Tag: Bengaluru

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Excerpt

Letters from a Daughter to Her Father

Title: Thorns in My Quilt: Letters from a Daughter to Her Father

Author: Mohua Chinappa

Publisher: Rupa Publications India

LOSS

4 August 2022

Living Room, Bengaluru

Dear Baba, Today is your shraddho, the puja for your departed soul. Referring to you as a soul seems so distant. Calling you anything but ‘Baba’ seems like two strangers speaking to one another. The purohit is here to do the rituals. The atmosphere is sedate. The room is lit and the flowers in the vases are in full bloom. I am glad we have cousins in the city; otherwise, it would be very lonely for Ma and me. We know very few people who would make the effort to attend a staid function like a shraddho. How does one end a tie so deep with a mere ritual? One can’t. It does feel surreal to watch your photograph with a jasmine garland around the lifeless frame. The sandalwood phonta or tika on your forehead makes you look different. The living room has been cleared. The large antique box has been covered with a white cloth, and your photograph is placed on it in such a way that you are facing the direction that will lead you to the other world. The shraddho among Bengali Hindus is a ceremony that is performed to ensure a passage for the recently deceased to the other world. The rite is both social and religious and is meant to be conducted by the son. But you have no male heir. So I defy tradition and lead the puja.  I follow the rites dutifully and chant the mantras, which don’t mean much to me. You are gone. There is no mantra that can soothe my heart. On the floor is a bed, laid out with a pillow and an umbrella for your onward journey to God-knows-where. I follow the purohit. Neel joins me in the ceremony. I feel so anchored, having him next to me. What a loving child he is. He makes life so much simpler for me. After the puja, we put out a plate of your favourite food so that a crow can come and eat it. Leaving the food in the corner of a lane seems ridiculous, but I have decided not to question any of the rituals, for I don’t want Ma to feel that I didn’t do my best. I leave the plate on the ground. There are bottles strewn around, and the ground is not very clean. I don’t turn back for another look. Your photo has now been removed and stands on my marble corner table. I put out the burning incense sticks and remove the flower garlands. It is still sinking in that I won’t be able to hear your voice ever again, calling out to me, asking me for something or the other. As we sit down to eat, Neel reminds me how you discussed Left politics and he argued with you on capitalism, just to rile you up in jest. You had such a wonderful bond with my child. I smile as I hear Neel mimic you and your quintessential Bengali ways of reacting to situations. Those debates between you both. I loved the way you both called each other Dadu. Baba would say, ‘Dadu, you must read about the world and its magnificent history. The great idea of how civilizations emerged, and how revolutions took place in protest against tyranny and oppression. As you read, you will learn that the world is a beautiful study of humanity and historical events.’ And Neel would say, ‘Na, Dadu, I will only read books that emphasize the profit and loss of capitalist businesses. Whoever cares about art and philosophy?’ Neel knew how you would go red in the face. And you would say, ‘No businessman ever built a nation; it is the thinkers and the dreamers who created a world of equal opportunities.’ This camaraderie you both shared remains the most beautifully preserved and poignantly pure memory of you with your grandson. I remember those days when you constantly waited to hear from Neel, and how the Sundays were marked aside to have your long-awaited conversations with him. You truly were a wonderful grandfather to my son. I feel empty as the furniture in the living room is rearranged to how it was before. Like nothing has happened, and no one is now gone forever. It looks as if you will come back in a minute, ask for a cup of tea and brood with your arms crossed over your chest. I think just being there to watch me do everyday things made you feel calmer. I don’t know. But I hope someday, I will understand the silence between us. Comfortable spells of silence, and some very terrifying ones. Like your death.

Love

Manu

*

5 August 2022

Bengaluru

Dear Baba, The vermilion has been removed now. The parting is stark white the hair oiled tied into a braid of acceptance. The grey mixed with the leftover black strands falling carelessly on her shoulder. I had seen her one lonely noon take a pair of scissors cut off her locks Like Samson and Delilah. She was at war A war with her own existence Her identity has been shaken Her oar is cracking open along with her broken sail. She sets to the seas but the land is far away on the horizon shining like the crystals found on a crown lost in a war lying forlorn for the head of the right king but now Samson is dead the Philistines have left too the palace has been torn down but parts are intact. Her locks sheared from guilt for being alive. Will she find her shore with her broken boat and tattered sail hoping the seas take her in or the fire of her breath is gutted before it becomes wild like a forest fire burning the little birds coloured kites stuck between branches and her capsizing boat too lost in the new world!

Love,

Manu

About the book:

Thorns in My Quilt: Letters from a Daughter to Her Father is a series of letters written by a daughter to her father after he passed away. Unspoken thoughts, unshared memories and unsaid words combine in this searing and poignant account of a relationship filled with joy, but with equal moments of sorrow.

Mohua Chinappa (Manu) loved her Baba, who was as kind as he was cruel, as well-read as he was unworldly, as loved as he was unloved. His dearest Manu recollects her childhood in Shillong, infused with the aroma of vanilla essence that went into the butter cookies he baked. She reminisces about her father holding her little hand while helping her through the undulating, rain-drenched roads. Mohua returns to Delhi, where she spent a part of her growing-up years, and revels in the memory of a government house with a harsingar tree. She writes to him about her broken marriage, recalls how her parents left her side, and how she reinvented herself. The letters are often selfish yet strangely cathartic.

Her father’s kidney failure prompted a daughter to confront the demons within—the loss, the doubts, the emptiness, the guilt of saying things, and the angst of not saying things.

About the author:

Mohua Chinappa is an author, a columnist, a renowned podcaster in India, a TEDx speaker, a former journalist and a corporate communications specialist.

The Mohua Show, a podcast she started in 2020, has close to 2 million downloads. She contributes regularly to various national dailies and magazines, including The Telegraph, Deccan Herald and Outlook. She is regularly invited as a speaker on TEDx and Josh Talks.

Mohua’s other initiative—NARI: The Homemakers Community—provides a platform for homemakers to voice their everyday challenges.

