Tag: Calcutta

Categories
Excerpt

When the Road Becomes the Teacher

Title: When the Road Becomes the Teacher

Author: Shubha Apte

Chapter 4

THE FIRST FLIGHT — LESSONS FROM SINGAPORE

“A journey is not so much a place, but a new way of seeing.” — Pico Iyer

Travel has always been my passion. From childhood, the love for exploring new places was instilled in me by my parents. They believed travel was not just recreation, but education.

Every school vacation, my father would plan a month-long trip, taking us across cities, temples, forests, and historic landmarks.

By the time I stepped into adulthood, the entire stretch of Gujarat and Saurashtra was familiar terrain — Dwarka, Porbandar, Jamnagar, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Surat, Rajkot.

We traveled across the country too, exploring Calcutta in the east and venturing north to Kashmir, Amritsar, Agra, Delhi and Jaipur, Jodhpur and Jaisalmer in the Northwestern part.

Along the way, each place offered its own unforgettable charm — the serenity of the Golden Temple, the fragrant rose gardens of Jodhpur, the majestic palaces of Jaipur, the golden deserts of Jaisalmer, and the shimmering beauty of Dal Lake in Srinagar.

Each journey painted my childhood with stories, sights, and memories that would stay with me forever.

Perhaps that is why, when I was finally given the opportunity to travel abroad on a business trip to Singapore, my excitement was indescribable.

But beneath that excitement was a quiet nervousness — it was my first international trip, a solo journey, and I had to navigate visas, documentation, and the unfamiliarity of foreign travel.

I still remember the night before my flight — the quiet hum of anticipation, the open suitcase neatly arranged with formal wear and presentation notes, and the flutter in my heart that felt both brave and uncertain. This wasn’t just another professional assignment — it felt like a rite of passage.

Singapore was my first glimpse of a world beyond India — an island nation I had only encountered in business magazines and travel columns.

As the aircraft lifted off the runway, I felt something shift inside me. Beneath the official purpose of the trip lay something more personal: the realization that I was crossing a threshold that would reshape the way I saw work, people, and myself.

The first few days were busy with meetings and deliverables, yet my Singapore-based colleagues made sure I didn’t miss the beauty of their city.

Over weekends, they took me to Gardens by the Bay, Sentosa Island, Universal Studios, Little India, and shopping districts filled with light and energy. Their warmth made the newness less intimidating.

I experienced my first metro journey abroad — taking the MRT from Ang Mo Kio to Raffles Place — and was amazed at the punctuality, efficiency, and discipline that seemed to pulse through the city’s transport system.

Gardens by the Bay left me mesmerized; Sentosa offered calm and peace, while Universal Studios was a burst of color, joy, and laughter.

Singapore’s friendliness, cleanliness, and multicultural harmony made a deep impression on me.

It was a place where professionalism coexisted effortlessly with warmth, where discipline didn’t suppress diversity but strengthened it.

When I returned home, friends and colleagues asked about the presentations, the meetings, and the outcomes.

But what stayed with me long after the trip was not just the work accomplished — it was the inner shift.

Singapore taught me that stepping outside our comfort zone widens our world in ways we never expect.

That first flight did more than carry me across countries — it carried me into a broader way of thinking, observing, and belonging.

It showed me that growth often begins at the edge of comfort, and that the world is much larger and more welcoming than our fears allow us to believe.

“Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” — Miriam Beard

What Singapore Taught Me

Every first step into the unknown teaches us something essential about ourselves.

Singapore showed me that courage doesn’t always roar; often, it’s the quiet decision to board a plane alone and trust that you will find your way.

In every MRT ride, every unfamiliar street, and every new conversation, I discovered the subtle power of openness — the willingness to learn, adapt, and embrace difference.

When we travel with curiosity instead of fear, the world responds with generosity.

And sometimes, one journey becomes the beginning of a much larger unfolding — a reminder that confidence grows one step, one city, and one experience at a time.

Reflection: The First Flight Within

We often believe that courage lies in grand actions — but sometimes, it lies in handing your passport to an immigration officer with shaky hands.

My first flight taught me that courage is a journey too.

That every time we step out into the unknown, we return home a little braver.

A little wiser.

A little more ourselves.

About the Book:

When the Road Becomes the Teacher: A Reflective Memoir of Wisdom Gained Around the World is a memoir about how travel can transform the way we see the world and ourselves. Drawing on four decades of journeys across India and beyond, Shubha Apte reflects on the experiences, encounters, cultures, and unexpected moments that shaped her understanding of resilience, confidence, leadership, cultural intelligence, and personal growth.
From her first international business trip to Singapore to later journeys across Japan, Norway, Malaysia, Europe, and the United States, each destination became more than a place to visit—it became an opportunity to learn.
Part travel memoir and part reflection on personal transformation, the book invites readers to look beyond destinations and discover the lessons that every journey can offer.

About the Author:

Shubha Apte is an author, executive coach, and leadership consultant with over 35 years of corporate experience. She is the author of multiple books including the Amazon Bestseller, When the Road Becomes the Teacher. Her writing blends real-life insight with storytelling, exploring themes of resilience, purpose and human connections.

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

Click here to access Wild Winds: The Borderless Anthology of Poems

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

Categories
Editorial

Bells, Corners, Changes and Life

Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844, Painting by Joseph Mallord William Turner

Perhaps, the only constant that makes a difference in this ever-transforming world is how we react to changes around us. How do we interact with not just humans but our whole planet with its climate, contours, its plethora of flora and fauna?  Will that impact our survival in the long run? And yet with our focus on legacies, traditions, beliefs, we tend to ignore the call to adapt to the new that might help us move towards an unpredictable future. We forget perhaps that these systems had all been made by our ancestors to ensure survival. Somewhere along the way, these have become like fences caging us into small subsets. The strange thing is we continue to allow that to happen and create enclosures which we fight to maintain. The future that we face now seems even more tumultuous with climate change, rising sea levels and global warming taking a front seat while influx of refugees from war and natural disasters have already started making themselves felt. Add to that the shortages of resources that we have taken for granted for centuries. How would we survive these?

Is it by redefining the constructs we have created or just meeting in corners and finding commonalities as suggested by Ryan Quinn Flanagan in his poem ‘Corners’?

Corners are a meeting place, 
they hold a room together

Our poetry section often reflects what we experience, feel or see around us. We have poems on how nature overrides human constructs by Khayelihle Benghu. In ‘Passport for the Rain‘, she writes:

If rain possessed a passport, it would read:
Citizen of every place that drinks.

We have variety from around the world with poems from Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, Akil Contractor, George Freek, Pramod Rastogi, John Grey, Mary Tina Shamli Pillay, John Britten, Bharti Mehra, David Francis and Laila Brahmbhatt. Rhys Hughes has given us poetry inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, The Bell. While Poe wrote one poem in 1848 ( published posthumously in 1849), Hughes has written nine sprinkled with his brand of humour, including on cowbells and bell peppers!

We also have poetry in our translations with Ihlwha Choi giving us a glimpse of Korean life. Professor Fakrul Alam has brought to us in English a Bengali poem by Nazrul written on the death of Tagore, a poem that was read out in Calcutta radio by the poet himself in 1941. Tagore’s poem, Storm, has been translated in keeping with the heavy downpours in Asia this season. Fazal Baloch has shared an excerpt in English, which reads like a short story, from Aslam Dostain’s Balochi novel, Sótkál, giving us a flavour of the hard life in their region, where self-reliance is a felt need for survival. We have mental heath issues woven into this section with Isa Kamari’s translation of his own Malay novel into English, The Throne. We will be running a chapter every month from this novel.

