Tag: Bangladesh

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Interview Review

Of Wanderers and Migrants & Anuradha Kumar

A review of Anuradha Kumar’s Wanderers, Adventurers, Missionaries: Early Americans in India (Speaking Tiger Books) and an interview with the author

Migrants and wanderers — what could be the differences between them? Perhaps, we can try to comprehend the nuances. Seemingly, wanderers flit from place to place — sometimes, assimilating bits of each of these cultures into their blood — often returning to their own point of origin. Migrants move countries and set up home in the country they opt to call home as did the family the famous Indian actor, Tom Alter (1950-2017).

Anuradha Kumar’s Wanderers, Adventurers, Missionaries: Early Americans in India captures the lives and adventures of thirty such individuals or families — including the Alter family — that opted to explore the country from which the author herself wandered into Singapore and US. Born in India, Kumar now lives in New Jersey and writes. Awarded twice by the Commonwealth Foundation for her writing, she has eight novels to her credit. Why would she do a whole range of essays on wanderers and migrants from US to India? Is this book her attempt to build bridges between diverse cultures and seemingly diverse histories?

As Kumar contends in her succinct introduction, America and India in the 1700s were similar adventures for colonisers. In the Empire Podcast, William Dalrymple and Anita Anand do point out that the British East India company was impacted in the stance it had to colonisers in the Sub-continent after their experience of the American Revolution. And America and India were both British colonies. They also were favourites of colonisers from other European cultures. Just as India was the melting pot of diverse communities from many parts of the world — even mentioned by Marco Polo (1254-1324) in The Kingdom of India — America in the post-Christopher Columbus era (1451-1546) provided a similar experience for those who looked for a future different from what they had inherited. The first one Kumar listed is Nathaniel Higginson (1652-1708), a second-generation migrant from United Kingdom, who wandered in around the same time as British administrator Job Charnock (1630-1693) who dreamt Calcutta after landing near Sutanuti[1].

Kumar has bunched a number of biographies together in each chapter, highlighting the commonality of dates and ventures. The earliest ones, including Higginson, fall under ‘Fortune Seekers From New England’. The most interesting of these is Fedrick Tudor (1783-1864), the ice trader. Kumar writes: “In Calcutta, Dwarkanath Tagore, merchant and patron of the arts (Rabindranath Tagore’s grandfather), expressed an interest to involve himself in ice shipping, but Tudor’s monopoly stayed for some decades more. Tagore was part of the committee in Calcutta along with Kurbulai Mohammad, scion of a well-established landed family in Bengal, to regulate ice supply.”

Also associated with the Tagore family, was later immigrant Gertrude Emerson Sen (1890-1982, married to Boshi Sen). She tells us, “Tagore wrote Foreword to Gertrude Emerson’s Voiceless India, set in a remote Indian village and published in 1930. Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore called Emerson’s efforts, ‘authentic’.” She has moved on to quote Tagore: “The author did not choose the comfortable method of picking up information from behind lavish bureaucratic hospitality, under a revolving electric fan, and in an atmosphere of ready-made social opinions…She boldly took in on herself unaided to  enter a region of our life, all but unexplored by Western tourists, which had one great advantage, in spite of its difficulties, that it offered no other path to the writer, but that of sharing the life of the people.’” Kumar writes of an Afro-American scholar, called Merze Tate who came about 1950-51 and was also fascinated by Santiniketan as were some others.

Another name that stuck out was Sam Higginbottom, who she described as “the Farmer Missionary” for he was exactly that and started an agricultural university in Allahabad. Around the same time as Tagore started Sriniketan (1922), Higginbottom was working on agricultural reforms in a different part of India. In fact, Uma Dasgupta mentions in A History of Sriniketan: Rabindranath Tagore’s Pioneering work in Rural Reconstruction that Lord Elimhurst, who helped set up the project, informed Tagore that “another Englishman” was doing work along similar lines. Though as Kumar has pointed out, Higginbottom was a British immigrant to US — an early American — and returned to Florida in 1944.

There is always the grey area where it’s difficult to tie down immigrants or wanderers to geographies. One such interesting case Kumar dwells on would be that of Nilla Cram Cook, who embraced Hinduism, becoming in-the process, ‘Nilla Nagini Devi’, as soon as she reached Kashmir with her young son, Sirius. She shuttled between Greece, America and India and embraced the arts, lived in Gandhi’s Wardha ashram and corresponding with him, went on protests and lived like a local. Her life mapped in India almost a hundred years ago, reads like that of a free spirit. At a point she was deported living in an abject state and without slippers. Kumar tells us: “Her work according to Sandra Mackey combined ‘remarkable cross-cultural experimentation’ and ‘dazzling entrepreneurship.’”

The author has written of artists, writers, salesmen, traders (there’s a founder/buyer of Tiffany’s), actors, Theosophists, linguists fascinated with Sanskrit, cyclists — one loved the Grand Trunk Road, yet another couple hated it — even a photographer and an indentured Afro-American labourer. Some are missionaries. Under ‘The Medical Missionaries: The Women’s Condition’, she has written of the founders of Vellore Hospital and the first Asian hospital for women and children. Some of them lived through the Revolt of 1857; some through India’s Independence Movement and with varied responses to the historical events they met with.

Kumar has dedicated the book to, “…all the wanderers in my family who left in search of new homes and forgot to write their stories…” Is this an attempt to record the lives of people as yet unrecorded or less recorded? For missing from her essays are famous names like Louis Fischer, Webb Miller — who were better known journalists associated with Gandhi and spent time with him. But there are names like Satyanand Stokes and Earl and Achsah Brewster, who also met Gandhi. Let’s ask the author to tell us more about her book.

Anuradha Kumar

What made you think of doing this book? How much time did you devote to it? 

These initially began as essays for Scroll; short pieces about 1500-1600 words long. And the beginnings were very organic. I wrote about Edwin Lord Weeks sometime in 2015. But the later pieces, most of them, were part of a series.

I guess I am intrigued by people who cross borders, make new lives for themselves in different lands, and my editors—at Scroll and Speaking Tiger Books—were really very encouraging.

