These days, our cyclists’ group yearns for long weekends. On Sunday, 31st May 2026, Malaysians honoured Lord Buddha on his birthday. 1st June was marked as the King’s official birthday. In their honour, Malaysians enjoyed four days away from office. It would have been seven if one had mysteriously fallen ill on the preceding Thursday and Friday, as Wednesday, 27th May 2026, was Hari Raya Haji, commemorating Prophet Ibrahim’s sacrifice to God. With the holiday mood set, the cyclists were not inclined to stay idle.
With the holiday mood set, the cyclists were not inclined to stay idle during the festivities. Instead, they wanted to be in sync with nature, hear the birds chirp, and immerse themselves in the wild’s greenery.
Titiwangsa is marked in brown. Cameron Highlands and Fraser Hill are part of this range. From Public Domain
This was the first time we were trying this route and conquering these highlands that are part of the Titiwangsa, a mountain range that forms the spine of the Malay Peninsula. A few years ago, I did participate in a competition from Simpang Pulai in Perak, a western state, to the Cameron Highlands. Now, it is a different ballgame, approaching the beast from the east to kill it. The day started early with a drive up to Kuala Kubu Bahru, and after gearing up, the journey began. Before the climb, a brief historical detour made KKB feel like the right starting point.
For some historical perspective, KKB is an old town with a rich historical heritage. It had already become a tin-mining town by the 1870s. Legend has it the locals had built a dam above the original town, Kubu. Kubu (fort) was built by the warring factions in the 1870s Selangor Civil War[1]. The British moved in to set law and order.
The district officer, a Briton, had apparently hunted and killed an albino crocodile that the local folks believed was a guardian of the dam. Once the crocodile was gone, the balance was upset, and the dam broke its banks. Without its guardian, Kubu was almost destroyed, save a Chinese temple and a mosque. The destroyed area was named Ampang Pecah (broken dam). The town was rebuilt on higher ground and renamed Kuala Kubu Bahru[2].
Because the British officers thought KKB was too hot and humid for their comfort, they sent their workers to search for a place with a more pleasant climate. Hence, Fraser’s Hill came to the fore.
The roads leading to the Hill are unceremoniously remembered as the place where Malaya’s Highways Commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, was gunned down by communist insurgents in 1951. According to the Malaysian Communist Party, it was a ‘routine’ ambush and that ‘big catch’ was quite unexpected[3].
The climb up to Fraser’s Hill was quite gruelling. The inclination was around 5%, sometimes peaking at 10% and 12%. The Hill was about 1330 metres above sea level. After a short stopover at the resort station, it was a cool ride down the hill. From the ascent, the contrast made the descent feel especially rewarding.
From there, the long stretch down to Raub was pleasant, with mostly continuous slow decline, just enough to recover from the earlier climb up to Fraser’s. We also noticed a funny thing on Fraser’s Hill. Even though Fraser’s Hill is technically located in the State of Pahang, the administrative council is the Hulu Selangor Town Council in Selangor. After a short stopover, it was time to move on.
After cycling 86km over 5h51m and gaining about 1400m of elevation, we reached Raub, having completed the day’s ride.
I had imagined Raub to be a ghost town, much like the Wild West towns in America that became deserted after the gold ran dry[4]. I remembered from my geography lessons that Raub was the ‘gold capital of Malaya’. Bau in Sarawak was the other place with gold deposits. In the late 19th century, Raub was already famous amongst the locals for its gold. Raub, in the local lingo, meant a fistful. That was how much one could scoop of gold from the riverbed with a dulang (a flat tray used for mining). That drew in multinational companies, including an Australian firm that modernised mining to achieve higher yields. That, too, ignited related activities and the mushrooming of colonial Tudor-style buildings, which are neatly maintained to this day. Hence, modern Raub turned out to be a busy town, serving as a stopover for those travelling along the spine of the Peninsula to Gua Musang and Kota Bahru.
Raub hit the headlines again recently for being the centre of the ‘Hermès’ of king of fruits, the Musang King durian [5]. Disused pieces of state land belonging to the State Royalty were used by enterprising durian planters to churn out, via budgrafting, a particular breed of durian that had durian lovers from China yearning for more and more. Seeing its great potential, the Royalty decided to claim their land[6]. There is also talk of a different kind of mining in the pipeline in Raub for rare earth elements (REE). It is said being discussed between the State-level and Chinese investors[7].
After settling down at Raub Hotel, a convenient 3-star hotel right in town, we took a stroll around town. The imposing shop that caught our attention was Restoran Ratha Raub[8], a red-painted building with its name in bold, striking, contrasting fonts. At first glance, it seemed just like a generic Indian makan[9] shop. Only upon entering did it dawn upon us that the owners were going places. Plastered on its walls were numerous pictures of important luminaries enjoying themselves in the shop. There were even newspaper cuttings in the national dailies describing its curry as deliciously ‘foxy’! I wonder why. Is that a hint of the restaurant serving exotic meat? The one that took the cake was the photo the owner took with the Sultan of Brunei. Apparently, the restaurant also marketed its halal curry powder at a trade festival in Brunei that His Highness attended. We later learned that Restoran Ratha Raub also had a branch in the Klang Valley.
Day 2: Raub to Sg Koyan; Betau post
After a quick breakfast of bread and peanut butter by 0630am, we hit the road. The second day was going to be a recovery ride of sorts, and we were supposed to hit the Cameron Highlands on the last day. So, the plan was to ride to Sg Koyan, a small township in the middle of Pahang amidst the Felda land development programme.
The first small town we traversed was Cheroh, a Chinese New Village with a row of coffee shops, small- and medium-sized industries, half-plank, half-brick houses, and temples. Rows of palm oil trees soothed our eyes as we rode uninterrupted, except for a herd of cows criss-crossing the road, grazing their morning chow.
One of the fascinating things we usually see as we drive along the roads is how quirky some businesses’ names are. On this road, we noticed a regular coffee shop named ‘Double Three Kopitiam[10]‘, a direct reference to Hilton’s Double Tree. Perhaps the owner was aware of another restaurateur in Bangsar who got into a legal tussle with HSBC for naming his shop HSBC, too. The Bangsar owner thought ‘Hot Spicy Bangsar Cuisine’ aptly described what he was offering. An Indian family offering Chinese cuisine already had people turning their heads; what’s more, with a catchy name. The multinational conglomerate, Hongkong Shanghai Banking Corporation, which sprang from the tears of the family of a person with an opium addiction in China around the Opium War, thought otherwise. They sued, but it led nowhere. Along the way, too, I saw way too many schools, disproportionate to the area’s population. There were huge Chinese schools, Tamil schools and even residential ones. Perhaps people in this region understood the value of education or that politicians in cahoots with building contractors used school buildings as part of their moneymaking schemes.
In 3.5hrs, we had already completed the day’s intended 73km journey. We had reached Sg Koyan, our stop for the day. Since we had time on our hands and the ride was relatively easy, we decided to add an extra 15km, meant to reduce our burden on the last day. So, we ended the day after riding 88km in about 4h20m.
Sg Koyan is literally in the middle of nowhere. It is a collection area for jungle produce, a centre for Felda settlers, served by a row of shops, petrol stations and a farmers’ market. The only decent rest house, frequented by the rich and famous around here, as we later discovered, was Jelai Inn. This inn is clean, fairly well maintained and spacious. The restaurant, with an in-house chef, prepared various Malay dishes that we can bravely say changed our perception of how tasty traditional Malay cuisine can be—highly recommended.
After going the extra mile on the second leg of the journey, we reached Betau post. Betau is inhabited mainly by the orang asli (the original dwellers of Malaysia). The whole area had been gentrified, with nice roads and a rest-and-recreation area where people could sell their products. The area had received the royal seal as a weaving centre to showcase orang asli handicrafts. From there, we headed into the final stretch.
Day 3: Betau post to Ringlet to Tanah Rata
Selangor River Reservoir enroute to Fraser Hill
From there, the last stretch proved to be the most gruelling one yet. Starting with a slight climb, it increased to 5%, sometimes to 9-12%. The only saving grace was the occasional punctuation of climbs with descents, giving a brief respite to the sore muscles.
Even though this stretch spanned 60 km, it took us 5h15m and featured 1550m of elevation gain.
The roads all along the stretch were very well maintained and wide. They grew narrower, and the traffic grew heavier as we approached Ringlet and Tanah Rata. Nevertheless, we received adequate encouragement from passersby as we drew nearer and nearer to the elusive finishing line, set at the iconic clock tower in Tanah Rata. Thus ended the legendary ride over 229km, with an elevation gain of over 3,520 m and a moving time of 13 hr 53 m.
Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
There is a cartographic trick that India plays on the careless observer. Place a finger on Goa, cradled in the lap of the Western Ghats where the Mandovi meets the Arabian Sea. Now drag that finger clean across the peninsula — past the Deccan plateau, past the red laterite and the black cotton soil — until it arrives at Odisha, where the Mahanadi fans into the Bay of Bengal. The distance is vast. The terrain changes several times over. And yet, when you finally arrive, you feel, inexplicably, that you have not travelled at all. You have merely walked from one room of the same house into another.
Goa and Odisha are India’s fraternal twins, stationed like sentinels on opposite coasts, facing outward toward different oceans but turning inward toward an almost identical soul. They share no border, no common neighbour, no obvious historical corridor. And yet their resemblances are so startling, so layered, that they make a quiet mockery of the assumption that east and west shall never meet. In this country, at least, they have been meeting all along.
The Plate That Speaks First
Begin where all honest cultural inquiry must begin — at the table. In both Goa and Odisha, the grammar of a meal is written in two words: rice and fish. The xitt-kodi of a Goan Catholic household — rice with fish curry — is a mirror image of the bhata-machha that anchors every Odia thali. The curry leaves may change, the tamarind may yield to kokum, but the fundamental covenant between grain and sea remains unbroken.
Both states worship the coconut with equal fervour. It thickens their gravies, sweetens their desserts, oils their hair, and thatches their roofs. And in both places, the humble samosa — that deep-fried triangle of spiced potato — enjoys a curious and disproportionate celebrity, sold at every bus stand, every temple gate, every rain-drenched evening stall, as if it were the official snack of the coastline itself.
Weavers of Light
If food is the first language, cloth is the second. Odisha’s handloom tradition is among the most sophisticated in the world. The Sambalpuri ikat, with its geometric precision born of a tie-and-dye technique older than memory, is a textile that calculates like mathematics and sings like poetry. The Bomkai of Ganjam, the Kotpad of Koraput — each weave carries a district’s autobiography in its warp and weft.
Goa’s handloom heritage is no less poignant. The Kunbi saree, woven by the indigenous Kunbi community in checks of red and maroon, is a garment of earthy defiance — a refusal to vanish beneath the weight of colonial and commercial textile culture. In both states, the handloom is not an industry. It is an act of inheritance.
The handicraft traditions run parallel with uncanny symmetry. Odisha’s Pattachitra — those luminous scroll paintings rendered on cloth with pigments drawn from stone, earth, and lamp-black — find a philosophical cousin in Goa’s azulejos-inspired tile art and the painted terracotta work of its hinterlands. Odisha’s silver filigree from Cuttack, those impossibly intricate webs of metal that seem to have been spun by patient spiders, speak the same aesthetic dialect as the filigree and brass work of Goan artisans.
Temples, Tides, and the Slow Pulse
Both states are drenched in divinity. Odisha shelters the Jagannath Temple of Puri, whose Rath Yatra rolls through the world’s imagination every year, and the Konark Sun Temple, a stone chariot frozen mid-gallop toward the dawn. The Lingaraj Temple of Bhubaneswar presides over a city that was once a forest of a thousand shrines. Goa, often misread as merely a beach destination, guards some of the oldest Hindu temples in western India — the Mangeshi Temple, the Shanta Durga Temple, the Mahalasa Narayani, the Tambdi Surla — alongside the Basilica of Bom Jesus, where the remains of St. Francis Xavier lie in baroque silence. In both states, the sacred is not a Sunday affair. It is the air.
And then there is the pace. Both Goa and Odisha move at a tempo that the hyperventilating metros of India find baffling. The Goan susegad — that philosophy of contented ease — is a first cousin of the unhurried dignity with which Odisha conducts its daily life. Long before the global “slow living” movement became a wellness-industry buzzword, these two states had been practising it for centuries, not as aspiration but as instinct.
Songs in Different Scales
The musical traditions reveal yet another layer of kinship. Odisha gave the world Odissi — both the dance and the music — a classical tradition of astonishing fluidity, shaped by poets like Jayadeva, whose Gita Govinda remains one of the supreme lyric achievements in any language. The folk traditions — Dalkhai, Gotipua, the tribal Dhemsa — pulse with a rhythmic vitality that no concert hall can contain.
Goa’s musical soul lives in the Mando, a slow, swaying ballad of love and longing born from the encounter between Konkani sensibility and Portuguese fado. The Dulpod, faster and more festive, is its playful sibling. And beneath the tourist-facing trance and EDM, Goa’s folk traditions — Fugdi, Dhalo, Dekhni — carry the same rooted, communal energy that Odisha’s village squares have known for generations.
Goa’s Tiatr and Odisha’s Jatra are born of the same impulse — raucous, deeply local theatre traditions that turn village squares into stages, blend music with social satire, and have for generations served as the people’s newspaper, courtroom, and concert hall rolled into one.
