Tag: Bangalore

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Review

I am Not the Gardener

Book Review by Ranu Uniyal

Title: I am Not the Gardener: Selected Poems by Raj Bisaria

Author: Raj Bisaria

Publisher:  Terra Firma, Bangalore

Here is a book that I have been waiting for.  In several sittings you go through these breathtaking poems by Raj Bisaria.  A book that needs to be read with patience and, if you have had the privilege of being taught by him, you read with a curious eye.  Soft and gentle – a touch of an artist gently goads you to read it loudly– as if you are in an auditorium reading out to an unknown audience.  Who will listen to this voice of a gardener who with I am Not the Gardener weaves seasons of delight “telling of one’s heart is not self-gazing” but divine contemplation? 

The book does not carry an introduction to the author.  It has forty-three poems with photos capturing moments with family and friends. A few pictures of the domes and spires from Lucknow too add a special meaning to the verses. As director, producer, designer, actor and professor, Raj Bisaria has left an indelible mark. Press Trust of India described him as “Father of the modern theatre in North India”. Raj Bisaria founded Theatre Arts Workshop in 1966 and Bhartendu Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1975 in Lucknow. He taught English literature for more than three decades at the University of Lucknow. He is the first to receive Padma Shree from Uttar Pradesh for his contribution to modern theatre.  As a theatre artist his contribution remains unparalleled.

The first poem in this collection is ‘The Curtain Boy’. The poem is a thoughtful mediation on the meaning rather meaninglessness of all our actions.  The poet writes “I am not the gardener, / Nor the owner of the garden. / My job is to do odd things/ To weed out little wrongs/ To keep the pathway clean”. ‘Odd’ and “little” acts of “watching” lead to an awareness of the burden of possession and the transitory nature of dreams.  And this is followed by a similar concern in the poem ‘To a Young Actor’ – “I was told once to discipline/ Imagination in the rhythm/ of iambs and trochees. Only I wonder / If external form will give / Meaning to chaos.”

The poet, artist, and the philosopher in him create a complex mirage of emotions that reflect the restlessness and the anxiety of a man who finds comfort in words.  “In your dying/ My love has found / A new lease:/ For beyond death / Only love goes on”, the poet expresses his love for his mother in the poem ‘Elegy’.  Like Hamlet he gives voice to his own fears and then affirms with a defining certitude “Love is a quiet secret, / The seed within the rose.” The images are drawn from garden to the sea and the mountains “And I learnt to be silent / with the unspeakable granite of the mountains.”

Travel as a motif binds his restless spirit and opens the unreachable corners of his heart.  Love and fulfilment are contraries in a world trapped in the mundane.  In his poem ‘Byzantium’, Yeats refers to “The fury and mire of the human veins”. An artist seeks perfection in this imperfect world. The desire to transcend the ordinary compels him to write. The debut collection of poems gives us fascinating insights as Bisaria draws us to a wide range of experiences with a cry for attention “Do not shut my words out.  It is winter.” Here in lies an assertion with a sad awareness that yes, life is ending.  The artist within and the performer without must often be traversing contradictory spaces.  Both are equally strong and vulnerable. 

Sometimes the voice of the performer seems to undermine the anguish of the poet.  “He who does not forgive himself/ Forgives others less.” These are poems of love, longing, grief, and interminable loneliness that invades an artist whenever he confronts his inner self.  Those familiar with Bisaria’s dramatic productions might find a different voice lurking behind these poems.  It requires courage to accept one’s vulnerabilities, to confront the inner daemons and to pour an array of emotions with a faith that only an eternal seeker can display.  “To your shrines I came my Lord, / But I came without faith; / To your people I spoke my Lord / But I spoke without love; …Yet give me Lord peace/ To bear my own emptiness, / And your silence /Quieten my doubting mind.” This is not just a poem with the title ‘Prayer’, but a plea that resonates with a quest for self-realisation. 

A sadness runs through these poems.  Read and receive every word, every glance, every touch of this mortal self where “Love comes slowly by and by…” and the poet firmly believes “Love’s life is more than time…”. “It is a flight in the freedom of self…”. Even if you try hard, it is difficult to run away from oneself.  Like a shadow your inner conscience follows you, here, there, and everywhere.   

Ranu Uniyal is a poet and a Professor from the Department of English and Modern European Languages, University of Lucknow.

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Categories
Stories

Getting Old is like Climbing a Mountain

By Saranyan BV

Courtesy: Creative Commons
Getting old is like climbing a mountain, you get a little out of breath 
but the view is much better!
                                                                     - Ingrid Bergman, actress

He arrived in the morning. He was carrying a small bag but enough to contain things to stay for three to four days. His visit was unannounced. Although he was cordial, I didn’t inquire into the purpose of his visit. I invited him inside and showed him the spare room where he could rest a while. He was seventy-nine years and could do with some rest. His body language showed he was grateful, yet he didn’t offer a reason for his presence in the morning. I went inside the kitchen so that I could prepare a cup of coffee for him. I heard him move inside his room, the footsteps of an old man. I could hear him take things out from the bag and push some back. After a while, the sounds stopped. The house turned silent. It sounded silent and silence sounds like death. My eyes roved over the kitchen table to check on the things available to make a decent breakfast for uncle. He was in need. He looked famished.

I pushed open the door leading to the backyard, in the kitchen garden, the plants were unkempt. It was a messy area of about forty-four square feet. I plucked brinjals and tomatoes to make the sambar respectable and to add on to the coconut chutney which was already done. There was also coriander, not ready for plucking, but at times like this it could be useful. I heard the sound of the cistern flush, the water drained without giving inkling of anger. I handed him the cup, he took it and kept looking at the floor. He drew an arc with the toe of his right foot. I could not understand what the act meant except he was disturbed. There would be time later to get to know. For the time being I let him feel at home. He didn’t inquire about my husband’s whereabouts. My husband was his nephew. Uncle might have assumed Shyam has gone to office. Actually, Shyam has gone to handover his Renault Kwid for the first unpaid service. He would be late today. Shyam too would have to have his breakfast before starting for work. Maybe they could have it together. We all could.