After I’d finished a series of pieces on early South Asians in America, I wanted to look at those who had made the journey in reverse, i.e., early Americans in India, and so the series came about, formally, from December 2021 onward. I began with Thomas Stevens, the adventuring cyclist and moved onto Gertrude Emerson Sen, and then the others. So, for about two years I read and looked up accounts, old newspapers, writings, everything I possibly could; I guess that must mean a considerable amount of research work. Which is always the best thing about a project like this, if I might put it that way.

What kind of research work? Did you read all the books these wanderers had written?

Yes, in effect I did. The books are really old, by which I mean, for example, Bartolomew Burges’ account of his travels in ‘Indostan’ written in the 1780s have been digitized and relatively easy to access. I found several books on Internet Archive, or via the interlibrary loan system that connects libraries in the US (public and university). I looked up old newspapers, old magazine articles – loc.gov, archive.org, newspapers.com, newspaperarchive.com, hathitrust.org and various other sites that preserve such old writings.

You do have a fiction on Mark Twain in India. But in this book, you do not have very well-known names like that of Twain. Why? 

Not Twain, but I guess some of the others were well-known, many in their own lifetime. Satyanand Stokes’ name is an easily recognisable still especially in India, and equally familiar is Ida Scudder of the Vellore Medical College, and maybe a few others like Gertrude Sen, and Clara Swain too. I made a deliberate choice of selecting those who had spent a reasonable amount of time in India, at least a year (as in the case of Francis Marion Crawford, the writer, or a few months like the actor, Daniel Bandmann), and not those who were just visiting like Mark Twain or passing through. This made the whole endeavour very interesting. When one has spent some years in a foreign land, like our early Americans in India, one arguably comes to have a different, totally unique perspective. These early Americans who stayed on for a bit were more ‘accommodating’ and more perceptive about a few things, rather than supercilious and cursory.

And it helped that they left behind some written record. John Parker Boyd, the soldier who served the Nizam as well as Holkar in Indore in the early 1800s, left behind a couple of letters of complaint (when he didn’t get his promised reward from the East India Company) and even this sufficed to try and build a complete life.

How do these people thematically link up with each other? Do their lives run into each other at any point? 

Yes, I placed them in categories thanks to an invaluable suggestion by Dr Ramachandra Guha, the historian. I’d emailed him and this advice helped give some shape to the book, else there would have been just chapters following each other. And their lives did overlap; several of them, especially from the 1860s onward, did work in the same field, though apart from the medical missionaries, I don’t think they ever met each other – distances were far harder to traverse then, I guess.

What is the purpose of your book? Would it have been a response to some book or event? 

I was, and am, interested in people who leave the comforts of home to seek a new life elsewhere, even if only for some years. Travelling, some decades ago, was fraught with risk and uncertainty. I admire all those who did it, whether it was for the love of adventure, or a sense of mission. I wanted to get into their shoes and see how they felt and saw the world then.

Is this because you are a migrant yourself? How do you explain the dedication in your book? 

I thought of my father, and his cousins, all of whom grew up in what was once undivided Bengal. Then it became East Pakistan one day and then Bangladesh. Suddenly, borders became lines they could never cross, and they found new borders everywhere, new divisions, and new homes to settle down in. They were forced to learn anew, to always look ahead, and understand the world differently.

When I read these accounts by early travellers, I sort of understood the sense of dislocation, desperation, and sheer determination my father, his cousins felt; maybe all those who leave their homes behind, unsure and uncertain, feel the same way.

You have done a number of non-fiction for children. And also, historical fiction as Aditi Kay. This is a non-fiction for adults or all age groups? Do you feel there is a difference between writing for kids and adults? 

I’d think this is a book for someone who has a sense of history, of historical movements, and change, and time periods. A reader with this understanding will, I hope, appreciate this book.

About the latter half of your question, yes of course there is a difference. But a good reader enters the world the writer is creating, freely and fearlessly, and I am not sure if age decides that.

You have written both fiction and non-fiction. Which genre is more to your taste? Elaborate. 

I love anything to do with history. Anything that involves research, digging into things, finding out about lives unfairly and unnecessarily forgotten. The past still speaks to us in many ways, and I like finding out these lost voices.

What is your next project? Do you have an upcoming book? Do give us a bit of a brief curtain raiser. 

The second in the Maya Barton-Henry Baker series. In this one, Maya has more of a lead role than Henry. It’s set in Bombay in the winter of 1897, and the plague is making things scary and dangerous. In this time bicycles begin mysteriously vanishing… and this is only half the mystery!

We’ll look forward to reading a revival of the characters fromThe Kidnapping of Mark Twain: A Bombay Mystery. Thanks for your time and your wonderful books.

.

[1] Now part of Kolkata (Calcutta post 2001 ruling)

Click here to read an excerpt from Wanderers, Adventurers, Missionaries: Early Americans in India

(This review and online interview is by Mitali Chakravarty)

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

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Tribute

How Nazrul Stirred the Winds of Change

Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976). From Public Domain

Kazi Nazrul Islam was born in Churulia in India on 24th May, and he died a Bidrohi poet in Bangladesh. When he was born in 1899, it was before the McMahon Line of Partition had been drawn. He looked up to Rabindranath Tagore as his mentor but his form of poetry was more rebellious and his lyrics, different, though no less beautiful. His heart belonged to a united Bengal as can be seen from much of his works. He started magazines, supported feminism, brought out Begum Rokeya’s work in his journal, spoke of rising beyond borders and he has even written of climate change more than a hundred years ago…

His essay on melting icebergs has been translated by Radha Chakravarty. Today, we celebrate Nazrul’s birth anniversary with translations of his works from Bengali. These showcase the diversity in his writings, broadness of his thought and his concern for global issues that remain unresolved to date: his essay on climate change, a story grown out of his experiences as a soldier translated by Sohana Manzoor, a poem on poverty and lyrics on women and living in a world that transcends human constructs rendered in English by Fakrul Alam and more. Welcome to Nazrul’s world!