The Literary Mirror
The literary parallels are quietly profound. Fakir Mohan Senapati, the father of modern Odia literature, wrote Chha Mana Atha Guntha — a searing, ironic novella about land, power, and peasant dispossession — in the 1890s. Across the map, Goa’s literary tradition in Konkani, shaped by figures like Bakibab Borkar (the poet-laureate of Konkani verse), Ravindra Kelekar, and Damodar Mauzo, has grappled with similar themes of identity, colonial memory, and the tension between tradition and modernity. Odisha’s Pratibha Ray and Goa’s Mauzo — both Jnanpith laureates — wrote in languages the literary mainstream often overlooks, yet carved from Odia and Konkani respectively a body of work so luminous that the nation’s highest literary honour had no choice but to find its way to their doors. Both literatures are enormous in depth and criminally under-read outside their states.
Even the economies rhyme. Both states sit on vast mineral wealth — iron ore in Goa, iron ore, bauxite and coal in Odisha — and both have built significant chapters of their economic story on extraction. Mining has been, for decades, a genuine engine of revenue and employment. But prosperity extracted from the earth exacts its own price. Both states have watched hills reshaped and rivers thickened with slurry, and both have grappled with the same difficult question that every resource-rich society must eventually face: where does sustainable use end and irreversible damage begin? The Dongria Kondh resistance in Odisha’s Niyamgiri hills and Goa’s prolonged civic movement against unregulated mining are stories of communities recognising that the wealth beneath their feet should not come at the cost of the world above it. In both states, the mandate is the same: to mine responsibly, restore what can be restored, and find an economic imagination that honours both the ledger and the landscape.
Stone, Laterite, and the Architecture of Belonging
The buildings of Goa and Odisha could not, at first glance, look more different. Odisha’s architectural glory resides in the Kalinga style of temple building — a tradition that flowered between the sixth and thirteenth centuries and produced some of the most breathtaking sacred structures on the subcontinent. The Rekha Deula, with its curvilinear tower soaring heavenward, the Pidha Deula, with its stepped pyramid, and the barrel-vaulted Khakhara Deula — each is a masterclass in proportion, carved from sandstone and laterite without a drop of mortar, held together by iron dowels and the sheer precision of stone cut to stone. The Lingaraj Temple rises a hundred and eighty feet; the Sun Temple at Konark was conceived as a stone chariot for Surya himself.
Goa’s architectural signature, meanwhile, is the Indo-Portuguese house — the balcão-fronted villa with its oyster-shell windows, its Baroque churches, its colour-washed facades in ochre and cerulean and terracotta. Where Odisha built upward in devotion, Goa built outward in conviviality.
And yet the kinship runs deeper than surface style. Both traditions are rooted in laterite — that rust-red, iron-rich stone quarried from the earth itself — and in an instinctive dialogue between structure and climate. Goan houses, whether Hindu or Catholic, were designed around the monsoon: thick laterite walls to absorb the heat, sloping roofs of Mangalore tile to shed the deluge, courtyards to channel light and air. The traditional Hindu house in Goa, with its rajangan (courtyard) and its Tulasi Vrindavan (holy basil) at its centre, is an inward-looking sanctuary not unlike the courtyard homes of rural Odisha, where domestic life orbits an open-air heart and thatched or tiled roofs slope against the same seasonal fury. In both states, the house is not merely shelter. It is a cosmology — oriented by Vastu[1], shaped by rain, and built from the very ground on which it stands.
The Sacred as Daily Bread
Spirituality in Goa and Odisha is not a compartment of life; it is the wallpaper. In Odisha, they say Bara Masa re Tera Parba — thirteen festivals in twelve months — and this is not hyperbole but arithmetic. From Rath Yatra to Raja Parba, from Nuakhai to Kumar Purnima, the Odia calendar is a procession of devotion, agriculture, and communal joy so tightly woven that one cannot tell where worship ends and daily life begins. The festivals are tied to the rice cycle — seeding, sowing, harvesting — so that the act of farming itself becomes a prayer. Odisha is a land where Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism have coexisted and cross-pollinated for millennia, leaving behind the cave monasteries of Udayagiri and Khandagiri, the Buddhist stupas of Ratnagiri and Lalitgiri, and the Shakti temples that dot the landscape like exclamation marks of feminine divinity.
Goa answers with its own brand of sacred pluralism. Here, Hindus light candles at the Basilica of Bom Jesus, and Catholics offer prayers at the Shantadurga temple at Fatorpa. The feast of Our Lady of Miracles gathers both communities under the same roof, exchanging oil and candles between church and temple as naturally as neighbours exchange sugar. The Zagor celebrations and the Shigmo festival are not Hindu events attended by Christians out of politeness; they are Goan events, full stop. In both states, religion is not a doctrine to be debated but a rhythm to be lived — embedded in the morning’s first lamp, the evening’s last bell, and every meal served between.
The Farmer and the Monsoon
Rice is not merely the staple food of Goa and Odisha; it is the organising principle of their rural civilisations. In Odisha, paddy covers nearly seventy per cent of cultivated land, and the entire social calendar revolves around its seasons — Akshaya Tritiya marks the seeding, Raja Sankranti the completion of sowing, Nuakhai the first tasting of the new harvest. The traditional beushening method — broadcasting seed and then tilling post-emergence — speaks of a farming intelligence shaped by centuries of reading the monsoon, the soil, and the floodplain.
In Goa, the ingenuity takes another form: the Khazan system, an ancient network of bunds and sluice gates that reclaim low-lying coastal land from the tides, allowing farmers to cultivate salt-tolerant rice varieties and rear fish and prawns in the same fields. It is an act of ecological engineering so elegant that modern agronomists study it as a model of sustainable land use.
Both states grow coconut, cashew, and areca nut alongside their paddy. Both rely overwhelmingly on the monsoon — Odisha’s irrigation covers barely a third of its cultivable land, and much of Goa’s paddy is rainfed. Both are lands of small and marginal farmers, where the average holding is modest and the relationship between cultivator and earth is intimate, personal, and unmediated by large-scale mechanisation. And in both states, a quiet revolution is underway: Odisha’s Millets Mission and Goa’s growing organic farming movement are attempts to reclaim indigenous crop diversity from the grip of high-yield monoculture — to remember that the land, like the people, thrives best when it is allowed its full vocabulary.
The Playing Field
In a nation drunk on cricket, Goa and Odisha are the two states that have had the audacity to fall in love with other sports. Goa is India’s football heartland. The game arrived with an Irish priest in 1883 and never left. Clubs like Salgaocar, Dempo, and Churchill Brothers have won national titles; six Goans have captained the Indian football team. During the FIFA World Cup, Goan streets erupt into a carnival of flags and giant screens, and the village tournament — barefoot boys on a laterite pitch — remains as sacred as Sunday Mass. Football in Goa is not a sport. It is an identity.
Odisha’s sporting soul beats to a different drum — the hockey stick. The state has produced legends like Dilip Tirkey, Amit Rohidas, Sunita Lakra, and Deep Grace Ekka, and became the first state government in India to sponsor the national hockey team. The Birsa Munda International Hockey Stadium in Rourkela, which hosted the 2023 World Cup, is a monument to Odisha’s commitment. But what unites both states is not the particular sport but the underlying defiance: a refusal to accept cricket’s monopoly on the Indian sporting imagination.
Both states also share a love for traditional and community games — Kho Kho and Kabaddi[2] are played at village festivals in both, and both have ISL football franchises (FC Goa and Odisha FC) that draw passionate, roaring crowds. The playing field, it turns out, is yet another room in the same house.
Rivers, Mangroves, and the Shared Ecology
The ecological parallels between these two states are no less striking. Both are coastal, riverine, and monsoon-fed. Both shelter significant mangrove ecosystems — the Khazan mangroves along Goa’s estuaries and the Bhitarkanika mangrove forests of Odisha, one of the largest in India. Both are biodiversity hotspots: Goa’s Western Ghats forests are a UNESCO heritage site, while Odisha’s Simlipal and Satkosia reserves harbour tiger, elephant, and crocodile populations of national importance. The Olive Ridley sea turtles that nest on Odisha’s Gahirmatha beach have cousins that occasionally visit Goa’s Morjim. Both states understand, in their bones, that the sea is not merely a border but a livelihood, a deity, and a defining force — and that the mangrove, the estuary, and the fishing village are not the periphery of civilisation but its very foundation.
And then there is the matter of diaspora. Both Goa and Odisha are states whose people have scattered across the world yet remain fiercely tethered to home. The Goan communities of Bombay, the Gulf, the UK and Lisbon mirror the Odia communities of US, Europe, Surat, Hyderabad, and beyond. In both cases, the expatriate carries the cuisine, the festival calendar, and the mother tongue like a portable homeland — and returns, without fail, for the annual feast or the harvest celebration, as though the umbilical cord to the village were made not of flesh but of something altogether more durable.
Goa and Odisha do not need a bridge between them. They already are the bridge — two ends of a single cultural arc that bends across the Indian landmass, proving that civilisational kinship does not require geographical proximity. They are proof that identity in India is not merely a function of latitude and longitude but of something deeper: a shared covenant with the sea, with rice, with the loom, with the slow and sacred act of living.
If India is a house with many rooms, these two states are the twin balconies — one facing the sunset, the other the sunrise — built from the same stone, painted in the same light, listening to the same tide.
East and West do not merely meet here. They embrace.
[1] science of architecture in alignment with natural forces
Mud caves in the author’s village: Photo Courtesy: Larry SuChicago: From Public Domain
I left China in 1997 with little more than youthful ambition and the resilience my parents had instilled in me. Since then, the United States has become my second home, first as an international student and later as a naturalised citizen. In nearly three decades, I have returned to my hometown five times, each visit less a simple trip than a pilgrimage, rich with memory, loss, and renewal. Of these, three homecomings stand out most vividly, moments when the presence of my parents, siblings, and villagers reminded me of who I am and where I come from. In their sacrifice, hard work, and quiet endurance, I found lessons in resilience and gratitude that reach beyond my own life and speak to something universal.
Home Visit in 1999
My hometown lies in Heyang County, Shaanxi Province, about fifteen miles from the county seat and five miles from the nearest town. In my memory, a winding dirt road served as the village’s lifeline, linking it with surrounding towns and villages. Though not entirely cut off, the village remained relatively remote, as public transportation was non-existent at the time. To the east and west stretched deep gorges and ravine carved by centuries of rain and snow. Three miles to the north rose Mount Liang, the county’s highest peak, towering yet desolate.
Approximately thirty families, around one hundred and twenty residents, called this village home. The village unfolded along two streets which were riddled with potholes throughout the year. In dry weather, stirred up by the robust northwest wind, a pervasive layer of dust enveloped the streets and the villagers in swirling dances. Conversely, during the rainy season, the thoroughfare turned into a muddy quagmire, making passage difficult. The villagers had to throw in discarded bricks, stones, or fragments of decaying planks to make a makeshift path. Dump sites, replete with smoldering wood, fallen branches, and both animal and human waste, cluttered the sides of the streets. There were very few trees, making the village barren and dreary.
The dwellings varied between mud or brick caves, with a few select families having brick and wood houses when they first settled here. Whatever they were, they had lost their usual shape and colour due to the relentless beating from rain and wind.
Mud caves. Photo Courtesy: Larry Su
We lived in two cave dwellings dug into a high cliff, about three hundred feet from the village street. In front of them lay a small dirt yard, where sheds housed our pigs, ox, chickens, and rabbits. The yard also held the latrine, a simple pit enclosed by dirt walls, whose stench, especially on warm or hot days, often drifted into our living spaces.
This is my hometown, where I was born and lived for eighteen years before leaving for college in Xi’an, the provincial capital, in 1983. I studied English literature at Xi’an International Studies University, earning both my BA and MA degrees, and later joined the faculty of its English Department. I remained there until 1997 when I left for the United States.
Inundated by academic work in graduate school and lack of financial constraints, I did not plan any home visit during my two years of studies in the United States. However, the sudden death of a drunkard in the rooming house I shared with a few American students hastened my decision to make a visit to China.
As a newcomer to the culture, I never linked the drunkard’s brown bags or bulky coat to the heavy drinking that would claim his life. His body was discovered days later, only after the foul smell crept through the air ducts and into our rooms. It happened three weeks before the semester’s end. Fearing I would soon be alone in that eerie house and weighed down by eighteen months of separation from my wife, son, and parents, I hastily bought a plane ticket back to China.
My three-week visit to China was brief, quiet, and deeply comforting. I was overjoyed to see my loved ones and longed to linger in those carefree days, away from foreign foods, stacked books, and unfinished papers. My wife, also a faculty member of Xi’an International Studies University, went to Xianyang International Airport to welcome me back. We traveled by a slow train and a rattling farm tractor to reach my village home. Though I had gone only a short time, I noticed the brick caves, built fifteen years earlier to replace the old loess ones, were already losing mortar. A thin film of black grease from years of cooking stained the walls. Cold air seeped through the cracks in the doors and windows. The animal sheds, with broken doors and missing bricks, made the courtyard even colder and more desolate.