I hoped uncle would spruce himself and be ready before Shyam returned. I was not going to rush him.

Shyam would be in a terrible hurry. He could catch up with his uncle while he is pushing the idlis[1] down his throat. I have to keep requesting Shyam time and again to eat slowly. Food is meant to be enjoyed and not be dealt with as if it is a task to be completed. Breakfast is the only meal Shyam has at the dining table. He took his lunch in the office canteen and the night meal was invariably at the bar he frequented. I had rehearsals for the coming play at Ranga Shankara in Jayanagar. Most evenings, I was out. I think he ate only fritters and no proper dinner. I never questioned him about his activities. He found that convenient.

I went past the room in which the uncle was lodged. I pretended to go out under some pretext. The garbage collector had entered the street. The garbage needed to be in cans outside the gate. I peered in. The door was open. Uncle was seated on the mattress leaning back on his hands. He was looking up at the ceiling fan, at his own reflection on the chromium plated hub-cap. He had not switched the fan on, the weather was fine. I collected the compost bag and kept tossing handfuls on the potted plants in the courtyard. That was my weekly routine. The plants responded to the manure but the moment the plants shoot buds, insects destroyed them. I tried to give uncle some privacy by remaining in the garden. He looked rather pulled down. If he wanted to make some calls in my absence, I’d rather facilitate it; but he didn’t.

Uncle lived in Hebagoddi with his only son, his house overlooking the wholesale fruit market. Whenever we visited, I found him standing on the open terrace upstairs and watching the trucks loading and unloading. Ajay resigned his job in Hosur and had left to take up new assignment in Abu Dhabi. He told us he wanted to move with his family to Abu Dhabi. I wondered if he could take his father as well. Maybe that was what made uncle preoccupied – the thought of being left alone without his son, who was also his caregiver.  Uncle had a handsome pension as a retired school master. He was not dependent monetarily, but he needed someone to assure him everything was going to be fine. An old man required assistance and supervision. My dad’s brother had dementia from being lonely they said.  since He had no one to talk to. He was a bachelor with lots of money but dementia doesn’t check the wallet before setting in.

I went back to the kitchen. The decoction had filtered down. I mixed the coffee and took it along with two Marie biscuits. He took it and placed it on the table. His hand shook. He said, “Thanks.” He wasn’t curious about Shyam’s absence. I was surprised he did not inquire.  He was Shyam’s uncle not mine.

I told him, “Shyam would be back shortly, I will serve breakfast when he comes.”

“That’s nice”, he said. “In that case I will have the coffee after breakfast. I took Pantacid just now. Let the medicine do the job.” He took the two biscuits, placed them on the paper napkin and returned the cup.

I said, “Fine.” I lifted my chin to scrutinize his face.

“Its difficult to live with Ajay’s wife,” he said. Uncle moved towards the window turning face away from me. The top two panes of the window were open. They overlooked the vegetable garden I was ambitious about curating. Beyond that was a small 30 feet road. I did not attempt to mollify him. I left the job to Shyam. He was Shyam’s his uncle.

Uncle said, “I can grow enough vegetables in my house in the terrace, I mean in Ajay’s house. People these days grow vegetables in plastic grow-bags you know. I can grow enough for the family or even more. She wouldn’t allow.” He meant Ajay’s wife. Growing vegetables is my passion. My conviction is one should try to grow food in lifetime instead of only consuming. It’s my desire to grow at least one kilo of rice with my bare hands at least once in my life, I told this to uncle in order to keep him cheerful until Shyam returned.

“We should find a place in our village and try doing growing the rice there. Being in city, you can’t”, he said and curbed his instinct say more. The conversation cheered him and I believed took his mind away from Ajay wanting to shift his family to Abu Dhabi. I was not sure if Ajay was planning to take his dad there. It may not have been a workable proposition.

I said, “Its good to try, to think on those lines. I guess Shyam would agree to the idea post his retirement. As of now I have this theatre group which pegs me here.”

A car entered the lane, the sound of its engine was echoing from the between the compound walls. The colony would have looked more impressive without the compound walls. The car stopped in front. The driver’s face seemed familiar but I could not place him. Shyam got down from the other side. He thanked the driver and entered. The car sped away, it was an old red-coloured Punto. The driver smiled on seeing I was trying to place him.

I was not sure if I should inform Shyam about the unannounced guest or leave him to find out for himself. Maybe he knew of the arrival and had forgotten to inform me.

Shyam said, “I must rush, Sundar has promised to pick me on the way. Can’t make Sundar wait.” He went straight into the washroom. He was the type who would expect his wife to keep his clothes ready when he came out of the bath. Before that, he would want the towel. I did that part of the chore, returned to the living room from where I could see uncle. He was not affronted by Shyam’s behavior. He seemed to understand. He smiled sympathetically upon seeing my distress.

“Let me set the table for breakfast,” I told him and went about doing so. I wanted to tell Shyam to eat slowly — to get up only when uncle finished. Uncle came out of the room for the first time. He sat quietly in front of the dining table where Shyam sat normally. He leaned using his elbows on the table. He saw me arranging the plates. He opened the lid where idli was stacked. He smiled again. There was plenty. I too sat pretending to remove the speck on my plate.

“I have to find an old age home,”he said nodding his head.

 “It would do you good. you can be all by yourself,” I said.

“You don’t understand the point Kamala,” he said. I could hear Shyam coming out of the bathroom. He started dressing. He dressed himself first before using the hair drier and combing his hair. I knew as soon as he finished, he would head for the dining table. I waited for the sound of the drier being switched off. I had not informed Shyam about uncle’s presence as yet. Waiting at the breakfast table, I was not sure I should make the effort. He obviously was not expecting to find uncle. I hoped he would be polite to his uncle.