Her book—Nautanki Saala and Other Stories—was awarded the PVLF Best Debut Non-Fiction (in English) Award 2023. She also has two poetry collections to her credit—If Only It Were Spring Every day and Dragonflies of My Dreams.

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Poetry

An Apology

By Alpa Arora

AN APOLOGY 

Where do knives go when they die?
Do they sink in the ground,
Without a sharp sound?
Or do they watch with devil wings,
While you sit around and cry?

Do they burn to lava, molten, but cold,
Steel words purified by silence,
A sad, pungent shame released into air?

Do they sit around and wait for their funeral,
A rigid coffin forever holding their fiery breath?

The one who cut even the hardest of fruit,
Now sits around sulking because no one
Really knew, they didn't mean to be so cruel.

Where do knives go when they die?
Where do words go to return to silence?

Alpa Arora is a former journalist/content writer who has been writing articles, poetry and short stories for the last 25 years. Her work has been published in The Times of India and Bengaluru Review. Her first novel, Floating Worlds, is looking to be published in the coming year. She resides in Bengaluru.

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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Essay

Metaphorical Maladies

By Satyarth Pandita

In her seminal work, Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag delves into the intricate realm of disease metaphors and presents evidence from the literary field that has employed metaphors for human illness, especially tuberculosis and cancer. Sontag draws on a rich literary history, referencing the works of Stendhal, Karl Menninger, Thomas Mann, Charles Dickens, Thomas Wolfe, Franz Kafka and others, to illustrate how metaphors for diseases have been ingrained in our cultural psyche. The two diseases, TB and cancer, discussed at length in the essay, are viewed from innumerable literary points of view. Fictional and real-life views of people surrounding these diseases have been put forward, which betray a cacophony of contrasting and similar ideas.

Sontag astutely dissects the contrasting metaphors associated with tuberculosis and cancer. Tuberculosis, she argues, has been romanticised and considered more socially acceptable and often viewed as a glamorous affliction. “Having TB was imagined to be an aphrodisiac and to confer extraordinary power of seduction. Cancer is considered to be de-sexualizing.” Sontag describes the tumour as “a foetus with its own will”. She further states that TB is a disease of poverty and deprivation, whereas cancer is a disease of middle-class life. She adds that cancer is associated with affluence, with excess. The metaphors associated with the diseases, she contends, not only affect the body but also shape societal perceptions and cultural narratives. The metaphorical attributions of TB and cancer in literature and society echo broader societal perceptions of class and status.

Published in 1978
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

There is an aphorism by Heraclitus that men have devised gods in their own images, and as Sontag states, the nomenclature of ‘cancer’ is derived from the Greek- karkinos and the Latin- cancer, both of which mean crab. She clarifies by quoting Galen that since the external tumour’s swollen veins resembled a crab’s legs, that is how it got its name. This tendency to associate unfamiliar things with familiar ones is common; people often perceive shapes in clouds, drawing comparisons to known objects. Similarly, diseases are often viewed through familiar frameworks. Since diseases afflict and weaken us, they are often seen as adversaries. Thus, labelling the experience of battling cancer as a fight imbues individuals with a sense of hope, suggesting the possibility of victory amidst adversity.

Sontag, betraying the nature of cancer as a slowly progressing disease that suddenly manifests without any warning, presents the earliest evidence where it was first used metaphorically by Wyclif in 1382. “The word of hem crepith as a kankir”.She assembles the different metaphors associated with Cancer, which are as diverse as the number of human illnesses. For her, Cancer is a source for topological metaphors: “spreads”, “proliferates”, “diffused”, and “excised”.

The essay examines the mythologies and superstitions associated with these diseases and how metaphors sometimes wear the cloak of superstition, too. But metaphors make the understanding of the disease more manageable. Metaphors are a means of understanding the meaning of things. That which cannot be explained as such can be explained by metaphors. In his books, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, Aldous Huxley states: “It is difficult, it is all but impossible, to speak of mental events except in similes drawn from the more familiar universe of material things. If I have made use of geographical and zoological metaphors, it is not wantonly out of a mere addiction to picturesque language. It is because such metaphors express very forcibly the essential otherness of the mind’s far continents, the complete autonomy and self-sufficiency of their inhabitants.” The metaphors will exist, and educating the masses is the only way to stop them from becoming a stigma or superstition against that disease.

Published in 1954
Published in 1956

Quite possibly, the doctors refraining from revealing the true nature of disease inherently to the patient might reflect the notion of fear of death. The diseased person might perhaps think that death will come to everyone but him. Revealing his cancer to him might imply the idea of the inevitable approaching death. Thus, employing the metaphor of ‘battling’ with cancer provides a sense of relief to the patient of emerging victorious in the battle. A diseased man on the bed is akin to a newborn baby, with the only difference being that in one, the river of life has begun to flow, whereas, in the other, it is on the verge of drying. An afflicted man is as helpless as a baby. He craves for care. In this vulnerable state, directly discussing the illness may be too distressing, necessitating the use of metaphors to convey the situation. The patient’s understanding is limited. The only truth he has made a pact with is the slipping of time and the approach of death.

Regardless of how one has lived, everyone desires a death with dignity. Yet, why is it that some illnesses seem to afford this dignity while others do not? What criteria determine whether an illness is seen as favourable? Is it pain or time? The dilemma is akin to choosing between jumping into a well or off a cliff―Death awaits at both ends. As Susan Sontag herself ‘battled’ breast cancer, one cannot help but wonder whether the book would have been different had her affliction been tuberculosis instead. The essay appears biased, elevating tuberculosis and its sufferers while diminishing the dignity of cancer patients. It only examines these diseases from a personal perspective. TB has been presented as a glorified disease, whereas cancer is something that rots the body. Only briefly does the essay touch on the societal perceptions that label tuberculosis as a disease of poverty and cancer as a disease of affluence.

It is not only cancer and TB that have attracted metaphors or have been known to be identified with them. In fact, every other disease and illness is accompanied by metaphors, like an object and its shadow. And it must be noted that some diseases, apart from being associated with metaphors, are linked with gods and deities.