At meals, I noticed my father’s gnarled hands and heavy knuckles rubbed by decades of toil. The gray cotton padded coat was worn out on his shoulders and elbows. Around his waist was a thick hemp rope, the kind used to bundle corn stalks in the fields. Cinched tightly around his coat, it kept the biting wind from slipping in through the gaps, but it looked rough, even absurd. The cotton-padded shoes hand made by my mother were also tattered with cotton exposed. The towel he used to wear over his head in winter had totally lost its whiteness. No doubt life was very hard for them.
During my year and a half in the United States, I spent most of my time in the library and rarely ventured beyond the college campus to see how Americans lived. Still, I caught glimpses of their lives. From visits to my professors’ homes, I saw spacious houses surrounded by trees, lawns, and flowers, with garages large enough for two or three cars. They wore casual yet high-quality clothes, and at parties served sandwiches, barbecued meats, salads, and red wine. Such abundance and variety were things I had never experienced before. Years later, when I owned my own house, I came to understand that Americans had achieved this standard of living after World War II, so I could not help but ask myself: Both Americans and Chinese are human beings, how could their lives be so different, with Americans enjoying plenty, modernity, and comfort, while the Chinese peasants endured poverty, primitiveness, and hardship?
The morning of our departure for Xi’an, my father carried my suitcase on his shoulder, his steps steady on the familiar dirt road, while my wife and I followed behind. The path, worn by years of passing feet and baked dry by windless days, had turned into a powdery film that rose with every footfall, stinging our eyes and filtering into our nostrils. He glanced back and quietly suggested we move to the edges, where the earth was less trampled and the dust less suffocating. As we walked, the frosty wind whistled through the withered corn stalks, their hollow rustle echoing memories I could not keep down.
I was pulled back to those early mornings two decades ago when my father and I walked this same road with a cart of potatoes. Nothing had changed in the region since then. Now with each step, a heavy sadness settled over me. I looked around at the land that my parents lived on for most of their lives; its parched, colourless soil gave little and demanded much.
A few questions throbbed quietly inside me: How lucky I was to escape this poor land! If I had not made it to college, would I be living the same kind of life as my parents? What would be the future for my parents and siblings? When would they finally see a day of plenty, not like the Americans, but be able to eat wheat flour at every meal, not as a holiday luxury, but as an everyday certainty? The silence around us offered no answer, only the sound of the wind scraping through brittle stalks and the soft crunch of dust beneath our shoes.
In less than half an hour, we reached the bus stop. The sun had yet to rise, and the morning air still clung to its chill, though the brisk walk had warmed our bodies. We stood by the roadside, the sky slowly paling, waiting for the van to appear over the horizon. I turned to my father and told him to head back home. He shook his head gently. “I’m not busy,” he said. “Waiting a few more minutes won’t hurt.” He stood beside us, his hands folded deep within his sleeves.
He stood there quietly, patient as ever, perhaps a little awkward too, never at ease in public spaces. Six feet tall and striking in his younger years, he had never learned to take pride in his height or in any part of himself. Life had worn it out of him. Decades of bowing to weather and labour had stripped away any sense of vanity, replacing it with a humility so deep it bordered on invisibility. He saw himself as nothing more than a poor peasant, a man whose only worth came from the work his hands could do in the fields or on the mountain slopes. In his eyes, he was always falling short, always inadequate, someone who never quite belonged unless tethered to a plow, a hoe, or a load on his back.
We waited nearly twenty minutes before the van finally appeared, its headlights slicing through the pale morning mist. When the door creaked open, he stepped forward, lifted our suitcase in, greeted the driver with quiet courtesy, and said, “They are my son and daughter-in-law. They’re heading back to Xi’an.” Then he stepped back, just a pace or two, and stood off to the side, his tall frame silhouetted against the dim sky, waiting without a word. I leaned out and told him he could head home now. “It’s all right,” he replied softly, not moving.
As the van lurched forward, he began to wave slowly at first, then with greater insistence, as if trying to hold on for a moment longer. We waved back, again and again, until the village road curved and he vanished from view. That farewell, quiet and unceremonious, was the last time I would ever see him.
Home Visit in 2009
In August 2009, a year and half after my father’s death, my wife, son and I took a flight from Chicago to Shanghai to visit home. From 1999, when I last saw my father to this homecoming, ten years had passed, yet due to our tight financial situation, we were not able to visit my father and mother. Neither could I attend his funeral in 2007 due to the cost and the hassle of reapplying for a visa after the visit. So this home visit was long overdue. It was a 14-hour flight, and I could not wait for the plane to touch down.
The Shanghai Pudong International Airport was modern, spectacular and state-of-the-art. We waited for two hours to transfer to Xi’an, the nearest city to my wife’s hometown and mine. We first stayed in my wife’s parents’ home for a few days, enjoying the comfort and hospitality my parents-in-law extended to us, but I was counting the days to be with my mother and siblings.
As the car was racing through the newly built highway, my heart was flying home faster than the wheels. When it hit the county seat where my father and I sold potatoes thirty years ago, my heart was pounding faster. I was gripped with a longing and anxiety that I was unable to describe in words. As the car got on the road from the town to the village, memories of the roadside landmarks came back to me: the scattered villages, the apple orchards, and the sudden curves of the road. Now, the surface of the old road had been removed, and a new layer of asphalt had been laid on it. It was also lined with trees. With the summer air and greenness all around, the surroundings were mellow and pleasant.
When the car got to the edge of the big valley before it raced down the slope, I could see vaguely my village. In five minutes, I would get home. My heart tightened and it kept tightening until I felt out of breath. In no time the car arrived at the west end of the village. We almost missed it because the stone lion that was always stationed there had disappeared. As I grew up, the lion was the landmark of the village, and the villagers would always stand there chatting and seeing traffic pass.
Now my feet touched the street I had long missed over the past decade. In my absence, both the houses and the streets had changed beyond recognition. The streets had been widened and cleared of debris. The old dirt houses had given way to brick and cement structures. The gateposts, once made of mud bricks with rough wooden planks for doors, had been replaced by sturdy gleaming metal gates.
The car parked outside the courtyard. My mother and the siblings ran excitedly outside. My mother was older and thinner but in good spirits, as she always was even though she suffered from poor health her entire life. She stooped quite a bit and walked more slowly. Her once abundant hair had also become thin and silvery. My younger brother, my two sisters and their husbands had all changed their clothes for the welcome, but their brown faces, greying hair, and callous hands all gave them away, showing the crushing impact of years of hard labour on their bodies. It was especially heart-breaking to see my two sisters, slightly fairer than their husbands, but still wore rough skin and tired expressions, looking older before their time. They all helped to unpack the car and carried our big suitcases to the sitting room.
In the courtyard, my younger brother had built a new brick flat of three bedrooms. The two on the sides were installed with doors and livable, but not the bigger one in the middle that would require a bigger, specially made door. With the added bedrooms, the living space had been expanded.
I felt its spaciousness, but I also felt its emptiness and loss because of the absence of my father. When he was living and I was in college and graduate school for seven years, his presence in the courtyard filled it with warmth and love. I never failed to see him on the roadside waiting for me when I got off the vehicle. He guessed the dates and would always stand on the roadside to try his luck. Some days he was disappointed when I failed to show up, but when he did see me, his face was all smiles. He walked fast to carry whatever luggage I had. He excitedly exclaimed that he thought it was about time I should return home. He repeated this sentence for years. He put the luggage on the floor of the kitchen, sat in silent contentment at the edge of the Kang[1], and quietly smoked his water pipe while mom was preparing food. I could see that among his life-long laborious hustle and bustle this was the most relaxing and enjoyable moment for him.
For all my years in school from the first grade to graduate school, he never asked what I was learning and how I did it — not that he was not interested or did not care. Given his taciturn nature and lack of education, he felt he was not equipped to inquire about my progress. He knew he could count on me to do well in school. His lack of words conveyed more of his love and expectation than any language could express.
Now he was gone. It must have been very hard for my mother to face the days and nights without him. For more than forty years of marriage, my father bore the burden of most of the fieldwork so that my mother, always in fragile health, could remain at home, focusing on making clothes and preparing meals for us children. Their life together, though often marked by conflicts born of poverty, was sustained by a shared sense of duty to raise five children and to hold on to hope for the future. With her partner gone, the strong shoulder she had leaned on for forty-six years was no longer there. The loneliness must have been overwhelming.
I looked forward to being by her side in this difficult time, but I was also weary of the return. After all these hard years, I finally made it, becoming a professor in an American university. The status of a well-educated intellectual teaching in a Chinese college was enough to call for admiration, let alone a professor teaching in America. Even today, the mention of America would create in listeners associations with wealth, money, status, and superiority, yet could I have delayed my father’s death? Could I have done more for him and the family? What could I have done differently? At the bottom of my heart, I felt embarrassment, regret and guilt.
We were led into the sitting room of the new house which my younger brother had built. Right on the wall of the sitting room, I saw a big canvas portrait of my father’s bust my close friend asked made for his funeral. I stared at that picture. All the emotions that had been pent up within me seemed to explode. I sobbed with tears pouring down my face. The picture was probably taken shortly before his death. His hair was receding, short and mostly white. His stubble also grew white and had not been trimmed for a few days. His skin, due to long years of exposure to the sun, rain, snow and wind, had lost its hue and become dark brown. Wrinkles were engraved on his forehead and around his shrunk and mournful eyes. The hard life had reduced a tall and handsome young man into a visage too painful to see.
My younger brother helped me to our father’s memorial tablet in another room. On the table was another picture of him and some tributes like incense, dry fruits and paper that we burnt for him. I lighted a few incense sticks and knelt on the floor. I said I was sorry to come home late, and I asked for his forgiveness. For all these years, all my father did was work. He never stopped working till his last breath. He gave all he had to his poor family. He started his life’s journey early, walked on the frozen road of hardship for years, and his life was cut short because of too much exertion and exhaustion. He died too early. He did not deserve any of these.
I wished that my stable financial and overall status change in America had come earlier, so that I could do something for my father and family. It took me seven years to obtain my master’s and PhD degrees before I found my current job. It was difficult for me and my family. Both my wife and I depended on assistantships in the States to finish our doctoral degrees and raise our son, but it was harder for my Chinese family left behind. How did he and the family survive all the hardships all these years? From time to time, I called and asked how the family was doing, my father, as reticent as he was always, would say, “The same as usual. Now we had enough to eat.” He never shared details. He did not want me to worry.
Now he was dead. For his short sixty-nine years he lived a hard life, supporting his wife and five children. Never did a day go by without him thinking how he would put food on the table and, when we were young, how to save to send us to school.
One scene remains vivid in my memory. When I was in elementary school, my father, elder brother, and I hauled a cart of potatoes to the county market sixteen miles away. We stood beside the cart the entire day until every sack was sold. By the time we started home, night had fallen, and the air was dark and cold. Near the outskirts of town, we stopped at a nearly deserted food stand. My father bought my brother and me a bowl of noodles to ease our hunger and warm our stomachs. For himself, he asked only for a bowl of hot noodle broth, free of charge, into which he soaked the cornbread we had brought from home. That was his dinner. After a whole day in the cold—calling to passersby, weighing potatoes, helping customers pack their goods—he longed for a bowl of noodles that cost barely three American cents, but he would not spend that money, choosing instead to save every coin for daily necessities and for his children’s tuition and supplies.
This was who my father was, a hard-working yet destitute Chinese peasant living at the bottom of society, always lacking food, money, and the basic necessities, dying so untimely without enjoying a day of hearty meal and relaxed mind, leaving nothing behind for people to remember him by: no money, no property, no words, except the good memories people had of him. Is this what life is? What kind of world is this? Who should be held responsible for him and people like him?
It had never occurred to my father to complain against any individual, institution or society. Like millions of Chinese peasants living from the 1960s to the end of the 1970s, he was a victim of his time marked by the Great Leap Forward, the People’s Commune Movement, the Great Famine, and most devastating of all, the ten-year long Proletariat Cultural Revolution. It was estimated that over forty million Chinese starved to death just from the Great Famine from 1958-1961.
During my short stay at home, I ventured to the villages nearby. I saw peasants as old as in their 70s and 80s, stooped and frail, still toil day in and day out in the poor soil, to contribute to their sons’ building a new house or paying their daughters’ dowry. I read about millions of migrant workers, leaving their aging parents and small children behind, selling their labour to factories and workshops in big cities earning $600 a month. They work fourteen hours a day with only one or two days off in a month.
My 45-year-old sister recently worked in a factory in Guangdong. She told me she worked more than fourteen hours a day, with only two short meal breaks of about twenty-five minutes each. The rest of the time she stood in front of a machine, collecting washing machine parts that poured out nonstop. She could not step away, even briefly, without parts piling up and crashing to the floor. To prevent this, she avoided drinking water so she would not need to use the restroom as often.
I often wonder what our father would think, knowing from the grave that his grown children, though no longer hungry or ragged, still must toil so hard to make a living. They still depend on crops and apple orchards for survival. They still lack savings for family emergencies, vacations, or helping their children marry.
Home Visit in 2019
I visited China in May 2019, during which I delivered a lecture entitled “William Faulkner and His Works” at my alma mater. Before the talk, a formal ceremony was held, and I was awarded an honorary professorship. I had invited my mother to attend, but she declined. For a woman in possession of a lifelong interest in meeting people and seeing new places, her refusal seemed unusual.