Shyam came in. He had heard our voices, if not the subject of our conversation. He was pleased perceptibly to see his uncle, he went behind him, put his hand over uncle’s shoulders and gave him a hug from behind. He said, “What a surprise! How is Ajay doing? Is he really liking it out there, it is a dangerous country, not meant for one with his kind of temperament.” Shyam rushed with his words, he wanted to convey whatever he wanted quickly without giving scope for his uncle to respond. He looked at me and said, “I promised uncle that I would find him a comfortable old age home. Better that Ajay takes his family quickly to Abu Dhabi. He has the knack of getting into trouble if left alone.”

Uncle didn’t want to prolong the conversation about his son. He said, “Something that fits my pension, not a paise more, I don’t want to take help from Ajay though he may be earning in Dinars now.”

He craned his neck to see when I would start serving. Shyam pulled the chair away from the table to sit, the chair made a grating noise on the floor. I switched the fan on and started serving. The three of us ate quietly. Shyam kept stuffing idlies as was his habit. He choked a bit but managed to swallow without any issues. I had only one idli. I got up to prepare coffee. Sundaram could arrive any moment, though Shyam had not stated the time of his arrival. Shyam took his uncle to the verandah in front. I could hear them talking, though I could not make out what they discussed. It sounded like they wanted to keep me out.

Uncle left our house after three days. He never went back to Ajay’s house. He went straight to the old age home. I felt sad. Shyam had arranged accommodation where uncle could stay in relative comfort. That’s what Shyam told me the previous night.

Whatever the comfort and care the old age home offered, such homes for the aged could not offer hope. Inmates kept falling sick, became invalids and sunk to death slowly. Besides they all had their own tales of woe which each would share, deepening the shadows in others lives. A home could not offer hope.

Shyam said the three days stay with us had restored uncle’s faith in humanity. It was a tall statement, though I suspected it was true. We tend to seek our own space in the kingdom of self-righteousness, we feed on such feelings. During the afternoons we had watched movies together on Netflix or Prime Video. Uncle made the selection. He always chose a crime thriller or science fiction, avoided movies focused on family relationships.

He took me into confidence and confessed on the last day. Shyam was to drop him at an old-age home named after Mother Theresa the next day. Uncle told me almost in whispers after the movie, as if he didn’t believe what he said, “Ajay’s wife is very loving, I can’t say she was wanting in that faculty.” I wanted to believe uncle.

When uncle left, there were tears in his eyes. He didn’t try to mask his feelings. I could not figure if it was on account of a feeling of gratefulness or of grief. He sprayed the insecticide on the rose plants in the courtyard while Shyam was loading his things in the car. I had presented him warm blanket in case the home didn’t provide one. Shyam promised to visit him often, though he did not specify how often.

Ajay’s family had left. He sent uncle photos of their new home. I had half a mind to tell uncle to stay with us, though I didn’t. He was not a bother, was really not a bother. He would have helped with the kitchen and courtyard garden as well as the proposed one in the terrace upstairs. During his brief stay, he helped to water the plants, folded the laundry, cut vegetables for cooking, he cut such perfect cubes. He enjoyed peeling garlic pods. He loved it. One day when the daily maid absented herself, I even found him doing the dishes quietly without letting me know. I had closeted myself in our room to memorise lines and cues of a new play.  

Uncle could have stayed with us if it was not too long. Life looks interminable if we don’t know how long. We didn’t know how long all this would go on had he stayed. He looked healthy though he was seventy-nine. You never know. Love without willingness to take on the responsibility was an aborted child, that much I knew.

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[1] Steamed, savoury rice cake

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Saranyan BV is Bangalore based poet and short-story writer. His works are being published in Indian and Asian journals regularly. He came to the realm of English by mistake but loves being there. He is a big fan of Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski. He thinks that the genre short story is going to rule literature in the days to come, if the writers are ready to take up the challenge.  

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

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Categories
Poetry

‘A Stray Feather of Blue’

By Saranyan BV

Courtesy: Creative Commons
TUMBLED BELIEF

We sit on 
one side 
of the seesaw plank,
and think 
we have conquered: 
When you conquer 
one side alone --
Know ye 
Men of Destiny --
There is 
another side 
which needs defending.
Never sit on 
one side 
of the seesaw
and think 
you have arrived.
It’s like collecting
a stray feather of blue,
mistaking it
for an ostentation.
Courtesy: Creative Commons

Saranyan BV is poet and short-story writer, now based out of Bangalore. He came into the realm of literature by mistake, but he loves being there. His works have been published in many Indian and Asian journals. He loves the works of Raymond Carver.

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

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Poetry

Naïve are the Phosphenes

By Saranyan BV

Phosphenes are the colourful depictions of lights that we sense with our eyes closed. Courtesy: Creative Commons
Naïve are the phosphenes

Asleep, when our eyes close,
It is not darkness as we imagine --
A night of timelessness and of starry wisdom unfolds,
In whose halcyon ambience,
Eyes link to ears to
Compose lilt-lyre music of intriguing feathers.
The mind is more alert than when we are awake.
The kind breeze throws up phantasmagorias.
The swank phosphenes,
Unlimited by and native to parameters of the iris’s womb,
Rove with infinite images,
Roving the planet and roving the universe,
Chariots of legitimacy, more beautiful than the colours of rain --
Naïve are the phosphenes, that we have seen, known and never embraced.

Saranyan BV is poet and short-story writer, now based out of Bangalore. He came into the realm of literature by mistake, but he loves being there. His works have been published in many Indian and Asian journals. He loves the works of Raymond Carver.

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

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Poetry

Born To Be Me

By Rachel Jayan


Let no one tell me I'm falling short 
From expectations I so fiercely fought! 

Let no one tell me who I am 
Only me and the great 'I-am' --

Free from my chains, 
And free from pain.
Free to love my skin,
And free from so called sin.
Free from creed and colour
And free to find my Anchor!! 

I was born to be free! 
I was born to be me! 
I'm all of the above
And more than your eyes can see! 