Book excerpts also has a translation this time with Ramananda Bharati’s Bengali travelogue, The Forest of Snow, brought to us in English by Somdatta Mandal. Aruna Chakravarti has reviewed this non-fiction for us. The other excerpt is from Hughes’ The Biscuit Thief, a book that reflects his distinct brand of absurd humour. Keith Lyons’ interview this time features an excerpt from interviewee Jayanthi Sankar’s short story set in Singapore. Mandal has written on yet another translation from Assamese by Ranjita Biswas of Arupa Patangia Kalita’s The Moonlight Saga. Bhaskar Parichha has discussed Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man, co-authored by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson. He claims that this book is “is indispensable reading for anyone interested in literature, intellectual history, cultural modernity, or the life of a man whose vision of humanity continues to speak powerfully to an increasingly interconnected world.”

This month’s non-fiction section has trotted around the globe. We have Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan’s essay discussing how to redefine norms. His take is a bit different from Flanagan’s. He tells us, using Huck Finn, Terminator and Sangam Literature, people need to ask not, “What is right?” but “How did I come to believe this is right?” Rengin Uçkan’s writes on the need for framing rules that are compassionate for refugees. And Farouk Gulsara with his inevitable gruff humour talks of climate change while stating things as it is: “Climate change not only shrinks our summer beachwear but also makes outdoor living impossible. Additionally, it’s proving to be more expensive to consume anything…”  Jun A. Alindogan narrates how typhoons have increased in number in Philippines and how it affects them while Jeena R. Papaadi reflects on her literary journey. Meredith Stephens shares her sailing adventures in Australia with stunning photographs by Alan Noble. And Suzanne Kamata has brought us a flavour of the unique Zine Fest in Kobe, where both groceries and books find a place!

Devraj Singh Kalsi hovers between fact and fiction. He has a musing which seems like a hash of dark fiction but based on his experiences. He has also shared a story that is purely fictional. Yi-jung Chen brings to us a quirky love story set in Taiwan across time and space while Brindley Hallam Dennis tells a tale about a dog who sits at a table and sips drinks with a straw! Jay Samanta gives a narrative about a modern relationship based on social media output. Naramsetti Umamaheswararao has shared a fable that talks of freeing nature. The issue is, can we really?

In Borderless Journal, we hope to create a space which will help reflect not just the times but also look forward to ideas that can move us towards surviving in a happier world, built on the basis of accepting differences, filled with love, kindness and compassion. While this may sound clichéd and repetitive, given the current climes, these values cannot be emphasised often enough and perhaps our content to an extent does reflect that, sometimes with a soupçon of humour. Do pause by our contents page for this August and tell us what you think.  

Winding up this issue, we would like to thank our all contributors for their wonderful writings and photographs. Huge thanks to the Borderless team without who this issue would not have been as vibrant. Special thanks to Sohana Manzoor for her fabulous artwork. Thank you all. All of you together make this journal come alive.

Enjoy the reads!

Cheers,

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE CONTENTS FOR THE AUGUST 2026 ISSUE

.

READ THE LATEST UPDATES ON THE BORDERLESS ANTHOLOGIES BY CLICKING ON THIS LINK

Categories
Excerpt

The Forest of Snow

Title: The Forest of Snow

Author: Swami Ramananda Bharati

Translated from Bengali by Somdatta Mandal

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

There is a shelter called ‘Hoti’ almost half a mile above from here. This place was exactly below Hoti Pass. We stayed at Kalajabar, but several of our companions went and put up at Hoti. It was also called ‘Chor Hoti’ and was 15,000 feet above the sea level.

Today is the 13th of Asharh and we will have to cross Hoti Pass today. This pass was the confluence of life and death. The road was inaccessible and covered with snow. The highest peak in this pass was 18,300 feet above the sea level. The locals call these high peaks ‘katha’. If wind arose while crossing this katha, it would blow away any rider. If there was a cloud, the rider would be buried in the snow and there would be no sign of the carrier, the ox or the goats. Again, excessive cold would also give rise to tribulation. If the humans or the animals stumbled and fell, there would be no trace of their bodies. This was the condition of the road and if one didn’t walk for nine miles today, there wouldn’t be any place to take a rest. So, everyone woke up at 4 a.m. to start the journey. Our leader Kedar Singh shouted and woke everyone up, ‘Get up, today we will have to cross the katha.’

Everyone got up from their beds and came outside. After finishing the morning rituals, they started preparing for the journey. The jhabbu was prepared for me to climb on. My servants came and told me, ‘Today you will have to wear pajamas and laam.’

In Tibetan, shoes were known as ‘laam’. They were made of fur and looked somewhat like hunting boots. It served both the purpose of shoes and socks. I wore the laam and pajamas and didn’t forget to wear the other woolen clothes… I covered my head and ears with a warm cap. After that I tied the turban very strongly on top of it. In this manner, I wore a strange attire and climbed on the jhabbu’s back. My servant handed me some pepper and palm candy and said, ‘If you feel cold, put these in your mouth.’ I said, ‘Thank you’, and accepted them.

On other days everyone was in a jovial mood when they commenced their journey, and they walked with enthusiasm. Today however, everyone’s face was dry, and their movement wasn’t encouraging at all. In this way all of us started travelling in a single file. The bridle of my jhabbu was in Kharga Singh’s hands, who moved ahead of me. Vishnu Singh moved behind us, beating the jhabbu to keep it in motion. After that, several jhabbus, five or six yaks and four or five horses followed us. Each of these animals had a carrier upon its back. Again, behind them many people followed in a serial manner. Kedar Singh and five or six others moved very slowly ahead of me. This road was so narrow that two people or two animals couldn’t move side by side. No one spoke a word; everyone was cautious about his movement. The sun rose; the wonderful Himalayan scenery was in front of us; but who would watch it? Everyone was too occupied in seeing where they were stepping and chanting holy prayers in their mind.

I was quite all right all this while, but now my hands and feet felt like freezing and my breathing turned very slow. I couldn’t sit any further on the jhabbu’s back, but there wasn’t any other way. There was no place to alight from the jhabbu’s back, when suddenly, the bull stopped its movement. Finding no other option, my servants pulled me down from the animal’s back; I stood there perplexed. What I saw in front of me was awful. The path in front had subsided with snowfall. Seeing that my carrier had stopped in his tracks. After getting rid of my weight, it started climbing the mountain straight up. The other carriers also followed suit. The travellers also moved in that direction.

I could not move and I kept standing there like a zombie. My servants pulled both my arms and said, ‘What are you trying to do? Come on, this place is not suitable for taking a rest. It will be dangerous as the day advances; if clouds assemble or there is a strong wind, none of us will survive.’ They pulled both my arms and ushered me upwards. Just as an antelope climbs up a tree with its front paws, I too kept on walking with the help of my two assistants and managed to climb the mountain. After walking in this manner for about an hour, we came to a comparatively better path. Now, I was able to walk without support from others. After walking for some time, I looked in front and saw a mountain peak and plenty of fog below. We would have to cross this snowy stretch and reach the top of the peak. It would not only be very difficult but dangerous too.

We continued walking in a queue, one person following the other. No one was sitting upon their animals’ backs anymore. The animals were also following us. After walking for a while, we came close to the snow. There was no sign of any path here; all the land had disappeared under blankets of snow and moreover, the place was very slippery. From here we would have to walk in this snow for about a mile until we found signs of the pathway once again.

Kedar Singh said, ‘The jhabbus and the yaks will go before us, and we will follow them. The goats and sheep will come behind us because the jhabbus and the yaks know the way. They would be able to select the safe route. Also, we will step on the footprints left by the jhabbus and the yaks and cross this dangerous place safely.’

That was exactly how things took place. By following the jhabbus and their footprints, we crossed the snow safely and came to the path. Now it wasn’t so fearful anymore. We spoke to each other comfortably and arrived at the top of the mountain at around 11 a.m. This place was 18,300 feet above the sea level. Smiles returned upon everyone’s faces. Overwhelmed with joy, they cheered to their individual gods and said, ‘There is no more fear. We have crossed the katha.’