Later I learned that her health had declined sharply over the past two years, making long trips difficult. This became painfully clear during my walks with her in the village. I held her weakened arm, little more than thin flesh over bone, as we moved slowly along the path. Every few minutes she had to stop and sit, murmuring that her legs were too weak to carry her farther.
As I walked with her through the village, I noticed many changes. The streets had been paved with cement, streetlights now stood on every post, and running water had been installed in every household, yet the village also felt emptier. Wealthier families had moved to the county seat, and younger men and women had left for jobs in larger cities. What remained were mostly the elderly and children, giving the village a quiet and desolate air.
My younger brother had upgraded his home. In September, I learned from my younger brother that our mother was seriously ill. It started with a few swollen teeth, then a big ball grew on one side of her face, so big that it squeezed her eye. My brother and sisters thought it might be some infection that would heal in a week or two, but when it became more than two weeks, they decided to take her to the county hospital, only to be told that they could not treat her, that she needed to be transferred to a hospital in Xi’an. She was taken to the emergencies of two big hospitals, only to be told that they could not treat her.
They then took her to the third hospital affiliated with the Fourth Military Medical University, one of the best ones in Xi’an. I happened to have a friend working there, and I called him repeatedly, asking if he could help arrange for my mother to see a doctor. Through his connection, she was admitted to the emergency department. A team of specialists were assembled, and they diagnosed her case as advanced oral cancer, with very slim chances of recovery. If we insisted on treatment, two hospitals would need to be involved. Part of her face would have to be cut, and her chest opened to drain the fluid. Given her age, the likelihood of surviving such a surgery was minimal.
After careful discussion, my brother, sisters, and I decided to forego the attempt and brought her home, leaving her final days in God’s hands. It was indeed a hard decision for us. We felt extremely guilty for our mother did not deserve to die this way, yet she accepted it with resignation and sigh. She said, “How did the Lord allow this weird illness to happen to me?” For two weeks she lay on bed, becoming weaker day by day, withering away until she lost her last breath.
Since she was diagnosed, I had been preparing to fly back to China for the funeral. Because of my absence from my father’s funeral, I was determined to attend my mother’s funeral, to make sure she had a decent burial. I told my siblings that I would be glad to pay for all the expenses. That was the least I could do to show a little appreciation for what she did for the family and me. I spent fourteen hours flying from Chicago to Beijing, then two hours from Beijing to Xi’an, then four hours of drive home. By the time I arrived home, more than twenty-four hours had passed.
The moment I knelt before my mother’s dead body in a coffin, my eyes were filled with tears. I told her how sorry I was not to be with her for the last weeks now that she was forever gone. With a heavy heart and hasty breath, my words were repeatedly interrupted by my sobbing. My brother and sisters, kneeling beside me, tried to calm me down and asked me not to be carried away by my grief.
The second day was filled with preparations for the funeral. A few large tents, complete with tables and chairs, were rented and set up by a group of young men. The caterers arrived in their big truck, bringing utensils, meats, and vegetables. They busily set up the stove, chopped the meat, and cleaned the vegetables. In the nearby field, the grave diggers worked diligently, laying bricks to line the walls of the grave. My brother and I carried home-prepared food to the gravesite, along with light refreshments, cigarettes, and liquor, as tokens of our appreciation for everyone’s efforts.
The funeral ceremony was held the next day. Relatives, villagers and the people nearby packed the small square in front of the courtyard. My mother’s coffin was carried by a few strong men from the house outside and placed on a frame for people to pay their last respect. Our sisters and the women relatives knelt around the coffin, cried and chanted the hard life my mother had lived, while my elder brother, younger one, and I knelt in front of the coffin. The band started to play music of mournful nature.
I then stood up and gave a short eulogy outlining mother’s sacrifice and her impact on us. As I started to utter those words, they invoked images of the past years when my mother, always in poor health, did her best to make clothes and food for us. I especially mentioned how she insisted on us siblings going to school to get an education during a financially challenged times. Without her push, encouragement and resourcefulness, our lives now would be different.
When the ceremony ended, the coffin was placed on a motorized vehicle for transport to the graveyard. As it moved slowly toward the site, we siblings, along with relatives and villagers, followed behind, carrying the funeral decorations. When the coffin was about to be lowered into the grave, everyone gathered along the sides. I offered a prayer for my mother, thanking the Lord for bringing her into our lives and for all she had done for our family. I asked Him to remember her sacrifices and contributions and to welcome her into heaven. I recited a verse from Revelation 21:4: “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.” After my prayer, the villagers helped cover the grave with cement boards and dirt.
On the journey back home, and later on the flight to the United States, my thoughts were consumed by the many sacrifices my mother had made. She did not come from this region. She was born into a prosperous doctor’s family in Gansu Province, but during the national famine, she was forced to leave Gansu and migrate to Shaanxi, where she married my father. Within four years, she had given birth to three sons, placing an immense burden on our already poor family, and later she bore two daughters. Years of poor health, inadequate nutrition, and endless labour to provide food and clothing for the family left her frail. I remembered how she often lay on her side, wracked with pain from stomach ulcers caused by malnutrition, yet the family could not afford medicine.
My mother was a very ordinary peasant woman. She had only three years of schooling, yet she understood the value of education and how it could shape the future of her children. One memory remains carved in my mind. Every time I returned home from four years of boarding school, she made sure I had a bowl of noodles to give me some nourishment. Our family was extremely poor and survived mostly on corn and sweet potatoes, yet she used the small amount of wheat flour she had saved to make me that simple meal. Watching me enjoy a hearty bowl after days of dry corn bread and hot water brought her more joy than when she ate the food herself. She would sit beside me, relaxed and smiling, asking about school as I devoured the noodles.
I recalled more… One winter during high school, I was short just one dollar of my tuition. My homeroom teacher, stern and unyielding, made me walk five miles home and warned me not to return without the full amount. My parents, especially my mother, went from house to house in the village, humbly pleading for a small loan for a week or two. Most turned them away, citing their own hardships, but a few, out of pity, offered a yuan or two. By late afternoon, the small contributions had added up. I returned to school at dusk.
Now that both of my parents are gone, I probably will not return as often as I once did, yet home will always hold a permanent place in my life, its significance untouched by time. It has become a wellspring that nourishes me, as it has for many years. Whenever I think of home, I remember my parents, siblings, and the villagers. Their hope, hard work, and resilience have inspired me throughout my studies, career, and life. I have always thought: if my parents could endure those grueling years, far harsher than anything I have faced, I could persevere as well.
Struggling with a difficult reading, drafting a paper, or completing a PhD dissertation feels like a minor challenge compared to the battles they fought for food, clothing, tuition, farming tools, seeds, and fertilizers. For my challenges, I could seek more time or consult a professor. For my parents, failing to buy seeds or fertilizers in time could mean missing a season, leaving the family without a harvest, a matter of life and death. It is almost unimaginable how they survived those years. Their stories of sacrifice and resilience must be remembered and passed down through generations.
I have benefited most from their hard work and sacrifice. I owe a profound debt of gratitude first to my parents, and then to my siblings. My father spent his life labouring in the fields, always placing his faith in the land; my mother devoted herself to cooking and sewing, always ensuring we were clean and presentable. My siblings, who left school early, worked alongside our parents, giving all they had to support the family. I, the one who stayed in school the longest, completing graduate studies, reaped the rewards of their toil and perseverance. Without their sacrifices, I might be living the same life as my siblings today, repeating the same exhausting work my parents endured. For my entire life, I can never fully repay what they gave to our family.
Beyond feelings of indebtedness, these homecoming visits also prompt me to reflect on deeper issues. The contrast between my life and that of my siblings in China could not be more striking. It is almost as if I live in a king’s palace, eating what I want, buying what I desire, and traveling to places that interest me, without concern for cost, while they worry daily about whether there will be enough rain for the crops, whether they can save enough for their children’s education, or whether they have enough to face unexpected emergencies. Yes, they do not go hungry, but their lives remain far from secure or comfortable. Witnessing their struggles, I often feel guilty that I cannot do more for them. I cannot help but wonder why some people are able to change their lives through hard work, while others, despite equal or greater effort, cannot. Is there such a thing as fate? What lies behind it, and can it be changed?
I cannot answer these and the frustrations that are hard to quell, I remain hopeful and calm. My parents often told us when we were children that even though we could not control the weather or the harvest, we must give our best effort and never let drought, storm, or hail prevent us from planting the next season’s crops.
I realise homecoming is no longer simply about returning to a physical place; it is about returning to the essence of who I am. My parents’ fields, the worn paths of our village, and the laughter and burdens shared with my siblings shaped the foundation upon which my entire life was built. Though I may not walk those village roads as often as before, they live within me, and every achievement of mine carries their unseen footprints. My parents’ sacrifices and my siblings’ endurance gave me the privilege of education and the chance to live a life far removed from the toil of farming. Their lives remind me that fate is both mysterious and humble. We cannot fully explain why one child remains tied to the land while another journeys across oceans into universities and cities; nor can we fully reconcile the injustices of unequal rewards for equally hard labor. Still in this tension between destiny and effort lies the lesson my parents embodied: We must keep planting seeds, even when the harvest is uncertain. Their resilience teaches me that while we may not command the outcomes of life, we can command the spirit with which we endure it.
Thus, homecoming becomes more than nostalgia. It is a renewal of faith, gratitude, and responsibility. It compels me to remember not only what I received but also what I must pass on: the stories of hardship, the virtues of perseverance, and the wisdom of contentment. Just as my parents left behind a legacy of strength and dignity, I too must carry forward their spirit, telling and retelling their stories so that the future generations may know the price paid for their opportunities.
Even as life pulls me farther from the village, home will remain my wellspring, reminding me of the values that no distance can erase. In remembering, I find balance between guilt and gratitude, between abundance and humility, and between fate and choice. And in this balance, I carry with me the most enduring inheritance my parents left behind: the courage to live with resilience and the grace to be content in every circumstance.
[1] A heatable clay bed, a traditional Chinese sleeping platform made of earth or brick. It has hollow interior channels connected to a stove or external fire source, circulating warm air to heat the clay mass and provide energy-efficient warmth during cold winters
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Larry S. Su has been a professor of literature and writing for the past thirty years. He has also been a passionate reader and ardent writer since college. He writes both in Chinese and English, and his writings have appeared extensively in the Chinese and English publications, mostly in the form of articles and essays.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
When the word ‘Partition’ is mentioned, it is always assumed to refer to the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. In fact, the Partition of the British Raj occurred five times.
Not so long ago, as recently as 1928, a vast expanse of land from Aden in the West to Rangoon in the east was united as the Indian Empire, all under British rule. It was the zenith of the British Empire, and it seemed the sun would never set on the Empire. A quarter of the world’s population lived here, from the Red Sea to Southeast Asia, and they all used the Indian rupee. One would travel across the span with an Indian passport. By 1971, in just 40 years, this Empire had been shattered five times, resulting in 12 nation-states.
We should learn to tell stories by listening to how housewives gossip. They narrate intimate personal stories about their neighbours, with vivid detail, as if they were there in the target’s bedroom. It becomes more believable when real characters are added. The same advice applies to telling history, his-story. Sam Dalrymple’s Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia does exactly that. A dry subject like history is turned into an unputdownable book by giving human faces to the people making difficult decisions at the administrative level and to those who have to bear the brunt of those decisions. Perhaps the author’s filmmaking background pushed him towards this style. That makes it very engaging.
The author, Samuel Hew Tantallon Darymple, is a scholar of Sanskrit and Persian, as well as a historian, author, activist, and social media influencer. He co-founded Project Dastaan[1], a peace-building initiative that uses digital technology to reconnect people displaced by the 1947 Partition of India with their childhood communities and villages.
The five Partitions mentioned in this book are: the separation of Burma from India in 1937; the reclassification of Aden as a British protectorate; the formation of Pakistan; the dissolution of the 550-odd princely states; and, finally, a bloody civil war that led to the formation of Bangladesh.
The Indian idea of ‘Bharat’ is traditionally shaped by the ancient Hindu geography of Bharatvarsha, a triangular landmass stretching from the Himalayas in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south. Notably, Afghanistan, mentioned in the Mahabharata, and Burma, known as Brahmadesh (Land of Brahma), do not fall within this framework. The city of Kandahar in Afghanistan is apparently named after Gandhari, the blindfolded matriarch of the Kaurava clan.
After the 1905 Partition of Bengal and the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, calls for self-governance grew louder. To pacify the Indian public, the Crown sent a group of seven, known as the Simon Commission[2], in 1928 to implement constitutional reforms. It did nothing to advance Indian independence but demarcated Burma as a territory quite separate from British India, and its inclusion in India was an error.
Coincidentally, this was the aftermath of the 1928 Depression. Before this, Burma was a melting pot of cultures. Its capital, Rangoon, one of the busiest commercial cities in Asia, was labelled the ‘Paris of the East’. It is said that in 1920, there were more traders in Burma than in New York. Rangoon port was an important harbour for the export of rice, teak and petroleum. Its banking services drew people from many regions. It was a multilingual and multicultural city, shaped by large-scale migration. People were heard speaking Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Marwari, Urdu, Chinese, English, and other languages.