I am my Father’s Daughter
And I just can't fall short! 
I don't want to measure up! 
And I don't want to match up!
I was born to be free!
I was born to be me!

Free from expectations I so fiercely fought --
Let no one tell me I'm falling short!!

Rachel Jayan is the head of the primary school at Indus International School, Bangalore. She is a passionate educator who wishes to see a transformational change in her students. She believes it is important that each individual makes time to reflect, introspect, apply, express and inspire others to make, and be the change they wish to see in the world today.

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

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes

What I Thought I Knew About India When I was Young

Courtesy: Creative Commons

I had a jigsaw of a map of India but it wasn’t a proper map. It had the names of cities on it but it was covered in pictures too, scenes of ‘typical everyday life’ for people who lived in various parts of the country. This jigsaw introduced me to India. I saw lots of elephants and tigers and women picking tea and men drinking the tea and coconut trees and mountains and a few deserts. The trees, elephants, tigers, women and mountains were all the same size. Sri Lanka was included in the map and because it is a much smaller landmass it only had room to show one elephant and one woman picking tea.

This jigsaw was one of several jigsaws that I had in the same series. They were all the same size too, so that I came away with the mistaken impression that India, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South America were all as large as each other. I have checked just now and I see that these jigsaws were made by Waddingtons and called ‘jig-maps’ and now I also learn that the Indian one didn’t contain Sri Lanka after all. The fallibility of memory! Looking at it for the first time in almost fifty years I discover that Bangalore is represented by a man playing a flute to two cobras in a basket while a wise mongoose looks on. Was Bangalore ever really like that? Was it like that when the jigsaw was made? Clearly a lot has changed in half a century.

The jigsaw was only the starting point of my intellectual discovery of the Indian subcontinent. Films augmented my growing awareness. Films showed me that the meaning of India could be found in elephants, tigers and women picking tea, not to mention men drinking tea, coconut trees, mountains, deserts. The place seemed marvellous. I decided to go there one day. But when? The thing to do was to consult a proper atlas, not a jigsaw, in fact a battered old atlas bound in ripped green cloth that dated from the 1920s and was probably a book once owned by my great-grandfather.

India seemed far away, yes, but not as far as Australia, and because I had cousins in Australia who had come to visit (bringing me a boomerang as a gift), I knew the voyage was feasible. First, I would reach France, that was the first step, and I felt confident I could walk to France. There was the inconvenience of a stretch of open sea between Britain and France, but I believed I could construct a raft from driftwood and sail across without too much trouble. Once I arrived in France the remainder of the journey would look after itself. I equipped myself for the walk. I took a penknife and a flask of orange squash, and I set off. There was woodland near the house where I grew up and I walked for ten minutes or so before meeting a boy I knew who was unsuccessfully trying to climb a tree. He came down with a crash, asked me for a drink and I obliged. Half the squash went down his gullet and I knew I could never hope to reach France on a half empty canteen. I returned home.

But I never abandoned the quest to reach India, I merely postponed it. The country had snakes in baskets! How could I resist that? Where I came from, the only stuff you found in wicker baskets was laundry. Boring in comparison! The snakes in India were musical and loved flute melodies. That also was amazing. It occurred to me that snakes were flute-like themselves and perhaps had even evolved from flutes (or vice versa) which explained the association. What if the strong resemblance led to a flautist accidentally trying to play a snake instead of a flute? The question alarmed me for days.

Maybe the music produced as a result would be the best ever heard by any human ear? Or perhaps it would be the worst! Yet another thing to find out for myself when I got to India. In the meantime, to continue my research, I spent a lot of time with a toy called a ‘View-Master Stereoscope’ that showed images on slides in 3-D. It was a plastic box with two lenses and a lever that rotated a disc on which the images were fixed.

One of the discs in my possession was an arrangement of “spectacular views” from around the globe. It included Banff in Canada, the Golden Horn in Turkey (those are the only other two I remember) and yes, a frontal view of the Taj Mahal. I studied the Taj Mahal carefully. It was vast and white. What clues could I glean from it? I wasn’t sure. Someone told me it was constructed by elephants. I accepted this but wondered what use elephants had for such a grand monument. It wasn’t edible. It wasn’t a bun.

On a school trip I was taken on a bus to Bristol Zoo, which seemed to lie at an extraordinary distance from the small town where I lived. We were shown an elephant and informed by a teacher that it was an Indian elephant, because it had small ears. Those ears looked vast to me and from that moment I had no choice but to regard the teacher as incompetent, a fool who didn’t know the difference between big and small. The incompetence of adults was something I learned the hard way, like most children. For instance, another teacher told us that crude oil was ‘liquid gold’ but I knew he was wrong. Oil was black and gold was golden, they couldn’t be the same. He had neglected to explain it was a metaphor. That might have helped his credibility.

My grandmother knew a little about India because one of her uncles was a sailor and had been there. He came back full of stories about it. People in India were able to levitate cross-legged, he had told her, after studying a thing called yoga. But yoga was dangerous. Some men had tied themselves in knots doing it and couldn’t be untied. They had spent the rest of their lives as a knot. Only the lightest men could levitate as far as the ceiling. Occasionally one of them would go up the chimney and drift away on the breeze. He had sometimes been far out at sea and watched them drifting over his ship. He had waved to them but if they broke their concentration they would come back down and make a splash, so his cheerful greetings were ignored. No offence taken, he said, he understood their predicament. Well, that was India for you.

In Calcutta he had seen a magician with a rope who had thrown it up high in the air and it had become rigid. Then he climbed it and vanished at the top. It was an impressive trick but he couldn’t see the point of it. He preferred the men who slept on nails instead of mattresses. Had he actually seen any of these chaps himself? No, not exactly. Nails grew on trees in that country and during his stay there had been a drought and a bad harvest and there weren’t enough nails to spare and those magic men had to sleep on porcupines instead. It was better than nothing, he supposed. My grandmother passed these tales onto me, uncritically and with evident approval. She always regretted not being born a man and going to sea herself. She wanted to be a pirate.