The natural beauty of this place was unimaginable even by a poet. The high snow-white Himalayan peaks stood like pillars on all four sides; the blue sky spread like a canopy on top of it, as if it had been decorated to offer shelter to the fatigued travellers. One could imagine the wide stones to be seats in the middle of the pavilion; from a distance the pleasant and soothing sound of the mountain river seemed to be asking about the whereabouts of the fatigued travellers, and different species of mountain birds were welcoming them with their very sweet voice. I was a fatigued traveller. I couldn’t resist the warm welcome of nature and therefore sat down there. My companions also sat there to take a rest. Now the cold had been reduced with the heat of the sunrays and there wasn’t any trace of clouds in the sky. With the rays of the sun, the mountains all around seemed golden, and the clear blue sky seemed to be opening up its breast and embracing the huge, snowy mountain peaks.

Seeing this eternal scenery of the Himalayas, I lost myself. I wanted to stay here forever but my companions were impatient. One of them pulled my hand and lifted me. ‘You cannot sit here any longer. This mountain has no wood, grass, or water. We won’t get firewood unless we walk another four miles ahead, and so even tea cannot be prepared. We will die if we don’t drink tea or have food. Come on, now we must move downhill, and today’s descent is even more difficult than the ascent.’

I got up. They walked in front of me, and I kept on following them.

After we had travelled for a while, I realised why the descent was more difficult than the ascent. It was as if I had to climb down from the sky to the underworld. The yaks, horses, sheep, and goats had already gone far ahead. Many of the travellers had also gone before us, and they looked like a row of ants. I started descending very slowly. There was a dangerous path in between and it was only discernible because of the footprints of the men and animals. The unfathomable mountains were in the south and on the left were the uneven mountains covered with snow. This place was so sloping and slippery that one couldn’t walk without the help of others. I held a long staff in my left hand which I planted in the snow and walked slowly with its support.

After going a little further, I found my feet sinking in the snow; it was like the difficulty we faced   when our feet would get stuck while trying to walk in the mud in our desh, our homeland.  Walking in the snow had turned my feet numb and I couldn’t lift them up. At such a moment I saw a horse slip on its feet and slide down below. Its breeder was also going with it and within a second both disappeared! After that I didn’t get any news of them. Witnessing this scene created a great fear in my mind. I thought I would lose my life here today itself. Even then I didn’t lose the hope of life and kept on walking slowly. Just then I stumbled and fell but one of my fellow travellers immediately pulled me up by holding my hands. My carrier had also tumbled, but it too was saved on this occasion.

All of us crossed that snowy region and arrived at a safe place approximately around noon. Now the hope of living returned once again. But hunger and thirst had made us so exhausted that there wasn’t the strength to take even another step. There was plenty of water in front of us, but it was so cold that it was impossible to drink it. This mountain didn’t have any sign of firewood so we couldn’t prepare tea and quench our thirst. Firewood wouldn’t be available unless we went further for two more miles. I was forced to climb up on the back of the jhabbu. Every Hindu would understand how difficult and heart-wrenching it was for him to get up on a cow’s back. But according to the saying, ‘Follow the rules applicable in each country,’ I abided by the words of the Shastras and climbed on the animal’s back.

I went for one mile in this manner. There were so many ascents and descents within this one mile, and it was followed by a steep descent that forced me to climb down from the animal’s back once again. Excessive strain, hunger and thirst exhausted me so much that I couldn’t move my feet. But the hard heart didn’t ever blow out. So, with a lot of difficulty, I kept on walking just to keep myself alive.

After going a little further, I found a few traders sitting by the roadside. I went and sat near them. Among them an old man very politely gave me a mat to sit on and immediately offered some warm tea to drink. Later he also gave me barley flour and molasses to eat. After eating and drinking, I regained my strength. After resting for a while and talking to them, I found out that they were also travelling to Tibet. They had come here the day before. They would rest here today and would go to Dwapa via Hoti tomorrow early morning. We would stop at Jhonghing, half a mile away from here. My companions had already proceeded towards that place. One of my servants had also gone forward with my belongings; the other one was with me. I took his help and after a lot of effort reached Jhonghing at around 2 p.m.

We would stay there that day. Our camp was inside a small cave. There was a river about a mile from this cave. Sufficient grass and firewood were available on both its banks. My servant had prepared food and tea for me even before I reached my den and had also let free the animals which were carrying our load to graze. I arrived at my den, had my meal and laid down. I didn’t have the strength to rise. About eight or ten tents were pitched and they contained about a hundred people. Also, there were many people outside the tents. These people had more than two hundred goats and sheep to carry their luggage and a few yaks, jhabbus, and horses.

About the Book:

In 1898, the wandering saint Swami Ramananda Bharati set out from the Garhwal Himalayas towards one of the most remote and revered destinations in the world: Mount Kailash and Manas Sarovar in Tibet. Travelling through perilous mountain passes, glacial valleys and isolated border villages, Bharati journeyed not merely as a pilgrim in search of divine grace, but as an observant traveller deeply attentive to the people, landscapes and contradictions of the Himalayan world.

The Forest of Snow chronicles this extraordinary expedition across the high Himalayas—through Joshimath, Niti, Hoti Pass and beyond—capturing the majesty of snowbound peaks, roaring rivers and sacred shrines, alongside the hardships of life at the edge of empire.

Bharati writes vividly of Bhutia traders preparing for their annual caravans into Tibet, highland communities who migrate with the changing seasons, weather-beaten caves sheltering pilgrims, mountain food that consists only of tea, butter and barley flour, and the tense borderlands shaped by colonial surveillance and Tibetan restrictions. Along the way he encounters an unforgettable cast of companions and strangers: clever interpreters, eccentric lamas, drunken villagers, Tibetans suspicious of English spies, and even dacoits.

Blending spiritual reflection with sharp ethnographic observation, Bharati’s narrative moves beyond conventional pilgrimage writing to offer one of the earliest modern Bengali accounts of travel into Tibet. First serialised in 1901 as Himaranya, and later recovered from incomplete manuscripts, The Forest of Snow stands today as a rare and compelling record of Himalayan travel at the turn of the twentieth century.

About the Author:

Ramananda Bharati (1836–1901) was a Bengali scholar, reformer, ascetic, and travel writer who moved between orthodox Hinduism, Brahmo reformism, and monastic spirituality. Trained in Sanskrit and honoured with the title ‘Vidyaratna’, he taught at Calcutta’s Wesleyan Mission School, where his engagement with Christian missionaries led him towards monotheism and the Brahmo Samaj. Following the deaths of his wife and son, heartbroken, he entered the Dasnami monastic order and became a paribrajak sadhu (traveller-saint), visiting pilgrimage sites across India and even to Tibet.

About the Translator:

Somdatta Mandal is Former Professor of English and Chairperson at the Department of English & Other Modern European Languages, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Somdatta has a keen interest in translation and travel writing.