Poetry

Arise O Woman and Two Flowers on One Leafstalk, lyrics by Nazrul, have been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

Daridro or Poverty by Nazrul has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

Prose

The Day of Annihilation, an essay on climate change by Kazi Nazrul Islam, has been translated from Bengali by Radha Chakravarty. Click here to read.

Temples and Mosques: Kazi Nazrul Islam’s fiery essay translated by Sohana Manzoor. Click here to read.

 Deposition of a Political Prisoner: A Speech by Nazrul: A powerful speech by Nazrul from the Selected Essays: Kazi Nazrul Islam, translated by Radha Chakravarty. Click here to read.

Hena, a short story by Nazrul, has been translated by Sohana Manzoor. Click here to read.

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Nazrul Translations

Nazrul Lyrics Translated by Fakrul Alam

Professor Fakrul Alam translates two songs by Nazrul on social isssues from Bengali

Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976)

Born in united Bengal, long before the Partition, Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) was known as the  Bidrohi Kobi, or “rebel poet”. Nazrul is now regarded as the national poet of Bangladesh though he continues a revered name in the Indian subcontinent. In addition to his prose and poetry, Nazrul wrote about 4000 songs.

Arise O Woman
 
Arise, o woman, arise flaming!
Arise, daubing your forehead blood-red,
Everywhere unfold your flaming tongue.
Dance wildly—excited, inspired.
Arise, hapless, maligned snake,
Awake, kindling the world aflame!
Burn briskly, o fume-filled smoky one,
Arise, mothers, daughters, brides, wives, nieces.
Arise prostitutes, cast out, exiled ones
With the tidal force of the Ganges, arise,
Down-trodden ones. Streaking clouds with lightning
Arise, aroused by Durga, the ever-triumphant one.
‘Arise O Woman’ performed in Bengali 
Two Flowers on One Leafstalk 
 
Hindu and Muslim -- two flowers on one leafstalk --
Muslim its jewelled eyes, Hindu its heart and soul! 
In the lap of their mother, the same sky is reflected,
Where sunlight and moonlight alternately sway. 
Within their bosoms the same blood courses
While the same navel string binds the twain.
We breathe the same earth mother’s air
And drink the same earth mother’s water.
In her bosom, the same fruits and flowers grow.
In the soil of the land are burial sites quite akin --
Doesn’t matter if one is called Gore -- the other Shoshan!
We call out to our mothers in the same language.
We sing for them songs strung in similar tunes!
‘Two Flowers on one Stalk’ performed in Bengali

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

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 Amazon International

Categories
Tagore Translations

Excerpt from Red Oleanders

An excerpt from Professor Fakrul Alam’s unpublished translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Raktakarabi or Red Oleanders (1924) from Bengali: It was first published in Prabasi magazine. This play rebels against totalitarianism.

Roktokorobi (Red Oeander) by Tagore
Red Oleanders. From Public Domain
Introduction

This play is based on truth. However, any reader who turns only to historians to ascertain the authenticity of events is bound to be left unfulfilled by it. Let this suffice then as an explanation: as far as this poet is concerned, they are based fully on truth.

It is possible also that geographers will differ on the play’s actual setting. But everyone knows that the setting is informally known as Lucre Land. Scholars say that the mythical Lucre Land was the site of the gilded throne of Mammon, the God of Wealth. But it will not be right to see this play as one set entirely in a mythical period; it should not be classified as a fable either. The land that it deals with it has in its mines the most precious of minerals. Its discovery led to tunnel-digging. This is why people fondly calls it Lucre Land. We will get acquainted with some of the diggers involved in due course.

No one can expect historians to agree on the real name of the monarch of Lucre Land either. The one thing that I know is that the moniker used for him is “The Dreaded”. In due course it will be clear why this is the name by which he is called.

Outside the king’s palace walls are latticed windows. It is from a room with such windows that The Dreaded One chooses to meet any number of people he wants to talk to. Why he acts so bizarrely is something that we know nothing more about than what becomes apparent from the exchanges taking place between the main characters of this play.

The chieftains who run the kingdom on the king’s behalf are well-suited to carry out their work. They are also supposed to be far-seeing—all of them are members of the King’s inner council. Their carefully taken measures ensure that there are no lapses in the work being done by the diggers. And so this is how Lucre Land has developed steadily. The supervisors, once diggers themselves, have earned on their own merit the titles they now have. Indeed, in efficiency they often surpass the chieftains they once worked for. If the laws governing Lucre Land can be called euphemistically “The Full Moon’s Beams”, the responsibility of enforcing them are entrusted to the supervisors manning what can be called its Department of Disgrace.

In addition, there is the “Holy One”. He always swears by God but lives off what is allotted to him by the chieftains. He is believed to be responsible for a lot of the “good things” that are benefitting Lucre Land.

From time to time, inedible marine animals get stuck in the net of the fishermen casting their nets here. They are of no value though—either as edible creatures or as ones that can be traded for cash. On the contrary, every now and then they leave behind holes in the nets they get entangled in. In a net flung in the course of the plot of the play, however, a girl called Nandini shows up—a girl seemingly destined to tear apart the intricate net that separates the King of Lucre Land from the rest of the world.

As far as we can see at the start of the play, the events it dramatizes take place outside the room with the latticed windows where the king lives. We get to know very little of what is happening inside the palace though.

This play is set in the country called Lucre Land. The workers here are employed to dig gold. Its king remains hidden behind a thick screen. Only one scene of the play, however, is set behind the screen. The remaining scenes all take place outside.

From Public Domain

Enter Nandini and Kishore—a young man employed in digging mines

Kishore: Nandini! Nandini! Nandini!

Nandini: Why keep calling my name again and again young man? Do you think I have a hearing problem?

Kishore: I know you have no hearing problem. I keep calling you by your name because I like doing so. Do you need more flowers? If you do, let me go and get some.

Nandini: Go, go back to work. Don’t waste any more time here.

Kishore: What I do all day long is dig for gold. Whenever I can steal some time away from such digging to search for flowers for you. That makes me feel alive.