My grandmother’s uncle knew all about curries but I didn’t and I waited a long time before I tasted my first. It blew off the roof of my mouth, but looking back, I imagine, it was a very mild curry. Like most British men I soon acquired a taste for spices and eventually I became what is known in common parlance as a ‘chilli head’, going so far as to munch on the spiciest raw chillies available and insisting through a forced grin that they were “nothing special”, but that was later. My first curry was an eye opener. On second thoughts, it was more of an eye shutter, as I squeezed back the tears into my ducts. Yet this experience is a necessary rite of passage for all British males. It is the ‘test of fire’ and no less important than ‘the test of liquid’ (one’s first beer in a pub) and the ‘test of hair’ (the first shaving of the chin). These are the three essential tests, although there might be some others of lesser importance.

It must also be admitted, and I don’t say this cheerfully, that Kipling had a deep influence too on what I thought I knew about ‘India’. He is a problematic author now, one who made too many assumptions about how acceptable it was to work within the rigid structures of an imperialist system and only petitioning for greater humanity within that system. We can look back now and chide him for not opposing the system itself, but as a young British boy, I had no thoughts about systems of any kind. I was unhistorical despite my interest in history. The past was a place of knights bashing each other with maces, the distant past was a place where cavemen bashed each other with clubs. The present could never be history because it wasn’t the past, a simple equation in my head, and when Kipling wrote of his contemporary India, I received his impressions in my own time. Therefore, his India became mine too. ‘Gunga Din’ was exactly the sort of chap one might meet in the streets today. It never occurred to me that Kipling was a relic, an antique, for the reason that his books stood on my bookshelves now, and thus had contemporary relevance.

My sister’s best friend at school was an Indian girl, Joya Ghosh by name, but because we lived in a small town in Wales, I don’t think it registered in my mind that her parents had come from elsewhere. I didn’t think about the matter very much, if at all. She was merely a person with a deep laugh, much deeper than the laugh any child ought to have, thinking back on it now. It rumbled. It was the sort of laugh I later came to associate with hearty men with big beards, Captain Haddock or Taras Bulba types. She didn’t have a big beard or even a small one, at least I don’t recall seeing one.

She once courageously interceded in order to stop a pillow fight between myself and my sister. Her diplomacy in maintaining her neutrality as she did so impressed me considerably. But I never asked her anything about India. Maybe she wouldn’t have known much, but that is beside the point. I never even made the attempt. Nor do I remember meeting her parents or siblings, though I surely must have. She was here and India was elsewhere, so no connection could be logically made. The Jungle Book cartoon film filled in all the gaps anyway. I learned that in India wolves held conferences, that monkeys had kings, and that vultures were willing to join forces with humans to frustrate the machinations of tigers. This seemed perfectly reasonable.

When I was 14 years old, a brief article on Buddhism in an encyclopaedia captured my imagination. I wanted to know more about this philosophy. Where should I turn in order to find out more? There were no books on the subject in my local library, which was the only source of reading material in the town, and no adults I asked knew anything about it. The Buddha had found enlightenment under a tree in India. Would I have to travel to India to find enlightenment about his enlightenment? That seemed probable. My grandmother’s uncle hadn’t said anything to her about it, strangely enough, so I had to extrapolate from that one encyclopaedia article. It mentioned reincarnation and I liked this idea. To get an opportunity to be every other animal under the sun! To understand that already I had been many of those animals. Sublime!

The deeper aspects of the philosophy were passed over in that article. But my mind was made up, I would henceforth be a vegetarian, and I have been one ever since. There was familial opposition to my decision, of course. If I was no longer going to eat meat, what would I eat? British food back then was famous for being terrible (some would say it still is) and there was no tradition of tasty vegetarian meals. A vegetarian meal was simply an ordinary meal but without a lump of meat included, in other words a plate of boiled potatoes, boiled carrots, boiled cabbage, sprinkled with salt and pepper. This was years before the Curry Revolution that shook our island nation to the core, threw out our complacency and shattered our culinary blandness.

I now decided that I was a Buddhist and would go to live in a monastery in the mountains when I was older. Unlike my first attempt at walking to India, my second attempt would see me equipped with more than just a penknife and flask of orange squash. I would go equipped with inner tranquillity. That was the idea anyway. If I met with an accident during the journey, savaged by wild beasts or attacked by bandits on mountain slopes, it wouldn’t matter too much because I would be reborn as some other animal, maybe a squirrel or goose, and have an interesting life in a new form. I might even be reborn as an animal with enough strength to turn the tables on my attackers. A rhinoceros or hippopotamus. That would be fun and I regretted that I wouldn’t be there to see what happened, even though in another sense I was there…

But I kept putting off the day of my departure. There were too many other things to do first, such as pass my school exams and save enough pocket money to buy a new bicycle. Also, I didn’t want to shave my head. Time and tide wait for no man, or so they say, and weeks turned into months, months into years, and then I lost interest in walking seven thousand kilometres overland because I had started to go on hiking trips with friends and was learning what distance really meant to legs and feet. My first proper manly hike was 28 Km through forested hills and my feet were blistered on the soles so badly that for the next three days I walked on tiptoes like a conspirator but while making noises that no conspirator would make, “Ouch!” and “Yow!”

I grew up even more than I already had, went to university, graduated and travelled. I had friends who went to India and came back and they told me tales of their adventures. These adventures were suspiciously devoid of canyon rope bridges and cobras swaying to flute music, and equally suspiciously full of ghee-laden sweets and cheap beer. I eventually made it to India, but I went first to Sri Lanka, for reasons too complicated to outline in an article of such a short length. Yes, there were ghee-laden sweets and cheap beer shortly after I landed in Bangalore, but I think that was just coincidence. As for canyon rope bridges I still haven’t encountered any, but I did see an incredibly rickety broken bridge when I went to Coorg, absolutely the sort of thing one finds in old adventure novels or in the films adapted from them.