The turn of the economic tide and the disparity in economic status between the ethnic Burmese and the sojourners sparked a series of unrest. The Chettiars and Bengali houses and shops were targeted. Indians were systematically excluded from Burma, forcing rich traders to become refugees and make a beeline for India. This long march over the Patkai hills to India became a feature again as Japanese soldiers (and the Indian National Army under Bose) advanced during World War 2. The experiences of Mariappan, a Tamil shopkeeper who fled to Tamil Nadu to start anew in Burma because of his lowly caste, and had to run again because of Burmese nationalism, are heart-wrenching. Then there is Uttam Singh, who had to endure a treacherous long march home to Punjab across the hills. Losing everything, it was a miracle that he and his family made it in one piece. Little snippets like these are the real reasons this book grows on readers.
Caught in the middle are the Naga people, whose land lies precariously between Burma and India. Although its leaders rallied for an independent Naga state, a fifth of the region fell under Burmese control. For decades to come, insurgency remained an issue. On April 1st 1937, Burma was carved out of British India, leaving many unanswered questions and triggering years of attempts to usurp power within Burma, followed by years of military rule and turmoil.
After its capture by the British East India Company, Aden was governed as part of the Bombay Presidency. It was an important coal station for ships. The administrators regarded Arabs as fundamentally different from Indians. To increase efficiency, the British decided in 1937 to rule the port of Aden as a British colony and its hinterland as a protectorate, much to the dismay of many in the Indian community there. The rise of Arab nationalism that followed, with the emergence of dynamic leaders such as Gamal Nasser of Egypt, who promoted Arab patriotism, meant the former Arabian Raj kingdom would no longer be associated with Indians. Indians, once regarded as cultured and civilised, were soon viewed as competitors. By the late 1950s, a reverse exodus began. Indians with deep roots in these Arab lands, including property, businesses, and connections, had to flee helter-skelter back to India and the UK. The Ambanis were one such family affected by this.
Although Jinnah initially joined the Indian National Congress, his affiliation with the Muslim League grew stronger as he felt that Gandhi was leading the party and the nation towards a more Hindu-centric direction. The way the Congress conducted its meetings was as if they were at a religious ceremony, with chanting of mantras and singing of religious hymns. Muslims began to question how they would be treated in an independent India with Congress at the helm of power. Even though Jinnah appeared as an icon of Hindu-Muslim unity, later events propelled him and other Muslims to push for a two-state solution for post-independent India.
In a way, as Gandhi promoted his Hindu agenda, the Burmese, with their Buddhist practice, also increasingly felt more detached from India, further fuelling Burmese nationalism.
The post-WW2 era saw many changes in India. Britain was in debt, and the push for independence and a separate nation for Muslims was in full force. The third Partition was about to take place, but it was preceded by mindless killings and violence in the areas destined to be part of Pakistan. The Bengal region witnessed brutality on Direct Action Day, led by Suhrawardy and his acolyte, Mujibur Rahman, who would later be instrumental in the formation of Bangladesh. Things were no better in Punjab. The confusion created by Radcliffe’s arbitrary carving of the country left people unsure which country they belonged to, even one month after the ‘tryst with destiny’ speech.
There was then a scramble to recruit the 550-plus princely states to join Pakistan or India, or to stand alone. This was the 4th Partition. Recruitment reached feverish heights in states such as Junagadh, Kashmir, and Hyderabad. Junagadh housed two sacred Hindu sites, Dwarka and Somnath, but was ruled by a Muslim Nawab. Kashmir had a Hindu king, but his subjects were predominantly Muslims. The situation was reversed in Hyderabad.
The shattered subcontinent of India has been in constant flux even after attaining self-rule. It has to deal with internal squabbles and hostile neighbours. The situation becomes complicated as the world divides itself into the blue corner of capitalism and the red corner of communism. Marxism and Maoist ideology spread across its states, creating skirmishes here and there.
Pakistan, too, had its own problems. The insistence on using Urdu as the national language was not taken lightly by the Bengali-speaking East Pakistanis. The discord reached a tipping point in 1971, when the Bengali Awami League won the Pakistani elections. Civil war broke out when West Pakistani leaders refused to accept the election results. India sent in its troops to squash West Pakistan’s army and effectively completed the Fifth Partition, the creation of the country of Bangladesh.
The recurring theme throughout the book is that people continue to help one another, regardless of the day’s political climate. Despite ideological differences, people help people. The book highlights numerous heart-stirring accounts of the extraordinary resilience and compassion of everyday people. These ‘unity in diversity’ stories emerge from small acts of kindness that transcend religious, social, and economic boundaries.
It remains to be debated by future historians whether the colonial masters can be blamed for shattering the land that spanned the Arabian Gulf to Southeast Asia. Given the insatiable appetite of human greed for land, wealth and power, are these sequelae inevitable anyway?
Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
By Percy Shelley, 'Ozymandias', 1819 edition
The real world spark for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” wasn’t purely poetic imagination but it was archaeological gossip with excellent comedic timing. In 1816, news reached England that a colossal granite bust of Ramesses II, often referred to as the Younger Memnon, (aka Ozymandias by the Greeks) had been unearthed in Egypt and was on its way to London. The statue was enormous, ancient, and very much not intact. Broken, battered, and missing key pieces, it arrived less like a triumphant relic and more like history’s version of a “before” photo gone permanently unanswered. Shelley, never one to miss an opportunity for philosophical irony, saw exactly where this was going.
Ramesses II, after all, was not a man known for moderation. His titles alone read like a LinkedIn profile written without character limits. One of them, “King of Kings”, was inscribed on the pedestal of the very statue now showing up in London looking like it had lost an argument with time itself. Shelley translated that title straight into the poem, ensuring that Ozymandias’s voice would echo loudly, right before being undercut completely.
At its core, “Ozymandias” is what happens when an ancient ruler commissions the Bronze Age equivalent of a massive Instagram flex, and time responds by absolutely ratioing it.
The poem opens with a traveller recounting what sounds suspiciously like the least glamorous vacation slideshow imaginable. Instead of sunsets or souvenirs, we’re given ruins in a desert. Not even dignified ruins, either, just two giant legs standing awkwardly in the sand and a shattered face lying nearby. This is not the kind of monument that inspires awe so much as mild concern. If this were a modern tourist site, it would come with a plaque reading: “Formerly Impressive. Please Use Imagination.”
And then comes the inscription, which is where the satire really starts to stretch its legs. Ozymandias doesn’t simply claim power, but he declares himself the King of Kings and commands all who pass to look upon his works and despair. It’s bold. It’s confident. It is, as history clearly demonstrates, wildly optimistic.
Because immediately after this declaration of unmatched greatness, the poem delivers its deadpan punchline, “Nothing beside remains.” That’s it. No empire. No cities. No loyal subjects live tweeting his victories. Just sand. Vast, flat, indifferent sand. It’s as if time paused, reread the inscription, raised an eyebrow, and quietly erased everything else.
The statue’s physical condition doesn’t help his case. The face, half buried, cracked, and broken, still carries what Shelley calls a “sneer of cold command.” This suggests that even in ruin, Ozymandias managed to retain the personality of someone who would have been exhausting to follow online. You can practically imagine him posting daily declarations of greatness with comments disabled. His empire didn’t last, but his bad attitude, preserved in granite, somehow did. It’s the archaeological equivalent of a fossilized ego.
What makes the whole thing even more amazing is the sheer effort that went into creating this monument. This wasn’t a casual side project. Designers planned it. Sculptors carved it. Workers hauled it across landscapes to place it somewhere appropriately dramatic. Years of labour went into capturing Ozymandias in his full “behold my glory” aesthetic. And now, centuries later, it’s a broken art installation in the world’s largest sandbox. If monuments received annual evaluations, this one would read, “Strong initial impact. Failed long-term objectives.”
Shelley’s point isn’t just that power fades, it’s that Ozymandias genuinely believed he’d outsmarted mortality. Death might come, sure, but his legacy would remain forever, intimidating future generations into awe. Instead, his message survives only because it’s so spectacularly wrong. Readers don’t despair when they see his works, they experience second hand embarrassment on his behalf. His warning to rivals has become a warning to himself.
The setting seals the joke. The “lone and level sands” contain nothing else, no ruins of cities, no remnants of civilisation. Nature has gone full minimalist, stripping the scene down to its most brutal contrast. Against that emptiness, Ozymandias’s claims look less commanding and more delusional. The silence delivers the verdict more effectively than any narrator could.
Of course, Shelley isn’t just mocking one long dead Pharaoh. Ozymandias stands in for every leader who confused dominance with permanence. History is full of people who built monuments, declared themselves irreplaceable, and assumed the future would be impressed. The future, as it turns out, is rarely in the mood.
Even Ramesses II himself, arguably one of Egypt’s most powerful and accomplished Pharaohs, could not escape this irony. His statues were propaganda tools, meant to scream greatness across centuries. When one finally arrived in London, broken and incomplete, it did exactly that but not in the way he intended.
‘Ozymandias’ in that sense, isn’t just a warning about fading power, it’s a satire about how absurd unchecked confidence looks once time has had a say. The king who demanded despair now inspires reflection, humour, and a gentle reminder that the louder the boast, the quieter its echo tends to be.
Time doesn’t argue. It waits. And then it lets the ruins speak.
In the 19th century, Benito Mussolini fancied himself less a man and more a monument, preferably one carved in marble, chest thrust forward, chin angled eternally toward destiny (or at least a flattering light source). In his own imagination, he was the sequel to Rome, not a mere politician, but a reboot of empire, complete with dramatic speeches, synchronised salutes, and an alarming number of uniforms for someone who never quite won a war.
He spoke often of glory, of legions, of history bending obligingly in his direction. If Julius Caesar had crossed the Rubicon River, Mussolini would cross the street, provided there were cameras. His Italy would be disciplined, resplendent, and feared. Trains would run on time, crowds would roar on cue, and maps would gradually recolour themselves in reassuring shades of “Italian ambition.”
But there is something endearingly fragile about men who compare themselves to eternity. They tend to forget that eternity has a long memory and a sharp sense of irony.
Like the boastful Ozymandias in the poem with the shattered statue in the desert, Mussolini constructed not just a regime, but a self-image meant to outlast sand, wind, and inconvenient facts. He posed, proclaimed, and postured his way into history, convinced that future generations would gaze upon his legacy and tremble appropriately.
Instead, history did what it does best, it waited.
The Round Colosseum originally built in 80CESquare Colosseum built by Mussolini in 1942From Public Domain
Because while Mussolini was busy reenacting Rome, the world had moved on to more modern catastrophes. His empire turned out to be less of a Colosseum, more cardboard set, impressive from a distance, but distressingly flimsy up close. Military campaigns faltered, alliances shifted, and the grand narrative began to fray like a cheap banner left out in the rain.
And then came the collapse, swift, humiliating, and utterly indifferent to his carefully rehearsed grandeur. The man who styled himself as Il Duce (The Leader), the infallible leader, found that infallibility has a very short shelf life when reality intervenes. Statues, literal and metaphorical, do not crumble all at once. First, a crack. Then another. Then, suddenly, the whole thing looks less like a monument and more like debris.
In the end, Mussolini’s legacy resembles that broken colossus in the sand, a once imposing figure reduced to fragments, surrounded not by awe, but by a kind of puzzled silence. The grand declarations echo faintly, like lines from a play no one remembers attending. “Look on my works,” he might have said, but history, squinting into the distance, struggles to find anything intact enough to admire.
What remains is not the empire he promised, but the cautionary tale he became. A reminder that self-mythology is a risky business, especially when you start believing your own press releases. The louder the proclamation of greatness, the more satisfying the eventual deflation.
And so, Mussolini endures, not as the architect of a new Rome, but as a rather theatrical footnote to its long shadow. A man who aimed for immortality and achieved, instead, a kind of poetic symmetry, the bigger the statue, the more dramatic the ruin.
Then in 21st century, Trump arrived, as not so much as a politician but as a brand, capital letters implied, gilded edges included. His name was already stamped across towers, steaks, ties, and the general concept of self-confidence. When he entered politics, it seemed less like a campaign and more like a licensing deal with history.
Here, at last, was a figure who understood that power, in the modern age, is as much about spectacle as substance. Why simply govern when you can perform governance? Why speak when you can proclaim? Why build policy when you can build a persona so large it requires its own skyline?
Like the monarch in that well-worn desert poem, he projected an image of immovability. His words carried that same tone of “cold command”, a conviction that reality itself ought to rearrange in response to his declarations. Critics were dismissed, facts negotiated with, and complexities flattened into slogans sturdy enough to fit on a hat.
He cultivated loyalty not just as support, but as devotion. Crowds gathered, slogans echoed, and the line between leader and legend blurred in the heat of repetition. There were rallies that felt less like civic exercises and more like episodes in an ongoing series, complete with catchphrases and recurring villains. The message was clear, this was not merely a presidency, it was an era, a brand extension into the realm of destiny.
And then there were the monuments. Not carved in desert stone, perhaps, but etched into skylines, social media feeds, and the collective consciousness. Towers bearing his almost spoken name stood as vertical declarations of success. Each structure seemed to say, “Look on these works,” though one suspects the subtext was “preferably from a flattering angle.”
But the thing about monuments, whether sandstone colossi or glass and steel high rises, is that they depend heavily on perspective. From up close, they can appear overwhelming, permanent, inevitable. From a distance, or with time, they shrink into context. The desert, metaphorical or otherwise, has a way of reclaiming narrative.