Nandini: Young man—don’t you know they’ll punish you if they find you not at work?

Kishore: But didn’t you say you really, really want the red oleanders? What delights me is that you can’t find them easily anywhere nearby. I found only one red oleander tree behind the rubbish dumped all over the place and that too after searching hard for it.

Nandini: Show me the place and I’ll go pluck the flowers myself.

Kishore: Please don’t say such a thing again. Don’t be so cruel Nandini! Let the tree remain as my one secret. Bishu sings for you songs he composed himself. From now on, I’ll get you the flowers you want and flowers that I can call my own.

Nandini: But the beastly people of this place keep punishing you. My heart breaks whenever they do so.

Kishore: The pain I endure makes the flowers that blossom even more dearly mine. They are the harvests of my sorrow!

Nandini: But how will I endure the pain and the suffering you have to endure on my account?

Kishore: What pain? That there will come a day when I’ll sacrifice myself fully for you is the thought that comes to my mind again and again.

Nandini: You keep giving me so much. Tell me, what can I give you in return?

Kishore: Make this pledge to me—every morning you’ll take the flowers from me.

Nandini: Fine, I’ll do that. But careful….

Kishore: No way I’m going to restrain myself! No way! I’ll bring you flowers even if I have to face their lashes every day!

Exit Kishore

The Professor Enters

Professor: Nandini! Don’t go; look at me!

Nandini: What for Professor?

Professor: Why do you keep surprising me again and again only to disappear afterwards? Since you succeed in stirring my mind, why don’t you then stir it up fully? Just stay for a minute and let me say a few things to you.

Nandini: Why do you need to talk to me?

Professor: If I’m to talk about what is of importance, just take a look! Our diggers climb up to the top from the tunnel with what they have mined from the heart of the earth and then carry burdens on their head like termites do. All the wealth of Lucre Land comes from that dust-mixed source—gold is the outcome! But beautiful one, you are golden not because of such dust but because of the light you emit. How can only the need for wealth detain you?

Nandini: You keep saying the same thing again and again. What amazes you so whenever you look at me Professor?

Professor: There is nothing surprising about the light that brightens the flower gardens in the morning. The light that comes through cracks in the wall are something else though. In Lucre Land you are that kind of unexpected light! Tell me—what could you for be possibly thinking about as far as this place is concerned? 

Nandini: I am amazed to see the whole city’s focus to explore what is underground and all the groping in the dark that goes on. They keep digging in these underground tunnels for treasures that have been fossilising there for ages. These are treasures earth buried there.

Professor: What we do is exhume the corpses of such resources devotedly. We want to tame the ghosts within them. If we can tie the golden lumps up and retain them so that they don’t seem strange, we’ll have the world in our grasp.

Nandini: What is more shocking is that you have your king covered up in a wall made up of weird nets. It is as if you wouldn’t like people to find out that he is human. I feel like either opening the cover of that dark tunnel or flooding it with light. I feel like tearing up such a weird net and rescuing the man trapped inside.

Professor: Just as the ghost of fossilised wealth can be scary, the king we have can terrify us because of the power he has to scare his subjects.

Nandini: Everything you keep saying is so concocted.

Professor: Yes, I’ve made them up for sure. A nude need not be identified; only his tailored clothes will mark him as a king or a beggar! Come to my house—I’ll be delighted to make you wise with words of wisdom.

Nandini: Just as your diggers bury themselves when digging the soil, you seem to be digging deeper and deeper into your books. Why would you waste time on someone like me?

Professor: We are dense, thick-headed creatures, submerged in opaque scholarly work. You are the evening star we see when we have nothing else to do; seeing you makes our wings restless. Come home with me; let me spoil myself for a change.

Nandini: No, not now—I’ve come to see your king seated in his chamber.

Professor: He stays within his latticed wall; he won’t let you in for sure.

Nandini: No wall can block me; I’m here to spend time with your king in his chamber.

Professor: You know what Nandini—I too live inside a wall. I’ve sacrificed a lot of my human side; only my scholarship stirs in me. Just as our king is awesome, I’m an awe-inspiring scholar. 

Nandini: You must be joking! You don’t seem frightening at all. Let me ask you this question: If they could bring me here, why didn’t they bring Ranjan to this place as well?

Professor: Their strategy is to tear up everything. In any case, let me say this: why bring your precious soul to a place so full of lifeless treasures?

Nandini: If Ranjan is brought here, their dead hearts will stir again.

Professor: Nandini alone has been enough to strike the chiefs of Lucre Land dumb; imagine what will happen if Ranjan is brought here as well.

Nandini: They have no idea how strange they can be. If God could make them smile, the spell they are in would be broken. Ranjan’s smile is God’s smile!   

Professor: The smile of God is like sunlight—it melts ice but doesn’t move boulders. If you want to stir our chieftains, you need to be forceful.

Nandini: Ranjan’s strength is like your Shankhini River. Just like that river, he’ll be all smiles at one moment and a destructive force in another. Professor, let me tell you what has been a secret till now. I’ll be meeting Ranjan later today!

Professor: How do you know this?

Nandini: We’ll meet, for sure we will. The news has come that we’ll be united soon.

Professor: How can such news travel without attracting the attention of the chiefs?

Nandini: They’ll come through the same route that ushers news about spring. It’s touched with the colour of the sky and the lilt of the wind.

Professor: In other words, the colours of the sky lilt the breeze that ushers in spring.

Nandini: When Ranjan comes, I’ll be able to show you how news that has been flying can land on earth.

Professor: Once the subject of conversation turns to Ranjan, there is no stopping Nandini from talking. Never mind! Since I’ve mastered real knowledge, let me enter its depths; I myself don’t dare do anything now.      

He comes back after advancing a little.

Nandini, aren’t you frightened at the thought of being in Lucre Land?

Nandini: Why should I be?

Professor: Animals fear solar eclipses but not the round sun. Lucre Land is a place where an eclipse of sorts has taken place. The sun was bitten when it got into a gilded crater during an eclipse. Since it itself wasn’t full, it didn’t want anything else to be fully developed. Let me advise you—don’t hang around this place. When you leave these craters, they will be yawning before us—but I’ll keep insisting—flee! Be happy with Ranjan anywhere else where people don’t shred the borders of Mother Earth’s sari into bits!     