And now I sit under a magnificent banyan tree and consider how all my current knowledge about India deviates from what I thought I knew about the country in my distant youth. I think I have only really learned one thing, which is that India is simply too large to comprehend. There is too much of it, and it is full of people doing things, and those things are baffling even when explained because the explanations, no matter how lucid they are, are also baffling. This is a complicated way of saying I haven’t found any snakes in my bed yet, no bears in my bathroom, and I still haven’t been eaten by a tiger and reincarnated as a mongoose. But anything at all can happen.

Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.

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

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Categories
Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes

My Love for R.K. Narayan

R.K. Narayan gives me a ‘warmer’ feeling than any other novelist. This doesn’t mean that his books make life seem easy. On the contrary, his work is absolutely committed to dealing with the travails of existence, but there is a deep humanity about his style that strongly appeals to my better nature, and I love immersing myself in his world. I feel that no more genuine and sincere guide can be found to our common reality than this author.

He was an author I was aware of for a long time before I actually read him. I planned to read his books one day, but most things that are postponed until that magical ‘one day’ seem never to happen. Finally, I dipped into a very small book of his short stories when I had a bout of flu. This was a sampler volume, pocket sized and easy to race through, but I paced myself at one story a day. They were a gift to an unwell man. I loved them. Nearly all of them had a twist at the end, but the twists didn’t feel at all contrived.

There was some other quality about them that intrigued me. They seemed to display not the slightest trace of self-consciousness. They reminded me of the authors I had most enjoyed when I first discovered the joys of literature, Robert Louis Stevenson, the early H.G. Wells, some Dickens. They allowed me to be a pure reader again, rather than an aspiring writer who was always on the lookout for ways to improve his own technique.

Hot lemon tea and short stories just like these are what a man needs when the flu takes hold of him. I finished the slim volume and recovered my health. I now knew that Narayan was an author who strongly appealed to me. Therefore, it was necessary to seek out his other books. I went to the local library, a library that happens to be one of the best I have ever visited, but all the Narayan books were already on loan. However, there was another author with an Indian name on the shelf very near where Narayan should be. I decided that he might act as a temporary substitute and I took out a volume at random. It turned out to be the very first book of V.S. Naipaul, certainly an Indian writer, but one who was also a writer from Trinidad, on the opposite side of the world to India. I read it, loved it, found it very different from Narayan.

Miguel Street is a brilliant collection of linked stories. These tales are set in one street in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad, and written in a deceptively simple style that Naipaul claims was inspired by the author of the old picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes, published in 1554 and probably written by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, a book I read a few years ago with great enjoyment. But there is a rhythmic music to Miguel Street that clearly has little to do with that earlier work. It is a funny book, but behind the comedy is a certain measure of pain, and behind that pain is more comedy, and so on. The stories are therefore multi-layered, and this concealed complexity of form works as a very satisfying contrast to the singsong language of the telling. But these tales are hard. They aren’t as warmly embracing as Narayan’s.

I came to the conclusion, one I think I still hold, that Naipaul and Narayan are opposites, that they represent two poles on one spectrum of literature, that the first is hard and cynical, the other yielding and benevolent. Naipaul always seems to be a pessimist, and even in optimistic passages he is pessimistic about the worth of optimism. Narayan always seems to be an optimist, and even when things go wrong for his characters, he is optimistic about their pessimism. More to the point, their pessimism doesn’t endure, it dissipates rapidly. I admire both authors immensely, but I would much prefer to meet Narayan and drink coffee with him than meet Naipaul over any drink.

After I finished Miguel Street I returned it to the library, and now Narayan was back on the shelves, so I helped myself to The Bachelor of Arts, a novel that flows with incredible smoothness. It tells of Chandran, who graduates from college and falls in love with Malathi, a girl he sees on the river bank one fateful evening. His yearnings for her lead to the most dramatic adventure of his youth, as he impulsively but bravely decides to reject the world when he is unable to have her as his wife. But that is only one extended incident among many. The story is delightful, charming, innocent, but it also has elements of melancholy. It is humorous and yet serious. Reading it, I fully understood why Graham Greene said that Narayan was his favourite writer in the English language. Greene also claimed that Narayan had metaphorically offered him a second home in India, and that was exactly the way I felt too.

Then I learned that The Bachelor of Arts was one volume in a loose trilogy, and I obtained the other two books linked to it. Swami and Friends turned out to be almost as engrossing and fascinating, though a little simpler in structure. The English Teacher, on the other hand, was much more sombre in tone, with a plot concerning an English teacher who loses his new wife to typhoid. Narayan lost his own wife to the same disease. The sadness and poignancy of certain scenes in this novel are thus intense, yet the author never allows his narrator to become self-indulgent and the ending of this novel is beautiful. This is a trilogy that can be regarded as authentic, and what I mean by this is that there is no sense that the truth is being operated on by the tools of the writer’s trade for effect. Truth here is unadorned and more effective as a result. It takes gentle courage to write this way and succeed so admirably.

I do feel with Narayan that he is befriending the reader as well as relating a narrative. As I have already said, Narayan gives me a warm feeling that no other writers do to the same degree. His style is perfect for the needs of readers who wish to forget about the technical aspects of literature and feel exactly the same way they did when they were young and launching themselves into the mighty universe of literature for the first time.

Narayan is able to do two contradictory things simultaneously, namely (1) show that we are all the same throughout the world, and (2) show how cultures and people around the world differ from each other. And although other authors can pull off this trick, with Narayan it doesn’t feel like a trick at all but a natural expression of his being. It is true that I have enjoyed some of his books less than others, he is far from being the perfect writer. Talkative Man, for example is one of the weaker works, a short novel, more of a novella really, set in the fictional town of Malgudi as are most of his books, and it is charming and humorous and a little bit haphazard, a semi-picaresque in which the action always seems to be episodic and wide-ranging but in fact is firmly grounded in that one small town in a sleepy backwater of Southern India.