History, as always, proved to be an uncooperative audience. The seemingly untouchable aura began to flicker, then waver, then, most inconveniently, invite scrutiny. The voice that once filled arenas began to echo differently, as though the acoustics had changed. What once sounded like certainty started to resemble insistence.
And here the comparison to that shattered statue becomes irresistible. Not because everything vanishes, far from it, but because what remains is oddly disjointed. Fragments endure, phrases, images, impressions. A pedestal without its full figure. A face remembered more for its expression than its achievements.
The lesson, if there is one (and satire insists there must be), is that power built on projection is particularly susceptible to erosion. The louder the declaration of permanence, the more history seems to take it as a challenge. “Observe my greatness,” says the ruler. “Give it a moment,” replies time.
In the end, the figure who once seemed larger than the system becomes part of it, filed, debated, reinterpreted. The monuments still stand, of course, but their meaning shifts. What was once awe inspiring becomes, with enough distance, a curiosity. A relic of a moment when personality tried to outpace permanence, and, like that ancient king in the sand, discovered that time is the harsher critic. Perhaps his current antic in the Middle East could be his “Waterloo”.
If Ozymandias had taken a brief detour eastward say, a spiritual exchange programme before commissioning that ill-fated statue, he might have found in the Mahabharata a rather comprehensive warning label, “Caution, ego may appear permanent but is, in fact, highly perishable”.
Because if there is one text that understands the fine art of watching powerful men dramatically overestimate their shelf life, it is this sprawling epic of dynasties, destinies, and deeply committed bad decisions.
Take Duryodhana, for instance. Here was a man who didn’t just believe the kingdom was his, he believed the universe had personally notarized the claim. If Ozymandias carved “King of Kings” into stone, Duryodhana essentially carved “Mine” into an entire map and dared anyone to bring an eraser.
Like our desert bound statue enthusiast (and certain more modern figures with a fondness for branding), Duryodhana cultivated loyalty that blurred into devotion. Courts were filled with nodding allies, affirming uncles, and the occasional voice of reason that was quickly ignored for disrupting the aesthetic. After all, nothing ruins a good narrative of invincibility like someone pointing out reality.
Enter Krishna, who might best be described as the epic’s version of a calm, cosmic fact-checker. While others delivered speeches, Krishna delivered perspective, the kind that gently suggests, “Perhaps don’t build your identity entirely on winning at all costs.” This advice, naturally, was received with all the enthusiasm of a terms and conditions agreement.
And so, like a man commissioning a statue taller than his own foresight, Duryodhana doubled down. The result? The Kurukshetra War, an event so catastrophic it makes Ozymandias’s lonely desert look like a minimalist art choice rather than the aftermath of total collapse.
What’s particularly Ozymandian about the whole affair is not just the fall, but the confidence before the fall. Duryodhana walked into the war convinced of his permanence. His power was vast, his allies numerous, his rhetoric polished to a fine sheen of inevitability. If he had a pedestal, it would absolutely have read, “Look on my armies, ye Mighty, and reconsider.”
History (or epic poetry, which is history with better dialogue) responded in its usual way, by waiting.
Because just as the sands eventually reclaim the boastful statue, the battlefield of Kurukshetra quietly dismantled every assumption of permanence. One by one, the pillars of Duryodhana’s certainty collapsed. Not all at once, never all at once but enough to turn confidence into something far less photogenic.
By the end, what remains is strikingly familiar, not the empire he imagined, but the lesson he unintentionally authored. Much like Ozymandias, Duryodhana’s greatest legacy is not his power, but the spectacular mismatch between his expectations and reality.
Meanwhile, characters like Yudhishthira, hardly perfect, occasionally indecisive, and significantly less interested in self-branding, endure in a different way. Not as towering monuments, but as complicated, human figures who understood (sometimes too late) that power without humility is just a very elaborate countdown.
The Mahabharata, then, reads like a long form satire of the Ozymandias Syndrome, the irresistible urge to declare oneself permanent in a universe that specialises in editing such claims down to footnotes.
So, if there is a lesson worth carrying forward, it is not about avoiding ambition, monuments, or even great struggles. It is about perspective. Before we carve our names into stone, raise towers toward the sky, or wager everything on a certainty, it is worth pausing to ask, how will this endure when seen from far away, at a distance measured not in kilometres, but in time?
Because time does not rush to correct us. Like Krishna, it does not need to raise its voice. It allows events to unfold, lets pride exhaust itself, and waits patiently for meaning to reveal itself. When the noise has faded and the dust has settled, what remains is not the spectacle of victory, but the quiet truth of what was built with wisdom, humility, and awareness. And that, more than triumph, is what lasts.
Ravi Varmman explores leadership, culture, and self-inquiry through a philosophical lens, weaving management insight with human experience to illuminate resilience, ethical living, and reflective growth in an ever shifting world today.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
The Norton Anthology of English Literature Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. D: The Romantic Period. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.
Wilkinson, Richard H. The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000.
Younger Memnon British Museum. “Colossal Bust of Ramesses II (Younger Memnon).” London: British Museum Collection Online, accessed 2026.
Benito Mussolini Bosworth, R. J. B. Mussolini. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2002.
Farrell, Nicholas. Mussolini: A New Life. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1951.
Donald Trump Setoodeh, Ramin. Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass. New York: HarperCollins, 2024.
Mahabharata Debroy, Bibek, trans. The Mahabharata (10 vols.). New Delhi: Penguin Random House India, 2010–2014.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are solely that of the author and not of Borderless Journal.
If one wants to understand the ‘chaos theory’, one has to place oneself at the centre of ‘around about’ — the way the traffic weaves around, observing the traffic go by as everyone swerves to get to their destinations. The one from 9 o’clock reaches 3 o’clock; 6 o’clock reaches 12 o’clock. It does not matter whether the vehicle is following or counter to the traffic flow; it gets through.
Adding to the pandemonium is the incessant honking from all right, left and centre.
Despite knowing all these, after our stint from Kashmir to Leh, India still managed to lure us back. This time around, we signed up for a tour across Rajasthan, from Jaipur to Udaipur.
Day 0: Delhi to Jaipur
After landing in Delhi from Kuala Lumpur late at night, we left for Jaipur the next morning. We had our first lesson in chaos theory that morning. The confusion about transport arrangements, running to get a taxi in a hurry, rushing to an unmarked site designated as Jaipur bus station, waiting for a bus we thought had left, and finally getting on the correct bus were all proof that the churning of the Universe is indeed impossible to comprehend.
Despite all the traffic jams, the packed vehicles and our increasing anxiety not to miss the bus, all the taxi driver could tell us was “aram sey!” (equivalent to saying, take a chill pill).
Jaipur, the Pink City, had its rare February showers the day before. As if to usher in our visit, the large part of the city around the lake, Jal Mahal, was in full gear, preparing for an air show. We managed to catch a glimpse of what the Indian Air Force had in store.
Jaipur showcases a history that built alliances with the Mughals and managed to preserve its buildings and heritage. Their allegiance with the invaders could have been viewed as betrayal by their contemporaries, the Sikhs and Marathas, who were fighting tooth and nail against the Mughals. Ajmer Fort is a massive fort with brilliant engineering.
To top that, there is a stepwell, Phanna Meena Ka Kund, with its intricate geometrical design that has stood the test of time. Jaipur is known as the Pink City, not without good reason. The roads leading to town are paved, lined with multiple red buildings and architectural marvels. The intricacies of Hawa Mahal make it look like a 3-D movie cutout propped against a building. It was too beautiful to be true.
Phanna Meena Ka KundHawa Mahal
Adjacent to the Hawa Mahal is Jantar Mantar, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that houses the world’s largest stone sundial clocks. One cannot help but wonder: with so much scientific knowledge in their ancient past, how did they just fall like swatted flies when the Western imperial powers walked over them in the 18th century through to the 20th?
Day 1: Jaipur to Sambhar
We started early at 6 am to avoid the morning traffic. Surprisingly, Rajasthanis must be early risers, as even at that early hour, the streets were already bustling with activity.
The itinerary for each day was straightforward. We would cycle daily around 70-90km, with a water break every 20-30km, and reach our predetermined accommodations around noon. There were 12 cyclists; the youngest was 33, but most were over 60.
The route on the first day was mainly flat, traversing small towns and villages, and sometimes haggling with motorcycles, lorries, and buses for space to pass. The trouble is that the vehicle sometimes appears unannounced (with loud honks, of course) and goes against the traffic!
The terrain was mostly flat. It was funny cycling in desert-like conditions, with scorching sun and a cool 20 C wind. The early morning temperatures would start around 15C and reach 23C at noon.
After reaching the hotels prepared by the organisers, evenings would be spent in tête-à-têtes, awaiting dinner, or being shown around town.
Flamingos at Lake Sambar
Day 2: Sambhar to Pushkar
Starting before the break of dawn, at 6, we began cycling into the dark under the guidance of the bicycle headlight and the road lines. When dawn broke, we finally realised that our view was acres of fields as far as the eye could see. About an hour into our journey, we reached a village, one of the many villages yet to come. The villagers would look at us funnily, not knowing what to make of us, a bunch of fellows cycling at an unearthly hour. All we had to do was hail, “Jaya Sri Ram“! Their look would change, a smile would emerge, and they would raise their hands in unison, in solidarity, knowing quite well that we were harmless and one of them.
Along the journey, we saw many animals that we, Malaysians, would not see in mainstream. We saw peacocks perched on trees and houses. Lining the roads were innumerable cows, donkeys, goats and even pigs.
As the day got hotter, the temperature built up to about 25 °C. Riding in desert-like conditions with no shade from trees or clouds. The interesting thing is that we did not see a single person carrying an umbrella. They were pretty much comfortable, just under the sun, with the ladies in their veils and the men in their turbans.
Lake at Brahma Temple
The main attraction of Pushkar is the rare Brahma temple. Legend has it that Lord Brahma was cursed that He should not be worshipped. The irony of this place is the presence of a large lake amid arid terrain with desert vegetation. It remains an enigma waiting to be answered, just like the mystery of creation and why the Creator Himself does not have a temple of worship.
Day 3: Pushkar to Beawar
Again, the trip started early at 6 in the morning, in complete darkness, along what turned out to be acres and acres of fields. The generic appearance of a village would have concrete roads, a row of shops with large advertisement boards in big Hindi fonts, and a strikingly gaudy combination of hues: yellow, green, and red. This same psychedelic colour combination is mirrored in Rajasthani clothes. The ladies’ sarees and dupattas are so contrasting that they cannot be missed. The same goes for the men’s unique bright coloured turbans.
Cows would seem to roam freely, with their droppings spread liberally on and by the roads. The row of buildings would mostly end with a temple or a school.
Around Beawar
The terrain today was mostly flat, with the sun shining at its fullest by 9.30 at 23C. After about 6 hours, we reached Beawar.
For a small town, Beawar has so many mid-range hotels, probably to cater to the numerous businesspeople who come here. Beawar, due to its central location, serves as an important hub for the cement, textile, and wool industries. There is no special iconic monument.
Day 4. Beawar to Kamlighat
Rise and shine, and we hit the roads again. Today’s menu is a gruelling one, cutting through the Aravalli hills.
“What is all this for?” asked a curious onlooker when told that we were cycling from Jaipur to Udaipur. I thought that was a profound question that questions the core of our existence. What is the purpose of anything in life?
This ride turned out quite hilly, mostly along the national highway. Missing today were the tractors with loudspeakers blasting Bhangra beats. For the past few days, we had seen tractors plying the countryside carrying workers and produce, setting the beat for the whole vicinity to get into the dancing mood. Err, but the lyrics were neither inspiring nor devotional. They were suggestive and laced with profanity.
Growing up in Malaysia, we were taught that travelling on a highway was sacrosanct, with traffic rules to be followed and vehicles in tip-top condition. Not in Rajasthan, they are not. One could actually see a whole five-tonne lorry travelling on the wrong side of the highway and honking violently at oncoming traffic as if the lorry’s right to drive on the wrong side was being infringed!
The terrain was monotonous, with rolling hills and a steep 6.5% incline, and the sun was hot from 9.30 am. Being a highway, there was nothing much to see here. About 6 hours later, we reached Kamlighat, some 88km away.
Kamlighat
Kamlighat is a small town with nothing spectacular to show. A row of shops, many stalls selling fruits and vegetables, and our accommodation was the biggest building around. A stroll pretty much covers the whole town.
Kumbhalgarh Fort
Day 5. Kamlighat to Kumbhalgarh
This proved to be the toughest ride yet. Riding through the Aravalli hills was no walk in the park. It was a slow burn with multiple gradual inclines. The 70km journey ended at the Kumbhalgarh Fort. The fort is labelled the Great Wall of India, the second-longest wall in the world after the Great Wall of China.
There was a light-and-sound show that essentially narrated the glory (and sometimes turbulent) days of Maha Rana Kumbha. He was a descendant of Emperor Asoka and later Rana Rathap, who fought valiantly against the invaders.
Day 6. Kumbalbagh to Udaipur
This proved to be a fun ride. Starting late at 7 am, it turned out to be a short ride, after much heckling and joking. A large proportion of the journey was along national highways; the later detour through the smaller villages proved interesting. A few observations I made as a curious Malaysian passing through the everyday people in the midst of their day-to-day lives are these.