Click here to read the review

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

Categories
Excerpt

The Courtesan, Her Lover and I 

Title: The Courtesan, Her Lover and I 

Author: Dr Tarana Husain Khan

Publisher: Hachette India

Dagh’s presence in Calcutta was magnetic. The city, resplendent and cosmopolitan, embraced him. This was Dagh’s second visit to the city. He had come with Nawab Kalb e Ali Khan in 1866; he found the city even more grand than on his earlier visit. Dagh’s arrival had been announced in poetic circles and the nobility. Invitations to mushairas started pouring in. His baithak became the hub for poets, nobles and admirers as people flocked to meet him and spend time with him. He found the people of Calcutta cultured and affable and made hundreds of friends. Among his visitors was Abdul Ghafur ‘Nassakh’, the deputy collector of Midnapur, who had questioned Dagh’s lineage in his tazkira, somewhat insultingly referring to him as the ‘son of Chhoti Begum’, implying that Dagh, who proudly wrote his name as ‘Nawab Dagh Dehlvi’, was the offspring of a junior begum of Nawab Shams of Jhirka and not entitled to use the grand suffix. Nassakh was your tutor and a regular at your kotha. You had expected Dagh to snub him, but he surprised you by extending a warm hand of friendship. Nassakh, charmed by Dagh’s magnanimity, became a regular at all of Dagh’s mushairas, and his son became Dagh’s shagird. Dagh continued to write to Nassakh for years and often asked him to intervene in your frequent quarrels with Dagh. Nassakh was a typical British official, officious and correct. You privately accused him of being servile to the British. Dagh said Nassakh was redeemed by his love for Urdu poetry and his sensitive kalaam. He found Nassakh a man of old values, a wazeydaar—a reading that proved to be true. Dagh gave a lot of importance to lineage and family as a determiner of behaviour and attitude. He formed enduring bonds and kept in touch with friends and acquaintances all his life by writing numerous letters every day.

Dagh, you realized, was an open-hearted person. He harboured no grudges, even befriending known enemies and critics, and used to say mulaqat ko to safai se—cleanse your heart when you meet someone. You, on the other hand, were more guarded and suspicious of people, often judging them for their actions or reported words. Your outward geniality towards your clients was perfected over the years, but your unforgiving heart would never open to anyone you had once rejected. There were no two sides to Dagh’s personality—he projected what he felt inside and was nearly always affable and generous to a fault. You were astounded at Dagh’s innocent trust in people even after suffering reverses, mistreatment and insults throughout his life. Strangers who got to know him would feel loved, accepted and find comfort. Unlike his cousin, the great poet Ghalib, Dagh was never arrogant. You had heard that Ghalib’s sojourn to Calcutta in 1828 for reinstatement of his pension was marked by tussles and conflicts with old friends and he made new enemies. Dagh only brought harmony and affection wherever he went.

He would often ask you, ‘Why do you love me so? Dark and old as I am.’

You would laugh and reply, ‘Yes, no one would like your face; it’s you I love. I have never met a person like you.’

Monsoon rains swept through Calcutta, and Dagh enjoyed the salubrious winds, often going for moonlit drives along the Hooghly with you. He loved to watch the moon chasing the clouds on the bridge. The windows to his upstairs room were thrown open to the moisture-laden winds and the light spray of rain. Your life would forever turn back to look upon those days and nights as a time of contented happiness. You often sat receiving guests in Dagh’s salon, introducing him to the grandees, very much the mistress by his side. Every poet and connoisseur clamoured for his appearance at their mushairas. Dagh was kind and didn’t refuse even the humblest invitations.

You loved his quick humour, which matched your impetuous repartee. He could lighten everything with a witty remark; only you had the power to crumple his heart with a serrated sharp word. Ah, give me your prolificity you sighed; just that, and I can give you my life, my words, my soul. I shall be forever your slave and write at your command, you promised.

Dagh was at his most prolific at that time, reciting and penning ghazals every day from the wellspring of his lived happiness. He made you sit in the room as he wrote. You were his inspiration, and you felt words emanating from your pen almost as effortlessly as his. A touch, a look, a shared thought would pull you towards each other in the middle of a sher. You would float into his ghazal and he into yours. His nights after the mushairas were yours, and you had stopped hosting soirées at the kotha during his stay. This time was for the flowering of your love, unfettered by fear from Nawab Haider and mean-minded remarks by Dagh’s friends. The anxiety of the clandestine dissipated, and you relaxed in his arms, opening your heart to him. You observed his habits closely—his love for Indian attar, which he so generously sprayed on himself, and his abhorrence of drinks—you were his only vice, he said. Yes, I and all the other tawaifs you have loved—you couldn’t resist the barb, even when it found its mark in the hurt of his eyes.

On one such pleasant evening, on the insistence of Nassakh, you organized a mushaira at your kotha. It was to be a grand event, with the members of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah’s family arriving from Metiaburj along with his noblemen. You had helped to make all the arrangements, hoping that the mushaira would finally win you an invitation to one of the Metiaburj soirées, where you would sing under the benign eye of the corpulent Nawab Wajid Ali Shah. Metiaburj was the epitome of culture in all of Hindustan, and if Nawab Wajid Ali Shah invited you for a recital, it meant you had made your mark in the world of poetry, you told Dagh. He laughed, saying, ‘Your heart is the only mark my poetry seeks.’

The mushaira was a great success, a convergence of all the renowned poets and grandees of Calcutta. Phaetons and carriages choked the road as guests were ushered in by liveried guards. Dagh was not well off, and Nassakh and you had financed the expensive soirée. Your presence there underlined your association with Dagh as his muse and lady love. When finally the lamp was kept before Dagh, signalling that he would be reciting his new ghazal, his words were for you and Calcutta.

Roknā dil ko ke shauq zulf e dilbar le chalā

Thāmnā mujh ko ke saudā merā sar le chalā

Ye ḥasīñ ye mehjabīñ ye shahar aisī lehar ba lehar

Dāgh kalkattey se lākhoñ Dāg̣h dil pe le chalā

My heart is swept away with the tresses of my beloved

This transaction of passion has numbed my reason

This town with its waves of luminescent beauties

Dagh leaves Kalkatta with his heart bearing numerous marks (dagh)

Nawab Kalb e Ali Khan’s letter summoning Dagh back to Rampur came like a death sentence. It had been a little more than two weeks since he arrived—how could there be such little time for you? Dagh requested for a two-month extension of leave, which was refused. You tried to persuade him to stay back. Whatever I have, is yours, stay with me here, you reiterated. He was so popular in Calcutta that there were many who would happily sponsor him; together, you could make a good living. But Dagh was a faithful servant of the Nawab, indebted by the latter’s many favours—Rampur riyasat had supported Dagh when he lost his father and again when his mother was expelled from the Mughal court. Besides, Dagh was a married man, and that was also an article of faith. Once again, he invited you to accompany him back to Rampur, but you couldn’t leave your obligations towards your family and sever all relations. These were familiar arguments, fuelled by the pain of impending separation and the inevitable stalemate between you. Within a few days, Dagh left, feeling, he said, like a corpse leaving the city. He had to reach Rampur before Ramzan.

Is this how it will end, you asked yourself. For how long can this continue? As Ramzan fasts and sehri sounds buzzed around you and him in different parts of Hindustan, you heard of him writing a masnavi, Faryād e Dāgh, a plea from his grieving heart. Would it be an obituary to your love?

About the Book

In the royal courts of nineteenth-century Rampur, courtesan–poet Munni Bai Hijab captivates the legendary Urdu poet Dagh Dehlvi, who immortalizes her in his verses while inadvertently eclipsing her voice. More than a century later, Rukmini, an aspiring writer, stumbles upon Dagh’s letters in the archives of the Rampur Raza Library and finds herself drawn to the fierce, flickering presence of Munni Bai Hijab.

Torn between worlds—a Hindu woman in a Muslim household, a cosmopolitan spirit in a conservative town—Rukmini begins to trace the forgotten threads of Hijab’s story, even as her own life starts to unravel. Her husband chases yet another doomed business idea. Her daughter walks away from medical school. And when her friendship with Daniyal, the stoic guardian of Rampur’s past, deepens into desire, Rukmini must confront her greatest fear: becoming her mother, the woman who once walked away from their family. The Courtesan, Her Lover and I is a haunting novel of longing, ambition and women who dare to write themselves into history.