I recall a passage from the book The Monkey Grammarian in which the author, Octavio Paz, describes a scene inside the ‘Temple of Galta’ which is also known as ‘The Monkey Temple’ in Rajasthan: “The children leap about and point to the stone, shouting ‘Hanuman, Hanuman!’ On hearing them shouting, a beggar suddenly emerges from the rocks to show me his hands eaten away by leprosy. The next moment, another mendicant appears, and then another and another.”

The Mark of the Beast was written in 1890

When I first read this passage, I was immediately reminded of the story ‘The Mark of The Beast’ by Rudyard Kipling and a paper that I had read related to the story titled ‘Recognizing the Leper: Hindu Myth, British Medicine, and the Crisis of Realism in Rudyard Kipling’s The Mark of the Beast’. The author of the paper had woven the interconnectedness and drawn parallels between the story, the leprosy affected character and Hanuman-lila. In ‘The Mark of The Beast’, an Englishman named Fleete, in the company of his two friends, desecrates a statue of Hanuman inside a temple with his cigar and declares it as ‘the mark of the beast’ but is soon embraced by a “mewing” leper who emerges from behind the statue following which, Fleete begins to develop skin discolourations and starts exhibiting animal-like behaviour. In the paper, the author establishes a connection between Hanuman and leprosy to justify why the Hindu monkey god is often called ‘sankat-mochan’ or ‘liberator from distress’. Drawing reference from the study of Hanuman lore by Philip Lutgendorf, the author argues how Kipling’s story resonates with a specific Hanuman-lila that relates his manifestation as a leper before the 16th-century saint Tulsidas.

“Instead, he [the tree ghost] told Tulsidas to seek the grace of Hanuman and revealed that the latter came every evening to a certain ghat in the form of an old leper to listen to the narration of Rama's story; he sat at the back of the crowd and was always the last to leave. That night, Tulsidas surreptitiously followed the leper, who led him deep into the forest before the poet finally fell at his feet, hailing him as the Son of the Wind. As the ghost had predicted, the leper "denied a thousand times" that he was anything other than a sick old man, but Tulsidas persisted in his entreaties. Eventually, Hanuman manifested his glorious form. Raising one hand over his shoulder to point southwest, he said, "Go to Chitrakut," and placing the other hand over his heart, added, "I promise you will see Rama.”

 Illness as Metaphor should not be considered a caution about metaphors in their relation to illness but rather a critique of their misapplication, where these metaphors can morph into stigmas that persist in people’s consciousness. “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later, each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place,” Sontag states in the opening lines of her book-length essay. But, unless one is born in the mythical Shangri-La, and as long as humanity exists, illnesses and their accompanying metaphors will persist, evolving with each new malady that emerges. Today, it is cancer, just as yesterday, it was tuberculosis and COVID-19. Tomorrow will inevitably bring new illnesses, accompanied by a fresh set of metaphors that shape our collective understanding of the ever-present shadow of illness in the human experience.

Satyarth Pandita is a Junior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bengaluru. He completed his dual degree of Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Biological Sciences (major) and Humanities and Social Sciences (minor) from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal (IISERB).

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

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Review

‘Burradin’: An Indian Christmas

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: Indian Christmas: Essays, Memories, Hymns

Editors: Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

We all know that Christmas Day, the night that Jesus came to earth, bringing with him peace and love for all humanity, is celebrated by Christians all around the world with great enthusiasm and merriment. Interestingly, for a multicultural country like India, Christmas is equally celebrated — not only as a religious festival but also as a cultural one. For a country where less than three percent of the population is Christian, the central celebration is the birth of a child, but it takes on new meaning in different Indian homes.  Known in local parlance also as “Burradin”[big day] Indians from all classes and communities look forward to this day when they can at least buy a cake from the local market, shower their children with stars, toys, red Santa caps and other decorative items, and go for a family picnic for lunch, dine at a fancy restaurant or visit the nearby church. This syncretic cult makes this festival unique, and for Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle editing this very interesting anthology comprising of different genres of Indian writing on the topic – essays, images, poems and hymns, both in English and also translated from India’s other languages is indeed unique.


Mary and Jesus’ a painting by Sister Marie Claire. (Picture courtesy: SMMI Provincialate, Bengalaru)

‘Adivasi Madonna’, a painting by Jyoti Sahi
Images from Indian Christmas: Essays, Memories, Hymns

In his introduction which he titles “Unto All of Us a Child is Born,” Jerry Pinto reminisces how he was surprised when he saw his first live Santa Claus. He was a figure in red that Akbarally’s, Bombay’s first department store, wheeled out around Christmas week. “He was a thin man, not very convincingly padded… seemed to be from my part of the world, someone who would climb up our narrow Mahim stairs and leave something at the door for us at three or four a.m., then take the local back to his regular job as a postman or seller of second-hand comics. The man in the cards and storybooks preferred London and New York. And a lot of snow. … Today, it is almost a cliché to say that Christmas, like every other festival, is hostage to the market.”

The other editor, Madhulika Liddle in her introduction “Christmas in Many Flavours” states, “According to the annals of the Mambally Royal Biscuit Factory bakery in Thalassery, Kerala, its founder Mambally Bapu baked the first Christmas cake in India”.  It was way back in 1883, at the instance of an East India Company spice planter he set about trying to create a Christmas cake. Liddle wondered what that first Christmas cake tasted like; how close it was to the many thousands of cakes still baked and consumed at Christmas in Kerala? She also writes about the situation in India, where instead of wholesale and mindless importing of Christmas ideas, the people have been discerning enough to amalgamate all our favourite (and familiar) ideas of what a celebration should be and fit them into a fiesta of our own.


Images from Indian Christmas: Essays, Memories, Hymns: dressed up as Santa Claus leave for school in Punjab. (Picture courtesy: Ecocabs,Fazilka).