Villages in Rajasthan are no different from those in Malaysia. If in Malaysia, azan and religious sermons are broadcast over the speakers, here in almost every village, it is the sound of ‘Om Jaya Jagadisha Hare[1]‘ and sermons on their speakers. The bottomline is that the majority dictates what is kosher for the masses.
We, the cyclists, were kind of local celebrities among the people, especially among the younger kids, who would wave at us. Some would even come so far as to bump fists with us. Interestingly, even some young ladies who walked along the roads would wave to us. If one were to observe, the ladies would not do the same when accompanied by a male companion. Instead of waving, they would pull down their shawls to cover their gaze.
Addendum
The cyclists shared many pleasant moments on and off the saddle. During one of those tête-à-têtes, the talk about each other’s countries’ politics came up. There was a lot of Modi-bashing among the Indian cyclists — that he had outlived his usefulness and that his every move appeared like propaganda. So I asked them one question, “If there were a snap national election today, who would you vote for?” Without a pause, they all replied in unison, “Modi!” That’s the trouble everywhere. Nobody has a perfect government. Everyone has to decide between the devil they know and the one they do not.
Last day in Udaipur, running around
The cyclists utilised this day to unwind after six days of cycling. The few touristy spots were the target.
City Palace, Udaipur
First, we visited the picturesque City Palace and scenic Lake Paricha. There was a boat ride around the lake, quite reminiscent of that in Budapest, only that Udaipur had much more to offer. The City Palaces had many sections and a museum attached to them. Pichola Lake is situated in the centre. A boat takes tourists around and makes a stop at a luxurious hotel to give them a taste of opulence. The property opens onto another section of town called Hathipole, which features rows of shops showcasing Rajasthani art, crafts, produce, and souvenirs. Hathipole is another proof of order within chaos. The auto-trishaws and motorcycles weave through the tiny lanes while shoppers still manage to jump from shop to shop, getting their best bargains.
To absorb the Rajasthani experience, one has indulge in their culinary traditions. Two dishes specific to this region are batti, a tennis-ball-sized hard bread made from unleavened wheat flour. It is eaten with dal or yoghurt. Next is lal maas, a fiery mutton dish, packed with chilli and Rajasthani spices.
The day ended with lazing around town and walking the streets of Udaipur. Fateh Sagar Lake offered an excellent view of the various hues of the setting sun on the horizon. It houses a solar observatory station.
Extra day
While we were still in recovery mode, most Indian cyclists returned home. We had one more day to kill, so we went out to explore more of Udaipur, the Lake City.
Still centred around the lakes, we took a cable car trip up to Neemach Maa Mandhir, perched 900 metres up on a hill overlooking Fateh Sagar Lake. It is said to be a powerful protective guardian of a particular dacoit clan.
Fateh Sagar Lake, Udaipur.
Next stop was at the Maruthar Folk Dance to sample a traditional Rajasthani Cultural show. Besides witnessing some folk dances, we watched puppet shows and an experienced dancer performing a balancing act with multi-tiered pots on her head whilst grooving to metal petals, bowls, and shredded glass.
To end our visit on that hot day was the mausoleum erected for Rajasthan’s most revered hero, Maharana Pratap and his heroes who defended the region from foreign invaders. The enclosure also includes a museum that relives the glory days when the kingdom of Rajasthan was a force to be reckoned with.
Take-home message
An international expedition like this is quite life-affirming. It is priceless to realise that our mental illness is shared by many around the world. With this healthy obsession, we can explore places worldwide at a quite close and personal level. One is not merely taken to touristy spots, but can see the country as it is, warts and all.
While walking around the Kumbalbagh fort, we encountered a group of 60- and 70-year-old American cyclists, not quite by accident but by what was screaming on their T-shirts. After the usual cursory greetings, we discovered that they were more eccentric than we. These people in the geriatric age group were on a month-long cycling tour around Rajasthan, Kashmir, and Ladakh!
[1] “Om, Victory to the Lord of the Universe (Vishnu), the Remover of Miseries”. A devotional prayer in Hindi.
Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.
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We are the most connected generation in human history. Is this why does leaving feel so utterly weightless?
There was a ritual. I still remember it distinctly. You probably remember it, or your parents do. The last morning of a visit — to a grandparent’s house, a village cousin’s home, an uncle’s rambling bungalow where the ceiling fans whirred through long afternoons — had a particular texture. Trunks or suitcases were latched. Strolleys hadn’t arrived yet or were on their early novelty days. Bags were piled by the door. And then, invariably, someone wept.
Not a little polite sniffle. Real tears. The kind that came from a grandmother pressing your face into her sari one more time, or an aunt who had spent a week feeding you as though you might never eat again, standing at the gate long after the rickshaw (autorickshaws were not common) or the personal car (Ambassador or Fiat[1] depending on the size of the family mostly) had turned the corner. You waved until you could no longer see her. She stood there until she could no longer see you. That was the goodbye.
Try to find that scene today. Go ahead. You won’t.
Today, the goodbye is punctuated not by tears but by the brisk choreography of the in numerous selfies.
Phones are raised, filters applied in real time, expressions arranged for maximum glow. The image is uploaded before the car has reversed out of the driveway. The caption reads: Such a beautiful time with family. So blessed. Heart emoji. Heart emoji. Heart emoji and a few ummahs thrown in. Thirty-seven likes in the first eight minutes. Nobody cried. Nobody needed to. You’re already on a group chat together.
The old goodbye made sense in its economic context. Distance, in those decades, was not merely geographical — it was temporal. A cousin who lived two states away or a city even in the same state was, in practical terms, a person you saw once a year, twice if there was a wedding or a funeral nudging the universe into action. Letters arrived weeks after they were written, sometimes smelling faintly of the sender’s home. Trunk calls were events, scheduled and anxious and too expensive to linger over. When you left, you genuinely did not know when you would next sit in the same room.
So the tears made sense. They were a rational response to real absence. Grief, after all, is the tax we pay on love, and those goodbyes had genuine grief in them — not theatrical, not performed, not calibrated for an audience. Just the honest acknowledgement that a period of closeness was ending, and the ending mattered.
WhatsApp changed the mathematics of absence. So did video calls, Instagram, the entire chirping infrastructure of perpetual connectivity. Your cousin in Rayagada is now a voice note away. Your village relatives appear on your screen every Diwali whether you want them to or not. The emotional logic of the old goodbye has been quietly dismantled, brick by brick, by the algorithm’s promise that no one ever really has to leave.
But here is the uncomfortable question: has connection replaced closeness, or merely simulated it? The notifications keep flowing, but something in the texture of relationships has changed. We know more about each other’s lives — the holidays, the promotions, the new kitchen tiles — and feel, perhaps, less. The mystery that once made a reunion electric has been replaced by the tepid familiarity of a continuous feed. When you already know what someone had for breakfast, the surprise of seeing them in person is somewhat diminished.
And then there is the paradox of the modern public display of affection. We live in the golden age of the PDA. Couples announce their anniversaries with slide shows. Families post coordinated outfits for festivals. Friendships are commemorated with “appreciation posts” of baroque emotional intensity. The declarations have never been louder or more frequent. The relationships, statistically, have never been more fragile.
Divorce rates climb. Friendships dissolve over a single inflammatory tweet. Families splinter over WhatsApp forwards. The online performance of devotion seems almost inversely proportional to its durability offline. We have, it seems, confused documentation with feeling, reach with depth, and visibility with love.
There is something almost poignant about this — people posting tribute reels for relationships that are already, privately, ending. The Instagram caption lags behind the reality by about three months. The photograph preserves the illusion the way formaldehyde preserves a specimen: perfectly, and without life.
The old woman weeping at the gate was performing nothing. There was no camera to catch the angle of her grief, no audience to validate it, no metric by which to measure its impact. It existed purely because it was true. That is what made it unbearable and unforgettable in equal measure.
This is not, to be fair, entirely a story of decline. Connectivity has genuine gifts. The grandmother who once waited three weeks for a postcard now receives a video of her grandchild’s first steps within minutes. The cousin separated by continents is present — imperfectly, through a pixelated screen, but present — at the birthday party. Something real is preserved by these tools, even if something else is lost.
And it would be sentimental to pretend that all those old tears were purely authentic. Families are complicated. Some of those goodbyes mixed genuine love with relief. Some of the weeping aunts were also, frankly, exhausting. Nostalgia has a well-known tendency to airbrush the difficult parts.
But what does seem genuinely lost is the cultural permission to let a goodbye mean something. To stand at a gate and feel the weight of separation without reaching for a phone. To let the absence be real, just for a moment, before the notifications begin. The old goodbye taught us that love has a physical grammar — it lives in proximity, in the particular smell of someone’s kitchen, in the specific quality of their silence at the dinner table.
The old goodbye taught us that love has a physical grammar. These things do not transmit over Wi-Fi.
Perhaps the most honest thing we can say is this: we have traded depth for frequency, and we are not entirely sure we got the better deal. The feed is always full. The gate is always empty. And somewhere between the two, a particular kind of tenderness — unrehearsed, unselfconscious, and completely without likes — has quietly slipped away.
No one posted about it. No one noticed it go. Gradual but sudden demise.
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[1] Popular brands of cars in India in the late 1900s and early 2000s
Charudutta Panigrahi is an author. He can be reached at charudutta403@gmail.com.
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Whose story are we recounting when we attempt to narrate history? An unexamined acceptance of anthropocentric biases have placed man at the centre of historical narratives and historical accounts. The time has come when this assumption of man’s centrality is being challenged and overturned. Both posthumanism, a concept that directly challenges man’s centrality and planetarism[1], which sees the interconnectedness of the natural, animal and human, have displaced the human entity from its position of unquestioned and unquestionable centrality.
Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, Ghost Eye(2025), made one go back to the earlier novels in the series with a similar cast of characters, Gun Island (2029) and The Hungry Tide (2004). Like many of his other novels, these works also encapsulate the themes that Ghosh communicates with increasing urgency in successive novels-climate change and man’s hubris which has catapulted mankind into an increasing tailspin hurtling towards ecological disaster.
In Gun Island, Ghosh asks a whole series of questions which make us look at history differently. What if history is understood through the lens of migrations and mass movement or natural disasters, through unexpected bird migrations, beaching of dolphins and the shifting movement of oceanic boundaries? Is there a pattern to extraordinary events, coincidences or are they a matter of pure chance? Is time always linear? What if temporality works in loops? What happens when we are faced by recurrences and presentiments?
What if we review and revisualise history not as bounded by national boundaries but a more fluid and flowing substance — water, seas and water bodies? Some contemporary books like Oceanic Histories (2017)offers the first comprehensive account of world history focused not on the land but viewed through the seventy per cent of the Earth’s surface covered by water. Tracing the histories and the historiographies of the various oceanic regions, the book highlights the links between human and non-human history and the connections and comparisons between parts of the World Ocean. If history is a set of geo-political narratives centred around land and its acquisition, why can’t we have histories of waterways? As a life-giving but also potentially destructive substance, water occupies a prominent place in the imagination. At the same time, water issues are among the most troubling ecological and social concerns of our time.
Water is often studied only as a “resource,” a quantifiable and instrumentalised substance. Thinking with Water instead invites readers to consider how water — with its potent symbolic power, its familiarity, and its unique physical and chemical properties — is a lively collaborator in our ways of knowing and acting. What emerges is both a rich opportunity to encourage more thoughtful environmental engagement and a challenge to common oppositions between nature and culture.
Thinking about history brings me to women’s history and the issue of international women’s day, which falls on March 8th. While the question of women’s day maybe a matter of individual opinion, the question maybe rephrased as “do we need a woman’s day” or “why do we need a woman’s day”at all?
Do we need it as a kind of affirmative action? Given the historic lack of a level playing field, it is perhaps a reparative action? Or is it a needed inclusive action, that reflects changes in social policy? Much as we would like to think along positive lines about women’s development and empowerment, the picture across the world is a grim one.
For those who feel that everyday is women’s day, we could perhaps recall the broader historical context. The IWD originated from early 20th-century labour and suffrage movements in North America and Europe, demanding better pay, shorter working hours and better working conditions.
Ideally , women and girls should have equal rights under the law, rendering them safe from violence, with rights to access education, livelihoods, resources, and justice on equal terms. When these rights are realised, the impact extends far beyond individual women and girls to their families, communities, and society as a whole. Research shows that gender equality delivers better outcomes across economies, health systems, peace processes, and democratic resilience. In this context, 8th March provides an occasion to recall how far we have come. It is also a necessary reminder of how far we still have to travel in order to ensure that women and other oppressed minorities get their fair share on earth, rather than direct their eyes to heaven.
It may seem a form of tokenism to earmark one day out of 365 days in the calendar as women’s day, but at least it’s a beginning where we could begin to reassess how much we take women’s roles as caregivers and nurturers for granted. Many descriptions of women are couched in a familiar vocabulary which views women as daughters ,wives and mothers, who are the backbone of the family, pillars of society, the glue that binds communities to each other and models of resilience and endurance. Yet this idioms of approbation do not protect women from harassment, abuse and gendered violence of many kinds; in Catherine McKinnon’s words, they are rendered less than human. When we begin to recognise women as human beings with agency, legitimate claimants of human rights and deserving gender parity and justice, we will probably not need International Women’s Day.