About the Author

Dr Tarana Husain Khan is a writer and food historian based in Rampur. She is the author of a bestselling historical fiction, The Begum and the Dastan (Hachette India), and Degh to Dastarkhwan: Qissas and Recipes from Rampur (Penguin Random House India). She has co-edited and contributed to the anthology of food writings, Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia (Pan Macmillan India). Her writings on food, culture and gender have been published in Global Food History Journal, Gastronomica Journal and prominent media outlets. She was granted a Research Fellowship at the University of Sheffield for an AHRC-funded project. This is her fourth book. She lives between Rampur and Nainital with her husband.

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

Categories
Interview Review

Aruna Chakravarti Converses about her Ghost Stories

An introduction to Aruna Chakravarti’s Creeping Shadows: 13 Ghost Stories, published by Penguin India, along with a discussion with the author.

Ghosts are evocative of a past… of history one could say. Then who could be a better storyteller of the past than an author steeped in colours of historical fiction — Aruna Chakravarti! In the past she not only translated novels set in colonial India but evoked the Bengal Renaissance to perfection in her two Jorasanko novels and details of a court hearing in her retelling of the Bhawal prince! This time the diva of historical fiction brings to us a book of spine chilling, ghost stories, Creeping Shadows: 13 Ghost Stories.  It is her third collection of short stories.

Aruna Chakravarti
Published in 2026

The narratives are so vivid and visual that they could be worthy of being made into films. They are distinctive in that she has mostly created her own very horrific ghouls – not the traditional ones. They pop up and frighten the reader with their bizarreness and terrifying presences which linger even when you try to sleep at night! She has given us thirteen stories — a spooky number in itself — spread across multiple communities in Asia.

Some of the narratives evoke the past, starting from the 1800s. ‘The House of Flowers’ is set in China partly and partly in Kolkata, where there is now a thriving Chinatown known as “Tangra” and a Kali temple that serves ‘noodles’ as its prasad or offering. The story has echoes of Pearl S Buck’s China interestingly. What comes as a surprise is the fluency with which she has woven in the influences that impact a community of migrants!  

Chakravarti has used her skills as a writer of historical fiction in some of the stories like, ‘The Road to Karimganj’, in which a spook takes us back to undivided Bengal, when passports were not needed as in the story of the migrant Chinese. Hovering around history are more narratives like ‘Possessed’, where a courtesan who performs with the legendary Girish Ghosh1 of the nineteenth century Kolkata undergoes, along with the audience, a strange spooky experience!

Traveling down the century, closer to our times, is the story that is perhaps one of the most bizarre and yet most relatable, ‘The Necklace’. Set in the Anglo-Indian community and the glamour of Park Street — where Wiccan writer, Rajorshi Patranabis, claimed to have met a colonial ghost awaiting her lover — Chakravarti’s narrative is of black magic and betrayal. The fiction is far more impactful and frightening than the factual narrative, which too was spine chilling! You realise what makes fiction so much more gripping than facts — anything can happen in fiction. Chakravarti is imaginative enough to make it as creepy and shadowy as any regular horror writer!

Holding on to that thought, the author holds the key to our experiences as she skillfully outlines two demons grown out of poverty in ‘A Winter Night’. The conclusion has a sense of irony and tragedy. ‘Truth is stranger than Fiction’ weaves in more of the diversity in the historic annals of Bengal. The story that starts the book, ‘The Caregivers of Gazipur’, has an unresolved ending, like some of her other narratives. Though there is a frightful resolution in ‘They Come Out After Dark’. The ghosts play spine chilling havoc with fears of the living while recalling the senseless violence of 1947. ‘There are More Things in Heaven and Earth’…takes us back to the atrocities committed during the Sikh riots of 1984 in Delhi. The mingling of fact and fiction to create weird a fantastical narrative is addressed during a conversation on the supernatural. And there is an exploration of the lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which probably is a touch of the academic as Chakravarti had a long tenure as the principal of a girl’s college in Delhi. It also defines the authorial stance in this story:

‘Don’t forget what Hamlet said to Horatio? There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’

What is unusual about these stories is the way she has created fictitious geographies and personas, evoking historic realities. They seem perfectly authentic to the reader, including the one set in China. There is a vast mingling of facts and fiction in these stories all to lead to spine-chilling ends with strange twists. 

‘Grandmother’s Bundle’ stands out in its rendition as the ghosts given out are part of the mythical lore of Bengal — stories that were related to most Bengali kids of the twentieth century. They have a touch of humour and dry wit, perhaps introducing a sense of comic relief among very dark and horrific stories that transport us into different worlds.

‘The Motorcycle Rider’, set in modern times, takes us into a university campus to shock us with horrific spooks born out of tragic deaths, while ‘Twenty-nine Years, Seven Months and Eleven Days’, merges a modern outlook with an unfathomable past, touching upon strange tantric yearnings. ‘Vendetta’ twirls nature and supernatural to give a frightening narrative of how nature takes its revenge… a theme that reiterates in writings addressing our current concerns with climate change.

The ease and fluidity with which she has switched from history and realism to horror and fantasy is amazing. Let’s find out more from her about this new persona that inhabits her writerly self…                                                           

Till now we have had translations, numerous novels—many of which can be called historical fiction—and realistic short stories with their base in history or contemporary life. What made you think of writing ghost stories?

After writing The Mendicant Prince which involved extensive research into the life and times of Prince Ramendranarayan Roy of Bhawal, I didn’t feel up to writing a historical novel again. The work had demanded delving into sociological texts, court records, letters, insurance papers and medical reports. Apart from research, historical fiction also demands a certain amount of field work.

Published in 2013
Published in 2016

Before writing the Jorasanko novels I visited the Tagore mansion thrice and while writing The Mendicant Prince, I went to Bangladesh to see the royal palace in Bhawal, renamed Gazipur. Though it has been totally neglected, with shopkeepers and squatters having overtaken most of the area, I was able to get some idea of the topography of the palace and its grounds. I saw the lake and the temple (which was locked) and was able to visualise where the halls and galleries and the apartments of the queens and princesses would have stood. All this work was exhausting. So, for a change, I decided to try my hand at short stories which emerge straight from the imagination. And while at it, I decided to break out of the mould of “historical fiction” writer in which I had trapped myself and try a completely new genre.

Published in 2022

I wrote the first one on an impulse and found myself quite enjoying the process. I didn’t even think of publishing at that time. The first story led to another and another. When eleven stories had been written I sent the manuscript to three publishers and was surprised when all three accepted it. It was then that I found out that ghost stories were the in-thing. That they were selling well and that publishers were looking out for them. I signed up with Penguin as you know. At one point my editor Moutushi Mukherjee suggested I write another two. Thirteen stories will make it even more spooky, she said.  So, I wrote another two.

Would you list these stories as fantasies or fantastical? Or are they stories of personal experience? Please elaborate.

No. They are not born out personal experience. I must confess that I have never seen a ghost in my life. I believe in sixth sense. As a matter of fact, I have acted on my sixth sense on occasions. I have had sudden impulses to do certain things and realised later that if I hadn’t yielded to the impulses, I would have regretted it. But I have had no brush with the supernatural. These stories were sparked off by sudden memories. Something I had read somewhere. Something somebody had told me years ago. A face I had seen in childhood which had stuck in my mind though whose I don’t remember. A conversation overheard which made no sense at the time but which, as an adult, seemed ridden with sinister nuances. A phrase from a book whose title and author’s name I had forgotten. In fact, I didn’t even remember the context from where the phrase had come.

Sudden flashes such as these triggered off the stories. But in the writing, they took on a life and soul of their own. I even feel, sometimes, that the pen took over and they were written by an invisible hand.

Your stories are set, sometimes in real landscapes and sometimes in fictional ones. What kind of research went into creating them? How do you make them so vivid and real?