There are several other aspects of Christmas celebrations too. The Christmas bazaars are now increasingly fashionable in bigger cities. The choral Christmas concerts and Christmas parties are big community affairs, with dancing, community feasts, Christmas songs, and general bonhomie. Across the Chhota Nagpur area, tribal Christians celebrate with a community picnic lunch, while many coastal villages in Kerala have a tradition of partying on beaches, with the partying spilling over into catamarans going out into the surf. In Kolkata’s predominantly Anglo-Indian enclave of Bow Bazar, Santa Claus traditionally comes to the party in a rickshaw, and in much of northeast India, the entire community may indulge in a pot-luck community feast at Christmas time. Thus Liddle states:

“Missionaries to Indian shores, whether St Thomas or later evangelists from Portugal, France, Britain, or wherever brought us the religion; we adopted the faith, but reserved for ourselves the right to decide how we’d celebrate its festivals.”

Apart from their separate introductions, the editors have collated twenty-seven entries of different kinds, each one more interesting than the other, that showcase the richness and variety of Christmas celebrations across the country. Though Christianity may have come to much of India by way of missionaries from Europe or America, it does not mean that the religion remained a Western construct. Indians adopted Christianity but made it their own. They translated the Bible into different Indian languages, translated their hymns, and composed many of their own. They built churches which they at times decorated in their own much-loved ways. Their feasts comprised of food that was often like the ones consumed during Holi or Diwali.

Thus, Christmas in India turned to a great Indian festival that highlighted the syncretism of our culture. Damodar Mauzo, Nilima Das, Vivek Menezes, Easterine Kire, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, Nazes Afroz, Elizabeth Kuruvilla, Jane Borges and Mary Sushma Kindo, among others, write about Christmas in Goa, Nagaland, Kerala, Jharkhand, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Shillong and Saharanpur. Arul Cellatturai writes tender poems in the Pillaitamil tradition to the moon about Baby Jesus, and Punjabi singers compose tappe-boliyan about Mary and her infant. There are Mughal miniatures depicting the birth of Jesus, paintings by Jyoti Sahi and Sister Claire inspired by folk art, and pictures of Christmas celebrations in Aizawl, Bengaluru, Chennai and Kochi and these visual demonstrations enrich the text further.


Seventeenth-century painting depicting Mary and Joseph travelling to Bethlehem. From a Mir’at al-quds of Father Jerome, 2005, Cleveland Museum of Art. (Wikimedia Commons)

‘Mother Mary and Child Christ’. Mid-eighteenth century, late Mughal, Muhammad Shah period. National Museum of India, New Delhi (Wikimedia Commons)
Images from Indian Christmas: Essays, Memories, Hymns

Interestingly, the very first entry of this anthology is an excerpt from the final two sections of one of Rabindranath Tagore’s finest long poems, inspired by the life of Jesus Christ. Tagore wrote the poem “The Child” in 1930, first in English and translated it himself into Bengali the following year, titling it “Sishutirtha.” But many years even before that, every Christmas in Santiniketan, Tagore would give a talk about Christ’s life and message. Speaking on 25 December 1910, he said:

“The Christians call Jesus Man of Sorrow, for he has taken great suffering on himself. And by this he has made human beings great, has shown that the human beings stand above suffering.”

India celebrates Christmas with its own regional flair, its own flavour. Some elements are the same almost everywhere; others differ widely. What binds them together is that they are all, in their way, a celebration of the most exuberant festival in the Christian calendar.

Apart from the solemnity of the Church services, there is a lot of merrymaking that includes the food and drink, the song and dance. The songs often span everything from the stirring ‘Hallulujah Chorus’ to vibrant paeans sung in every language from Punjabi to Tamil, Hindi to Munda, Khariya and Mizo tawng.

Among the more secular aspects of Christmas celebrations are the decorations, and this is where things get even more eclectic. Whereas cities and towns abound in a good deal of mass decorating, with streets and public places being prettied up weeks in advance, rural India has its own norms, its own traditions. Wreaths and decorated conifers are unknown, for instance, in the villages of the Chhota Nagpur region; instead, mango leaves, marigolds and paper streamers may be used, and the tree to be decorated may well be a sal or a mango tree. Nirupama Dutt tells us how since her city had no firs and pines, she got her brother’s colleague to fetch a small kikar tree as kikars grew aplenty in the wild empty plots all over Chandigarh. In many entries we read about how Christmas decorations were rarely purchased but were cleverly constructed at home.

A very integral part of the Christmas celebrations of course is music. In many Goan Catholic neighbourhoods, Jim Reeves continued to haunt the listeners in his smooth baritone: “I’ll have a blue Christmas without you/ I’ll be so blue thinking about you/ Decorations of red on a green Christmas tree/ Won’t mean a thing, dear, if you’re not here with me.”  Simultaneously, the words and music of “A Christmas Prayer” by Alfred J D’Souza are as follows: “Play on your flute/ Bhaiyya, Bhaiyya/ Jesus the saviour has come./ Put on your ghungroos/ Sister, Sister/ Dance to the beat of the drums!/ Light up a deepam in your window/ Doorstep, don with rangoli/ Strings of jasmine, scent your household/ Burn the sandalwood and ghee,/ Call your neighbour in, smear vermillion/ Write on his forehead to show/ A sign that we are one/ Through God’s eternal Son/ In friendship and in love ever more!/ Ah! Ah!” But the most popular Christmas song was of course “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way….”

In “Christmas Boots and Carols in Shillong”, Patricia Mukhim tells us how the word ‘Christmas’ triggers a whole host of activities in Meghalaya and other Northeastern states that have a predominantly Christian population. Apart from cleaning and painting the houses, everything looks like fairyland during Christmas, a day for which they have been waiting for an entire year. She particularly mentions the camaraderie that prevails during this time:

“Christmas is a time when invitations are not needed. Friends can land up at each others’ homes any time on Christmas Eve to celebrate. Most friends drop by with a bottle of wine and others pool in the snacks and the party continues until the wee hours of morning. It’s one day in the year when the state laws that noise should end at 10 p.m. is violated with gay abandon. …Shillong [is] a very special place on Planet Earth. Everyone from the chief minister down can strum the guitar and has a voice that could put lesser mortals to shame. And Christmas is also a day when all VIPism and formalities are set aside. You can land up at anyone’s home and be welcomed in. It does not matter whether someone is the chief minister, a top cop, or the terrifying headmistress of your school.”