He goes some distance and then returns

Professor: Nandini, won’t you give me one of the red oleander flowers you are carrying in your right hand?

Nandini: Why? What do you want to do with it?

Professor: On many occasions it occurred to me that the red oleanders you wear have some significance for you.

Nandini: I have no idea what they could possibly mean.

Professor: Perhaps the Divine Dispenser of your fate does. The red color emits mysterious negative vibes and not only ones that delight.

Nandini: Things that can frighten me?

Professor: God has in this case painted beauty with a brush dipped in blood! I have no clue to what you were scribbling in red as you came. There are malati, mallika, chameli flowers aplenty that you overlooked. What made you pluck flowers only from this particular flowering tree? Know that people only do unthinkingly what they are fated to do.

Nandini: Every now and then Ranjan will fondly call me “Red Oleander”. I don’t know why the thought occurs to me that my Ranjan’s love is of that colour. It’s the colour I wear on my neck, my bosom and my hand.

Professor:  So why not offer me a flower only for a while so that I can figure out the essence of that flower?

Nandini: Here, take this one. Ranjan will be here today. I’m so happy that I’ve decided to gift you this red oleander.   

The Professor departs.

Gokul, a Tunnel Digger, Enters

Gokul: Turn your face this way for once. I can’t seem to figure you out! Who could you be?

Nandini: I’m exactly what you see. Nothing else! Why do you need to know anything more?

Gokul: Not a good idea to not know. Has the King of this realm summoned you here for any reason?

Nandini: For no good reason!

Gokul: What a thing to say! He is trapping us all. You are the cause of the danger we all are in.

Anyone bewitched by your beautiful face is doomed. Let’s take a look—what is that swinging there where you hair is parting?

Nandini: Red Oleander flowers!

Gokul: What do they signify?

Nandini: Nothing!

Gokul: I don’t believe you at all. You must be up to something. There is bound to be trouble before the day is over. That is why you decked yourself so. What a dreadful trick!

Nandini: What makes you think I’m so terrifying just by looking at me?

Gokul: You remind me of a torch lighted up in many colors. Go and fool innocent ones by telling them— “Take care! Beware!”

Gokul Exits

Nandini is now outside a latticed window

Nandini (Striking the latticed window): Can you hear me?

Voice: I hear you Nanda! But don’t keep calling me again and again; I have no time left, not a bit.

Nandini: I feel very happy today! So happy that I’d like to enter your room.

Voice: No need to come in. If you have anything to say, do so from outside the room.

Nandini: I’ve brought you a garland made of jasmine flowers. It’s covered with lotus leaves.

Voice: Wear it yourself!

Nandini: It doesn’t suit me. I wear red oleander garlands

Voice: I am like a mountain peak. I look best unadorned.

Nandini: From such peaks waterfall stream. A garland will sway in your neck as well. Open the net—I’d like to go in.

Voice: I won’t let you in. Say what you want to now. I don’t have any time to lose.

Nandini: Can you hear any song from where you are?

Voice: What song?

Nandini: A song about the winter month of Poush[1]!  A song calling all to harvesting!

Poush calls us all
Come, come away
Its tray is full this day
With harvested crops galore
Come, come away

Don’t you see how the harvested rice’s loveliness mingles with the wintry sky?

In the heady wind 
Goddesses work
Across rice fields 
All over the land
A golden hue spreads 
So good to see. Ah me!
         

Come outside King! Let me take you to the field.

The sky is happy to hear in fields flutes play.
 Who’d want to stay indoors any longer today?
 Open, open all doors

Voice: I go to work? What work am I good for?

Nandini: Harvesting is much easier than the kind of work you do for Lucre Land.

Voice: The work which seems easy to you is actually hard for me to do. Can a lake dance like the foams of a waterfall?

Nandini: Your strength is truly amazing. The day you let me enter your treasury, I wasn’t a bit startled by your gold piles. What truly fascinated me then is the way you managed to put things into an orderly heap effortlessly despite your immense strength. Nevertheless, I’ll have to say this: can lumped up golden balls respond to the amazing rhythms of your hands as well as a rice field? Tell me O King, aren’t you at all afraid to handle the fossilised resources of the world day after day?

Voice: Why, what is there to fear?

Nandini: The earth bestows on us joyfully things it holds dear. But when even dead bones are snatched away by those who value them merely as precious things what they really do is dig up from the dark depths things a blind giant had cursed. Don’t you see that everyone here is edgy? Either that or they are scared.

Voice: Scared of what?

Nandini: The fear that things will be snatched away and of the killings that might follow.

Voice: I don’t know of any curse involved. What I know is about the power we can evoke. Does my immense strength make you happy Nandini?

Nandini: Very happy indeed. That is why I’ll insist: come out into the light; put your feet on the soil; let earth rejoice.

The light joy brings
Daubs ears of corn with dew
Why not feel the joy of touch?
Nature’s joy knows no bounds
A sight so good to see
—ah me!

[1] Ninth month of the Bengali calendar coincides with December-January of the Gregorian calendar.

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

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Categories
poetry of Jibanananda Das

Poems of Longing by Jibanananda Das

Translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam

Art by Jamini Roy (1887-1972). From Public Domain 
If I Get to Live Forever
(Ananta Jebon Pai Jodi)

If I get to live forever — then forever, I’ll be all alone —
If I return to the paths of the world, I’ll see green grass
Sprouting — will see yellow grass scattering — the sky
Whitening in the morning — like a tattered munia bird,
Breast blood - stained in the evening — again and again I’ll see stars
And view a strange woman untying braided hair and leaving
Alas, her face devoid of traces of the setting sun’s soft glow

If I get to live forever — forever, I’ll walk the ways of the world
All alone. If I ever return to the world’s pathways, I’ll see
Trams, buses, dust. Innumerable slums and, broken bowls too —
Dark and dirty lanes; fights, people swearing; squinted eyes
Rotten prawns; I’ll see a whole lot of things interminably
And yet all this time I won’t get to meet you again — for eternity!