There wasn’t any immediate research.  I needed to look up a few facts, now and then, mostly to be sure of their authenticity. But nothing truly back breaking. The landscapes, both physical and of the mind, were culled from my travels and my reading of both English and Bengali writers over the eight decades of my life. Much of it stayed with me tucked away in some unconscious part of the mind. Although I write in English, you will notice that almost all the stories are about Bengalis. Bengalis living in Delhi, Kolkata, Bihar and the small towns and villages of Bengal. There are Anglo-Indians, Punjabis and Chinese, too among my characters. But having lived in Bengal for generations, they have adopted Bengali customs and a quasi-Bengali way of living.  Many of the locales in which, they appear are fictional…gathered from my reading and observation of people from different strands of Bengali life.

You have a story set in China which also has the Chinatown of Kolkata in it. Have you been to China? What was the reason for the choice? Were you influenced by any Chinese writers? How did you visualise the Chinese migrants in Kolkata?

Yes, I have been to China. I visited the cities of Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing in 2004. Naturally, I have no personal experience of life as it was lived in the late 18th century which is the period covered in the story ‘The House of Flowers’. For this I had to rely totally on my reading of English authors writing about China like Pearl Buck and Amy Tan. Pearl Buck was a great influence on me while writing this story. It was from her books that I was able to catch the ambience of tea houses and brothels of the period. In depicting the Chinese family who lived in Calcutta in the early 20th century I had to rely on childhood experience, I knew some Chinese girls who had lived for several generations in Calcutta. And my imagination went into full play, of course.

In ‘Grandmother’s Bundle’ you have written about spooks from Bengal. It departs from your other stories in as much as it does not really introduce the supernatural except as a source of folklore. Do you feel it blends with the other narratives in your collection?

Well. It is different from my other stories in certain ways. Firstly, it is three stories rolled into one. Secondly, unlike the others, they are children’s stories. Thirdly, it is the only one that deals with ghosts and other supernatural beings with humour. Lastly, they have been drawn from folklore. I agree that it doesn’t quite blend with the others in this collection. But it is also true that each story in this collection is different from another. There are different time spans. Different locales. Different themes. Characters from different levels of society. That being the case, I think that this story lends variety and another flavour to the collection.

Your stories aren’t like the usual ghost stories one reads. The structure and content seem different. Your comments.

You are right. These stories do not belong to the gothic/horror genre. They are not about vampires, blood sucking bats, severed heads or violence heaped on violence. They are essentially human-interest stories with a supernatural twist at the end. I have taken my cue, you may say, from Coleridge’s demand for a willing suspension of disbelief  before reading his poetry. These stories have innocuous beginnings. Two friends sharing an apartment, a boy walking from his village to an unseen destination, a dinner party in an exclusive area of the capital, a marital spat or a telephone call at dawn. Then, a few paragraphs later a subtle hint is dropped startling  the reader into a realisation that it is not a simple story of human relationships. That it is headed in another, more sinister direction. Another hint is dropped and another. Then in the final sentence the bomb bursts. The last line is the most important line of the story. 

Which is your favourite story? And why?

Just as a mother loves all her children, I love all my stories. But mothers also have favourites and so do I. “The House of Flowers,” “Vendetta,” “Possessed” and “The Necklace” are my favourites. That’s because their themes are unusual and posed a greater challenge. And, perhaps, because I had to work harder on them than on the others.

Are you planning any new books? Exploring any new genres? Any new book we can expect soon?

I always think of a new book even when I am writing the current one. Yes, I am planning to explore yet another genre of writing. But my ideas are nebulous at the moment. Still in a fluid state That being the case I cannot share them with you. All I can say is that the work will be a challenging one and I’m not even sure I’ll be able to see it through. So, we must both wait for some more time

  1. Girish Ghosh (1844-1912) Actor and Director from Bengal ↩︎

 (This review and online interview by email is by Mitali Chakravarty)

.

Click here to read an excerpt from Creeping Shadows.

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

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

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

Categories
Excerpt

The House of Flowers by Aruna Chakravarti

Title: Creeping Shadows: 13 Ghost Stories

Author: Aruna Chakravarti

Publisher: Penguin India

The House of Flowers

Zihan stirred in his sleep. A chill breath passing over his limbs had awakened him. He strained his eyes, still heavy with wine fumes, and looked around. Where was he? This was not his room and this wasn’t his bed. He was lying in what seemed to be a small, confined space under an ornate gilded ceiling in a bed so soft, his limbs were sinking into its depths. The sky was paling with first light and long beams from a dying moon streamed in through the open window. The fragrance of an unknown flower, wild and sweet, filled the room. 

He turned his head towards the window. Something, like an opalescent haze, was obscuring his vision. At first, he thought it was a sheet of mist. Then, before his amazed eyes, it started to take a shape and form. It became a woman. He could see her slender limbs, smooth as white satin, shimmering through the garment that swayed and billowed around her form. Diaphanous as a film of gossamer. So light, it seemed woven out of moonbeams. Her face was swathed in mist.

The figure moved from the window and came gliding towards him. He could see her face clearly now. A perfect oval with apricot shaped eyes, brows like strung bows and hair that fell down her back like a sheet of black silk. He stared at the vision of loveliness so long and hard …his eyes began to hurt. He had never seen such beauty in a woman before.

She stood by his bed for a while gazing into his eyes, then lay down, her body light as a feather against his. Taking his face in her hands, she caressed it with a tenderness that reminded him of his mother’s touch. She drew the silky strands of her floating hair all over his naked body. Across his chest and abdomen, over his genitals, thighs and legs, down to the insteps of his feet. The wildflower scent from her limbs filled his nostrils. Her kisses fluttered on his lips, soft and cold as drifting snow…

The wine, still running in his blood, quivered in his veins. His limbs, untouched by a woman before, heaved luxuriously and his eyes closed in ecstasy. He drifted away…

How long he lay in this state of bliss, he couldn’t tell. It could be minutes. It could be hours. Gradually, an uneasy feeling came over him. Something heavy was pressing against his body. It was squashing his chest and squeezing the breath out of his lungs. He moved aside but the pressure grew in intensity, driving him further and further towards the edge of the bed. And now his heart beat rapidly with an unknown dread. What was happening? Was he still asleep and this a fearful dream? Suddenly his eyes sprang open and what he saw sent currents of ice water rippling down his spine. He felt the hot blood pulsing and pounding in his ears.  A muscle twitched and shuddered in his cheek…

The reed-slim body of the woman beside him had bloated to a colossal size. Her eyes, thin slits in the vast globe of her face, glittered with hate. Her mouth was a deep red gash through which yellow teeth, long and sharp as a panther’s fangs, hung to her chin.

The mountain of flesh was growing larger and larger every moment. It was filling the bed. He would fall over the edge any moment now. A scream gathered in his lungs but froze before it could reach his throat…

Suddenly she sprang on him; her nails sharp as claws ripping the skin off his chest and thighs. Digging her teeth into the soft flesh just below the right shoulder, she bit off a large hunk. Zihan’s eyes were glazed with pain and fear. He stared mesmerized as the monstrous creature rose from the bed and swayed and shuffled towards the opposite wall. She wore a garment of sheer white muslin that swelled and surged like waves about her form. Blood dripped from her slavering mouth and fell on the floor as her great body waddled, like a gorilla’s, from side to side. And now, for the first time, Zihan saw the coffin. It was open… 

Zihan screamed. Shriek after shriek burst from the throat that had been frozen all this while, hit the walls, and sent fearful echoes all through the house. Then, exhausted and half dead from shock and loss of blood, he lay motionless, whimpering like a child.

Kueilan was a light sleeper and the first to hear the cries. They seemed to be coming from the dead girl’s room. Her heart thudded with fear as she rushed to it and flung the door open. She stood where she was for a while, her eyes glued to the coffin. It stood in the same place but the seal was broken and its open lid rested against the wall. A lily-white hand with long tapering fingers was dangling from the edge. And now the lid began to move downwards. Slowly, soundlessly, it was falling in place. In a few moments it would reach the hand and crush it. A tremor ran through Kueilan’s frame. Her mouth opened in a scream but before she could utter a sound, the hand glided over the edge and slipped into the hollow where the rest of the dead girl lay. Then, before Kueilan’s amazed eyes, the coffin closed, the seal came together and all was as it had been.