But it lacks bite, for although Narayan’s novelistic bite is gentle, unlike the bite of Naipaul, it is a bite all the same. The Painter of Signs bites, and although there are some slapdash passages in this novel (as there are in Talkative Man) they are easy to forgive, thanks to the compelling soft force of the poignant story about two individuals who despite being on different life-paths, meet and become deeply involved with each other.

Yet there is one Narayan book that is supreme above all his others, at least in my opinion, and it is a collection of stories I took with me when I travelled to East Africa and wanted a companion light enough to carry in my small rucksack and amusing enough to make each mosquito-filled night pass smoothly. The one quality possessed by Narayan that makes him such an agreeable companion on a long journey is that he never lectures or talks down to the reader but invites him to share his world, his vision. His fictional town of Malgudi feels absolutely real to me, so much so that it is my favourite invented location in all literature, and I always accept the invitation to stroll its dusty streets.

Malgudi Days is the title of this wondrous volume. I read it in Mombasa. It is a collection that displays enormous variety within the compass of its fictional setting, the remarkable town of Malgudi, only occasionally venturing outside it, into the countryside or the jungle where tigers and angry gods cause difficulties for the people who stray into their domain. Most of the time, the people settled in Malgudi, or just passing through it, devise deeply human strategies for coping with the difficulties thrown at them by circumstance and fate, often making their own difficulties through the accretion of actions over years. Despite the warmth of Narayan’s prose style, the gentle mood he evokes, the benign ambience of the setting, there is suffering and guilt here too.

Characters are not infrequently criminals who have fled the scene of their misdoings and have relocated to Malgudi in order to start afresh. Not always can they leave behind their pasts. And yet there are no simple morality lessons here, the resolutions are often chaotic, ambiguous, the stories of some lives are left hanging. Narayan is in control of his material but not of life and life bowls balls that his characters can’t always bat…

It is difficult for me to enthuse too precisely about this collection without ending up saying things I have no wish to say. The individual stories are superb, but the sum is greater than its parts. To choose individual tales to praise seems a mild insult to the integrity of the whole, though I am aware that it is perfectly acceptable to pick out particular pieces and talk about them. The collection was not designed as a whole anyway but amalgamated from two existing collections and updated with a handful of new stories.

I am merely delighted that I discovered R.K. Narayan and I fully intend to read everything he published. And there are districts of Bangalore and Mysore that evoke some aspects of Malgudi and are there to be explored without having any specific ‘sights’ to seek out. Ambience is everything. Friendship within that ambience is a blessing. Narayan is a friend on a shelf, a genuine friend, and the black ink of his words on the white pages of his books are like reversed stars on a night sky that is as radiant as daylight.

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Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.

.

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

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Poetry

When the Road is Wet

By Saranyan BV

Courtesy: Creative Commons
There are times in life you want
Grandkids crowding around your legs,
And you want to be patient with them.
And times when you don’t want all this.
Want to quietly read books,
To punch the pedals on your bicycle.
There are times when neighbour’s kids
Come to play, they are old enough
To know this is not their home,
But they can come and go.
Fill your life with borrowed joy,
And fill it with space.
It’s time to feel like grandpa
When the road is wet 
And without potholes.

Saranyan BV is poet and short-story writer, now based out of Bangalore. He came into the realm of literature by mistake, but he loves being there. His works have been published in many Indian and Asian journals. He loves the works of Raymond Carver.

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

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Categories
Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes

I Went to Kerala

Photo provided by Rhys Hughes

I went to Kerala for Christmas, travelling from Bangalore on the night bus. It wasn’t the first time I had taken a night bus in India. The first time was when I went to Madikeri, high in the hills of Coorg. That bus was one with berths that one can lie completely flat on. In fact, you have no choice but to lie flat because there are no seats. It should be more comfortable than sitting upright all night, and I am sure many passengers find it so, but the vibrations of the engine made my body vibrate in sympathy and every bend in the road made me slide around the berth uncontrollably and when the bus climbed a slope all the blood rushed to my head, which was oriented towards the rear of the vehicle. I decided never to use this restful method of travel again.

This is why I chose a more old-fashioned style of bus in order to journey to Kerala. I understand seats. Your head is always up and your feet always down, and if this happens not to be the case then it quickly becomes obvious that some disaster has happened. Head up, feet down, seems to me the natural order of the universe when travelling a great distance. It was a twelve-hour journey. In India that might not be so remarkable, but I come from a small country where twelve hours on a bus is sufficient time to drive right across the land and a fair way out to sea. “Captain, there seems to be a bus overtaking us!” “Have you been at the rum again, bosun?” The immensity of India is something I doubt I will ever get used to. It is big even in terms of bigness.

Not that the bus with seats was completely free of problems. The seats had a lever by the side of them, and if this lever was pulled, the seats reclined. I was expecting something of this nature, but I was completely taken by surprise at the extreme angle they adopted. They reclined to an excessive degree. All was fine for the first fifty kilometres or so, then the young lady in the seat in front of me decided it was bedtime. She reclined the seat so precipitously that it whacked on my knees, and I was given no choice but to stare directly at the top of her head which was almost touching my chin. The only solution was to recline my own seat. I did so and heard a yowl from behind. I had taken my turn to crush some other innocent knees. And so I lay in this absurd position, sandwiched between two sleepers as the hours slowly passed.

The bus was soon filled with snorers and all of them were out of time with each other. I am a jazz aficionado, I love music with complex rhythms, and I also love polyrhythms, but the point of such intricate music is that there is resolution at some point along the melody lines. The contrasting rhythms ought to come together at least sometimes, in order to provide structure, but the snoring was far too avant garde for that. It was atonal and without time signatures. A man in a forest of lumberjack gnomes probably feels the same way I did, as the sawing takes place and the trees topple with a crash. There was no crash for me during that night, thank goodness, but plenty of jolting as the bus ran over potholes in the highway or swerved around unseen obstacles or accelerated to overtake rival night buses also full of snoring passengers.