If I have eternal Life
( Anante Jebon Jodi)

Given the boon of eternity, I would walk the ways of the world eternally.
All, all alone — what if I would see lush green grass in full bloom then? 
And what if I beheld the yellowing grass withering away — And view
The sky full of wan white clouds at dawn? Like a tattered munia bird
Blood reddened breast in the evening — I would see the stars repeatedly;
I would see an unknown woman’s hair drifting away from a loosened bun;
A woman who would leave — with a face bereft of the evening sun’s glow.

Munia birds. From Public Domain

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

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

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

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Categories
Essay

Where have all the Libraries Gone?

Professor Fakrul Alam writes of libraries affected by corporate needs… With this essay, we hope to launch a discussion on libraries as we knew them and the current trends…

From Public Domain

Dhaka, 2003

Where have all those libraries gone?

Back in the ‘70s, in-between classes, adda[1], and sports, I used to spend most of my time in the USIS[2], British Council, or Dhaka University libraries. I would go to USIS for its collection of magazines and fiction, and to the Dhaka University Library for almost everything else. Despite the dust, the load shedding, the noise, the frequent closures of the university and the missing pages within the books, it was a splendid place for both adda and study. Some of my friends and acquaintances lamented that somehow, I had lost interest in “fielding” and had turned into a bookworm, but every book that I read made me thirst for more treasures of English literature. And then there was the British Council Library.

Perhaps memory always rose-tints the past, but it seems to me now that it was the friendliest part of the city then. The lush green lawn and the open spaces that surrounded the library, the access to stacks and stacks of books, the periodicals that you could leaf through, anything from the latest cricket news to reviews of books, the abundantly stocked reference section that was a source of special delight for me, the rows after rows of books that you could explore—here was God’s plenty! The Dhaka University Library had no doubt a much richer collection, but inside the British Council Library you could occasionally experience the bibliophile’s ultimate thrill: leafing through yellowing pages of a fairly old book, only to set it aside for another one; or merely reading surreptitiously through a page or two, secure in the knowledge that not all books are to be swallowed, chewed, and digested, that at least a few are to be tasted, and that was what the British Council Library was for! I would take a book or a periodical on a lazy day, sit down in one of the chairs, and then dream away, secure in the feeling that “there is no Frigate like a Book/ To take us lands away/ Nor any Coursers like a Page/ Of prancing Poetry.”

Everything about the British Council of this period seemed to be inviting. You got to know the staff after a few visits and they were all very friendly. I was still a student when I was on a “first-name basis” with the expatriate assistant representatives and librarians. In the middle of the decade, though only a lecturer at Dhaka University, I could claim the Librarian, Graham Rowbotham, to be a dear friend. In retrospect and especially compared to the library decor and staff now, everybody and everything associated with the library seemed to be amateurish in a way that was endearing and conducive to aimless browsing and long hours of lounging. Book of verse or criticism in hand, I loved spending my mornings here, although “thou” would be a few desks away, and to be glanced furtively in an essentially one-way traffic!

New books kept coming fairly regularly and were ordered by people of catholic tastes and wide-ranging interests. But most importantly, membership was cheap. I can’t remember what the membership fees were, but it must have been ridiculously low since even in those cash-strapped days I never seemed to have been bothered about renewing my membership from year to year. And yet you didn’t have to be a member to go in and browse, although I always preferred to be one so that I could always have books to take away and read at home.

Returning to Bangladesh after six years in Canada, I found the British Council of the ’80s not that different from the inviting, relaxed place I knew in the ’70s, although by now incoming books had slowed down to a trickle. Towards the end of the decade, I think, the library added a video section, but, on the whole, the Council seemed to be cutting back on everything. I had also heard that the library was going to be restructured; apparently, the “Iron Lady” was bent on making the British Council less of a burden on the British economy and more of a self-sustaining, income-generating unit.

But the full effect of the restructuring of the British Council into a self-sustaining, charitable organisation was obvious only by the middle of the ’90s. The Thatcherite assault on the arts, a heightened British concern with security after the Gulf War, and unrest in Dhaka University all must have played their parts, for in 1995 the British Council decided that they would leave the campus for the security of the Sheraton Annex.

The first casualty of what was surely an ill-conceived decision, like USIS’s move to Banani was the British Council’s wonderful collection of books. Row after row of books were given away for free. Indiscriminately. Thoughtlessly. Even some reference books and bound periodicals were distributed gratis since it was felt the Sheraton British Council would have very little space.

Thankfully, the British Council abandoned its move to the Sheraton, but the Fuller Road library never recovered from the book-giving spree. Instead, the library was redesigned to give it a contemporary feel on the outside as well as the inside, security was beefed up, and everything about the library redone to give it a “new”, packaged look.

A cyber centre was installed to make you feel that the ambience was au courant, and impressive graphics-brightened the walls. But what is a library without stacks and stacks of books? The British Council was always the repository of the best in British culture, but this one seemed to be as anaemic as the foreign policy of present-day Britain and nowhere representative of the nation’s past cultural glory. Indeed, where were the Booker Prize winners, the Nobel laureates, the Poetry Book Society choices, London Magazine, Granta, The New Left Review, The London Review of Books? Where were the bibliographies, the reference books that you could use to track an idea or pursue a stray thought to an ever-widening world, so that even within the confines of a library you “felt like some watcher of the skies/ when a new planet swims into his ken?”

The British Council has leased the best piece of property in town from the University of Dhaka. And what does it offer the university’s students? Forced to generate revenues for its upkeep, it had become, as my dear friend put it so memorably, the New East India Company, making money any which way it is able to. Thus, the Council was now more bent on offering exorbitantly-priced language courses and all sorts of examination services, trading on its Englishness and cashing in on the dismal state of our educational system set back by excesses of linguistic nationalism, than on stocking books that represented the best in British culture and that could be made available to the largest group of people. Library fees are ridiculously high—which middle class family can afford to make its children members at Tk 1,300 a year? And entry to the library itself is restricted—you have to be a member to browse! In fact, everything about the present British Council Library reinforces the feeling that it serves almost exclusively two groups of people: the upper class of Dhaka and people desperate about going to Britain for higher studies!