‘Published with permission from Penguin Random House India from Creeping Shadows (2026)’.

About the Book:

The stories in Creeping Shadows are spread over a vast canvas, both in terms of time span and locale. A teahouse in ancient China. A brothel in nineteenth-century Calcutta. A forest lodge in Bankura. An old mansion in Bangladesh. A university campus in today’s Delhi. Beginning as human-interest narratives, they end with sudden, unexpected twists that raise hair ends and send trickles of ice water down the spine. Here are tales of shadows, tingles and chills…

About the Author:

Aruna Chakravarti has been principal of a prestigious women’s college of Delhi University for ten years. She is also a well-known academic, creative writer and translator with eighteen published books on record. They comprise five novels, two books of short stories, two academic works and nine volumes of translation.
Her first novel, The Inheritors (published by Penguin Random House), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and her second, Jorasanko, received critical acclaim and became a bestseller. Daughters of Jorasanko, a sequel to Jorasanko, has sold widely and received rave reviews. Her novel Suralakshmi Villa was adjudged ‘Novel of the year (India 2020)’ by Indian Bibliography published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature U.K. Her other well-known works include The Mendicant Prince which has been shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize, and Through a Looking Glass: Stories. Her translated works include an anthology of songs from Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitabitaan, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s Srikanta and Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Those Days, First Light and Primal Woman: Stories. Her most recent work is titled Rising from the Dust.
Among the various awards she has received are Vaitalik Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and Sarat Puraskar. She is also a scriptwriter and producer of seven multi-media presentations based on her novels. Comprising dramatized readings, interspersed with songs and accompanied by a visual presentation by professional artists and singers, these programmes have been widely acclaimed and performed in many parts of India and abroad.

Click here to read her interview/review

.

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

Categories
Tribute

Mark Tully: A Citizen of the World 

By Mohul Bhowmick

Sir Mark Tully (1935-2026), From Public Domain

There were very few things that Sir Mark Tully touched which did not turn to gold. In his later years, disenchanted by journalism, he resorted to making documentaries on steam trains. Accompanied solely by a production crew and armed with the knowledge that comes with instinct, Sir Mark established that the locomotives pulling these trains — running on steam — did exist in India, even if he had to crisscross his way to the western peripheries of Kutch to make his point. By then, the BBC, whose outstanding representative he had become, and whose torch he held aloft in times of crises, had become enamoured by the crony capitalism of the centre-right, which we would go on to see in later years.

Born in the southern suburb of Tolluygunge in Calcutta to parents who were Indian in all but name, Sir Mark was sent to study in England at the age of nine before joining the organisation which would, for better or worse, be the making of him. Known essentially for his factual reporting, albeit with the possession of a nuanced eye that made his stories seem humane, Sir Mark’s passion for conversation with his subjects made him highly esteemed in the eyes of his peers. The added benefit of reporting on events that shaped modern India — the Bhopal gas tragedy, Operation Blue Star, Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, the Babri Masjid demolition, et al — was the ream of concepts he had up his sleeve, and of which he made good use when he started writing books.

Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle was Sir Mark’s first book, but it was No Full Stops In India that embellished him as a legend who could comfortably balance storytelling with a subtle hint of refinement, and who had the repertoire of knowing his subjects inside. Despite being born in the country, he was only given the privilege of being an Overseas Citizen of India (OCI), but this did not deter Sir Mark from his goal — to tell the stories of real Indians and real India to those who did not know where to look. All his life, he rallied behind the cause of religious pluralism and batted for the inclusion of marginalised communities and minorities into the mainstream, but died a man broken by the scars of battle.

Much like the Ashokan rock edicts that were unknown to the ordinary Indian till James Prinsep deciphered the Brahmi script in the early 19th century, Sir Mark’s work went largely unnoticed in the country until he left the BBC. Harassed and harangued by the Indira Gandhi government, he had also been forced to leave the country when the Emergency was imposed. However, return he did, to his country of birth, and stayed loyal — to its people and to the truth — and continued challenging those in power with constant, if gratifying, attacks.

Telling stories with a precision that most remain unaware of despite the possession of all-seeing eyes, Sir Mark’s work remained a terrifying but ambitious challenge for any aspiring journalist to recreate. He left just the way he had wanted to leave, in the country of his birth, known as an Indian who had struck roots in its soil, blossomed in its spring and withered at its dusk. A man ahead of his times by several generations, Sir Mark Tully was an Indian we did not deserve.

Mohul Bhowmick is a national-level cricketer, sports journalist, poet, essayist and travel writer from Hyderabad, India. He has published five collections of poems and one travelogue so far. His latest book, The Past Is Another Country, came out in 2025. More of his work can be discovered on his website: www.mohulbhowmick.com.

.

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

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

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

Categories
Essay

The Last of the Barbers: How the Saloon Became the Salon (and Where the Gossip Went)

By Charudutta Panigrahi

If language were a haircut, “saloon” got a buzz cut and a blow-dry and came out as “salon.” That change in spelling is the visible tip of a larger style transformation: one rough, male-only ritual space has been trimmed, straightened, scented and repackaged into a gleaming, multi-service, mostly woman-centred retail experience. Along the way, the loud, fragrant, argument-heavy mini-parliaments of small-town India — the saloons — have been politely ushered into warranties, playlists and polite small talk.

Barbers in India are almost as old as conversation itself. The profession of the barber — the nai or hajam — is embedded in pre-colonial life: scalp massage (champi), shaves, tonsure at rites of passage, and quick fixes between chores. These services were usually delivered in open-fronted shops or under trees, with tools that were portable and livelihoods that were local.

The “saloon” as a distinctive, Western-flavoured, male gathering place began to consolidate during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Port cities and colonial cantonments — Bombay (Mumbai), Calcutta (Kolkata), Madras (Chennai) — saw the rise of dedicated shops selling not only shaves and haircuts but also imported tonics, straight razors and a distinctly public atmosphere shaped by newspaper reading, debate and gossip. Over time, that form blended with older local practices and spread inland. By the mid-20th century, the saloon — a recognisable, chair-lined, mirror-fronted social stage — existed in towns from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from Gujarat’s chawls to Assam’s market roads.

So ancient barbering traditions fed into a colonial-era intensification of the barbershop as public forum; by the 1950s–70s, the saloon as we remember it was firmly a part of India’s social furniture. The precise start date is a quilt of custom and commerce rather than a single founding ceremony — and that is part of the saloon’s charm.

Walk into a saloon in Nagpur, Nellore, Shillong or Surat and you’ll notice an uncanny resemblance. The reasons are simple and human:

  • Low price point: Saloons survive on quick volumes and walk-ins. That encourages many chairs, fast turnover, and layouts that invite waiting men to talk rather than sit quietly.
  • Ritual services: Shave, cut, champi. These are short encounters that thread customers through the same communal space repeatedly — ideal for gossip to collect and ferment.
  • Social role: The barber doubles as ear, counsellor, news-disseminator and crossword referee. That role is culturally consistent across regions: a saloon’s psychic geography is the same whether the tea is masala or lemon.

The result is that a saloon in Kutch and a saloon in Kerala will differ in language, politics and local jokes — but both will produce that same satisfying racket of opinion, repartee and advice. They are India’s unofficial, peripatetic fora for public life.