One very significant common theme in all the multifarious entries is the detail descriptions provided on food, especially the makeshift way Christmas cakes are baked in every home and the Indian way meat and other specialties are being prepared on the special day. There are several entries that give us details about the particular food that was prepared and consumed at the time along with actual recipes about baking cakes. “Christmas Pakwan[1]” by Jaya Bhattcharji Rose, “The Spirit of Christmas Cake” by Priti David, and “Armenian Christmas Food in Calcutta” by Mohona Kanjilal need special mention in this context.  Liddle in her introduction wrote:

“Our Christmas cakes are a reflection of how India celebrates Christmas: with its own religious flair, its own flavour. Some elements are the same almost everywhere; others differ widely. What binds them together is that they are all, in their way, a celebration of the most exuberant festival in the Christian calendar.”

Later in her article “Cake Ki Roti at Dua ka Ghar[2],” the house where they lived in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, she wrote how her parents told her that ‘bajre ki tikiyas’, thin patties made of pearl millet flour sweetened with jaggery, used to be a staple at Christmas teatime at Dua ka Ghar[3], though she has no recollection of those. She of course vividly recalls the ‘cake ki roti’. This indigenisation of Christmas is something that’s most vividly seen in the feasting that accompanies Christmas celebrations across the country. While hotels and restaurants in big cities lay out spreads of roast turkey (or chicken, more often), roast potatoes and Christmas puddings, the average Indian Christian household may have a Christmas feast that comprises largely of markedly regional dishes.

In Kerala, for instance, duck curry with appams is likely to be the piece de resistance. In Nagaland, pork curries rich in chillies and bamboo shoots are popular, and a whole roast suckling pig (with spicy chutneys to accompany it) may hold centre stage. A sausage pulao, sorpotel and xacuti would be part of the spread in Goa, and all across a wide swathe of north India, biriyanis, curries, and shami kababs are de rigueur at Christmas.

This beautifully done book, along with several coloured pictures, endorses the idea of religious syncretism that prevails in India. As a coiner of words, Nilima Das came up with the idea that ‘Christianism’ in our churches is after all, a kind of ‘Hinduanity’ (“Made in India and All of That”). This reviewer feels guilty of not being able to mention each of the unique entries separately that this anthology contains, so it is suggested that this is a unique book to enjoy reading, to possess, as well as to gift anyone during the ensuing Christmas season.

[1] Cuisine

[2] Cake bread

[3] Blessed House

Somdatta Mandal, critic, academic and translator, is a former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.

Click here to access an excerpt of Tagore’s The Child

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

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Categories
Review

A Memoir À La Carte

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: Digesting India: A Travel Writer’s Sub-Continental Adventures with the Tummy (A Memoir À La Carte)

Author: Zac O’Yeah

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Digesting India: A Travel Writer’s Sub-Continental Adventures with the Tummy (A Memoir À La Carte) is a culmination of thirty years of experience with the three things Zac O’Yeah loves most about life — eating, drinking and travelling — that put together a delightful travel-cum-food book. A detective novelist, O’Yeah is the creator of the Majestic Trilogy. He freelanced for the Swedish radio for 25 years before moving to India in 2000. Subsequently, he has written several bestsellers, both fiction and nonfiction. His writings have been part of Hindu Business Line and National Geographic Traveler.

The Scandinavian-Indian novelist takes us on an entertaining and informative journey through the country in this book. We learn about dishes we may not have heard of before, and food habits we may not have known about. The author takes the reader through the pleasures of drinking beer in Bengaluru, drinking toddy in Kerala, and eating boiled vegetables and masala-less curries in Sevagram, Maharashtra, to prepare himself for Rajasthan’s rich red flavours. During his travels, he discovers Goa’s literati culture while sipping cashew fenny. He finds two of his favourite foods, mushrooms and cheese, in Bhutan, and finds out what astronauts eat and drink in space. 

The book is an intriguing and profound story of an avid traveler’s untiring quest for evolving cultural and culinary experiences. It is a fast-paced, exciting book. In a nutshell, it is a very substantial, coconut-sized shell that captures all of India within its dimensions. It is the right place to learn about dishes we might not have heard of before, and food habits we may never have known existed. It is similar to what we experience when accompanying O’Yeah on a ‘spare parts’ tour. This starts in Shivajinagar, Bengaluru’s slaughterhouse area, where the exploration begins.

As he winds his way through India, he shows us the pleasures of drinking beer in Bengaluru (a slang for ‘beer galore’), drinking toddy in Kerala, and eating boiled vegetables and masala-less curries in Sevagram, the Mahatma’s ashram in Maharashtra, to prepare him for the rich red ‘lal maas’ [deer meet] in Rajasthan. During his visit to Goa, he discovers the literati culture of the state while sipping cashew fenny alongside Nobel laureates Orhan Pahmuk and Amitav Ghosh. In a delightful digression, he explores two of his favourite mushrooms and cheese in the Bhutanese dish, shamudatsi, and learns — while still on earth — what astronauts eat, and more importantly, what they consume, in outer space while still on earth.

It takes O’Yeah more than three hundred pages to guide us through India’s diverse food culture, which he explores in a fascinating way over the course of the book. The author combines history, anecdotes, and travel effortlessly. It is a mesmerising narrative that captures the reader’s attention.

He tells us Indian food traditions are no exception to the diversity of cultures in the country. The cuisine is incredibly diverse, with influences from many cultures. He explains how customs and religion are reflected in food. Food culture is incredibly varied, ranging from the spicy, vegetarian dishes of the south to the rich, meaty curries of the north. Many dishes are cooked with a variety of spices, from mild to extremely hot. Rice is a staple in many parts of the country, and chapati, a flatbread, is common.

Indian cuisine is also known for its wide variety of desserts. Sweets are usually made with milk and sugar, and often feature nuts and dried fruit. One of the most popular sweets is non-diary, jalebi, a deep-fried, syrupy dessert. The cuisine also features many savoury dishes. Another favourite is dal, a stew made with lentils or beans, and spices. Samosas are also a favourite snack, usually filled with vegetables and served with chutney.

