my dreams?

Dreams are often a jumble of our daily experiences, but they can also reveal our deepest fears or hidden desires. In them, we confront what already lives within us. Frosty nights are the darkest and most haunting, where we seek comfort in dreams that bind us to the painful echoes of the past and the uncertainties of the future. In this realm, a person’s core essence trembles, leaving them defenceless as the barren wilderness intrudes upon their imagination. These nightmares are as cold and unrelenting as the frost-covered nights themselves.

(The little ones who are sleeping will be haunted and continuously disturbed by the stories of children who were terrorised to death long ago in faraway places. Their serene sleep and dreams can be subverted by a red river that continually competes and devastates the territories beneath them).

Ahmad Rayees is a freelance journalist. 

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Categories
Poetry

Prismatic View by William Doreski

William Doresski
PRISMATIC VIEW 

Our daily prismatic view sorts
the world into clashing colours—
silver ripples, mustard leaves,
grey painted board and batten,

lichen-spangle boulders, crisp
imported fabrics that flatter
those who don’t need flattering.
We must unfold the spectrum.

The glass surface of our minds
smooths out the natural light 
and normalises arrogant hues
that frighten children and dogs.

In our youth we startled at
the faintest hint of artifice.
Now the unmoored hues comfort
rather than confront us. The river

coughs up neutral tones to ease
the gnashing of construction sites.
We still hate to see the planet
exposed to its raw geology

but we’ve hefted the deadweight
of being human so long we know
how ugly we look on the inside
where molts of creation continue.

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Cloud Mountain (2024).  He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors.  His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

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