Enter the salon: padded seats, curated playlists, appointment-booking and a menu so long it reads like a restaurant wine list (colour, rebonding, keratin, facials, pedicures, threading, and sometimes a minor festival of LED lights). A couple of business realities did most of the heavy lifting:

  • Women’s services earn more and recur more often. Regular facials, hair treatments and beauty routines translate into steadier, higher bills. The money follows the customer, and the space follows the money.
  • Franchising and professional training created standardized staff who follow brand scripts — which tighten conversation and reduce the barber-confessor vibe.
  • Unisex salons consolidated footfall, but that consolidation shrank male-only territory. Men who once had a semi-public living room now sit in chic, quieter spaces that discourage loud, extended debate.

The practical upshot: the saloon’s boisterous mini-parliaments were replaced by stylists with laminated menus, muted background music and an etiquette that favours privacy over political salvoes.

What we miss (and what we gained)

We miss the moralisers, the wisecracks, the boisterous consultancy of unpaid experts who knew which councillor was friendly with which shopkeeper and which wedding was scandalous; the loud education in rhetoric and local affairs; the bench-seat apprenticeship in how to perform masculinity in public.

We gain in expanded choices for women, more professional hygiene and techniques, new livelihoods for trained stylists (especially women), and spaces where people can pursue personalised care without the social cost that used to attend public rituals.

It’s not a zero-sum game — but it does reorder who feels proprietorial about public grooming spaces. The new economics say: she who pays more — and pays more often — gets the say.

Not all saloons are extinct. In smaller towns they still hum. In cities, they’ve evolved into hybrid forms:

  • Old-school saloons persist where price sensitivity and cultural habit remain strong: walk-ins, communal benches, loud conversation and a barber who’ll recommend both a haircut and the correct candidate for local office.
  • Nostalgic barbershops in urban pockets lean into the past with “vintage” decor, whiskey-bar vibes and sports on TV — except now they charge a premium and call the barber a “grooming specialist.”
  • Some entrepreneurs stage “men’s nights” or open-mic gossip hours in neighbourhood shops, trying to recapture the civic pulse while keeping the modern business model.

If you want the old saloon spark, look for places without appointment apps, with too many phones in sight but none in use, and with a tea flask on the counter.

What’s lost isn’t only a loud, male-only gossip pit; it’s a training ground for public argument and a place where local memory was kept live and messy. The saloon taught people how to spar without a referee; the salon teaches how to look good while being politely neutral. If you mourn for the saloon’s barbed banter, you can grieve — but also take action: host a “Salon for Men” in your local café, revive a community noticeboard at the barber, or convince your neighbourhood salon to schedule a weekly “open-chair” hour for community talk (and maybe offer tea).

And until then, if you miss the salty, pungent chorus of small-town democracy, go to any saloon that still has a kettle on the stove and a barber who knows the mayor’s schedule by heart. Sit down, get a shave, and watch a mini-parliament assemble around you. You’ll leave clean-faced, better informed, and maybe a little animated — exactly how democracy used to feel.

From Public Domain

.

Charudutta Panigrahi is a writer. He can be contacted at Charudutta403@gmail.com.

.

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

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

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

Categories
Musings

How Two Worlds Intersect

By Mohul Bhowmick

Sunset at Colaba, Bombay, which is currently referred to as Mumbai. From Public Domain

To think that Bombay is attainable is the first mistake of the rookie. And though this city attracts and repels in equal measure, it is the former that makes me want to linger all the more. And linger I do, over a cup (or was it two?) of piping hot Irani chai and bun maska at the Persian Cafe in Cuffe Parade. The rain starts just as soon as I step out of the metro station and make for the safer confines of the cafe, reminding me of home in more ways than one. It is only in Bombay that I am reminded that the culture of the Zoroastrians flourishes somewhere outside of Hyderabad as well.

Colaba lures me, but Kala Ghoda’s immense detachment from its suburban-esque walkways seems more pensive. With Mahatma Gandhi Road sweeping past the Fort and Dr Dadabhai Naoroji Road intersecting it at Flora Fountain, Bombay’s charm offensive lies bare. It is only much later, after I step into Kitaab Khana, the Bombay equivalent of Madras’ Higginbotham’s and Calcutta’s Oxford, that I strongly feel the Raj’s tentacles of reunion. On the other side of the road, the college named after Lord Mountstuart Elphinstone, who twice gave up the chance to be appointed governor-general of India, preferring to finish his two-volume work, History of India (1841) instead, is a reminder of the good that existed among our colonial masters.

*

But the second mistake that the rookie can make is by affirming that all of Bombay lies within the island of Colaba. While it did, in the days of the Raj, it no longer holds the sanctity of tradition as much as it does for the affluent who have no idea of when the last local leaves from Churchgate to Borivali. Versova, much a fishing village as Bandra had once been, is as far away from Colaba as Islamabad is from Vancouver, and Jogeshwari is a mere landing ground for the aristocrats of the north, for whom Thane is where the merely envious congregate and share stories over pav bhaji. A hint of Marathi wafts over the air, sprinkled generally with salt from the sea, and the Bambaiya of Parel and the Hindi of the island city are forgotten.

For what does a gentleman bred in the now-reclaimed Old Woman’s Island, fondly called Little Colaba, know of the fighting on the streets of Dadar? The Gateway of India, looming far beyond the ordinary, takes no part in the skyline of this Bombay, where political representatives of all hues and colours sell dreams just as kaleidoscopic as their ever-changing loyalties. Areas where no cars enter are not strictly unheard of in the Bombay of the north, and as Suketu Mehta so lovingly painted in Maximum City, it is a conurbation not afraid of its past, and one that is constantly stuck in an identity crisis. For there are more millionaires in Bombay than in any other city in the country, and they are only matched by the number of people who go to bed hungry. The Marine Drive becomes an elongated resting place for the unfortunate, the destitute or the merely curious once the lights on the Queen’s Necklace get turned on. I would have seen it had I known where to look.

*

To reclaim the days of the Raj, there are few places more apt to while away an evening than Colaba. There are certainly no places as germane as the cafes Mondegar and Leopold, which happily serve continental fare to their patrons after all these years without a trace of embarrassment at the culinary debaucheries they joyfully commit. Old men, with fedoras last seen in fashion in 1930 (before World War II took away the joys of wearing headgear, apart from sola topis, in a country where the sun has been awarded citizenship), and with shirts tucked into waistbands up to their lower chest, order bottles of grizzled beer with a side of mashed potatoes. Cholesterol and high blood sugar are forgotten when relieving one’s youth, especially with Spanish women gawking at the absurdity of it all in the flea market on the causeway outside. With the stroke of a pen, these men bring to life the jazz clubs of the early 1950s, recollecting the trumpeter Chris Perry at Alfred’s. And then they remember Lorna Cordeiro, of whom they speak as if she were a loved one.

The scarcity of vada pav in the vicinity of Kala Ghoda scares me until I remember that even autorickshaws are banned from this part of town. Much like a man seeking water from the desert atrophies of the Middle East, I lunge into a seller close to the Victoria Terminus. When he asks for a mere INR 30 for two vada pavs, I am shamed into submission, looking towards my shoes — coloured an extravagant yellow — and murmur notes of dissent that even my ears cannot pick up. A jet-black Mercedes-Benz skids past the puddle of water that has gathered around Flora Fountain, dousing me with dredges of obstinacy. There are two worlds that we live in, and Bombay may have achieved its supremacy over both yesterday.

Bun Maska can be found in Iranian cafes in Mumbai
Pav Bhaji, a popular street food of Mumbai
From Public Domain

Mohul Bhowmick is a national-level cricketer, poet, sports journalist, essayist and travel writer from Hyderabad, India. He has published four collections of poems and one travelogue so far. More of his work can be discovered on his website: www.mohulbhowmick.com.

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

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

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

Categories
Review

‘A Story of Moral Contradictions and Human Cost’

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

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

Author: Diya Gupta

Publisher: Rupa Publications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

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

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