He contends through his narrative how the country’s culture can also be observed in the process by which people prepare and consume their food. Meals are often served on large plates and eaten with their hands. “Eating off the floor” is a tradition in India that reflects the country’s diversity and history. India has something for everyone, including vegan curries and rich desserts. Whether you’re looking for something spicy or sweet, he concludes, India has a dish to suit every taste.

A thoroughly enjoyable and informative tour through Indian culinary art, Digesting India is the perfect introduction to Indian cuisine. As O’Yeah explores it, he can stomach anything and everything that grows or walks on earth. A delightful romp based on thirty years of understanding India through its food culture.

The book is an engrossing read — it’s like having a multi-course meal full of wonderful discoveries at every turn. There are thousands of interesting, unanticipated facts about local foods and the many places they come from in this book. A virtual adventure awaits you in the book.

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

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Categories
Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes

India Pale Ale

Courtesy: Creative Commons

I thought that I didn’t like India Pale Ale until I came to India. I wasn’t pale at the time but I was certainly ale (and arty)[1] because I had just spent three months in Sri Lanka and had acquired something of a tan. Maithreyi, my companion, took me to a place that sold ‘craft’ beers and I changed my mind about the merits of India Pale Ale and my mind has been changed ever since.

The notion of a ‘craft’ beer is one that intrigues and baffles me. I think of a craft as something involving working with wood, chiselling it, shaving it like an orthogonal chin with a plane, drilling it, fitting it together into a chair, table, ark for animals, or something beautiful but useless that looks like furniture but also might conceivably be a petrified tree stump.

Therefore, how can one ‘craft’ a beer? The foam on the surface of the brew once it has been poured into a glass can be removed with a flat tool, the blade of a knife or a metre long ruler or even a credit card. Yes, that is plausible and once or twice I have seen it done. But what other crafty actions remain to be taken in regard to the beer in order that it should be regarded as ‘crafted’? Drilling a beer is a futile exercise. We have all done that with our noses and understand the lack of permanent effect. Who among us has never surrendered to the temptation to dip our noses into the meniscus of our beers?

Let me adjust that hasty statement. Many or at least some of us have done that with our noses, at one time or another, probably long ago when we were the callowest of youths, students at some college or other and fairly new to the rite of drinking beer. The dipping of the nose might even have been accidental. Who can be a harsh judge in such circumstances?

So, it is settled that beer can’t be drilled, nor can it be sawn in half. We have all heard the wise saying that the optimist regards the glass as ‘half full’ and the pessimist regards it as ‘half empty’ and we instinctively know that the liquid in those philosophical glasses is beer. What kind of beer is less clear. If it is totally unclear then it must be a dark beer, but I suspect it is only unclear with a foggy opaqueness, which tends to lead me to conclude it is India Pale Ale. It becomes easier now to picture the scene in the drinking den, whether that den is posh and plush or crude and rude. We see the optimist and the pessimist, good friends but mismatched, holding up their depleted glasses.

Both are drinking India Pale Ale and have consumed exactly fifty percent of the contents of what once were brimming vessels. The optimist looks down at his glass with a large smile, “Ah, it is still half full. What excellent luck!” while the pessimist looks at his own glass with a deep frown, “It’s half empty already, what a blasted nuisance the world is!” But something strange has happened, and we have only just noticed it. We suppose that a ‘half empty’ glass contains beer in the bottom half and air in the top half.

Because this is a vision we are having, and visions aren’t subject to all the laws of physics, especially not gravity, we are amazed to peer closer and see the beer in the pessimist’s glass is confounding our (unreasonable) expectations. It contains the air at the bottom and the beer at the top. The optimist is impressed and cries, “What marvellous luck! You don’t need to tilt your glass at a steeper angle anymore in order to receive the India Pale Ale into your mouth. You can slurp it up from the summit of the glass.”

I am sure the pessimist will object to this positive interpretation of a beery situation and find some convoluted reason why this defiance of gravity is a bad outcome. But I am weary of these two fellows now. Let us leave them in peace to get drunk together, the optimist thinking that being drunk is good, his friend concluding that it’s not as good as he was led to believe it is, and head to a quite different location for a drink of our own.

The place Maithreyi took me to that sells ‘craft’ beers, including the India Pale Ale that is the subject of this small essay, was somewhere in Bangalore not far from Blossom Book House. We had bought books in that house, as we often do, a decent haul, and went to celebrate with beer and nibbles, and later, when we were just a little tipsy, we hurried back to Blossom Book House and bought more books. But this isn’t an article about books. It’s an article, or what passes in my mind for an article, about beer, specifically about the type of beer that is known as India Pale Ale. Where was I?

Oh yes, I was in that place that sold craft beers, and I have decided at this point to stop writing the word ‘craft’ in inverted commas. There were too many craft beers on offer for an easy selection to be made, so we ordered a sampler of many kinds, and they came on a big tray. They were in small glasses, dark beers and golden, reddish beers and greenish, fizzy beers and still beers, and perched on the end of the rectangular tray, two glasses of the mythic India Pale Ale. My reluctance to try these hangers-on is comprehensible when one considers how dreadful a non-craft India Pale Ale can be.

Back in Britain, decades ago, when first I allowed beer to pass the gates of my lips without turning it back, IPA was fairly popular among those unfortunate drinkers who lacked taste buds. Why they lacked taste buds was never explained to anyone’s satisfaction. Presumably they had lost them overboard while sailing from the Far East on packet steamers. It was a long time before I knew that IPA was an acronym for India Pale Ale. I assumed it was a word in its own right and that its own right was wrong. I would say that most beers sold in pubs in Britain in the 1970s were abominable, but this suggests that the Abominable Snowman would like them, and I doubt that he would.