In 1906…Current day Afghanistan From Public Domain
[1] A new subject that deals with the health of the planet
Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory. Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.
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Last month the Doomsday Clock had moved closer to midnight than at any point since it was created in 1947. Maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the clock is meant to signal how close humanity stands to destroying itself, whether through nuclear conflict, climate breakdown or new technologies. Its latest shift suggests that we are living through a particularly dangerous moment.
That is one way to look at the year ahead.
Another comes from a friend of mine who follows astrology. “2026 will be intense,” she told me after we had worked out the time difference to talk. “There are major planetary shifts happening. But that also means there is potential for growth.”
Between scientific warning and planetary symbolism sits a familiar question. Are we heading towards catastrophe, or simply moving through another period of change?
It is difficult to judge the scale of events while we are inside them. Perspective usually comes later. At the time, everything feels amplified. The media leans towards urgency. Our own thoughts do the same. The expectation of upheaval can sometimes be more overwhelming than the experience itself.
In recent weeks there have been many reminders of transition: the turning of the calendar year; the Lunar New Year observed across China, parts of Southeast Asia, Korea and the Himalayan region; the beginning of Ramadan for Muslims around the world. These moments draw people together in ritual and reflection. They offer continuity, even when the wider world feels unstable.
At the same time, global leaders speak in stark terms. The Secretary-General of the United Nations recently described a world marked by conflict, inequality and unpredictability. Climate scientists warn that we have entered uncharted territory. Heat records continue to fall. Rain arrives in sudden deluges. Winters in some places are no longer as cold as they once were.
For centuries, seasonal rhythms have provided reassurance. Spring follows winter. Festivals return at roughly the same time each year. Even the Gregorian calendar, introduced in 1582, was an attempt to bring order to time.
The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, wrote that no person steps into the same river twice. The water flows on, and so do we. It is a simple image, but it captures something steady and true about human life.
What feels different now is the speed. Changes that once unfolded across generations now seem compressed into years. Climate patterns shift within decades. Technology reshapes industries almost overnight. Artificial intelligence systems are altering the nature of work, leaving some people optimistic and others uncertain. I know people who are struggling to find employment, both those nearing the end of long careers and those only just starting out.
My friend attributes the turbulence to a conjunction of Saturn and Neptune. She links economic instability and political upheaval to movements in the sky. When she mentioned the recent increase in visible auroras, I thought of astronomers pointing out that the Sun is nearing the peak of its eleven-year solar cycle. Different explanations, same phenomena.
Whether we turn to science, philosophy or astrology, the underlying experience is similar. Things feel unsettled. Time feels faster. The future feels closer than it used to.
It is tempting either to tune out the warnings or to become consumed by them. Neither response changes what is happening. Ignoring risk does not reduce it. Constant alarm does not resolve it either.
We cannot return to a previous version of stability. The seasons will continue to shift, though perhaps less predictably. Technologies will continue to develop. Political arrangements will evolve. Some changes are small and gradual. Others are abrupt and disorienting.
The real question is how we live through them.
After our conversation, my friend sent a message: “Changes aren’t endings, but thresholds.” It is a hopeful way to think about uncertainty. Crossing a threshold suggests movement rather than collapse.
Perhaps this year calls for small, steady practices. Paying attention to what we consume, digitally and otherwise. Slowing down our thinking when everything pushes us to react. Staying connected to the people around us. These are modest responses, but they are within reach.
We step into the river again. The water is different. So are we.
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Keith Lyons (keithlyons.net) is an award-winning writer and creative writing mentor originally from New Zealand who has spent a quarter of his existence living and working in Asia including southwest China, Myanmar and Bali. His Venn diagram of happiness features the aroma of freshly-roasted coffee, the negative ions of the natural world including moving water, and connecting with others in meaningful ways. A Contributing Editor on Borderless journal’sEditorial Board, his work has appeared in Borderless since its early days, and his writing featured in the anthology Monalisa No Longer Smiles.
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Let me begin by saying that like most readers enamoured by her works, I really enjoyed reading Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me published in 2025. It is a soaring account, both intimate and inspiring, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as a gangster, as ‘my shelter and my storm’. In the meantime, many reviews of the book have already been published, some full of praise and some quite critical, but it can be undoubtedly said that the book created a literary storm that one hadn’t experienced for quite a long time. And to add to that, social media is now flooded with her interviews, readings etc., some very recent and some as old as fifteen years. This essay delves into several issues pertaining to it that have struck me as unique.
Born out of the onrush of memories and feelings provoked by her mother Mary’s death in 2022, this is the astonishing, often disturbing and surprisingly funny memoir of the Arundhati Roy’s life, from childhood to the present, from her movement from Kerala to Delhi. There are forty-two chapters in this book, not numbered, but the titles themselves are self-explanatory. By following their interesting nomenclature, one can get an inkling of how Roy has laid out her narrative strategy, by talking not only about her own life but how it has been intertwined with her mother in a peculiar love-hate relationship. In the very first chapter titled ‘Gangster’, (which Roy has been reading in many gatherings till now), she tells us about her peculiar relationship with her mother. In her excellent and unique narrative style, she says:
“As a child I loved her irrationally, helplessly, fearfully, completely, as children do. As an adult I tried to love her cooly, rationally, and from a safe distance. I often failed. Sometimes miserably. I wrote versions of her in my books, but I never wrote her.”
She then advices her reader: “Most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination – and that we may not be the best arbiters of which is which. So read this book as you would a novel. It makes no larger claim.”
The narration of the incidents always does not follow a strict chronological order. Some of the stories are already quite well-known. This tells us how the young Syrian Christian Mary Roy married a Bengali tea planter in Assam and had to soon leave her husband because of his drunkenness and lack of responsibility towards his family. Having no support except for a bachelor’s degree in Education, she takes the bold decision of walking out of the marriage and lands in Ooty along with her two young children to live in her father’s cottage. A few months into her fugitive life, her estranged mother and elder brother arrived from Kerala to evict her. They told her that under the Travancore Christian Succession Act, daughter had no right to their father’s property and that they were to leave the house immediately. Years later Mary would challenge the act in the Supreme Court and demand an equal share of her father’s property, and luckily by winning the case in 1986 she became a sort of celebrity overnight.
The story then moves on to Kottayam and then to Ayemenem in Kerala (some of the details of which are beautifully narrated in The God of Small Things too) where Mary Roy struggles to find a foothold for herself and the children and open a school. That story of how that school began in a rudimentary form and how it gradually grew into the well-known residential institution called Pallikoodam designed by the famous architect Laurie Baker, how it remained a top priority in Mary Roy’s life ( the school children prioritised over her own) along with her own eccentricities, her uncompromising nature and peculiar behaviour ( her refusal to be accepted as the mother of the famous writer Arundhati Roy, being one of them), till her death remains one major strand of the narrative.
The other major narrative strand pertains to Roy’s own life. Arundhati’s version of the story tells us how in the summer of 1976 she finished her high school at sixteen and leaving Kottayam (and of course her mother whom she wanted to dissociate forever), arrived alone without any contact in a completely alien territory in Delhi to take the entrance exam for the School of Architecture. Not having any contact with her mother for several years, she led a bohemian life, lived together with different people, saw partly the underbelly of life and did odd jobs to sustain herself. In the architectural school, she met Pradip Kishen and eventually married him (who was then the husband of the boss under whom she was working for a while). She scripted a screenplay for a movie called In Which Annie Gives ItThose Ones about the college life and though it was once telecast in Doordarshan decades ago, it had been lost till recently the footage has been recovered, restored and set as an official entry in the Berlin Film festival this year but one which Roy refused to attend citing the cause of Palestine.
She was involved in another movie script Electric Moon and acted in minor roles in some off beat films like Massey Sahib till she changed her mission of life. After the publication of The God of Small Things, Roy stopped writing novels and got involved in political and social causes and got involved with social activists like Medha Patkar and the Maoists in the Chhattisgarh region and even faced jail for a day for her protests. The writing she produced for a couple of decades were all powerful political manifestos supporting leftist politics (“The Algebra of Infinite Justice” being one of the well- known texts and My Seditious Heart, published in 2019, is a collection of her non-fiction) till she came up with her second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
In the meantime, the handsome royalty she received from her first novel changed her living style and for the first time Arundhati Roy managed to eke out a comfortable lifestyle and even buy a house of her own. Her narration is interspersed with several interesting anecdotes, relating to her relationship with her brother whom she mentions throughout as LKC, and their chance meeting with Micky Roy, their father in pathetic condition in Delhi. The chapter titled ‘Mama Bear, Papa Bear’ is very interesting to read. It begins with the following lines: “Seven years had gone by since I’d last seen Mrs Roy. The strangest thing is that I cannot remember how she and I came to be in contact with each other again”. Then the joy of seeing her brother after so many years was exacerbated with their meeting of their father Micky Roy, who had totally disappeared from their lives when they were kids. The pathetic state of the man almost dying out of liquor addiction, we are told about how he was “as frail as a small bird, lame and hunched over …he was severely malnourished, like people in UN pamphlets.” This is how Roy narrates the incident:
‘You would never have believed I was your father. You look so much more like me than your mother. Doesn’t she, Kapil Dev? Same nose. Same eyes…sorry eye.’(Giggle.) ‘I say Orundhuti, do you hit the bottle?’
He pronounced my name the Bengali way.
‘Me? No.’
‘Oh, go on. Tell the truth. All good Roys hit the bottle. Whaddyou say, Kapil Dev?’
(Giggle. Slap.)
After going through all the ups and downs of life, especially in relation to her mother (too many to be narrated here), the story end in the last chapter aptly titled ‘A Declaration of Love’ when in January 2022 she got a message from her mother saying that she loved her. Despite everything that had happened between them, somehow, she knew that to be true. “My lifelong refusal to stop loving her, no matter what, had finally breached her barriers.” The story ends with her death, the details of her cremating process, the performance of the Kottayam Police Band, the 21-gun salute she received and ultimately the memorial they built for her in the bamboo grove where the headstone mentioned Mary Roy as ‘Dreamer Warrior Teacher’ and ‘Founder Pallikoodam.’ The strange love-hate relationship that persisted between Arundhati and her mother comes out beautifully in the end when she writes:
“The first night in a Mrs Roy-less world, I spun unanchored in space with no coordinates. I had constructed myself around her. I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her. I had never wanted to defeat her, never wanted to win. I had always wanted her to go out like a queen. And now that she had, I didn’t make sense to myself any more.”
Another interesting piece of information is revealed in this concluding chapter is about how Arundhati casually decided to get divorced from Pradip Kishen with the same lack of seriousness with which she had got married, so that he and the girls (and their property) had no legal connection to her. The order granting them the divorce had been delivered to her the previous morning, at the very moment Mrs Roy died. ‘So, I, free woman, free falling, was heir to nothing at all. But I was curious about our great will-making mother’s will.’ Later she gets to know that her brother had marked off Mrs Roy’s house and its compound from the rest of the school and had it registered in her name. So, she decided to renovate the house and build the Grove simultaneously in it.
The Cover Design
Before concluding, I want to draw the reader’s attention to the special care that has been taken to make and market this book. The cover design is a highly skilled piece of production. On the stark red cover of the book with the title embossed artistically, we have half a dust jacket in white with two different pictures of Roy on the front and the back cover– one a current photograph of the author with her head full of pepper and salt curls and with a discreet smile on her face. The other photograph is of a much younger and radical Arundhati with a distinct far-away look in her eyes and with a burning cigarette on her lips. Though the publisher gives the statutory warning that cigarette smoking is injurious to health and it does not support it in any way, a very stark visual statement about the unnatural bohemian nature of the author gets revealed through this photograph.
Incidentally, this selling of a book through its stark and attractive cover reminded me of a similar strategy undertaken in 1997 when Roy’s debut novel The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize and took the literary world by storm. The book came out in what was essentially the pre-internet and social media era and the maximum number of reviews and essays that came out during that time were in print. In an essay which I had authored then, calling it “The Making and Marketing of Arundhati Roy”, I had shown that the contents of the dust jacket of the book differed radically from region to region and it was done through a deliberate and effectively thought-out strategy. So, in the Indian edition we had a different story outline giving us a gist of what to expect inside, especially the love of a paravan, an untouchable man with an upper-caste woman, along with the local setting in Kerala, Ayenemem, to be exact.
In the Random House edition published from New York, the story outline was completely different, not only telling us about untouchability and the love between Radha and Krishna that would lure the western reader to pick up the book about a unique place in India defined as ‘God’s Own Country’ in tourist brochures. Also, the photographs of Roy (both taken by her then husband Pradip Kishen) differed radically. With this new book, of course, such strategies didn’t work anymore. With innumerable book launches, readings by the author everywhere (a search on Youtube will even land you with interviews that are more than a decade old) we now come upon other ways and means through which the book has been popularised. But all said and done, I must conclude by saying that whether you agree or disagree with the extreme left wing political views that Arundhati Roy professes, those who still haven’t read this memoir have really missed reading a wonderfully written book with its 372 pages that is really unputdownable, with its lyrical as well as down to earth style of narration, full of new metaphors, new word coinages that are the USP of Arundhati Roy.
Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India.
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