Well, all this is a nuisance but one that is necessary for travellers to endure. I reached my destination safely and that’s what really counts. It was morning in Kerala and the heat was already intense. Bangalore is at altitude and altitude is a restrainer of temperature. The landscape shimmered and the port city of Kochi pulsated under the sun. No matter! Time to find my hotel and rest for a while in order to catch up on all the sleep I had missed on the night bus, whose motto is ‘sleep like a baby’, which turned out to be accurate, for I slept not at all and felt like wailing for hours. I went to the correct address and found that the hotel had been closed for the past two years. Ah well!

We are always advised to expect the unexpected, and we do this well, but I don’t think we are ever prepared for the types of unexpectedness we encounter. I was ready for the bus to break down, or for me to lose my way in the narrow entangled city streets, or for crows to swoop and peck my head. I wasn’t ready for a hotel to not exist. I soon found another and it was a better establishment with two ceiling fans instead of one, a balcony, even a fridge that was on the verge of working. That fridge later held two bottles of beer and cooled them from hot to lukewarm, and I drank them one evening and regretted it because I have no stomach for beer. Because of that warm beery incident, I missed out on sampling the palm wine that Kerala is so famous for.

The old part of Kochi is picturesque and labyrinthine. I wandered where I would and ended up somewhere, but I’m still not sure where. Christmas lights were strung between the buildings, large glowing stars had been erected on the summits of walls, on roofs, or dangled from gables. One church I passed had a façade in the form of a gigantic angel. This was really quite surreal. We tend to think of angels as radiant beings with a human form, perfect men and women, but if you read the Bible you will soon see that most angels have an appearance that is not human at all. The highest rank of angels, the Ophanim, resemble sets of interlocking gold wheels with each wheel’s rim covered with eyes. They float through the air without needing wings. A church façade based on one of these angels would be an example of experimental architecture. But the church in the shape of a personable angel was endearing.

I walked past another church and saw a fleet of Santa Clauses mounted on bicycles about to set off. Is ‘Clauses’ the plural of ‘Claus’? I have no idea, for it has never occurred to me that there might be more than one of them. This fleet consisted of children in costume and I have no notion of where they were going or what they would do when they arrived. I strolled onwards and they rode past me, guided by two men on a scooter, one steering and the other holding in his arms a loudspeaker and facing backwards, like a Pied Piper who has entered the Electronic Age. One by the one, the Santa Clauses pedalled past, laughing, waving, generally enjoying themselves.

Photos provided by Rhys Hughes

This was Christmas at its most gentle, innocent and benevolent, a far cry from the Christmas ritual I witnessed exactly thirty years ago in Prague, where the tradition involves a saint, an angel and a devil chained together who stalk pedestrians in order to give them lumps of coal that represent the sins of the year. Prague was freezing, Kochi was broiling, and I know which I prefer, but the beer in Prague is certainly better. I reached the waterfront and sat under a tree and wondered if the mass migration of Santa Clauses I had seen was truly a fleet. Maybe it was an armada instead, or a division? Is there a collective noun for Father Christmas? A Splurge of Santas?

Kochi is riddled with waterways, and it feels like an excellent location for a port, which it is. No wonder it was established at that spot. I felt a small connection to the ancient mariners who had sailed here from the West long ago, from Europe and around the tip of Africa and across the Indian Ocean. One day I will travel from this very place to the islands of Lakshadweep. This has been a dream of mine for a long time, since I was eight or nine years old. I had entered a competition run by the Twinings tea company and I won. A map of the Indian Ocean was given with the names of islands removed and the entrants had to fill in those missing names. I consulted an atlas to do this, as I imagine every other entrant did, but I had an unknown advantage.

My atlas was very old, a green battered thing, and the Lakshadweep islands were marked by that very name. In other atlases the island chain was apparently named as the Laccadives. The administrators were looking for Lakshadweep and that is how I won a year’s supply of tea. It came regularly via the postman in an endless series of little tubs, Earl Grey, Lapsang Souchong, Peach Oolong. But in the end, this endless series finally ended, and my tea luck turned out only to feel inexhaustible rather than to be so. I have never won a competition since or even come close. But I have had a fondness for tea and Lakshadweep ever since, so it is imperative that I sail to those islands one day.

During my time in Kochi, I travelled on a boat only once, from Fort Kochi to Vypin Island. A battered rusty ferry crammed with foot passengers, cars and motorcycles. Cost of ticket? The equivalent of three British pennies. This is far cheaper than the cost of any ferry I have ever been on, with the exception of the occasional free ferries that I have encountered around the world, such as the one that takes passengers across the Suez Canal from one side of Port Said to the other, or the ferry that travels back and forth between Mombasa, which is on an island, and the African mainland. Sea travel is something special and I have done too little of it in my life. If I could have sailed back to Bangalore, I would have. As it happens, I went back on another night bus, but this time the person in the seat in front of me only reclined their seat to a reasonable angle. My knees were not crushed, and in return I did not crush the knees of the person behind me. I like and admire reasonable angles. They make geometry sweet.

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Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.

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

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Categories
Poetry

No OTP required

By Saranayan BV

Neeladri Road — Bengaluru. Courtesy: Creative Commons
NO OTP REQUIRED

	
The streets are full of Zomato guys,
Amazon, Swiggy courier boys,
These angels of delivery form the axis of weekend bonanza.
Today the pavements lean on kerb railings 
Laden with young men and women
Punching into their mobiles,
The women's skirts this evening shorter than what they normally wear.
The roads are difficult to cross at Neeladri Road,
Even God needs to be careful with the revellers.

How does it matter my pockets are empty and throat dry?
Someone's trying his voice in the rooftop bar,
Using an old mike with cutting-edge karaoke,
Why, I have music to keep me on buddy!

Life is only all it can give, no OTP required.
The range between Glenlivet and palm-toddy isn’t all that big --
I have no hassles with God or OTP.

Saranyan BV is poet and short-story writer, now based out of Bangalore. He came into the realm of literature by mistake, but he loves being there. His works have been published in many Indian and Asian journals. He loves the works of Raymond Carver.

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

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles