Summer, Dune in Zeeland by Piet Mondrain (1872 – 1944)
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.
‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets (1941) by TS Eliot
If we look back in time, we have a better life than that of our ancestors. Though conflicts rage and climate change is a reality that we all dread, it can safely be said, we have progressed beyond the imagination of those who lived a hundred years ago. The fact that some books from the past still reverberate with echoes of what the present holds says much for the outliers or authors who could think out of the box. Despite this complex intermingling of ideas and times, perhaps the world will change more now than before. We do not know anything for sure though experts are always predicting a future that for most of us remains unknown. What we can present is our own estimate of what can be and a definite assertion of what is. Truth as such is a matter of perception. That complicates it further. However, one of the changes that is definitely here to stay is climate change and our changing environment. Given that this is the month that homes World Environment Day, we have a smattering of writings that revolve around nature and also the human spirit that defies age.
We have featured a writer who revels in nature and is an ageless voice that bridges multiple cultures, Ruskin Bond. As he turned ninety-two last month, he published multiple new books. We have an excerpt from one of them, Scenes from the Magic Mountain: Five Seasons in the Mussoorie Hills and Beyond, a brilliant collection of snapshots of his interactions with nature over time — be it frogs, snakes or just trees. Some of the vignettes are humorous and some, as all classics are, thought provoking. Bond puts into words how he chose to work in Landour (a small town in Himalayas) and continued to write from there for sixty years. He talks of the spell the mountains cast on him, “I like to think that I have become a part of this Magic Mountain; that by living here for so long, I can claim a relationship with the trees, wild flowers, even the rocks that are an integral part of this landscape.” The other book excerpt is a contrast to Bond’s, a non-fiction called Burnout Highway by Anmol Diddan. It explores the collective suffering of stress at work where achievements distance humans from nature and a fulfilling life and urges readers to be open to changes.
In keeping with the theme of environment, Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed Stephen Alter’s The Fragrance of Rain: A Brief History of the Monsoon. He tells us: “The Fragrance of Rain is much more than a history of weather. It is a meditation on nature, culture, memory, and belonging… Like the season it celebrates, the book is refreshing, nourishing, and lingering in its impact…” While Rakhi Dalal expresses her delight with Shyam Manohar’s The Cold War of Sadanand Borse, a novella translated from Marathi by Jerry Pinto, Meenakshi Malhotra revels in Giti Chandra’s debut book of poems, Setting Traps for Light.
In translations, Professor Fakrul Alam has captured the flavours of Nazrul’s Bengali lyrics, which also echo of the rainy season or monsoons. Isa Kamari brings to us more of his Malay poems in English and Ihlwha Choi shares a rendering of his Korean poem, ‘Dragonfly 2’, into English. One of Tagore’s poems from Balaka (Flight of the Cranes, 1916) has found its way into this issue after being translated. We also have a touching Balochi story around social gaps from the late Abdul Qayum Sarbazi, brought to us in English by Fazal Baloch.
Hughes has continued sharing his short fables, which are absurd but also, comical! A sensitive story about the natural world mingled with Maori concepts by Keiran Martin seems so much in sync with the oceans while Jeena R Papaadi has woven a strange narrative located in a land that only one man could visit. Plamen Vasilev shares a human-interest story set in Europe and Rabiya Rehman takes us to Lahore in quest of a missing destination! Naramsetti Umamaheswararao’s narrative takes us back to a village that opted for trees, thus enriching the environmental lore in this issue.
We have a real life heart rending story from a young girl in our Pandies Corner, written and related by Deeksha Vats, based on the story told by a victim of familial violations and violence.
Our non-fiction section homes Larry Su’s essay on how his life took him from a rural mud cave in Shaanxi province to the glamour of Chicago. Reflecting on the changes he has experienced on his rare visits to his original homeland, Su muses on the cultural and socio-economic gaps he has observed between the two places. Charudutta Panigrahi – as if in direct opposition — shares similarities between two diverse geographies.
Suzanne Kamata explores a custom which may not be that eco-friendly in her column from Japan. Jun A. Alindogan brings home the impact of climate disasters while dwelling on blessings with his narrative about a narrow escape from the Typhoon Ondoy (2009). While Meredith Stephen writes of sailing to Timor Sea with photographs by Alan Noble, Farouk Gulsara takes us on a cycling adventure around the mountains of Titiwangsa. In another musing, he also explores the idea of good and evil in a sardonic tone while Sai Abhinay Penna dwells on the grandeur and vastness of the universe over his morning jog. Gowher Bhat writes of a man for whom age seems to be just a number as he publishes his debut book at 93! One wonders at the frequency of such occurrences — we have writings about two authors above ninety in the June issue. In contrast, Devraj Singh Kalsi brings in mortal fears while writing of visiting doctors with a soupçon of humour – some of it directed at himself.
Perhaps, laughter is really the best medicine to keep well! Ruskin Bond makes us laugh and writes of nature in a way that touches hearts and makes us forget the contrasting glitzy world, where we suffer stress and burnout. Our environment makes a difference, doesn’t it?
With that we wrap up our June issue. Huge thanks to our fabulous team, especially Sohana Manzoor for her wonderful artwork. To all our contributors, heartfelt thanks — we are because you are. And gratitude to our readers who make it worth our while to write and publish here.
We will next meet you during the monsoon months of South Asia though, near the equator, it rains almost every day and, in the Southern Hemisphere, it will be peak winter!
Mud caves in the author’s village: Photo Courtesy: Larry SuChicago: From Public Domain
I left China in 1997 with little more than youthful ambition and the resilience my parents had instilled in me. Since then, the United States has become my second home, first as an international student and later as a naturalised citizen. In nearly three decades, I have returned to my hometown five times, each visit less a simple trip than a pilgrimage, rich with memory, loss, and renewal. Of these, three homecomings stand out most vividly, moments when the presence of my parents, siblings, and villagers reminded me of who I am and where I come from. In their sacrifice, hard work, and quiet endurance, I found lessons in resilience and gratitude that reach beyond my own life and speak to something universal.
Home Visit in 1999
My hometown lies in Heyang County, Shaanxi Province, about fifteen miles from the county seat and five miles from the nearest town. In my memory, a winding dirt road served as the village’s lifeline, linking it with surrounding towns and villages. Though not entirely cut off, the village remained relatively remote, as public transportation was non-existent at the time. To the east and west stretched deep gorges and ravine carved by centuries of rain and snow. Three miles to the north rose Mount Liang, the county’s highest peak, towering yet desolate.
Approximately thirty families, around one hundred and twenty residents, called this village home. The village unfolded along two streets which were riddled with potholes throughout the year. In dry weather, stirred up by the robust northwest wind, a pervasive layer of dust enveloped the streets and the villagers in swirling dances. Conversely, during the rainy season, the thoroughfare turned into a muddy quagmire, making passage difficult. The villagers had to throw in discarded bricks, stones, or fragments of decaying planks to make a makeshift path. Dump sites, replete with smoldering wood, fallen branches, and both animal and human waste, cluttered the sides of the streets. There were very few trees, making the village barren and dreary.
The dwellings varied between mud or brick caves, with a few select families having brick and wood houses when they first settled here. Whatever they were, they had lost their usual shape and colour due to the relentless beating from rain and wind.
Mud caves. Photo Courtesy: Larry Su
We lived in two cave dwellings dug into a high cliff, about three hundred feet from the village street. In front of them lay a small dirt yard, where sheds housed our pigs, ox, chickens, and rabbits. The yard also held the latrine, a simple pit enclosed by dirt walls, whose stench, especially on warm or hot days, often drifted into our living spaces.
This is my hometown, where I was born and lived for eighteen years before leaving for college in Xi’an, the provincial capital, in 1983. I studied English literature at Xi’an International Studies University, earning both my BA and MA degrees, and later joined the faculty of its English Department. I remained there until 1997 when I left for the United States.
Inundated by academic work in graduate school and lack of financial constraints, I did not plan any home visit during my two years of studies in the United States. However, the sudden death of a drunkard in the rooming house I shared with a few American students hastened my decision to make a visit to China.
As a newcomer to the culture, I never linked the drunkard’s brown bags or bulky coat to the heavy drinking that would claim his life. His body was discovered days later, only after the foul smell crept through the air ducts and into our rooms. It happened three weeks before the semester’s end. Fearing I would soon be alone in that eerie house and weighed down by eighteen months of separation from my wife, son, and parents, I hastily bought a plane ticket back to China.
My three-week visit to China was brief, quiet, and deeply comforting. I was overjoyed to see my loved ones and longed to linger in those carefree days, away from foreign foods, stacked books, and unfinished papers. My wife, also a faculty member of Xi’an International Studies University, went to Xianyang International Airport to welcome me back. We traveled by a slow train and a rattling farm tractor to reach my village home. Though I had gone only a short time, I noticed the brick caves, built fifteen years earlier to replace the old loess ones, were already losing mortar. A thin film of black grease from years of cooking stained the walls. Cold air seeped through the cracks in the doors and windows. The animal sheds, with broken doors and missing bricks, made the courtyard even colder and more desolate.
At meals, I noticed my father’s gnarled hands and heavy knuckles rubbed by decades of toil. The gray cotton padded coat was worn out on his shoulders and elbows. Around his waist was a thick hemp rope, the kind used to bundle corn stalks in the fields. Cinched tightly around his coat, it kept the biting wind from slipping in through the gaps, but it looked rough, even absurd. The cotton-padded shoes hand made by my mother were also tattered with cotton exposed. The towel he used to wear over his head in winter had totally lost its whiteness. No doubt life was very hard for them.
During my year and a half in the United States, I spent most of my time in the library and rarely ventured beyond the college campus to see how Americans lived. Still, I caught glimpses of their lives. From visits to my professors’ homes, I saw spacious houses surrounded by trees, lawns, and flowers, with garages large enough for two or three cars. They wore casual yet high-quality clothes, and at parties served sandwiches, barbecued meats, salads, and red wine. Such abundance and variety were things I had never experienced before. Years later, when I owned my own house, I came to understand that Americans had achieved this standard of living after World War II, so I could not help but ask myself: Both Americans and Chinese are human beings, how could their lives be so different, with Americans enjoying plenty, modernity, and comfort, while the Chinese peasants endured poverty, primitiveness, and hardship?
The morning of our departure for Xi’an, my father carried my suitcase on his shoulder, his steps steady on the familiar dirt road, while my wife and I followed behind. The path, worn by years of passing feet and baked dry by windless days, had turned into a powdery film that rose with every footfall, stinging our eyes and filtering into our nostrils. He glanced back and quietly suggested we move to the edges, where the earth was less trampled and the dust less suffocating. As we walked, the frosty wind whistled through the withered corn stalks, their hollow rustle echoing memories I could not keep down.
I was pulled back to those early mornings two decades ago when my father and I walked this same road with a cart of potatoes. Nothing had changed in the region since then. Now with each step, a heavy sadness settled over me. I looked around at the land that my parents lived on for most of their lives; its parched, colourless soil gave little and demanded much.
A few questions throbbed quietly inside me: How lucky I was to escape this poor land! If I had not made it to college, would I be living the same kind of life as my parents? What would be the future for my parents and siblings? When would they finally see a day of plenty, not like the Americans, but be able to eat wheat flour at every meal, not as a holiday luxury, but as an everyday certainty? The silence around us offered no answer, only the sound of the wind scraping through brittle stalks and the soft crunch of dust beneath our shoes.
In less than half an hour, we reached the bus stop. The sun had yet to rise, and the morning air still clung to its chill, though the brisk walk had warmed our bodies. We stood by the roadside, the sky slowly paling, waiting for the van to appear over the horizon. I turned to my father and told him to head back home. He shook his head gently. “I’m not busy,” he said. “Waiting a few more minutes won’t hurt.” He stood beside us, his hands folded deep within his sleeves.
He stood there quietly, patient as ever, perhaps a little awkward too, never at ease in public spaces. Six feet tall and striking in his younger years, he had never learned to take pride in his height or in any part of himself. Life had worn it out of him. Decades of bowing to weather and labour had stripped away any sense of vanity, replacing it with a humility so deep it bordered on invisibility. He saw himself as nothing more than a poor peasant, a man whose only worth came from the work his hands could do in the fields or on the mountain slopes. In his eyes, he was always falling short, always inadequate, someone who never quite belonged unless tethered to a plow, a hoe, or a load on his back.
We waited nearly twenty minutes before the van finally appeared, its headlights slicing through the pale morning mist. When the door creaked open, he stepped forward, lifted our suitcase in, greeted the driver with quiet courtesy, and said, “They are my son and daughter-in-law. They’re heading back to Xi’an.” Then he stepped back, just a pace or two, and stood off to the side, his tall frame silhouetted against the dim sky, waiting without a word. I leaned out and told him he could head home now. “It’s all right,” he replied softly, not moving.
As the van lurched forward, he began to wave slowly at first, then with greater insistence, as if trying to hold on for a moment longer. We waved back, again and again, until the village road curved and he vanished from view. That farewell, quiet and unceremonious, was the last time I would ever see him.
Home Visit in 2009
In August 2009, a year and half after my father’s death, my wife, son and I took a flight from Chicago to Shanghai to visit home. From 1999, when I last saw my father to this homecoming, ten years had passed, yet due to our tight financial situation, we were not able to visit my father and mother. Neither could I attend his funeral in 2007 due to the cost and the hassle of reapplying for a visa after the visit. So this home visit was long overdue. It was a 14-hour flight, and I could not wait for the plane to touch down.
The Shanghai Pudong International Airport was modern, spectacular and state-of-the-art. We waited for two hours to transfer to Xi’an, the nearest city to my wife’s hometown and mine. We first stayed in my wife’s parents’ home for a few days, enjoying the comfort and hospitality my parents-in-law extended to us, but I was counting the days to be with my mother and siblings.
As the car was racing through the newly built highway, my heart was flying home faster than the wheels. When it hit the county seat where my father and I sold potatoes thirty years ago, my heart was pounding faster. I was gripped with a longing and anxiety that I was unable to describe in words. As the car got on the road from the town to the village, memories of the roadside landmarks came back to me: the scattered villages, the apple orchards, and the sudden curves of the road. Now, the surface of the old road had been removed, and a new layer of asphalt had been laid on it. It was also lined with trees. With the summer air and greenness all around, the surroundings were mellow and pleasant.
When the car got to the edge of the big valley before it raced down the slope, I could see vaguely my village. In five minutes, I would get home. My heart tightened and it kept tightening until I felt out of breath. In no time the car arrived at the west end of the village. We almost missed it because the stone lion that was always stationed there had disappeared. As I grew up, the lion was the landmark of the village, and the villagers would always stand there chatting and seeing traffic pass.
Now my feet touched the street I had long missed over the past decade. In my absence, both the houses and the streets had changed beyond recognition. The streets had been widened and cleared of debris. The old dirt houses had given way to brick and cement structures. The gateposts, once made of mud bricks with rough wooden planks for doors, had been replaced by sturdy gleaming metal gates.
The car parked outside the courtyard. My mother and the siblings ran excitedly outside. My mother was older and thinner but in good spirits, as she always was even though she suffered from poor health her entire life. She stooped quite a bit and walked more slowly. Her once abundant hair had also become thin and silvery. My younger brother, my two sisters and their husbands had all changed their clothes for the welcome, but their brown faces, greying hair, and callous hands all gave them away, showing the crushing impact of years of hard labour on their bodies. It was especially heart-breaking to see my two sisters, slightly fairer than their husbands, but still wore rough skin and tired expressions, looking older before their time. They all helped to unpack the car and carried our big suitcases to the sitting room.
In the courtyard, my younger brother had built a new brick flat of three bedrooms. The two on the sides were installed with doors and livable, but not the bigger one in the middle that would require a bigger, specially made door. With the added bedrooms, the living space had been expanded.
I felt its spaciousness, but I also felt its emptiness and loss because of the absence of my father. When he was living and I was in college and graduate school for seven years, his presence in the courtyard filled it with warmth and love. I never failed to see him on the roadside waiting for me when I got off the vehicle. He guessed the dates and would always stand on the roadside to try his luck. Some days he was disappointed when I failed to show up, but when he did see me, his face was all smiles. He walked fast to carry whatever luggage I had. He excitedly exclaimed that he thought it was about time I should return home. He repeated this sentence for years. He put the luggage on the floor of the kitchen, sat in silent contentment at the edge of the Kang[1], and quietly smoked his water pipe while mom was preparing food. I could see that among his life-long laborious hustle and bustle this was the most relaxing and enjoyable moment for him.
For all my years in school from the first grade to graduate school, he never asked what I was learning and how I did it — not that he was not interested or did not care. Given his taciturn nature and lack of education, he felt he was not equipped to inquire about my progress. He knew he could count on me to do well in school. His lack of words conveyed more of his love and expectation than any language could express.
Now he was gone. It must have been very hard for my mother to face the days and nights without him. For more than forty years of marriage, my father bore the burden of most of the fieldwork so that my mother, always in fragile health, could remain at home, focusing on making clothes and preparing meals for us children. Their life together, though often marked by conflicts born of poverty, was sustained by a shared sense of duty to raise five children and to hold on to hope for the future. With her partner gone, the strong shoulder she had leaned on for forty-six years was no longer there. The loneliness must have been overwhelming.
I looked forward to being by her side in this difficult time, but I was also weary of the return. After all these hard years, I finally made it, becoming a professor in an American university. The status of a well-educated intellectual teaching in a Chinese college was enough to call for admiration, let alone a professor teaching in America. Even today, the mention of America would create in listeners associations with wealth, money, status, and superiority, yet could I have delayed my father’s death? Could I have done more for him and the family? What could I have done differently? At the bottom of my heart, I felt embarrassment, regret and guilt.
We were led into the sitting room of the new house which my younger brother had built. Right on the wall of the sitting room, I saw a big canvas portrait of my father’s bust my close friend asked made for his funeral. I stared at that picture. All the emotions that had been pent up within me seemed to explode. I sobbed with tears pouring down my face. The picture was probably taken shortly before his death. His hair was receding, short and mostly white. His stubble also grew white and had not been trimmed for a few days. His skin, due to long years of exposure to the sun, rain, snow and wind, had lost its hue and become dark brown. Wrinkles were engraved on his forehead and around his shrunk and mournful eyes. The hard life had reduced a tall and handsome young man into a visage too painful to see.
My younger brother helped me to our father’s memorial tablet in another room. On the table was another picture of him and some tributes like incense, dry fruits and paper that we burnt for him. I lighted a few incense sticks and knelt on the floor. I said I was sorry to come home late, and I asked for his forgiveness. For all these years, all my father did was work. He never stopped working till his last breath. He gave all he had to his poor family. He started his life’s journey early, walked on the frozen road of hardship for years, and his life was cut short because of too much exertion and exhaustion. He died too early. He did not deserve any of these.
I wished that my stable financial and overall status change in America had come earlier, so that I could do something for my father and family. It took me seven years to obtain my master’s and PhD degrees before I found my current job. It was difficult for me and my family. Both my wife and I depended on assistantships in the States to finish our doctoral degrees and raise our son, but it was harder for my Chinese family left behind. How did he and the family survive all the hardships all these years? From time to time, I called and asked how the family was doing, my father, as reticent as he was always, would say, “The same as usual. Now we had enough to eat.” He never shared details. He did not want me to worry.
Now he was dead. For his short sixty-nine years he lived a hard life, supporting his wife and five children. Never did a day go by without him thinking how he would put food on the table and, when we were young, how to save to send us to school.
One scene remains vivid in my memory. When I was in elementary school, my father, elder brother, and I hauled a cart of potatoes to the county market sixteen miles away. We stood beside the cart the entire day until every sack was sold. By the time we started home, night had fallen, and the air was dark and cold. Near the outskirts of town, we stopped at a nearly deserted food stand. My father bought my brother and me a bowl of noodles to ease our hunger and warm our stomachs. For himself, he asked only for a bowl of hot noodle broth, free of charge, into which he soaked the cornbread we had brought from home. That was his dinner. After a whole day in the cold—calling to passersby, weighing potatoes, helping customers pack their goods—he longed for a bowl of noodles that cost barely three American cents, but he would not spend that money, choosing instead to save every coin for daily necessities and for his children’s tuition and supplies.
This was who my father was, a hard-working yet destitute Chinese peasant living at the bottom of society, always lacking food, money, and the basic necessities, dying so untimely without enjoying a day of hearty meal and relaxed mind, leaving nothing behind for people to remember him by: no money, no property, no words, except the good memories people had of him. Is this what life is? What kind of world is this? Who should be held responsible for him and people like him?
It had never occurred to my father to complain against any individual, institution or society. Like millions of Chinese peasants living from the 1960s to the end of the 1970s, he was a victim of his time marked by the Great Leap Forward, the People’s Commune Movement, the Great Famine, and most devastating of all, the ten-year long Proletariat Cultural Revolution. It was estimated that over forty million Chinese starved to death just from the Great Famine from 1958-1961.
During my short stay at home, I ventured to the villages nearby. I saw peasants as old as in their 70s and 80s, stooped and frail, still toil day in and day out in the poor soil, to contribute to their sons’ building a new house or paying their daughters’ dowry. I read about millions of migrant workers, leaving their aging parents and small children behind, selling their labour to factories and workshops in big cities earning $600 a month. They work fourteen hours a day with only one or two days off in a month.
My 45-year-old sister recently worked in a factory in Guangdong. She told me she worked more than fourteen hours a day, with only two short meal breaks of about twenty-five minutes each. The rest of the time she stood in front of a machine, collecting washing machine parts that poured out nonstop. She could not step away, even briefly, without parts piling up and crashing to the floor. To prevent this, she avoided drinking water so she would not need to use the restroom as often.
I often wonder what our father would think, knowing from the grave that his grown children, though no longer hungry or ragged, still must toil so hard to make a living. They still depend on crops and apple orchards for survival. They still lack savings for family emergencies, vacations, or helping their children marry.
Home Visit in 2019
I visited China in May 2019, during which I delivered a lecture entitled “William Faulkner and His Works” at my alma mater. Before the talk, a formal ceremony was held, and I was awarded an honorary professorship. I had invited my mother to attend, but she declined. For a woman in possession of a lifelong interest in meeting people and seeing new places, her refusal seemed unusual.
Later I learned that her health had declined sharply over the past two years, making long trips difficult. This became painfully clear during my walks with her in the village. I held her weakened arm, little more than thin flesh over bone, as we moved slowly along the path. Every few minutes she had to stop and sit, murmuring that her legs were too weak to carry her farther.
As I walked with her through the village, I noticed many changes. The streets had been paved with cement, streetlights now stood on every post, and running water had been installed in every household, yet the village also felt emptier. Wealthier families had moved to the county seat, and younger men and women had left for jobs in larger cities. What remained were mostly the elderly and children, giving the village a quiet and desolate air.
My younger brother had upgraded his home. In September, I learned from my younger brother that our mother was seriously ill. It started with a few swollen teeth, then a big ball grew on one side of her face, so big that it squeezed her eye. My brother and sisters thought it might be some infection that would heal in a week or two, but when it became more than two weeks, they decided to take her to the county hospital, only to be told that they could not treat her, that she needed to be transferred to a hospital in Xi’an. She was taken to the emergencies of two big hospitals, only to be told that they could not treat her.
They then took her to the third hospital affiliated with the Fourth Military Medical University, one of the best ones in Xi’an. I happened to have a friend working there, and I called him repeatedly, asking if he could help arrange for my mother to see a doctor. Through his connection, she was admitted to the emergency department. A team of specialists were assembled, and they diagnosed her case as advanced oral cancer, with very slim chances of recovery. If we insisted on treatment, two hospitals would need to be involved. Part of her face would have to be cut, and her chest opened to drain the fluid. Given her age, the likelihood of surviving such a surgery was minimal.
After careful discussion, my brother, sisters, and I decided to forego the attempt and brought her home, leaving her final days in God’s hands. It was indeed a hard decision for us. We felt extremely guilty for our mother did not deserve to die this way, yet she accepted it with resignation and sigh. She said, “How did the Lord allow this weird illness to happen to me?” For two weeks she lay on bed, becoming weaker day by day, withering away until she lost her last breath.
Since she was diagnosed, I had been preparing to fly back to China for the funeral. Because of my absence from my father’s funeral, I was determined to attend my mother’s funeral, to make sure she had a decent burial. I told my siblings that I would be glad to pay for all the expenses. That was the least I could do to show a little appreciation for what she did for the family and me. I spent fourteen hours flying from Chicago to Beijing, then two hours from Beijing to Xi’an, then four hours of drive home. By the time I arrived home, more than twenty-four hours had passed.
The moment I knelt before my mother’s dead body in a coffin, my eyes were filled with tears. I told her how sorry I was not to be with her for the last weeks now that she was forever gone. With a heavy heart and hasty breath, my words were repeatedly interrupted by my sobbing. My brother and sisters, kneeling beside me, tried to calm me down and asked me not to be carried away by my grief.
The second day was filled with preparations for the funeral. A few large tents, complete with tables and chairs, were rented and set up by a group of young men. The caterers arrived in their big truck, bringing utensils, meats, and vegetables. They busily set up the stove, chopped the meat, and cleaned the vegetables. In the nearby field, the grave diggers worked diligently, laying bricks to line the walls of the grave. My brother and I carried home-prepared food to the gravesite, along with light refreshments, cigarettes, and liquor, as tokens of our appreciation for everyone’s efforts.
The funeral ceremony was held the next day. Relatives, villagers and the people nearby packed the small square in front of the courtyard. My mother’s coffin was carried by a few strong men from the house outside and placed on a frame for people to pay their last respect. Our sisters and the women relatives knelt around the coffin, cried and chanted the hard life my mother had lived, while my elder brother, younger one, and I knelt in front of the coffin. The band started to play music of mournful nature.
I then stood up and gave a short eulogy outlining mother’s sacrifice and her impact on us. As I started to utter those words, they invoked images of the past years when my mother, always in poor health, did her best to make clothes and food for us. I especially mentioned how she insisted on us siblings going to school to get an education during a financially challenged times. Without her push, encouragement and resourcefulness, our lives now would be different.
When the ceremony ended, the coffin was placed on a motorized vehicle for transport to the graveyard. As it moved slowly toward the site, we siblings, along with relatives and villagers, followed behind, carrying the funeral decorations. When the coffin was about to be lowered into the grave, everyone gathered along the sides. I offered a prayer for my mother, thanking the Lord for bringing her into our lives and for all she had done for our family. I asked Him to remember her sacrifices and contributions and to welcome her into heaven. I recited a verse from Revelation 21:4: “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.” After my prayer, the villagers helped cover the grave with cement boards and dirt.
On the journey back home, and later on the flight to the United States, my thoughts were consumed by the many sacrifices my mother had made. She did not come from this region. She was born into a prosperous doctor’s family in Gansu Province, but during the national famine, she was forced to leave Gansu and migrate to Shaanxi, where she married my father. Within four years, she had given birth to three sons, placing an immense burden on our already poor family, and later she bore two daughters. Years of poor health, inadequate nutrition, and endless labour to provide food and clothing for the family left her frail. I remembered how she often lay on her side, wracked with pain from stomach ulcers caused by malnutrition, yet the family could not afford medicine.
My mother was a very ordinary peasant woman. She had only three years of schooling, yet she understood the value of education and how it could shape the future of her children. One memory remains carved in my mind. Every time I returned home from four years of boarding school, she made sure I had a bowl of noodles to give me some nourishment. Our family was extremely poor and survived mostly on corn and sweet potatoes, yet she used the small amount of wheat flour she had saved to make me that simple meal. Watching me enjoy a hearty bowl after days of dry corn bread and hot water brought her more joy than when she ate the food herself. She would sit beside me, relaxed and smiling, asking about school as I devoured the noodles.
I recalled more… One winter during high school, I was short just one dollar of my tuition. My homeroom teacher, stern and unyielding, made me walk five miles home and warned me not to return without the full amount. My parents, especially my mother, went from house to house in the village, humbly pleading for a small loan for a week or two. Most turned them away, citing their own hardships, but a few, out of pity, offered a yuan or two. By late afternoon, the small contributions had added up. I returned to school at dusk.
Now that both of my parents are gone, I probably will not return as often as I once did, yet home will always hold a permanent place in my life, its significance untouched by time. It has become a wellspring that nourishes me, as it has for many years. Whenever I think of home, I remember my parents, siblings, and the villagers. Their hope, hard work, and resilience have inspired me throughout my studies, career, and life. I have always thought: if my parents could endure those grueling years, far harsher than anything I have faced, I could persevere as well.
Struggling with a difficult reading, drafting a paper, or completing a PhD dissertation feels like a minor challenge compared to the battles they fought for food, clothing, tuition, farming tools, seeds, and fertilizers. For my challenges, I could seek more time or consult a professor. For my parents, failing to buy seeds or fertilizers in time could mean missing a season, leaving the family without a harvest, a matter of life and death. It is almost unimaginable how they survived those years. Their stories of sacrifice and resilience must be remembered and passed down through generations.
I have benefited most from their hard work and sacrifice. I owe a profound debt of gratitude first to my parents, and then to my siblings. My father spent his life labouring in the fields, always placing his faith in the land; my mother devoted herself to cooking and sewing, always ensuring we were clean and presentable. My siblings, who left school early, worked alongside our parents, giving all they had to support the family. I, the one who stayed in school the longest, completing graduate studies, reaped the rewards of their toil and perseverance. Without their sacrifices, I might be living the same life as my siblings today, repeating the same exhausting work my parents endured. For my entire life, I can never fully repay what they gave to our family.
Beyond feelings of indebtedness, these homecoming visits also prompt me to reflect on deeper issues. The contrast between my life and that of my siblings in China could not be more striking. It is almost as if I live in a king’s palace, eating what I want, buying what I desire, and traveling to places that interest me, without concern for cost, while they worry daily about whether there will be enough rain for the crops, whether they can save enough for their children’s education, or whether they have enough to face unexpected emergencies. Yes, they do not go hungry, but their lives remain far from secure or comfortable. Witnessing their struggles, I often feel guilty that I cannot do more for them. I cannot help but wonder why some people are able to change their lives through hard work, while others, despite equal or greater effort, cannot. Is there such a thing as fate? What lies behind it, and can it be changed?
I cannot answer these and the frustrations that are hard to quell, I remain hopeful and calm. My parents often told us when we were children that even though we could not control the weather or the harvest, we must give our best effort and never let drought, storm, or hail prevent us from planting the next season’s crops.
I realise homecoming is no longer simply about returning to a physical place; it is about returning to the essence of who I am. My parents’ fields, the worn paths of our village, and the laughter and burdens shared with my siblings shaped the foundation upon which my entire life was built. Though I may not walk those village roads as often as before, they live within me, and every achievement of mine carries their unseen footprints. My parents’ sacrifices and my siblings’ endurance gave me the privilege of education and the chance to live a life far removed from the toil of farming. Their lives remind me that fate is both mysterious and humble. We cannot fully explain why one child remains tied to the land while another journeys across oceans into universities and cities; nor can we fully reconcile the injustices of unequal rewards for equally hard labor. Still in this tension between destiny and effort lies the lesson my parents embodied: We must keep planting seeds, even when the harvest is uncertain. Their resilience teaches me that while we may not command the outcomes of life, we can command the spirit with which we endure it.
Thus, homecoming becomes more than nostalgia. It is a renewal of faith, gratitude, and responsibility. It compels me to remember not only what I received but also what I must pass on: the stories of hardship, the virtues of perseverance, and the wisdom of contentment. Just as my parents left behind a legacy of strength and dignity, I too must carry forward their spirit, telling and retelling their stories so that the future generations may know the price paid for their opportunities.
Even as life pulls me farther from the village, home will remain my wellspring, reminding me of the values that no distance can erase. In remembering, I find balance between guilt and gratitude, between abundance and humility, and between fate and choice. And in this balance, I carry with me the most enduring inheritance my parents left behind: the courage to live with resilience and the grace to be content in every circumstance.
[1] A heatable clay bed, a traditional Chinese sleeping platform made of earth or brick. It has hollow interior channels connected to a stove or external fire source, circulating warm air to heat the clay mass and provide energy-efficient warmth during cold winters
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Larry S. Su has been a professor of literature and writing for the past thirty years. He has also been a passionate reader and ardent writer since college. He writes both in Chinese and English, and his writings have appeared extensively in the Chinese and English publications, mostly in the form of articles and essays.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
More than twenty-five years have passed since we first met, and I still do not understand what drew me to Gurmit so tenaciously. Gurmit was wont to insist, “Chris. We were together in a past life, and something went tragically wrong. We are forced to get it right in our subsequent lives.” I used to rubbish his explanation for our inexplicable bond but I have no better explanation.
Our story in this life began at O’Hare airport in March 1994. For me, it was lust at first sight. There is no other way to describe my visceral reaction to the man I saw standing ahead of me at our San Francisco gate. I immediately fixated upon his dark black, soft, uncut beard tucked up under his chin. His pink, supple lips. A generous topknot was gathered up into his sloppily wrapped pale blue turban. He was several inches taller than me with his turban. I overheard him speaking in a luscious—but not posh—British accent. He was the most handsome man I had ever seen. And when confronted by his beauty, I felt my stomach seize up. The smell of the coffee wafting from the Starbucks nearby made me nauseous. I was suddenly conscious about my unwashed waist-length hair, my unfashionably long shabby dress with knockoff Birkenstocks, the nails I bit down to the nub with chewed up cuticles and my face, which was speckled with red pimples unmasked by makeup.
I listened closely as he approached the staff at the gate. I overheard her assign him seats 16C and D. Evidently, he wasn’t alone. I wondered if perhaps he had a wife. After he left the counter, I next approached the gate agent and requested 16B. She smiled knowingly and said in a distinctly flat Chicago accent, “Honey, that seat is taken but I’ll get you as close as I can.” She winked at me as she gave me 14A.
I followed him back to where he was seated in the lounge. He was with a portly, stygian, clean-shaven man. They were speaking in Punjabi, which was a language I was studying in my doctoral program in South Asian Languages and Civilisations at the University of Chicago. I discerned from their conversation that the man was his uncle. Gauging from his accent, I surmised he was born in India. I tried to make eye contact with the man in the turban, but he didn’t notice me notice me. Why would he? I was unremarkable and he was engrossed in the conversation with his overbearing uncle.
When it was time to board the plane, I was close behind him. I wanted to find a way to strike up some small talk, but the uncle was a formidable adversary. Daunted, I continued eavesdropping on their conversation. They were going to visit relatives in San Jose. I noticed that there was no wedding band on either of his meticulously clean hands. I felt queasy—in a good way. I was twenty-three and inexperienced, but I knew I wanted him.
Once the flight reached cruising altitude, I pulled out a notebook, tore out a piece of paper, and wrote to him in Punjabi, “If you’re not married, you can call me when you reach San Francisco. I’ll be at this number… Don’t be freaked out if a man answers. It’s my friend Gene. I’m staying with him.”
When the flight attendants were up and about, I folded the missive and turned on the call light. An officious flight attendant arrived. “Ma’am, can you hand this to the man in the light blue turban in 16C?” She smiled wryly as she took the note from my hand. Then I watched in agony as she made her way to 16C. Suddenly, I was struck by the horrifying thought that this British-born Sikh may not read Punjabi. But…his older uncle, with the Indian accent, likely did.
As soon as the seat-belt light went off, I practically ran down the aisle to reach the man struggling to read my note. “Hi. I’m Chris. I sent that note,” I said out of breath, pointing to the offending letter with my left and extending my right hand in a shake.
The man was befuddled but not displeased. “I’m Gurmit. Nice to meet you,” as he extended his own hand. Ignoring the curious uncle, I explained the content of my note as my face flushed deep red, and my hands trembled. My heart was leaping out of my chest. I pulled back my waist-long hair and blurted out quietly “I am in San Francisco for the week. I’d like to meet you if you are game. My number is in the note.”
I bolted in terror before he could respond. I had never been so impulsive before, and I was mortified by the thought of rejection after making such an ass of myself. But he was evidently intrigued if the curious grin on his face was any valid clue. Back in my seat, I was seized by thoughts of this Gurmit and what I should’ve said instead of running back to my seat.
The plane landed. He made eye contact with me and smiled as we disembarked. My friend Gene was waiting for me at the baggage claim. We continued to his apartment in the Haight. During the drive, I blubbered, “Gene, I did the craziest thing on the plane. I sent this note to some British Sikh dude who was totally hot. I told him to call me here if he wants to hook up.” I blurted it out in one breath hurriedly to preclude Gene from interrupting with his usual “You did what?” Gene’s stiff posture slackened, from which I concluded he was impressed and appalled at the same time. “How do you know you didn’t give my number to some psycho?” Gene thought the
whole thing was a cockup and was dubious that the dude in the turban would call. Nonetheless, he offered suggestions on tourist sites.
Once at Gene’s home, I anxiously awaited a phone call that may or may not come. Gene and I made small talk while I kept looking down at my watch. Gene would occasionally say with his familiar ‘I told you so’ voice, “He isn’t going to call you. What you did was insane.” Three hours later, the phone rang. Gene answered. “It’s for you, Chris. It’s that British guy you mentioned,” Gene belted out in complete surprise as he handed me the handset. My hands shook as I took the receiver, “Chris, it’s Gurmit. From the plane.” His voice stirred an unfamiliar feeling in my body. It was desire. “Do you want to see the sites with me tomorrow?” I excitedly exclaimed, “Absolutely! What about meeting at the Fisherman’s Warf, Pier 39, at 10 am?” He eagerly agreed.
After a restless night of fitful sleep, we met at the appointed place and hour. We spent the day seeing the tourist sites in San Francisco. Both of us preferred to see the city on foot. Sometimes we’d tuck into a cute restaurant for a bite to eat or to have a cup of coffee for me, tea for him. This gave us ample opportunities to speak with each other, cramming as much information gathering into the day as possible. Gurmit and I turned out to be the same age. When I asked Gurmit why he came to Chicago, he explained “I am a doctor in London. I came to Chicago to learn how to treat gunshot wounds and other traumatic injuries.”
“But why did you have to come to Chicago to study this, Gurmit?”
“Because we don’t have enough gunshot injuries in London to study,” Gurmit said sheepishly.
“Are you doing your residency to be a trauma surgeon?”
“No. I am just doing an externship in trauma work; my main medical profession is obstetrics and gynecology.”
I recoiled briefly. I had always disapproved of men being gynecologists, and I refused to avail of them. I preferred Gurmit as a trauma surgeon.
“What do you do, Chris, and how do you know so much about South Asia and Punjabi?” I explained that I’m doing my PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilisations, focusing on Sikh diasporas and the Punjabi language. Gurmit lit up. “I’m actually doing a PhD as well in reproductive medicine,” he enthused. We shared our stress of doing doctorates.
Apart from our academic interests, however divergent, perhaps the most important commonality was that both of us had recently lost our mothers to cancer. We bonded over our still-raw grief and our varied, complex relations with our living siblings. He had two sisters. I had two half-brothers. We also discussed our problematic fathers.
“Chris, I have to warn you. I come from a traditional Sikh family. My family cannot come to know of us meeting. My uncle is cool. But my father will sternly object.”
This was a chilling harbinger of things that would come hurtling our way in time. But we agreed to see where this went before agonising over his regressive father.
“Gurmit, I also have to tell you something. I don’t really know my father. He’s a deadbeat dad.”
If Gurmit was shocked by the nature of my paternity, his face didn’t reveal it.
With his family obligations in San Jose and my obligations to my friend Gene, we didn’t spend but one or two more days together that week. On the ferry from Alcatraz back to shore, our bodies grew close under the setting sun. Gurmit cupped my face and kissed me for the first time. I felt the softness of his moustache on my upper lip. My stomach fluttered as his tongue met mine and his hand moved to my lower back. We lingered in that kiss for minutes. It was not a hungry kiss. It was a tender kiss. It was a kiss that said I want you, but let’s take our time.
After we parted ways in San Francisco, we wrote letters weekly and we spoke on the phone when we could, which was very expensive in the early 1990s. We planned to meet in London a few months later, in June. I was on my way to India for the summer, where I would study Hindi and hopefully Punjabi in the idyllic—if very wet during the Monsoon—northern Indian hill station of Mussoorie. Throughout the duration of the flight, over numerous gins and tonic, I pondered what we would do and how we would do it when we met. Prior to leaving, I joked, with more seriousness than levity, with my saucy girlfriend Carmen, “The only parts of London I want to see are the walls and ceiling of Gurmit’s bedroom.” I imagined a romantic meeting at the airport.
The plane landed and disgorged its passengers. I passed through baggage claim, where I picked up my singular item: a large rucksack crammed haphazardly with Indian clothes for the summer, some notebooks, and Hindi and Punjabi grammars. I looked for Gurmit everywhere. He was nowhere to be seen. An hour passed. Then two. I felt the sour taste of panic rising in the back of my throat. Tears welled up and streamed hot down my cheeks. I was heartbroken and terrified. “What the hell have I done?” I wondered aloud.
To tame the panic, I flipped through the expanse of my 650-odd-page Lonely Planet India. Repeatedly. I tried to take naps, cuddled up to my ruck sack on the waiting area floor. After three hours, I wrote him off. He must have gotten cold feet, I presumed. Crestfallen, I began making my way to the ticket agent to change my flight. Then, at the last possible moment, I heard Gurmit call out “Chris! I’m over here! Where are you going, silly?” He had just arrived. He was sweaty, out of breath, and completely oblivious to the terror and disappointment I was experiencing despite my obviously tear-streaked face.
Unable to sublimate my anger, I barked at him, “Where the flaming hell have you been? I was literally on my way to book myself on the next flight to Delhi! I was scared to death, goddamnit, Gurmit. Goddamnit!” Gurmit was sheepish. With downcast eyes, he tried to explain his inexplicable lateness.
“I’m really sorry, luv. I set off from dad’s place in Gravesend late and missed several commuter trains to London.”
I pointed out the obvious, “If this were important, you would’ve left early, and you would have caught those trains.” I was still crying.
He offered one apology after the next, which I begrudgingly accepted. But it took several hours for me to shake off the anger and disappointment at him not being there when I arrived. There was no romantic reception.
While I was still stewing, we were making our way through a series of Tube and bus connections. “Here’s an A to Zed of London, which you’ll need while you’re here,” he said, foisting a massive tome into my hands. I was utterly befuddled as he tried to explain this collection of endless maps and, with repeated reference to it, sought to explain to me where we were going and how. “I know. It’s overwhelming, innit? But you’ll figure it out. You’re smart,” he said, beaming a wide, toothsome grin.
At long last, we arrived at the aging brownstone walkup in Golders Green he called home. This too failed to meet my expectations. I presumed that because he was a doctor, he had the means to have his own flat. It turns out that young doctors are not well-heeled in the United Kingdom.
“So,” he paused with some embarrassment, “I’m renting a room from an elderly lady.” He could see the disappointment on my face. When we climbed the stairs and entered the flat, the octogenarian greeted us with tea. She was deeply chary of me from the first moment she laid eyes on me. She announced, while taking a sip of her tea, with precision in the Queen’s English, “The young lady shall not be allowed to spend the evenings in the flat.”
Without putting up a fuss, Gurmit explained to me, “You will stay with my younger sister, Saabjit. She’s only an hour away by bus. I’ll show you where she is in the A to Zed.” I shuddered at the thought of making my way here with that ominous and overwhelming volume.
Saying goodbye to the officious landlady reeking of rosewater and talc, we entered his room and closed the door. The chemistry that overtook me at O’Hare airport engulfed me once we were alone. We kissed for what seemed like ages. Then, at long last and while looking into my eyes, he slipped my dress gingerly over my head. He undid my ponytail and scattered my hair about my naked shoulders and began to kiss my clavicle. Horribly ashamed, I said “Gurmit, I’m on my period.” To which he cheekily responded, “I’m a gynecologist. Do you think I care?” His smile put me at ease. He removed his turban and set it upon his desk, and untied his topknot. His long, black, thick hair tumbled below his waist, releasing a scent of coconut with which he plied his hair.
I was utterly mesmerised by the beauty of this man. I opened myself to him, forgetting my anger from several hours before. He kissed me tenderly on my lips as he entered me with his voluminous hair falling around my face. Our bodies intertwined. Our smells comingled. We made love until we were exhausted. Gurmit was the most sharing and attentive lover. He went to every length to pleasure me. After we made love, Gurmit braided our hair together in the low evening light. Then he smiled at me and said “Now I’ve got ya.” But in truth I wasn’t going anywhere…except to his sister’s house to spend the night.
During that week in London, we fell into a routine. During the day, he and I would stay together until late at night. Unable to control ourselves around each other, we made love in an offbeat section of Regent’s Park, in the unlit alcove of an apartment building in Golders Green, in a cemetery near his house, in the bathroom at a bar in Swiss Cottage. Then Gurmit would deposit me at his sister’s flat, where I would sleep until nine or so, have breakfast, then make my way over to Gurmit’s flat, where our shenanigans would begin anew.
At the end of the whirlwind week, I realised that I still didn’t know this man. I had not met any of his friends. Our bond was largely physical. I enjoyed being in his presence, but our physical attraction to each other made it impossible to get to know him at a deeper level. All I knew by the end of the week was that I wanted more of Gurmit. I wanted more opportunities to go beyond our sexual attraction and intrepid encounters. Then, at the end of that week, I hopped on a plane and went to India for the summer.
Despite being busy with my studies in Mussoorie, I was unable to stop thinking of Gurmit. Then, after a few weeks, my period was late. I needed to speak with Gurmit. But in those days, making international calls from India was not straightforward or affordable. One had to find an agent who would book the extremely expensive call. I called Gurmit at his flat several times, but his landlady reported, “Sorry, dear. He’s still at work.” After five or six increasingly stress-filled efforts, I finally reached him and blurted out, “Gurmit, my period is very late.” Without missing a beat, Gurmit said, “Chris, that is terrific news. I want to marry you. I hope you know that.”
I was taken aback.
I was not ready to be a mom or a wife. Up to that point, our relationship was physical rather than emotional. Being alone and pregnant in India was not something that I could countenance. I had no idea how to even begin finding an abortion facility. After three panic-filled weeks, my period finally came. Perhaps my period was just irregular, as it sometimes was in those young years of womanhood, or perhaps I miscarried. When I began to bleed, I again called Gurmit. After several attempts, once more, I reached him. “Gurmit, we’re in luck! My period came!” I was ecstatic. I was practically crying from relief. But Gurmit was devastated. “Oh Chris. I was really looking forward to being the father of your baby.” I felt discomfited by this claim, given the nature of our relationship.
During most Monsoon days in Mussoorie, it rained nonstop. I had to have my clothes dry-cleaned because it was impossible to dry them outside. Leeches were a common nuisance on the hour-long trek up the hill to class and down again. After class, I would return to the room I had rented in a guesthouse. The rain falling on my tin roof created a romantic atmosphere that made me miss Gurmit poignantly.
I wrote to him daily after lunch and made my way through the rain and leaches to the post-office in the next bazaar. He was an equally vigorous letter writer. We exchanged details of our days and our expectations for our next meeting on my return trip in early October. I told him about the monkeys who slipped through the bars of my room to eat my peanut butter, and he told me about interesting patients he had treated and their infertility challenges. He updated me on Saabjit’s various hijinks. Through those letters, I began to get to get a sense of who Gurmit was as a person, how he spent his days, what he dreamed about and what he wanted from this life.
October finally came. I made my way from the cool climbs of Mussoorie to the inferno that was Delhi for my flight home to Chicago via London. This time, when I landed in London, I did not expect Gurmit to be on time. I saddled up to a coffee shop with a book and waited for him. An hour or so later, Gurmit arrived with his perfunctory apologies. I didn’t even bother asking him why he was late. Our time in London was brief. Before returning to London, I informed Gurmit that I wanted to celebrate my birthday in Edinburgh. Dutifully, Gurmit booked our tickets on a comfortable bus, and we passed the eight-hour journey canoodling and generally discomfiting the other passengers with our altogether too public displays of affection.
At the hotel in Edinburgh, we settled in quickly, and our hands immediately began exploring and undressing each other’s bodies. I wish I could remember the details of the hotel room. But all I remember is how ravenous we were for each other. “Chris, luv, do you mind fetching the condoms from my coat pocket?” However, when I went to his coat pocket, I found just two condoms. “Gurmit, condoms come in clusters of three. Where the hell is the third condom?” I demanded accusatorily. Gurmit’s face was ashen.
“Chris, what are you talking about? What are you suggesting?”
“Gurmit, I think you know exactly what I’m suggesting. Who was—or maybe is—she? One of your goddamned nurses?”
Gurmit insisted that there was nothing awry. But I didn’t believe him. I didn’t sleep with him that night. A seed of doubt had been planted, and I was beginning to feel like a fool for thinking this amazing man was all that he seemed.
A few days later, I was on a plane back to Chicago.
Back in Chicago, those seeds of doubt sprouted and took root. We were still together, but other problems quickly emerged. Gurmit, as he explained on the first day, was from a traditional Sikh family. Although his father, who lived with his older widowed sister, had been living in Gravesend for more than three decades, he still followed the lifestyle of India in the 1960s. His father expected Gurmit and his two sisters to have arranged marriages. Gurmit was the oldest. Any socially unacceptable behavior on his part would compromise the arranged marriage prospects for his two younger sisters.
However, neither wanted the arranged marriages being foisted upon them. I had spent enough time with the youngest sister, Saabjit, in London to know that she would do most things to avoid an arranged marriage, and if those things comprised a ‘to do’ list, she was making her way through that list efficiently. Paramjit, the older of the two sisters, had escaped to Australia to avoid being gheraoed by her father’s plans for an arranged marriage in 1991. And to triumphantly hammer the final nail in that coffin, she hooked up with a white guy and had two children out of wedlock with him. Their father disowned her and her children.
Given Saabjit’s myriad misadventures, Gurmit asked that I let Saabjit live with me in Chicago. He thought my nerdy ways would have a salubrious effect upon her. I welcomed Saabjit to our couch, where she joined me and the Chinese husband-wife duo, who were my roommates. But Saabjit was incorrigible. She was shoplifting, picking up drug dealers at the laundromat, and disporting with miscreants that she found loafing about near McDonald’s on 53rd Street.
“Saabjit, aim higher than drug dealers, for fuck’s sake! You’re just putting yourself and me at great risk.”
“Chris, just because you’re fucking my brother, doesn’t mean you get to tell me what to do.”
After the dustup I called Gurmit. “Gurmit, you need to come out here. She’s going to get herself into big trouble. Hell, she’s going to get me in trouble.”
By the end of the week, Gurmit was in Chicago. “Saabjit. Chris is right. Find a professional man. Stop chasing the hooligans.”
Saabjit was clear in her response to him too, “Gurmit. Fuck off.” As if by plan, she got pregnant. She returned to London to have the baby. She was twenty-one.
When her father learned that she had given birth to a half-Black daughter through the Punjabi rumour network, he was predictably enraged. He gave her an ultimatum: put the child up for adoption and accept an arranged marriage to whomever he found for her at once, or else. She went underground.
As Gurmit and I were becoming more serious and as I spent more time in London, the responsibility reposed in Gurmit began eroding our relationship because the prospects for our future were increasingly dim. If we were walking down the street together in London and Gurmit saw another Punjabi in the distance, he would let go of my hand and speed up or even cross the street to get away from me. He was terrified of the Punjabi rumour mill and its devastating efficiency.
“Gurmit, it really hurts my feelings when you do that.”
“Sorry, luv. If my dad finds out, I’m in big trouble.”
We increasingly fought about Gurmit’s endgame or lack thereof. He kept insisting that we could get married once his sisters were “settled” even though they were never going to be settled in the preferred sense intended by the Sikhs of Gravesend.
There had been a window of opportunity for our relationship to progress meaningfully in spite of these constraints. Before the third year of my doctoral program, I could have switched to a comparable program in London, provided I could get admitted. However, Gurmit was still scared to death of getting caught. And when I perceived the window to be closed because I was now committed to Chicago, I told Gurmit I couldn’t live like this anymore. He had to be willing to break from his father’s expectations if he wanted to be with me. I needed to know that there was a future rather than an endless string of presents. And Gurmit simply could not do that. I broke up with him.
I concentrated upon my doctoral work and tried to put him out of my mind. That worked for a few years. In 1998, I moved to Los Angeles to work for the RAND Corporation. Alone in a new, overwhelming, and sprawling city, I thought about him often. I read and re-read his letters, and I fell in love with him all over again. Unable to resist the urge, I called him at his father’s home in Gravesend.
“Gurmit, it’s Chris. I’m calling from Los Angeles.”
Gurmit was excited to hear my voice. “Why are you calling?”
“Well, remember when you braided our hair together? I’ve been thinking about that a lot.”
“Me too, Chris. Me too.”
“Is there any chance you can come to LA? I’d like to try again?”
Within ten days, Gurmit was in Los Angeles. Our physical attraction was as strong as ever. But our lovemaking was tainted with sadness. After all, what had changed? I was afraid to ask Gurmit if he could tell his dad about us because deep down, I knew the answer.
Once, when I curled up against his body in bed, I cautiously asked: “Gurmit, how can we be together if you won’t tell your dad or at least marry me anyway?” He continued to harp on the necessary but insufficient condition of his sisters’ arranged marriages. I was livid.
“Gurmit, your sisters are mothers now.”
Gurmit’s position hadn’t evolved at all. Left with no choice, I explained, “Gurmit, I want you. I want us. But if you still can’t take on your dad, nothing is possible. I need you to leave on the next flight.”
Begrudgingly but without complaint, Gurmit was gone the next day. Years passed. We made a few furtive efforts to get back together. Each time was bedeviled by the same problem.
In April of 2004, I moved to Washington, D.C. for a job with the United States Institute of Peace. A month later, I met Jeff, the man I would marry. Later in December, we learned that I was pregnant, and so in March 2005, I married Jeff. We lost our baby the week before we married. Jeff was with me from the beginning to the bitter end of that tragic pregnancy. Then we lost again a few months later. For the second miscarriage, Jeff was distant and disengaged. This was a poisonous weed that took root early in our marriage.
While the losses created a distance in our new marriage, his parents pried those distances further. My mother-in-law, Mary, would say “Chris. You’re white trash. You come from the wrong side of the tracks, and you will always be from the wrong side of the tracks.”
When his parents were cruel like this, my husband did nothing. He was unable to confront his parents. I sunk into a deep depression. If I am unworthy of being protected by my own husband, what am I worthy of? We kept drifting apart, and Jeff refused to go to counseling.
“Jeff, I need you to go to counselling with me to save our marriage. It’s crumbling about us.”
“Chris, I can’t. What if the counsellor tells me I’m doing something wrong.”
“Jeff honey, we are both doing something wrong.”
But he was adamant in his refusal. The space between us became a chasm. And in that chasm, thoughts of Gurmit began to grow.
In 2014, nearly nine years into my challenging marriage, I went to London to give a book talk. After the talk, I was alone in my hotel. Memories of Gurmit and me were littered across London. I decided to call the home of Gurmit’s father and ask for Gurmit. Gurmit had always spent the weekends in Gravesend, and I assessed that he was likely there. I no longer had a functional number for him in London. Gurmit’s father answered in a thick Punjabi accent. I told him in Punjabi, “My name is Christine. I’m the woman who wrote all of those letters to Gurmit from India many years ago. I’d like to speak with Gurmit.”
Gurmit’s father responded briskly in Punjabi, “I know who you are. Gurmit’s not home.”
“Can you give him my number?” His dad agreed to do so. Then I went home to Virginia to wait.
Within two days, I saw the +44 number come up on my phone. It was Gurmit. I was on a train to New York for another book talk. We spoke for the duration of the train ride. I asked him if he was married. “Chris, I’m divorced, and I have a daughter. You?”
“Yes. But I’m miserable in my marriage.”
We began messaging and connecting on Skype. It was as if time had collapsed on itself. We were as we always were. But this time, Gurmit resolved that he would tell his father and marry me, irrespective of his father’s opinions on the matter. I told my husband that I was leaving him and that I was getting back together with Gurmit. Jeff was devastated, but he still refused to go to marriage counselling. Gurmit and I met thereafter in New York in December. Once we were together, our bodies found each other as they always had but Gurmit was lost. His marriage had changed his life. In New York he told me the whole story, or so he said.
“Chris, I have to tell you a lot of things. I am not the man you fell in love with. My marriage destroyed me.”
Gurmit began to explain the sordid truth of his recent past and present. He agreed to have an arranged marriage. His father found him a barely literate woman from his family’s village outside of Jullundur. I was appalled by Gurmit’s willingness to marry a woman who was so beneath him intellectually, and felt a strange pity for this woman. He had not even met her. Their engagement took place between the woman and his photo. His father picked a much younger woman he believed would be an amiable housewife, willing to take care of Gurmit, him and his sister while giving birth to children she would raise. It turns out that she wasn’t the simpleton they presumed her to be. While awaiting to come to England, she was studying U.K. immigration law, and she imagined a very different life for herself in the U.K. that didn’t necessarily include being married. At least this was Gurmit’s account.
Once in Gravesend, she began calling the police to report abuse at the hands of the residents of the home. She began staging suicide events, evidently telling the medical personnel that her family was abusing her. She filed a criminal complaint. Gurmit’s elderly aunt was taken into custody. Gurmit and his father also spent time in jail. Ultimately, those charges were dismissed. Along the way, she became pregnant but aborted the fetus without telling Gurmit until after the fact. But despite all of this drama and legal jeopardy, he took her back when she came crawling back to the marriage.
But she was undeterred: she wanted to remain in the U.K., but she didn’t want to be married if she didn’t have to. She continued the old patterns of trying to establish a collage of evidence of abuse. Even while trying to ruin her married life, she clung to it as a contingency plan. She became pregnant in hopes of keeping Gurmit until she no longer needed him. She filed a police complaint again. The household members were taken into custody again. This time, the judge found him guilty. He went to jail. He had to perform community service. He could no longer practice medicine.
“Gurmit, so how do you earn a living?”
“I work in a shop close to our home in Gravesend.”
I was floored. But this explains why I was unable to find anything on my extensive Google searches for him over the years. He was no longer an active, publishing scientist.
I asked him about his daughter. The story grew darker. “I don’t have a relationship with my daughter. I refused to visit her under visitation.” I was sickened.
“Gurmit, that’s what my father did to me. How the hell could you abandon your daughter?” I was simmering in rage. Gurmit offered the palliative that at least paid child support. It wasn’t enough. He had no defense for his actions.
Rightly or wrongly, at no point did I doubt his innocence. But his failures as a father were all too similar to my own father. I felt for his daughter. I imagined the crises of identity she will have to maneuver over the course of her life as a fatherless daughter. But I could feel in my bones that this great reveal wasn’t the entire truth. He was holding something back.
Back in Virginia, we continued to talk nearly every day. But I told him, “You’re still hiding something from me. I need to know what you’re hiding.” After a lot of persuasion, Gurmit conceded. “Chris, you’re right. I’m still married.” I felt a wave of nausea wash over me.
“What the fuck do you mean, you’re still married? You told me you were divorced.”
“I am divorced. But I had second arranged marriage.”
I could not believe the idiocy of this man. After the fiasco of his first arranged marriage, he had another marriage. As before, his father scouted his village for a simpleton. Once again, the engagement happened between the woman and a photo of Gurmit. Again, Gurmit had never met her prior to the wedding night, which he consummated. Something snapped inside of me. I was repulsed by him. I couldn’t stand the thought or sight of him. I told him that I couldn’t see him anymore.
And with that final grotesque revelation, a thirty-year saga ended abruptly as I confronted the damage I did to my marriage and what it would take to fix it.
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C Christine Fair is a Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University. She completed her PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilisation at the University of Chicago. Her creative pieces have appeared in Fictive Dream, Hypertext, Lunch Ticket, Bangalore Review, Glassworks, and Existere Journal of Arts, among others, in addition to her scholarly work and literary translations from Urdu, Punjabi and Hindi.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are solely that of the author and not of Borderless Journal.
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The scent of ozone and damp earth, the particular weight of afternoon light filtering through old venetian blinds—these small phenomena often announce memory long before language does. A man sits in a borrowed room, tracing with his thumb the grain of a worn wooden desk. He is not summoning a triumphant episode from his past; he is grasping at a faint, persistent echo: his grandfather’s rough hands, smelling of linseed oil, guiding him to adjust the focus on a heavy, obsolete microscope. This tactile ghost, a pressure without a narrative, is memory in its most primordial register—somatic, unspoken, resistant to articulation. Yet across the same room sits a framed, slightly faded photograph of a military regiment from a war the man never witnessed. If the desk grain belongs to the biology of remembrance, the photograph belongs to its cultural architecture. The former is of the body; the latter is of the nation.
Between these two points—molecular trace and cultural inscription—memory unfolds as a dual phenomenon. One register writes itself into the nervous system or even into the regulatory architecture of DNA; the other composes itself through stories, monuments, rituals, and shared forms of collective identity. Human remembering, therefore, is never a single mechanism. It is a negotiation between biological predisposition and symbolic world‑making. While Maurice Halbwachs argued that memory exists only within social frameworks—familial, religious, national—the new sciences of epigenetics complicate this picture by suggesting that experience may inscribe itself directly onto the genome, altering stress responses and emotional baselines (Halbwachs 1994). Jan Assmann placed cultural memory within the realm of external media—texts, rituals, archives—through which civilizations secure continuity. But what if continuity also occurs beneath culture, silently, in the biological preconditions of feeling, reactivity, and vulnerability?
The humanities have traditionally claimed memory as their domain. For scholars of culture, memory is built, curated, stabilized, even dramatised. The frameworks of collective identity depend on ritual performances, anniversaries, museums, and the symbolic politics of commemoration. Pierre Nora’s notion of lieux de mémoire—sites of memory—emphasises the necessity of external anchors when living memory fades (Nora 1989, 18). Paul Connerton underscores how societies remember through bodily habits: the manner of sitting, mourning, greeting, celebrating (Connerton 1989). Paul Ricoeur goes even further, proposing that identity itself is narrative; one becomes a self through the stories one tells and those narrated about the person (Ricoeur 2004). In this tradition, memory is a fundamentally symbolic undertaking. It requires a community, a language, a form.
Yet parallel to this symbolic tradition runs a different kind of memory science—one that refuses narrative and instead concerns itself with molecular inscription. Michael Meaney’s research on maternal care in rats revolutionised the field by showing how early‑life nurturing modulates the expression of genes associated with stress regulation (Meaney 2001). In Meaney’s experiments, pups that received high levels of licking and grooming developed healthier stress responses as adults due to reduced DNA methylation at specific sites in the hippocampus. This was not metaphorical memory but biological history. Szyf (2007) argues that the epigenome serves as an interface between the dynamic environment and the inherited static genome, responsive to chemicals and social behaviors like maternal care, shaping phenotypic diversity and disease susceptibility. Under certain extreme conditions—famine, war, prolonged deprivation—some studies even suggest intergenerational effects, whereby descendants inherit altered physiological responses shaped by ancestral trauma (Zhang and Meaney 2010).
Here arises a philosophical friction: cultural memory is fluid, socially negotiated, and open to reinterpretation; biological memory is involuntary, material, and often silent. If one is authored by discourse, the other is authored by experience itself. If one requires narration, the other bypasses language entirely. And yet, human memory—actual lived memory—always seems to emerge in the space between these two registers.
Bruno Latour would likely say this duality is not a conflict but an illusion. Modernity, he argues, falsely separated nature and culture into distinct domains (Latour 1993). Epigenetic memory and cultural memory demonstrate that the separation was never real to begin with. Biological predispositions shape how cultural narratives are received, processed, and embodied. Cultural narratives, in turn, modulate biological baselines—stress responses, temperament, even the perceived meaning of vulnerability. The subject is always hybrid: part symbolic construct, part molecular history.
Tim Ingold’s idea that human beings do not “store” memory but rather live along unfolding lines—lines of descent, perception, and movement—allows a different perspective (Ingold 2007). In this view, memory is neither an archive nor a code but an ongoing negotiation between the environment and the self. Early experiences lay down tendencies, grooves, or vulnerabilities, while cultural forms offer scripts, languages, and interpretive structures. The resulting life is neither determined biologically nor invented culturally; it is braided, entwined, perpetually unfolding.
Consider inherited trauma—a conceptual laboratory for observing this entanglement. A child of survivors may inherit an altered cortisol response, a nervous system calibrated toward vigilance. That same child is simultaneously raised within a narrative tradition of survival, persecution, resilience, or victimhood. The cultural story does not cause the biological predisposition, and the biological predisposition does not dictate the cultural story. Rather, each shapes how the other is lived. The narrative frames the physiological feeling; the physiology lends weight and urgency to the narrative. Memory occurs where the body trembles at the threshold of meaning.
Even the politics of memory shifts when viewed through this dual lens. Nikolas Rose’s “politics of life itself” points to how biological knowledge—molecular, epigenetic, neurochemical—reshapes governance and identity (Rose 2007). Cultural memory stabilises collective meaning, while biological memory renders life legible in new ways: as risk profiles, predispositions, susceptibilities. One is mobilised for identity, the other for prediction.
What emerges from these entanglements is a model of memory as dual‑register: one symbolic, one material. The symbolic register is flexible, contextual, and discursive. It legitimises, interprets, and projects meaning. The material register affects moods, is pre-linguistic, and enduring. It inscribes, tunes, and predisposes. The two registers do not mirror each other; they modulate each other. Without the symbolic, the material remains mute. Without the material, the symbolic remains disembodied.
Human memory exists in the shimmer between the registers. It is neither pure biology nor pure discourse; it is the embodied narrative of a life being lived in time. The man at the desk, staring at the old regiment photograph, is not merely recalling. His body, shaped by ancestral stress and nurtured by familial narratives, meets an artifact shaped by national history. His interpretation of the photograph is guided by cultural frameworks, but the emotional charge with which he confronts it may come from deeper, older inscriptions—those written, silently, in the folds of his biology.
To remember, then, is to stand at the crossroads of matter and meaning. It is to inherit stories and methylation patterns, monuments and cortisol rhythms, photographs and tremors. It is to live as a site where culture meets biology, where the past becomes present through both symbol and cell. Memory is not a story we tell, nor a gene we carry, but the meeting point where the body’s predispositions encounter the world’s demands for meaning. In that meeting—fleeting, trembling, always becoming—the human appears.
Amir Zadnemat is an Iranian writer and essayist with a master’s degree in literature from the University of Guilan. His work focuses on modern literature, cinema, and cultural criticism.
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Bibliography
Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Halbwachs, Maurice. 1994. On Collective Memory. Edited and translated by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge.
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Meaney, Michael J. 2001. “Maternal Care, Gene Expression, and the Transmission of Individual Differences in Stress Reactivity across Generations.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 24 (1): 1161–92.
Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (Spring): 7–24.
Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rose, Nikolas. 2007. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty‑First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Szyf, Moshe. 2007. The dynamic epigenome and its implications in toxicology. Toxicological Sciences 100, 7–23.
Zhang, Tie-Yuan, and Michael J. Meaney. 2010. “Epigenetics and the Environmental Regulation of the Genome and Its Function.” Annual Review of Psychology 61: 439–66.
Title: Love and Crime in the Time of Plague: A Bombay Mystery
Author: Anuradha Kumar
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
Maya is Discomfited
What shall we talk about?’ Maya asked in her irrepressible way, a lilt in her voice. That afternoon she was out cycling with Henry when the rain came down, turning heavy in moments. It was August and the middle of the monsoon season.
‘Tell me more about what you found. More about those…mysterious sketches. You have two minutes,’ Henry rolled his eyes playfully as he pulled out his watch.
Dark, thick clouds loomed over the sea and gathered by the palm trees and rocks lining the shore. Leaving their bicycles against the tall, old Ashoka tree, they had run, like many times before, toward the old Prong’s lighthouse to their right. Its white walls were damp-streaked and moss-stained, and the grey rocks huddled by it were dotted by foamy flecks. The sea swirled in noisily with an insistent rhythm.
They stood on the low stoop, looking out at the gravestones across the road. The door behind, blue paint flaking in places, creaked in the wind. The room in the old lighthouse always smelt musty. It was sparsely furnished with wooden chairs, a table, and a cupboard. Faded red curtains fluttered on the windows. A part of the roof near the fireplace leaked, and rainwater often dripped down into a large wooden tub. Soon, Henry always joked, it would fill up with fish. The keeper, an old Eurasian, waved to them from an upstairs window, his beard flailing through its rusting iron bars.
They were right at the tip of the city on the island of Colaba, and the new bicycles—shipped to Henry only that summer—were safe to ride on, with their evenly spaced wheels, pneumatic tyres, and a chain system. Henry was pleased with these new ‘Rover’ cycles, made by a company in Chicago, Henry’s home town. The wind left a mist on their faces, the gulls were noisy on the rafters, and they waited for the rain to ease.
The Causeway, its white stones grey in the wan light, stretched to the mainland. Built some fifty years ago, it now connected what had been the separate islands of Colaba, and the Old Woman’s Island to the bigger island of Bombay. If they craned their necks and looked to the left, through the palm trees, the stone walls of the old fort were clearly visible.
Henry took his cap off, twirled it with his fingers then placed it back on his head. Maya scraped the soles of her muddy boots against the stoop, and leaned against the door. They heard a sharp clear call, two eagles were majestically scouring the skies, their wings spotted white, and lighting up when the sun momentarily breathed through the clouds.
‘You’ve been thinking about the sketches, haven’t you?’
Maya nodded, her eyes the colours of the stormy sea. The eagles, she was thinking, maybe they were the White-bellied Sea Eagles familiar to these parts.
‘Tell me about it,’ Henry encouraged, stealing a look upstairs, and noting the open window. The keeper was probably all ears. They were always the subject of gossip, and Henry ruefully accepted this, always with a turmoil in his heart. He enjoyed Maya’s company and tried not to think too much of the future; most times he failed. Sometimes he thought Maya felt the same way.
~
Maya had found the sketches only a fortnight ago. In a room, dark, mysterious and unused, at the very back of the grey-stone ‘doctors’ house’ where Maya lived. She had wanted to use the room as a study. The doctors’ house stood on a narrow lane leading off the Colaba Causeway, on the sliver of land where Bombay stretched into the sea in a crab-like way. One walked through the house’s main hallway, and the study appeared after a series of small steps. Next to the study was the covered courtyard and on the left, its lone window faced the garden, with its wooden latticed fence, the bougainvillea and oleander creepers, and tall palm trees. Farther beyond, closer to the sea, lay the asylum and a part of the lighthouse, always visible from the upper floor windows of the doctors’ house. Sounds of the horse-drawn tramcars, the bells of the Afghan Church, the train coming in every morning and in the late afternoon, and the constant rolling of the sea, shaped a pleasing backdrop to everyday life in the house.
Once owned by Hormuzji Dorabji, a merchant whose business interests spread across Bombay, Surat, East Africa and Natal, the doctor Edith Pechey had first rented it when she came to Bombay to manage the city’s first women’s hospital. Soon there were two of them, when Charlotte Ellaby responded to Edith’s invitation, and that was how the bungalow got its name. Then about two years ago, though Maya felt it was much longer, the doctors’ house had a new resident when Maya joined them, a few weeks after reaching Bombay as part of a travelling theatre troupe from Lahore. The troupe soon moved on to another city, but Maya had stayed back. For a while only, she had thought at first, but months had flown by and the ‘doctors’ house’ was her home now. Edith had moved out when she married Herbert Phipson, an American businessman with offices in Bombay, and Maya still stayed on with Charlotte. Finding her feet in a city, warm and lively. Finding her heart too, but with that Maya wanted to take more time.
~
For Maya, the string-bound folder with the sketches was an unexpected find. It lay in the old wooden almirah, lost among dusty old account ledgers, old books, in old Pali and Persian, and crinkled maps brown with age.
‘They look so old, and so skilfully done.’ Henry still remembered the awed expression on Maya’s face the afternoon she told Charlotte and him about it. They had shared Maya’s delight, looking at the sketches—lifelike depictions of birds, drawn mainly in black ink, with distinct colours on some.
(Excerpted from Love and Crime in the Time of Plague: A Bombay Mystery by Anuradha Kumar. Published by Speaking Tiger Books, 2025)
ABOUT THE BOOK
It is 1896. A ship docks in Bombay Harbour, and as the workers rush to unload the cargo, a scream rings out. A large black rat, frothing at the mouth, has bitten one of the men.
Within weeks, a miasma of fear engulfs the city as ship-borne rats overrun its nooks and crannies, and more and more of its inhabitants fall sick—and die. Dr Acacio Viegas is the first to ring the alarm—it is the plague. The only way to control it is to sanitize the city’s slums, clean its drains, report any fever, and stay at home. The British Administration embarks on these measures on a war footing—until warning notes begin to turn up at Doctors’ House, where Maya Barton lives with Dr Charlotte Ellaby, and at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital—notes that threaten those who are ‘interfering’ with people’s religion and customs with dire consequences—all signed by the ‘Native Society’.
Maya and her friend Henry Baker, the American trade counsel, are soon hot on the trail of the Society, which leads them to the formidable Rangnekar Bhau, the Society’s founder, and its Secretary, the treacherous Satarkar, who hates everything new and ‘modern’, whether the British and the brown sahibs, and their so-called anti-plague drive, or women like Maya, who think too much of themselves.
As Maya and Henry unravel the mystery, they draw closer to each other and to what could be a future together. And Maya learns more about Reverend Barton, who could have been her father, and the Kashmiri woman who might have been her mother.
Anuradha Kumar once again uses her talent for recreating a period setting and engaging characters to brilliant effect in this sequel to the acclaimed The Kidnapping of Mark Twain, her first Bombay Mystery.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anuradha Kumar has worked for the Economic & Political Weekly. She has an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA). Her stories have won awards from the Commonwealth Foundation, UK, and The Little Magazine, India. She writes regularly for Scroll.in. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications like Fiftytwo.in, The India Forum, The Missouri Review, among others.Two of her essays received notable mention in ‘Best American Essays’ editions of 2023 and 2024. Her essay collection, The Sound of Lost Memories, was recently a finalist for the Gournay Prize (University of Iowa) and will be published (2027) by Cornerstone Press (University of Wisconsin, Stevens-Point).
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Moko Jumbies (or stilt walkers in colourful costumes) evolved from an old West African tradition, dating back to 13th-14th century. The tradition became part of American lore two hundred years ago as the plantation owners would import workers from Africa.
ANTICIPATION
I watch out my condo window this winter, packing up and leaving for spring. I structure myself in a dream as Moko Jumbie, masquerader on stilts. I lean out my balcony window in anticipation. Dead branches, snow paper-thin, brown spots, shared spaces. A slug of Skol vodka, a glass of cheap sweet Carlo Rossi rose red wine. I wait these last few days out. That first robin, The beginning of brilliance— crack, emerald dark, these colours.
Michael Lee Johnson is a poet in the greater Chicagoland area, IL. He is an internationally published poet in 46 countries, a song lyricist, has several published poetry books. He is editor-in-chief of 3 poetry anthologies, all available on Amazon, and has several poetry books.
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The year was 1881. The city — Kolkata. Its people, caught in the throes of a social and spiritual awakening the like of which they had never seen before, were sharply divided. Spinning between two worlds—one dying; one struggling to be born–they were all protagonists, all engaged in battle. Some to keep alive and perpetuate the old; others to hasten its death and bring about the birth of the new. But there were also those who felt the pull of both. Old and new. Traditional and modern. Science and faith. One such was Narendranath Datta, eldest son of Advocate Bishwanath Datta of Shimle.
Eighteen-year-old Naren was a fine figure of a man already. Tall and muscular, with broad shoulders and a heavy frame, his large, dark eyes flashed with spirit and intelligence from a strong, handsome face. He was a brilliant student and an even better sportsman. He could fence and wrestle and was an excellent boxer. Only last year he had won the Silver Butterfly at a college contest. With all this he was a fine singer and could play the pakhawaj and esraj[1].
PakhwajEsraj
That afternoon, he was pacing up restlessly up and down Hedo Lake Park under a sullen monsoon sky. Classes were over for the day, but he didn’t want to go home.
Naren: “What shall I do? Where shall I go? Home? Na! Na! Ma has filled the house with matchmakers. But I… I can’t even think of marriage just now. Life is short. Life is precious. I must discover the truth of it first. The worth of it.
“Shall I walk down to the Brahmo Mandir? I’ve gone there often with Dipendra. I like the prayers and sermons. I even join in singing the hymns. But…the experience remains on that level. Once, unable to control the curiosity that burns continually in my breast, I was guilty of a grave impertinence. ‘Have you seen God?’ I asked the Maharshi. But he had evaded the question. ‘You have the eyes of an ascetic,’ he had replied. ‘Abandon all enquiry and give yourself over to Him. With prayer and meditation, you will experience Him some day.’ The answer told me nothing.
“I’ve read the works of Western philosophers–Descartes, Hume and Herbert Spencer and have tried to make Logic and Reason my watchwords. I’ve tried to dismiss religion as the prop of the blind and weak. But…but certain religious customs have entrenched themselves in our culture from time immemorial! Can we wipe them out in an instant. And, even if we could, wouldn’t that create a terrible void?”
He laughed self-consciously. Was this a consequence of my meeting with Ramakrishna? Na Na. Not that. Never …
A few days ago, his uncle Ramchandra Datta had asked him to accompany him to Dakshineswar. And Naren, eager to escape the matchmakers, had agreed. He had been charmed with the place. The wide flight of steps rising from the river! The immense chataal[2]dotted with temples! The river itself — vast and unending as the sea! And, then, he had been led to a tiny room in the north west corner where, on a simple wooden chowki[3], sat a little dark man with a gap between his teeth and tiny, twinkling eyes. His hair and beard were unkempt and his coarse, half-soiled dhuti[4]rose to his knees. But the sacred thread that lay across his bare torso was thick and shining white. “Thakur,” Ramchandra Datta led the boy forward, “This is my nephew Naren. He sings well.” The man smiled and nodded encouragingly. And Naren, who enjoyed singing, dropped to the floor and sitting cross legged, a hand at one ear, commenced in a rich baritone…Mono Cholo Nijo Niketane…mind go to your own abode …
Ramakrishna in a trance
Ramkrishna went into a trance. He returned to consciousness and rushed up to Naren.
Ramakrishna: “I know you, my Lord! You are my Narayan! Why did you take so long in coming to me?”
Naren: (to himself) “The man is mad. Stark, raving mad! What do I do now? (Aloud) Let go of me. Please let go…”
Ramakrishna: “I will. If you promise to come again.”
Naren: (sternly) “I promise but I want to ask you a question first. Have you seen God? Tell me the truth.”
Ramakrishna: “Yes. I have seen God. As clearly as I see you standing before me.”
Naren had promised Ramakrishna that he would go to him again. But he had no intention of keeping his word. His reasoning told him that the man was a liar and a lunatic. But why was his heart saying something else? Why was it urging him to redeem his promise? He made a fresh resolve. He would go to Dakshineswar one last time and tell Ramakrishna, politely but firmly, that their worlds lay apart and he had other things to do.
A few days later Naren and his friends were enjoying a meal in an English hotel when he suddenly rose to his feet and walked out leaving everyone gaping in astonishment. Walking all the way to Dakshineswar, he barged into Ramakrishna’s room.
Naren: “I have just eaten what Hindus call forbidden meat. (His eyes challenged the priest) Now do what you need to do with me!”
Ramakrishna: “O re! Do you think My Mother will peep into your stomach to see what you hide in there? Beef and pork? Or vegetables and greens? She looks only into the heart. And yours is as pure as gangajal[5].” He put his arm around Naren’s shoulders. “See. I have touched you. Am I changed in any way?”
Naren: (aggressively) “How do you know where Your Mother looks or does not look? You claim you see Ma Kali and talk to Her. But I say your claim is false. I believe, like the Brahmos, that God is an abstraction–neither seen nor heard.”
Ramakrishna: (murmurs) “God? …. God is akin to a vast sea; an unending stretch of water. But when true faith is breathed upon it the water congeals and turns into ice—solid, tangible. And only then one sees God. Don’t I see you, one of the seven rishis, standing before me?”
Naren came home and thought long and hard. What did it all mean? Why had Ramakrishna called him one of the seven rishis[6]? Was the man mad? Or did he truly believe what he was saying? And, as the boy groped, his heart beat out the answer — dim and muffled but consistent. He, Naren, had assumed that faith and logic were polar opposites, and one could survive only by denying the other. But what if the two were one and the same? Ramakrishna saw faith as empathy in any relationship — human or divine. He saw Naren as that part of himself he considered his Godhead. Which was why his faith in him was unassailable. What a wonderful concept that was! Could he, Naren, ever establish that kind of empathy with anyone? Man or God? Wouldn’t his spirit deepen; grow richer if he could?
And now Naren understood one thing clearly. He was special because Ramakrishna thought him so. And he would have to carry the burden of love and faith placed on him, throughout his life, and make himself worthy of it…
A few months later Naren’s life changed dramatically. His father died and, as the eldest son, the responsibility for the family fell on him. Bishwanath Datta had been a prosperous advocate but, having always lived beyond his means, had died a pauper. What was worse he had left a trail of debts. Death had come to him so swiftly and suddenly — his wife and children reeled under the blow.
Vivekananda or Naren’s ancestral home in modern day Kolkata
With the creditors baying like a pack of wolves outside the door, Naren was forced to look for employment. He had no idea it would be so difficult. The streets were flooded with job seekers. Naren ran from pillar to post then, weak and exhausted with starvation and fatigue and crushed under a sense of defeat, he decided to run away from it all; to become a sadhu[7] and wander among the mountains. People would blame him for evading his responsibilities. They would call him an escapist. But he didn’t care…
Dakshineswar
Somehow, he didn’t know how, Ramakrishna got wind of his resolution and sent for him. Naren didn’t want to go. The man aroused all sorts of strange sensations in him. His body vibrated violently to Ramakrishna’s touch; his head swam, and his limbs felt weightless. Waves of rapture passed over his soul. Then, suddenly, he became his old, tormented, doubting, questioning self. He couldn’t bear these contradictions and decided to keep away. But Ramakrishna drew him like a magnet. Naren struggled against a current he didn’t understand for days, then succumbing, went to Dakshineswar. Ramakrishna took the boy’s hands in his and burst into tears. Something like a giant wave of light passed from those gripping hands and washed over Naren’s soul. His body trembled with ecstasy, and, in an instant, the truth lay bare before him. This little priest of Kali knew everything; saw everything. He sensed Naren’s suffering and suffered with him. The fire went out of the headstrong, stubborn boy. Loud sobs racked his chest and he clung to Ramakrishna’s hands as if they were his only hope.
Ramakrishna: “Naren re! It’s been so long since I’ve seen you. S-o-o long!”
Naren: (blubbering like a child) “You say you talk to Ma Kali. Why don’t you ask her to give us some food? I’ve heard you call her the Goddess of Mercy; the succour of the poor and wretched. Am I not poor and wretched? Why doesn’t she cast her eyes on me? My mother and brothers are starving…”
Ramakrishna with Naren
Ramakrishna: “Why don’t you ask her yourself?”
Naren: “How can I do that? I don’t know her.”
Ramakrishna: “You don’t know her because you don’t care to know her. I have an idea. Today is Tuesday. Go to her quietly when she’s alone and tell her what you want from her. She’ll give it to you.”
Late that night, when everyone was asleep, Ramakrishna sent Naren, practically by force, to the temple of Kali. The torch of knowledge trembled as enlightened India took her first cautious steps into an unknown realm. A vision, dim and shadowy, of something beyond the tangible world was driving out judgment and debate. Reason was about to surrender to faith, logic to intuition, as Naren stepped into the womb of the temple where Ma Kali stood. An earthen lamp, flickering in a corner, cast a soft glow over the naked form, black as night and of breath-taking beauty. A pair of glittering eyes gazed intently into Naren’s as he walked on unsteady feet and sank to his knees before Her…
Suddenly, a tremor passed through his limbs, making the blood leap up in his veins. He had seen — yes, he was sure he had seen the exquisitely chiseled lips part in a smile. He shut his eyes and opened them again. Yes — there it was. A smile of love and tenderness. And was it, could it, be… triumph? He thought he saw the image sway gently. But the room was full of shadows. Perhaps he was imagining it all! In his desperation he tried to revive all his old arguments; to summon up the logic and reason that had sustained him all these years. But he felt them slipping away. His eyes were glazed. Strange currents were running in his blood — sweeping him away. In the poorly lit room, swaying between patches of light and shadow, the image of the smiling goddess was trembling into life.
Naren: “Ma…Ma… Ma go![8]” Naren called again and again; stopped and looked around as though puzzled. “Why am I calling out to her? What do I want from her? Ah! Yes. I want food for myself and my family.” He shook his head vehemently. “Na Na. She’s the Mother of the three worlds! And she has smiled on me. How can I ask her for mundane things like food and clothes?” Naren knocked his head on the floor and cried out wildly. “Give me knowledge! Give me faith! Give me light! And above all these give me strength. Strength to suffer and endure! Strength to renounce!”
Ramakrishna was ill. He had been suffering from a bad throat and violent fits of coughing for some months now. His disciples had moved him from Dakshineswar, where the river air was cold and clammy, to a house in Baranagar. They had also sent for several doctors who diagnosed his ailment as Clergyman’s Sore Throat. But their treatment wasn’t working. Ramakrishna’s health was deteriorating day by day. His tongue was bloated to twice its size and was covered with sores. And to drink even a drop of water was agony.
At length Dr. Mahendralal Sarkar was called in. He was the most reputed doctor of Kolkata. He was also the harshest and most unpredictable. Yet, looking at the slight figure lying on the wooden chowki, he asked with a rare gentleness, ‘Where does it hurt?’
‘I feel a swelling in my throat the size of a rose apple.’
‘Open your mouth. Let me take a look.’
Ramakrishna obeyed, his eyes fixed fearfully on the stern face above his. Looking down at the torn, bleeding, ravaged organ the doctor’s eyes softened and he shook his head thoughtfully. “What is the diagnosis doctor?” Naren whispered, drawing him aside.
“Karkat Rog.” A shadow passed over Mahendralal’s face. “The sahebs call it cancer.” But within seconds he was his usual cut and dried self. Turning to the patient he said roughly, “I’m leaving some medicines. Take them regularly. And talk as little as possible. The world can do without your eloquence…”
Naren’s face reddened. “He’s our guru,” he said angrily, “Our link with God. He merits your respect.”
“Hunh!” The doctor gave a snort of contempt. “Why can’t man leave God alone and do his work on earth as best as he can? Why…”
“His work is the discovery of God,” Naren interrupted, his face flaming, “Just as yours is the spread of Science.”
Mahendralal laughed. “Has any man obsessed with God, be he Jesus, Chaitanya or Buddha, been content to make it a personal quest? No. He has to scream his lungs out and pull crowds along with him. Anyway– they were not my patients so what they did is none of my business. But this man is.” Fixing his large, fiery eyes on Ramakrishna he said sternly, “Remember what I said. No sermons and homilies. Give your voice a rest — for the present at least.”
Two days later Ramakrishna vomited blood — great globs splattering on his clothes, bed and all over the floor. Groaning with pain he beckoned Naren to his side, and holding his hands, looked deep into his eyes. “I give you all I have,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “From this moment I’m a pauper. I have nothing left. Nothing.” Then, his glance falling on his wife, Saradamoni, as she stood weeping in a corner, he said, “I leave her in your care.” Fixing his eyes on his wife’s pale, drawn face he said, “Do not weep. Naren will be to you the son you never bore.”
At these words something stirred in Naren’s brain. An image rose before his eyes — of a bleeding, battered body hanging from a cross; a pale emaciated brow crowned with thorns; a dying voice murmuring… “Mother…Behold thy son.” Sharp, scalding tears rose to Naren’s eyes and he wept like a child.
Ramakrishna died after midnight, two days later. His disciples thought he was in bhav samadhi[9]. For his eyes were open and his fingers twirled in the air. A thin whirring sound, like that of a clock work toy, was coming from his half open mouth. They moved around him chanting mantras and singing kirtans[10] — all except Naren, who jumped to his feet and ran all the way to Mahendralal Sarkar’s house. But the doctor, when he came, didn’t even touch the patient. “Start making arrangements for the cremation,” he said quietly, “He’s gone.”
One of the disciples, fearful of a sharp rebuke, murmured nervously, “He’s in bhav samadhi Daktar Babu.”
The doctor’s eyes were somber and his voice gentle as he answered, “I’m an ordinary physician who was given the privilege of ministering to a great soul. But I recognise the end when I see it. He is not in a state of bhav samadhi this time. It is maha samadhi[11].”
Swami Vivekananda and other disciples at the Mahasamadhi of Ramakrishna on Sunday, August 15, 1886.
There were a few distinctive features about the funeral procession that wended its way to Neemtala. One of the mourners held a Hindu trident, another a Buddhist spud. A third had a Christian cross in his hands and a fourth a replica of the crescent moon and single star– symbol of Islam. Ramakrishna had preached the concept of jata mat tata path (there are as many paths to God as there are faiths) and, even in their hour of desolation, his disciples hadn’t forgotten it.
Not many people had heard of Ramakrishna. Consequently. the number of mourners was pitifully small. The funeral processions of some other sadhus of the city had contained thousands. Ramakrishna’s numbered a little over a hundred. But one of them …was equal to a million.
Exactly four hundred years ago, to the day, a Italian sailor named Christopher Columbus had set sail on a discovery of India and landed, instead, on the shores of America. To mark that epoch making event a great festival was being organised in the city of Chicago of which an important feature was the coming together of spiritual leaders from all parts of the world. Invitations had been sent to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Confucians, Taos, Shintos and Zoroastrians along with representatives from the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Protestant Churches. Even Brahmos and Theosophists had been invited. The only religion left out was Hinduism. And that was because Americans knew nothing about it. From what they had heard, it was a savage, primitive cult whose members worshipped monkeys, elephants and rivers. The speakers sat in rows on either side of Cardinal Gibbons –Head of the Catholic Church of America. There was a young man among them; a youth in his twenties with strong, handsome features and dark, flashing eyes. He wore a loose robe of orange silk and a turban of the same material. There was something riveting about his appearance and many eyes turned to look at him.
“Who’s he?” Someone whispered from the audience.
“A Hindoo.” Another whispered back, “From India. His name is …let me see…S-o-a-m-i…very difficult to pronounce…S-o-a-m-i Viv…Viveka…Ananda.”
Naren’s metamorphosis from a whimsical lad to a representative of Hinduism at the Parliament of Religions was owing not so much to his own efforts as to a sequence of events that had carried him on its wings. After Ramakrishna’s death he took serious stock of his situation. ‘Who am I?’ he asked himself, “And what should I do with my life?” The answer came to him readily. He was an ascetic. And the true ascetic was rootless and free like a river that needed to flow to keep its waters pure and clear. He took a decision. He wouldn’t stagnate in this little Bengal. He would explore every inch of this huge country and see what it was like.
And thus, Naren’s travels began. He went from place to place without aim or direction. If anyone gave him food, he ate it. If not, he went hungry equally cheerfully. Sometimes someone bought him a railway ticket. But, more often than not, he had only his legs and lathi to take him forward. Everywhere he went he impressed everyone with his knowledge, dignified bearing and fluent English. Gradually his fame spread. More and more people were talking of the scholarly young man who was steeped in the wisdom of the East yet as liberated in thought and spirit as any European. He started receiving invitations from the royals of India. From Hyderabad, Alwar, Kota and Khetri.
While staying in the palace of Raja Ajit Singh of Khetri, Naren had an experience he would never forget. One evening, on entering the Durbar Hall, he was surprised to see a woman sitting on a carpet facing the Raja who lay sprawled on satin cushions surrounded by his courtiers. She was beautiful, though somewhat past her youth, and dressed in rich silks and jewels. She was singing a love song with smiles and provocative gestures. Naren’s back stiffened and his nostrils dilated in distaste. The choleric temperament and intolerance he had taken such pains to subdue flared up in him and he turned to leave the room. Suddenly the woman rose to her feet. Abandoning the song, she was singing she started on another. The song was a bhajan[12], Prabhu avagun chitta na dharo — Lord, hold not my sins against me.
Naren stood at the door, his feet rooted to the ground. His heart thudded painfully and a voice within him whispered, “You call yourself a sadhu! Yet you judge this woman!” Suddenly Ramkrishna’s eyes swam into his vision. Soft and sad. Holding oceans of mercy! And, in a flash, he saw the woman — not as she stood before him, wanton and voluptuous — but as a human being who carried within her a spark of that same godhead that irradiated his own soul. His eyes softened. He entered the room and took his place with the others.
Naren wove back and forth like a shuttle over the vast tapestry that was India. And, wherever he went he saw illiteracy and superstition, poverty and abuse of power. The caste system was like an insidious web trapping and choking the life breath out of the people. “To hell with Hinduism!” he muttered bitterly. “What is the worth of a religion which humiliates and rejects its own followers? True morality lies in feeding the hungry, nursing the sick and comforting the comfortless.”
Kanyakumari with the Vivekananda rock Memorial, where Naren attained enlightenment
It took Naren four years to tour the whole country. Then, one day, he came to the end of his journey. Reaching Kanya Kumari, he sat on a rock jutting out of the sea. A vast expanse of blue green water stretched, as far as the eye could see, on three sides. Behind him was India. Sick, starving, suffering India! Burying his face in his hands he wept; deep harsh sobs racking his starved, fatigued body. But his mind was clear. He had to find food for his countrymen. He could think of their souls and his own afterwards. But how was that to be done? Science was the answer. Scientific knowledge and modern equipment had to be imported from the West and used to grow more food for the masses. But no one gave anything for nothing. What could his country give in return?
He thought for hours and, slowly, the answer came to him. Weak and enfeebled though she was, India had something the West had lost. Christianity was under severe stress, reeling under a weight of doubt and speculation. Despair was setting in. But India had a spiritualism that went back thousands of years. It had survived the shocks and traumas of innumerable invasions and still stood firm. Give us food and we will give you a philosophy. That could be India’s slogan. He would take this message to the West. But how? Suddenly an idea struck him the enormity of which made him spring up, trembling, to his feet. He would go to Chicago and speak at the Parliament of Religions.
Implementing the decision was easy. Funds were raised by his admirers –the largest donation coming from Raja Ajit Singh of Khetri. And it was the latter who designed the costume he would wear at the Conference and gave him his new name. And thus, Narendranath Datta became Swami Vivekananda[13].
Swami Vivekananda at the Chicago Parliament of religions (1893)
And now the hour, for which he had undertaken a long and hazardous journey, was at hand. Naren walked towards the rostrum his heart thudding violently, his mind blank. Looking with glazed eyes at the sea of faces before him he tried to think of his guru Ramkrishna, tried to recall Ma Kali’s face as he had seen it on the night of his first spiritual experience. But, strangely, another face swam before his eyes — the face of Saraswati, the Goddess of Learning. “Have mercy on me Ma!” he prayed, “Unlock my tongue and give me speech.”
Taking a deep breath he began: “Sisters and Brothers of America.” As an opening sentence, this was an unusual one. People started clapping, a few at first, then more and more joined in. Naren was puzzled. Western audiences were generous with their applause. He knew that. But this was something more than ordinary applause; something he couldn’t fathom. Stirred by an emotion he had never experienced before, his fears fell away. His voice rose sonorous and strong:
“I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance… As different streams, having their sources in different places, all mingle their water in the sea, so Oh Lord, the different paths that men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, all lead to thee…”
The applause rose to a crescendo. Like a mighty storm it washed over the vast hall, in wave after deafening wave. People rose from their chairs and ran towards the rostrum. The other speakers stared at one another. What had the young man said that they hadn’t? Everyone had, at some point or the other, advocated tolerance of other religions. What they didn’t realise was that their discourses had been academic exercises. Naren had spoken from the heart and, in doing so, had won over the hearts of the Americans.
Swami Vivekananda was in a fix. As soon as it became evident that the young ascetic had the power to draw crowds the go-getting Americans lost no time in making a few dollars out of it. A Chicago firm, The Sleighton Lysium Bureau, offered to organise tours in various towns and cities of the United States for the dissemination of his message. Vivekananda signed the three-year contract with alacrity but regretted his decision within a few months. His managers drove him relentlessly from forum to forum and what began as a joyous interaction soon became a painful drudgery. He also found himself out of sync with the average American mindset. They attended his meetings in thousands but most of them looked at him as though he were a rare and exotic animal and asked absurd questions.
“Hey Mr Kanand!” A man addressed him once. “Is it true that in your country mothers throw their babies into a holy river to be eaten by crocodiles?”
“Well,” Vivekananda smiled, “If my mother had done so would I be standing here before you?”
“Boys are not thrown,” another voice was heard. “Only girls…”
“Is that so?” Vivekananda’s lips twitched. “But if all girls are eaten by crocodiles, I wonder how males are born. Perhaps one of you can enlighten me.”
“Even if you deny female infanticide,” an angry voice boomed, “Can you deny suttee?”
“No. But sati has been punishable by law for many years. Now, may I ask you a question? Have you heard of Joan of Arc of France? Or of the thousands of women who were branded as witches and burned at the stake in all parts of Europe? You haven’t? That’s what I thought. The West has conveniently forgotten its own history. You will never question a Frenchman about Joan of Arc. But the moment you see an Indian you’ll make it a point to ask him about sati.”
However, not all Americans were this insensitive. Some came in a genuine spirit of enquiry and listened to him with interest. One of them was a wealthy widow named Ole Bull. Another was a charming, vivacious woman in her thirties. Josephine Macleod, for that was her name, attended all his lectures and, over the years, became a good friend and an ardent admirer.
But, in faraway England, another young woman was waiting for the call. A woman whose destiny would become synonymous with Vivekananda’s, who would, in time to come, make India her home, imbibe her spirit and culture and work for her people as though they were her own…
Margaret Noble was thirty years old–the daughter of an Irish clergyman and a spinster. Love had come to her drab, lonely existence twice but she had been robbed of them both times. Once by death and once — desertion. This last blow was harder to bear than the first and it was in this frame of mind that she first saw Vivekananda. Listening to him, she felt herself transported to another world. She saw herself standing by a well beside a banyan tree under which an ascetic, bathed in the hues of sunset, was murmuring verses in a strange, exotic tongue. The spell broke in a few seconds, and she went home. But, for days afterwards, his face swam before her eyes– a bright golden face with large dark eyes burning with power and passion. She tried to shake it off, but it kept coming back.
After this she started attending Vivekananda’s lectures regularly — though in a spirit of non-acceptance. Her education had given her rational views and she was atheistic by temperament. But though she rejected the Hindu yogi’s doctrines, she couldn’t stay away from him. Vivekananda was amused. Perhaps he heard in the young woman’s vehement denials, an echo of his own. He had ranted against Ramakrishna but gone to him again and again. Margaret, he knew, was going through a similar experience.
There was one thing, though, that had a profound impact on her. Vivekananda never once touched on the negative aspects of the human race. The word ‘Sin’ was missing from his vocabulary. He always appealed to the highest and noblest instincts of humans. “The world needs men and women,” he said once, “who can find the courage to…abandon their own small families and seek out a larger one…” These words fell like blows on Margaret’s heart. She had sought love; a husband and children–a family of her own. But they had eluded her. She didn’t desire them anymore. She would answer Swamiji’s call. She would walk in his footsteps and seek out a larger world.
Vivekananda returned to India after four years — a conquering hero! A special Reception Committee, set up by the Maharaja of Dwarbhanga, met him at Khidirpur dock and escorted him all the way to Sealdah. As the train chugged its way into the station, the air rang with a tremendous cry and the platform shook under the feet of thousands of people pushing, jostling and treading on each other’s toes to catch a glimpse of the man who had left the country as obscure, penniless Naren Datta and returned as the universally acclaimed Swami Vivekananda. Not that everyone came in a spirit of respect. Many were mere onlookers. Some others came to carp and criticise. “The man is no longer a Hindu,” they whispered to one another. “He has eaten forbidden meat and slept with mlecchha[14] women. Besides, what call has a Kayastha to don a sadhu’s robe? What is our great religion coming to! Chhi! Chhi! Chhi!”[15]
Vivekananda was unfazed–touched neither by adulation nor censure. He had his work cut out. The first thing to do was to go to Alambazar and seek the help of his co-disciples in opening a mission in Ramakrishna’s name.
“A mission in Thakur’s[16]name!” the inmates exclaimed, “Like the Christians?”