I have done a little research (a very little, almost too little to be regarded as anything other than mildly faffing around) and I learn that India Pale Ales were once a noble style of beer, invented in the 18th Century for export by the sneaky imperialists of the East India Company. It was flavoured with hops, lots and lots of hops, more hops than a kangaroo would do, if it had a chance, and the adding of these extra hops had some effect that meant the ale would mature or whatever the word is during the difficult sea voyage.

I don’t really understand the chemistry of it, and I don’t really want to, I am merely repeating what I found out just now. IPA was an EIC product, proving to my own satisfaction that acronyms aren’t relatively modern inventions but have been around for a very long time. The decline in the quality of IPA, and all beers for that matter, during the 20th Century, is perhaps a mysterious one or maybe it has something to do with the big breweries rapaciously wanting to increase their profits by using less lovely ingredients and processes. I don’t especially like the taste of hops at the best of times. At the worst of times hops make me wince and frown like some kind of wincing frowner, a very lazy comparison, true, but my powers of simile and metaphor are temporarily on hold, for I haven’t recovered from a rather severe bout of acutely remembering the IPA and other beers of my early days on this gracious planet of ours.

A strongly hopped beer tastes, to me, like mouldy bread. The IPA of those long-gone days tasted like a sack of mouldy loaves swung around the head of a gorilla and used to bash one on the bonce. My powers of simile and metaphor, such as they are, seem to have returned. And yet when I took a cautious gulp of the IPA in the place that Maithreyi had guided me to, my preconceptions and established prejudices melted with the delightfulness of the taste that confronted me. What a magnificent India Pale Ale! I tried the other IPA on offer. Golly, this was even more wondrous! Let’s order more!

I say, my dear, we have bought books in our favourite bookshop. Isn’t it an astonishingly beneficial way to pass the time, obtaining books? And it’s not as if we buy them but never read them. We read them! Wouldn’t it be a jolly romp to return to the bookshop, once we have consumed more beers here, and engage in the act of purchasing more books? Indeed!

A final observation from an unobservant chap (myself). Any British fellow who guzzles IPA with gusto and ends up with a sodden moustache and beard as a consequence can be regarded as a ‘Pale Ale Face’ which is what ‘Indians’ in old Westerns almost called cowboys on occasion. Anyway, this essay appears to be over now, and the page on which this final paragraph has been written is an empty glass at last, the brew of its words fully consumed by your eyes, leaving only the dregs of a footnote at the bottom.

[1] Hale and hearty, a description used frequently in my youth, but which seems to have fallen out of favour. Falling out of favour is easily done if the speeding favour brakes to a sudden halt and the thing that was in favour isn’t strapped in properly. When it falls out of favour it often lands with a painful bump and favour drives off with a monstrous laugh. Even flavours can fall out of favour or back into it.

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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Categories
Stories

The Book Truck

By Salini Vineeth

When I first met Quissa, I thought she was yet another post-civil-war filmmaker—stoic and sceptical. At least she looked like one—unisex clothes in military green, brutally cropped hair, and a permanent frown plastered onto her face. She reminded me of Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road. But I soon learnt that stories transform her. Her frown smooths out, her dark-circled eyes twinkle, and her grave face turns into a canvas—a smile, a smirk, or a pout. 

“I want to make a film with you.”

I was surprised when Quissa sought me out a few months ago. Which shelter generation filmmaker hires a 60-year-old rom-com writer? The war-torn generation’s movies have no room for cheesy romance or mindless comedy.

“I wanna make a comedy movie,” Quissa clarified.

The thrill of waking up at dawn, brewing a cup of black tea, sitting at my desk staring at the laptop screen, and chuckling at my lines—I hoped I could relive those feelings. That was five months ago. Now I feel I shouldn’t have been too ambitious.

“A comedy movie needn’t be silly.” Quissa has been turning down my plots with no regard for my glowing legacy as a hitmaker. I can’t blame her, though. I had lost my mojo a long ago. Twenty years ago, to be exact.

The pandemic ended in 2022 but left the country knee-deep in recession. Our leaders clung to the ‘our country is the greatest!’ delusion for a while. Then the banks failed. Markets collapsed, online shopping dwindled, start-ups crumbled, and jobs diminished. The currency hit an all-time low value. Prices skyrocketed as people began essential supplies.

The hatemongers who had been sowing the seeds of the conflict knew it was time for harvest. They made the majority believe that the minority was a leech that sucked the country dry. Isolated clashes were blown out of proportion, towns burned, and the nation fought against itself. Quissa’s generation was orphaned during the civil war and spent their adolescence in dingy rehabilitation centres. But then, young leaders emerged from the shelters and instated democracy.

We called them the shelter generation.

The country has stabilized now, and the economy has revived. But the shelter generation anticipates war at any moment. They aren’t ready for a comedy movie; they might even find it offensive. But Quissa is confident, and I believe in her. The past few weeks, while we were hacking at plots, I couldn’t help but admire her deep sense of story. She understands what makes people laugh and what will be a wet firecracker. Quissa won’t settle for anything less than phenomenal. But I am unable to come up with a single decent plot. Stories had left me a long time ago. Maybe I am too adamant to admit that.

We have been sitting in my forlorn study for the past few hours, going over my new plots. Quissa reads them one by one and shakes her head in disappointment.

“This isn’t working. I want something fun, clever, and unapologetic, like Fleabag.”

“You’ve watched Fleabag?”

“Why wouldn’t I? I was thirteen, and it was the lockdown.” Quissa winces; memories have sharp edges.

“Anyway, you gotta come up with something better, something outrageous. People are addicted to gloom. I thought you rom-com writers could make even a rock laugh,” Quissa says, chuckling. It’s a taunt, but I laugh along. I know it isn’t easy for her to laugh. 

A notification flashes on her phone.

“Wow, it looks great! What you say?” Quissa asks, showing me an image on her phone.

A hurricane whirls around me and hurls me deep into the past.

***

October 2023

“We can’t just hole up in this apartment. We need to do something, anything,” the columnist said, peeping through the narrow slit in the curtain. A group of men were attacking a boy.

“The streets are burning. There’s no police, no government, nothing. What we can do is stay here and save our lives. No matter what we do, we can’t save this country,” the independent filmmaker said.