Significantly, the British Council Library now has remade itself as the Library and Information Services. What services? I stopped becoming a member in 1998 when I realised that the membership fees, which I could barely afford even then (the current fees are Tk 650 a year!), were entitling me to diminishing returns every year since the books and most of the periodicals I wanted to read were not there. The year I quit my membership after I had requested the library to procure a book on Burke and India for a research project but, despite repeated reminders to the librarian, that book never came (and I thought that they would listen to a professor of English literature at Dhaka University). The reference section was no longer stocking current bibliographies and sources of information about the world of books.

When I decided to write this piece, I thought in all fairness I should spend some time checking out the Library’s current state before I started critiquing its current library policy. To my dismay, I found that things had gone from bad to worse in the last few years. What services? There is now left only one shelf of literature books and another one devoted to reference items. The library looks pretty, and everything is neatly arranged but why does it remind me of the artificial, vacuous smile of the catwalk beauty? No doubt in line with modern concepts of interior design the library has more space than ever before, but all I see in it is emptiness! Yes, it is smartly done and for the smart people, but where is the world of knowledge in all this?

As my colleague pointed out to me in a note, “What services? How can the young come and request books they don’t know about? Knowledge comes from browsing the shelves, from looking at books and authors you have never seen before, and then you pick it up and read a new author, and perhaps you find a lifelong favourite and your mental landscape changes and that’s what a library’s function is, to widen, to broaden, to expose minds to superior stuff, not provide some crap ‘services’, some videos, some paper hangings, and then have the gall to call it ‘progress’ or ‘keeping up with the times’ or whatever!”

I should add that I have no real problem with the British Council cashing in on the O and A level market and IELTS[3] examinations, but I can’t figure out why it can’t plow back more of its surely substantial profits into establishing a proper library instead of the Fuller Road scam that now calls itself one. Let it charge the people who can afford its outrageously-priced language courses all it wants to, but why can’t it lower library fees so that anybody who wants to can use the library facilities, can browse and read in the library without having to pay anything? I am aware that the British Council is a registered charity and believe that it is supposed to spend its gains here, but can’t it become a leaner operation so that it can beef up its library services? Shouldn’t charity begin at home?

Our libraries have become shadows and shells of their former selves, and it is time we started to ask ourselves a very simple question: what exactly is a good library? And don’t we owe our children and ourselves at least one library?

(Adapted from the essay, ‘The British Council Library: The New East India Company?’ Published on November 8, 2003 in Daily Star)

[1] Casual sessions of tête-à-tête

[2] United States Information Service Library

[3] Internation English Language Testing System

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

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
Review

Mapping Raghu Rai: A Photo Journalist’s Journey

Book Review by Malashri Lal

Title: Raghu Rai: Waiting for the Divine

Author: Rachna Singh

Publisher: Hawakal Publishers

“My story should remain simple, step by step, click by click.”   -- Raghu Rai

Rachna Singh, notebook and recorder tucked in her bag, pen in hand, first meets Raghu Rai in his picturesque home nestled in the Mehrauli forest of New Delhi, a landscape with occasional medieval structures peeping through the trees. Away from a concrete encrusted city, Rachna, a patient biographer, knows that the legendary photographer whose images shaped the visual progress of a nation, has his own deep stories.  But will he reveal them? She pries the tales open by carving pathways through Raghu Rai’s photos— and a remarkable book about the person behind the camera is captured by a literary image-maker, in this sensitive, tender, and insightful biography. Rai permeates  a series of chapters that play intricate games with memory because every frame in the camera is connected to myriad threads of experience.

Since the book is sub-titled “Waiting for the Divine”, I naturally look for references to Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama to discover how the transcendent power of Raghu Rai’s photos of these two personages emerged. Entry into sacred precincts is never easy, and a camera in hand signals a definite obstacle. However, at the Sisters of Charity in Kolkata the photographer is permitted to follow the Mother unobtrusively. Yet, when a curtain flutters to reveal angel-like nuns and Rai dives to the floor to catch the best angle and the right light, even the Mother’s equanimity breaks and she is aghast! From such “shadowing” emerges the divine photograph titled “Mother Teresa in Prayer” with every crease in the luminous face catching the glow, an expression transporting her to realms beyond ordinary comprehension.

If Raghu Rai’s association with Mother Teresa is marked by reverence, his link with His Holiness the Dalai Lama is marked by friendship—one that extends to warm handshakes and brotherly embrace, informal conversations and a conviction about universal compassion. Says Rai, “His Holiness is an uninhibited, wonderfully loving man. How gracious of him to say he is my friend.” Again, it is the camera lens that reveals remarkable facets of the Dalai Lama– his childlike smile as also the sombre spiritual leader of a people in exile. Rachna Singh recounts an almost surreal story of a protective stone gifted to Rai by His Holiness that saw him survive a severe heart condition of ninety percent blockage while still chasing images of a crowded procession!

This takes me back to Rachna Singh’s intention, “My book is not a third-person memoir nor a chronological recounting of Raghu Rai’s life. Instead, it unfolds through candid conversations, inviting the readers into an intimate dialogue.” The reader’s response being part of her textual strategy, I too could add my account of the mystical energy felt in the presence of the Dalai Lama. The book’s attraction lies in this fluidity of the biographer, her subject and the reader being part of the evolving discussion of the deep philosophical pool from which photos are created. The trajectory of Raghu Rai’s life is well known—the photo journalist with The Statesman and India Today; his famous photo essays in the international magazines Time, Life, The New Yorker and numerous others, the award of a Padma Shri, his eminent friends and compeers, but Rachna Singh’s book probes Rai’s mind, his consciousness, his search and his beliefs. Therefore, it offers gems of information through anecdotes and the atmospherics of events, and some delectable quotations in Punjabi and English.