“Aren’t you ashamed to say that? Where’s all that activism you preach in your movies? Aren’t you sick of hiding like a rat?” the columnist retorted.

“No, I am not ashamed of keeping myself alive. You might not be afraid; the majority out there is your people. It’s not like that for me.”

“People, please. Don’t start a war in here. Yes, it’s been months, and it’s horrible. I want to do something, too. All of us do. But there’s nothing we can do,” the soap-opera writer intervened.

“Yes, we don’t have internet, not even the cellular network. It’s impossible to do anything,” the filmmaker supported.

“Do you think posting on social media would’ve got us out of this? Forget the internet. We need to get on the ground. Do something, at least die on the street. That’s better than rotting in here like cowards,” the columnist rushed out of the room.

I stood in my study, unable to curb the fury of my friends. When the unrest started three months ago, we thought it would pass in a week or two. But it didn’t. The four of us decided it was best to move into my high-rise apartment, a gated community where the super-rich lived. Unlike the majority in the country, we had enough money to buy food and other essentials on the black market.

The initial weeks went by amicably. We binge-watched movies, did our part of slacktivism, blamed the government, and planned trips we would take in the better future. We didn’t know we would be stuck in that apartment for the next few months. Then the internet broke down, our mobiles disconnected, supplies diminished, and so did hope. Each of us retreated into our heads.

A few more months passed, and the situation outside wasn’t getting any better. One evening we were sitting in the library, relishing our only comfort—books.

“Guys, I am done here. I am going out, I don’t know what I am going to do, but I am done hiding,” the columnist made a sudden announcement.

“Hey, be practical, okay? Hold on for a while, and we can survive this,” the soap-opera writer said.

“This country came to this situation because of cowards like you. Like the frog in boiling water, you’ll die, and you won’t even know it. I’d rather die fast,” the columnist retorted.

“I am tired of hiding too. But do you have a plan other than going out and getting shot at? It’s suicide, and I won’t let you do that,” the independent filmmaker said.

“Anything is better than sitting here hating yourself. I can’t loathe myself anymore. If not for these books, I would’ve gone out and got shot already,” I said, staring at the pages of Brave New World.

“What did you just say?” The columnist jumped up from the chair.

“Um… that I would’ve gone outside,” I mumbled.

“No, no. before that,”

“The books, I would’ve killed myself if not for the books.”

The columnist turned silent. Peeping outside the window, he brooded. He didn’t speak with any of us for the next few days. It felt like a volcano was fuming inside the apartment.

“I can’t hide anymore. We need to do something,” the columnist said. None of us said anything. “We may not know how to use guns, but we do have something more powerful. Our stories, our books,” he added. I felt a sudden rush of enthusiasm. A new wave of life passed through me.

“What nonsense are you saying? People are dying all around. Who wants to listen to stories? The country is burning; where’s the place for stories?” the filmmaker sniggered.

“The country is burning, yes. But it’s not going to burn forever. There’ll be a time when a new generation emerges to take the reins of this country. For that, they need hope. They should know there’s something to look forward to, a hopeful future. That’s what we are going to do. We’ll tell them stories,” the columnist said.

“If we want to do something, then we should do the basics. Food, water, and shelter. Do you think anyone hungry would want to listen to fairy tales?” I asked.

“We have a truck. We can buy more food, water, and books. We can go to the shelters and read to the children. I don’t know how long we’ll last, but don’t you think it would be a better use of the rest of our lives?” the columnist asked, looking at each of us expectantly.

“It’s suicide. I am not going to go out and get shot for your lame ideals,” the filmmaker declared.

“Me too. I won’t do something stupid like this.” The soap opera writer joined in.

So, it was just the two of us, but it didn’t stop us. Everything moved fast. We emptied our library and loaded books into my truck. We bought food, water, and petrol on the black market. We drove around, hoping our white flag and peace slogans would keep us safe.

But it wasn’t easy as we thought. We found children in shock and trauma in every shelter we went to. They ran and hid when they saw us. They cared little about our food or stories. But we didn’t give up. We went to shelters day after day, braving the violence on the streets.

The children did come around after a while. We sat with them in the dimly-lit dorms of those shelters. Children would relish the bread and water along with our stories. Our stories transformed them, at least for a while. Their fear disappeared, and their eyes twinkled with hope. For a few hours every day, they forgot all about the horrible world outside.

***

“What is this? Where did you get this photo?” I ask Quissa, staring at that image. It looks like a book cover, and the title reads The Book Truck. The cover features an old photo of our truck. My heart is beating at an alarming speed.

“Why? What’s wrong? This is the cover of the new book I am writing. It’s a personal project. I got this photo from a war photographer’s private collection.”

I take the phone from Quissa’s hands and zoom into the photograph with shivering fingers.

“A hand grenade blew the truck just a few minutes after this photo was taken. It killed him, and… and..” I choke on my words.

Quissa rushes to get me a glass of water. I take a sip, trying to compose myself.

“Oh, my God! Was it you?”

“Yes, me and my best friend.” I fill her in.

Quissa rushes to my side and sits by the foot of my wheelchair. She takes my hands into hers.

“I have been searching for you guys all this time. Without you, I wouldn’t have come out of the shelter alive. We were a bunch of kids, always scared, jumping at even the slightest of sounds. When the truck started coming to the shelter, things changed. We called it the book truck. We looked forward to the food, but what appealed to me was the stories. They gave me hope that things are going to be normal. But then you stopped coming. We had no way of finding out what had happened to it,” Quissa says, squeezing my hands.

“Do you remember those impromptu storytelling sessions? While looking for a new writer for the movie, I had your voice in my head,” Quissa adds, and a tear escapes her left eye.

A wave of life passes through me. A warmth embraces me. Quissa’s face tells me it was all worth it. I feel a story forming inside me.

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Salini Vineeth is a Bengaluru-based fiction writer. She has self-published four books and her stories have appeared in The Bangalore Review, Café Dissensus, and The Bombay Review among others. Her debut novel will release in 2023.

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