I turn here to Raghu Rai’s series on the Bhopal gas leak of 1984. “The black and white picture of a dead child, eyes open, staring sightlessly into space, lying in the rubble with a hand gently caressing the ravaged face in farewell,” describes Rachna, calling Rai a ‘Braveheart’ who painted a “searing picture of the tragedy.” The conversation is strangely matter of fact as though both the biographer and her subject are numbed by the enormity of that night of terror. Did Rai fear for his health or safety in the toxic air? The answer is “No” because the human pain around was greater than the instinct for self-preservation. All the journalists visited the mass cremations, the hospitals, the dead and the dying as though it was a “job”, Rai being practical enough to say, “You cannot let your spirit turn soggy with emotion.” Those of us who read of such tragedies and see photos in newspapers while sipping our morning tea should admire the intrepid people providing the raw material from ground zero.

Another memorable series was on Bangladesh refugees after the 1971 war—emaciated women and men often carrying sick children in baskets. Rai had been in the frontlines of the war and had once been surrounded by a hostile mob. Rachna is on tenterhooks as he narrates the details but he declared “I was more excited than scared … there was actually no time to feel scared.” At one time he even smiles and says, “It was a lot of fun.” Which brings me to probe the extraordinary grit and strength of photo journalists or reporters from war zones. Where does compassion and newsworthiness meet? Is image more important than the decimated human body? What lasting imprint does such witnessing leave?

Perhaps the answer lies in Raghu Rai’s quest for the Divine—beyond image, outside time. He was born in pre-partition India, in the village of Jhang that is now in Pakistan. He speaks haltingly of the childhood terrors—homes in flames, of escape in the pre-dawn—Rachna notes the tremor in his voice and the reluctance to recall those years. Yet she astutely links Rai’s portrayals of hurt and human sorrow, his sensitivity yet distancing from those early experiences. Finally, it’s been a holistic calm. Rai is quoted: “Photography has been my entire life—it has, in fact become my religion, a faith to which I have dedicated myself completely. My craft led me toward a meditative path that gave me insights to life and the divine.” And that quest bridges the beatific and the aesthetics in this most commendable book.

Malashri Lal, writer and academic, with twenty four  books, retired as Professor, English Department,  University of Delhi. Publications include Tagore and the Feminine, and The Law of the Threshold: Women Writers in Indian English. Co-edited with Namita Gokhale is the ‘goddess trilogy’, and also Betrayed by Hope: A Play on the Life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt  which received the Kalinga Fiction Award.  Lal’s poems Mandalas of Time has recently been translated into Hindi as Mandal Dhwani. She is currently Convener, English Advisory Board of the Sahitya Akademi. Honours include the prestigious ‘Maharani Gayatri Devi Award for Women’s Excellence’.

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Categories
Nazrul Translations Tagore Translations

Love Songs by Tagore and Nazrul: Translated by Fakrul Alam

From Public Domain

Tumi Kon Kanoner Phul ( From whose garden could you be) by Tagore was published in the collection called Kori O Komal (Sharp and Flat) in 1886.

From whose garden could you be
And in which sky were you a star?
Where could I have seen you before
And in what dream did you last appear?
When was it that you had last sung,
And when did you last look at my eyes?
I’ve forgotten it all!
All that I can remember now
Is that you were my eyes’ star!
Hush—don’t say anything now—
Just take a look and go your way
In this moonlight just smile and melt away!
Overcome with sleep, I look at the moon
With an enraptured heart
Like your eyes, let the twin stars in the sky
Keep streaming their rays.
Renderred by well-known contemporary singer, Srikanto Acharya

Anjali Loho Mor (Take my Offerings) was written and composed by Nazrul (1899-1976)


Take my offerings melodically, musically
Like a flaming lamp, my soul flickers
Captivated by you, O lovely one;
What feeling of bliss is this, making the body sway
And dance before you melodically, musically?
In ecstasy unfolds love’s petals,
Full of beauty, fragrance and love
Looking at your face, I’d like to say to you:
“Fall down like petals of flower will do
And colour your feet’s soles, melodically, musically”
Renderred by the legendary Feroza Begum (1930-2014)

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

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

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Categories
Poetry of Jibananda Das

‘All My Songs Will Still Only be for You’

Tumi to Janona Kichu (You seem to know nothing) from Jibananda Das’s poetry collection, Ruposhi Bangla (1934), has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam.

From Public Domain
You seem to know nothing, and it won’t matter if you don’t—
All my songs will still only be for you.
When Hemonto’s* early winter storms have gone away
Will you shed and lie down on my bosom
Like fallen leaves on a pathway?
Will your mind be content 
To be overtaken by sleep?
Will the sharpness you display now
Loose its edge by that dawn?
Did you really want only the dew
That gathered on my bosom that night?
Will only its taste
Satiate you?
Though I’ll shed, with all my life
I’ll cling to you as long as I am alive
All my songs will still only be for you!  

*Autumn

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

.

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

.

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

The Shipwreck

By Akbar Fida Ononto

I sit by my ship, holding its broken sail,
Drifting the tides of despair.
Bound by the sea that I love and cherish,
Yet lost in the world of blue oceans and breeze,
I try to retrieve … 

I am not a good sailor, yet dared this far,
Guided by the waves of the sea, 
And the soft morning star.
The horizon, once golden faded to grey,
Still, the ship plunged deeper as the light slipped away.

The currents once guided my vessel,
With mercy, care, and grace,
But I've lost her hull as the storm now rages.
Each ripple a secret, each tide a regret,
A tempest of scars ripped till broken and beaten.

The once familiar sea now sees no pain,
No guiding stars for this wreck remains.
My anchor once fastened, now shattered apart,
Lost my compass — Oh, the ache in my heart!

The waters, though vast, no longer seem kind.
It's her depth I loved, despite her storms leaving me blind.

Oh, sea, will you ever still your wild crest,
Or leave me forever with this ache in my chest?
For though I am broken, adrift on this wave,
It's your arms I’ll seek, till my ship meets its grave.

Akbar Fida Ononto is a student of the Department of English and Humanities at the University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh.

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