“Yes.” Squatting on the floor and taking deep puffs from a hookah, Vivekananda said, “I intend to put together a band of committed workers who will go from village to village, providing succour to the poor and needy and educating the masses especially the women of the land. And by education, I don’t mean literacy. That too. But the need of the hour is the inculcation of self-respect and self-worth in our people. India must awake from her stupor.”
From that day onwards Vivekananda turned all his energies into establishing the Mission of his dreams. It couldn’t have come at a better time for plague had broken out in the city and a severe famine was raging in many parts of Bengal. The disciples formed groups and moved from slum to slum and village to village, distributing rations, nursing the sick, burning the dead and teaching the unafflicted how to protect themselves from the dread disease. As for Vivekananda–he drove himself relentlessly though the strain was unbearable. After four years of living in a temperate climate, his body had lost its ability to cope with the heat and humidity of Bengal. He suffered from bouts of fever and dysentery but wouldn’t let up for a second.
He had his misgivings though. Funds were being organised by Ole Bull and Josephine Macleod. But how would he organise a band of women? Women, in this conservative society, refused to interact with males. He wondered what to do. Should he send for Margaret Noble?
The first glimpse of grey was paling the inky darkness of a winter night when a great ship inched its way into the estuary. Margaret Noble stood on the deck shivering, not so much with cold as with apprehension. She had severed all her links with England and come out to India. But would her new country accept her?
After Swamiji’s return, he had written to her a couple of times. Short, dry missives informing her that the Ramkrishna Mission had been established and that Ole Bull and Josephine Macleod were already there supervising the work. Not a word about her joining them. Then, six months later, the letter she had longed for and awaited, had come. A letter that had set her pulses racing despite the formal courtesy of its tone:
“Dear Miss Noble,
“I am now convinced that you have a great future in the work for India. India cannot yet produce great women, she must borrow them from other nations. Yet the difficulties are many. You cannot form any idea of the misery, the superstition, the shunning of the white skin. Then the climate is fearfully hot, not one European comfort is to be had in places out of the cities. You must think well before you plunge in. If you fail or get disgusted, on my part I promise you, I’ll stand by you unto death–whether you work for India or not.”
I will stand by you unto death…– a tremor of ecstasy passed over Margaret’s frame every time she thought of the words. Now, with doubt and fear gnawing at her heart, she repeated them over and over again like a mantra.
Belur Mathh
On alighting she sought his face eagerly in the crowd. Suddenly, a deep musical voice came from behind her. “Margot!” She spun around and got a shock. It was Vivekananda but how he had changed! He was only 34 but he looked close to 50! She didn’t know that he had been extremely ill. Diagnosed with diabetes he had been advised to make substantial changes in his diet, take a lot of rest and keep his mind calm and free. But he had shrugged off the doctor’s counsel particularly the latter part. The mathh[17]in Alambazar had been gutted by a fire and another one was coming up in Belur. Tension and anxiety had become part of his life. There was nothing he could do about it.
Sister Nivedita (1867-1911)
One evening, as they sat together looking out at the river in Belur, Vivekananda fixed his large dark eyes on Margaret’s clear blue ones and said softly, “I’m giving you a new name Margot. A new identity. From henceforth you shall be known as Nivedita. Do you know what that means? It means One who has dedicated herself.”
Fortunately for Vivekananda, the pestilence disappeared from the city as suddenly as it had come. But the grinding work and sleepless nights had taken their toll. He became very weak and had difficulty in breathing. The doctors were alarmed and ordered him to leave the dust and fumes of the city and go to the hills where he could imbibe some pure, clean air. Vivekananda had wanted to go on a pilgrimage to Amarnath for many years and he decided to do so now. Nivedita insisted on accompanying him. He was reluctant at first. It was an arduous, dangerous climb over steep jagged rocks and ice-covered terrain. The weather was wild and inclement, while the most basic amenities were missing. But Nivedita stood firm. She hadn’t come to India to enjoy a holiday, she pointed out. She had abandoned her own country and was trying to put down roots in this soil. She wanted to gain all the experience she could; to merge with the people and become one with them. Why couldn’t she do what he; what so many others were doing? Hadn’t she given herself to this country? Was not her name Nivedita?
On a dark cloudy day at dawn, a party of about three thousand pilgrims set off for Amarnath. Vivekananda and Nivedita walked side by side for a while. Then, suddenly, he left her and strode off to a ledge where a group of ascetics were flailing their arms and crying, “Hara! Hara! Bom! Bom![18]” Nivedita craned her neck to catch a glimpse of her guru. But she couldn’t see him. A throng of pilgrims had swallowed him up.
And thus, it was throughout the journey. He avoided her most of the time. Occasionally he would appear to make a gentle enquiry about her well-being or to bark out a command to the porter to secure her tent against the wind and rain and put a hot water bottle in her bed. Then he would be gone again. Nivedita walked in a crowd but alone. Footsore and weary; limbs aching with exhaustion; heart heavy as lead.
Along the mountain path the pilgrims walked, the line winding and unwinding like a giant snake. And now the path wound upwards, dramatically, over slippery snow-covered rocks for about two thousand feet. This was the last lap and the most dangerous part of the journey. Nivedita’s heart beat fast. Would she be able to negotiate it without him by her side? What if she failed? So many pilgrims lost their footing and fell down the treacherous precipices to lie there forever — buried under drifts of snow. What if she too…? Even as the thought came to her a voice, rich and resonant as a roll of thunder, called out her name. Startled she looked up to see Vivekananda leaning against a boulder smiling down at her. “Look Margot,” he said, “Look ahead of you.”
Following his pointing forefinger, she saw a stretch of level ground covered with a blanket of freshly driven snow which glimmered like a ghostly sea of silver in the light of the fading moon. At the same time, a shout of jubilation came to her ears. Singing and ululating, the frenzied pilgrims ran forward, slipping, falling, helping each other up. The perils of the journey lay behind them. Amarnath was less than a mile away.
Nivedita wanted to wait for Vivekananda. But the crowd engulfed her carrying her along on its waves. On and on she went propelled by the force of faith behind her, feet flying, arms outstretched; deafened by cries of “Hara! Hara! Bom! Bom!” Was this the merging she had envisaged and yearned for? Then why did she feel so restless? So empty?
Amarnath Temple with its shining pillar of ice
Nivedita entered the cave. In front of her was the shining pillar of ice that was the phallus of Shiva. But all she felt was a sense of anticlimax. Was this all there was to see at the end of this seemingly endless, nightmarish journey fraught with so much pain and peril? Water dripping from a crack in the roof of a cave and solidifying into a column of ice?
Vivekananda came in after a while. He had bathed in the river and his dripping body was naked except for a flimsy bit of saffron that covered his genitals. His eyes were stark and staring and his feet unsteady as he ran towards the linga[19] and flinging himself, face downwards, knocked his head on the ground. Then, rising, he stood eyes closed, head bowed over his hands, lips moving in a silent chant. Nivedita noticed that his body was swaying from side to side. As though he would lose his balance, any moment, and fall to the ground. But Vivekananda did not fall. He turned and, fixing his large bloodshot eyes on hers, cried out in a wondering voice.
Naren: “I saw Him Margot. He revealed himself before me. He who is the first in the pantheon! Deb Adideb Mahadeb[20] stood before me in a cloud of blinding light…. And you…you Margot?”
Nivedita: (shamefacedly) “To tell you the truth, I saw nothing and … and felt nothing. Nothing at all. The famed linga thousands come to see is nothing but a natural phenomenon. I’m sure there are dozens of such ice pillars in Europe.”
Vivekananda: “The eyes of your mind are shut like a newborn child’s and your soul sleeps within you. You understand nothing. Yet the great pilgrimage you undertook will not go waste. You’ll receive its fruits when you awaken–older and wiser.”
Returning to Kolkata Vivekananda flung himself into all his self-appointed tasks. But the old energy was gone. He looked and felt like a ghost of his former self. The doctors told him that his heart was severely damaged. It had gone into a shock and stopped the moment he had plunged his body, steaming and quivering with the rigours of the strenuous climb, into the icy waters of the river at Amarnath. He could have dropped down dead that very minute. But, since all organs have a way of recovering themselves, his heart had started beating again on its own. However, the muscles had slackened and it was, now, hanging an inch longer than it should. It was a dangerous condition and his condition could not improve. It could only deteriorate.
Vivekananda had lost touch with his family for many years now. But these days he found himself thinking of them often. He yearned particularly for his mother and went to see her one day. The old lady was shocked to see her son looking so sick and frail and insisted that he rest, excusing himself from his excruciating schedule. Extracting a promise from him to take her on a pilgrimage to Langalbandha, on the banks of the Brahmaputra, where Parasuram had been absolved of the sin of matricide, she cooked a meal for him and fed him with her own hands as though he was a child.
On his way back from Langalbandha, at Dhaka, Vivekananda had an unforgettable experience. It was a hot humid evening and, exhausted from meeting streams of people, he was standing on the balcony in the hope of catching some cool air when he noticed a phaeton at the gate surrounded by people clamouring in agitated voices.
A few minutes later, two women entered the room. One was stout and elderly; her face coarse and darkened with the ravages of her profession. The other was young and a ravishing beauty. “Sadhu Maharaj,” The older woman knocked her head on the ground at Vivekananda’s feet. “This is my daughter. No one would guess, looking at her, that she is very sick. She suffers from asthmatic attacks so severe–she screams with agony. We’ve come to you from very far with a lot of hope.”
“But I’m not a doctor,” Vivekananda smiled. “I try to cure the ills of the mind. And even in that I’m not very successful. I know nothing about the body.”
“Everyone says you are the greatest sadhu living. Read a mantra over my child’s head and release her from her suffering.”
“If I knew such a mantra, I would read it over myself. I’m an asthma patient, too, and suffer excruciating pain at times.”
“You’re testing me my lord!” The woman burst out weeping –harsh, racking sobs rasping out of a chest congealed with years of repressed grief. “I’m a lowly woman led astray in my youth…”
“I’m not testing you Ma,” Vivekananda shook his head sorrowfully. “Sadhus are human like the rest of mankind. If they had the power of bestowing life and health would they not be immortal themselves?”
The woman continued to weep and plead. “Touch my daughter and give her your blessing,” she begged. “That will be mantra enough for her.”
Suddenly the girl rose to her feet and pulled her mother up by the hand. Hate and anger flashed into her beautiful surma-lined[21] eyes. “You’re wasting your time Ma,” she said. “We’re fallen women–despised by everyone. He won’t touch me.”
Vivekananda smiled. Stretching out his hand he placed it on the girl’s head. “If by blessing you I can soothe your pain away I do so with all my heart. Now you must do something for me. If you find a doctor or a sadhu or anybody who can cure your asthma be sure to let me know. I suffer such terrible agony at times– I would be grateful for some relief.”
Nivedita was on a tour of Europe and America to collect donations for the Ramakrishna Mission. Away from the country she gained a clearer perspective. She saw India’s poverty, ignorance and subservience under an alien rule. She felt her pain and humiliation as she had never felt before. She told herself that the first task before anyone who loved India was to rid her of the foreign yoke.
While in America she heard of the great Japanese philosopher, Count Okakura, and his dream of creating a vast Asian race that could overpower the European. Okakura was in India, already, meeting people and pledging support on behalf of his own and several other countries of the east — not moral support alone but military and financial as well. An overjoyed Nivedita decided to abandon what she was doing and throw herself into Okakura’s movement. Swami Vivekananda heard about Nivedita’s return and felt disturbed and angry.
Nivedita: “Count Okakura is launching a movement for the independence of India. He wants me to accompany him to Mayawati. I’ve come to take your permission.”
Vivekananda: “Independence. Hmph! Is it a piece of candy you can snatch away from the British? Who doesn’t know or admit that living under a foreign rule is humiliating? But backwardness, ignorance and superstition are deep rooted social evils which have to be removed first. Freedom will follow. You’re chasing a mirage, Margot.”
Nivedita: “Why do you say that? Count Okakura…”
Vivekananda: “The most important task before you is to educate the women of the land. And that is what you should be doing.”
Nivedita: “I’m not a simple school teacher. I’m a daughter of India. You have dedicated me to her service. That is why I am Nivedita.”
Vivekananda: “No. I haven’t dedicated you to the service of any country. You’re a disciple of my guru Ramakrishna Paramhansa. I brought you here to serve humanity.”
Nivedita: “I haven’t strayed from the path of service. Is not freeing the enslaved service to humanity?”
Vivekananda: “We are ascetics. Politics is not for us. You have two options before you. To stay with the order and obey its rules or sever your connections with the math and follow your own inclinations. I cannot allow the Mission to be threatened.”
Nivedita’s face turned a deathly white. Stooping she touched Vivekananda’s feet and walked out of his presence. Two days later she left for Mayawati with Okakura.
Vivekananda was stunned on hearing the news. But strangely, what he felt most was neither outrage nor a sense of betrayal. He was overwhelmed by a feeling of loss. Nivedita had left him. Not because she had wanted to but because he had compelled her. Had he been too harsh? Too intolerant? He wanted to go to her and soothe her with a few kind words. But every time he thought of crossing the river his spirit quailed. He felt acutely exhausted and breathless these days and the slightest strain brought on severe palpitations. Yet, one day, he went. Dropping into a chair he said with a desperate urgency in his voice. “Come to the mathh Margot. Come as soon as you can.”
Vivekananda meditating
Nivedita went, early one morning, a few days later. She looked very beautiful in a flowing dress of white silk and a string of rudraksha[22] beads around her neck.
Vivekananda: “You came because I asked you. Not because you wanted to.”
Nivedita: “I wanted to with all my heart,” She murmured with tear-filled eyes.
Vivekananda: “You must be hungry. I’ll cook you some breakfast.” He went out and returned with a thala[23].
She ate. He washed her hands and wiped them tenderly finger by finger.
Nivedita: “What are you doing Swamiji? It is I who should be serving you.”
Vivekananda: “Jesus washed the feet of his apostles…” he murmured so low that it sounded like he was almost speaking to himself, “on the last day… “
Nivedita: (shocked) “Why do you say that? There are many years before you. You have so much more to give…”
Vivekananda: “No Margot. I’ve given everything I had. I’ve nothing left.”
Nivedita: (bursting into tears) “Who else but you? Who else but you?”
Vivekananda: “Sometimes it becomes necessary to cut down a large tree to enable the smaller ones to grow. I must make room for you.”
Vivekananda woke up, the next morning, feeling as though he had never been ill in his life. Rising he walked to the balcony without any pain or breathlessness. And, strangest of all, it seemed to him that his vision had improved. Was the sky really as blue as it looked today? The grass and leaves as green? Then a sensation, long forgotten, stirred in his belly. He was hungry. Prodigiously hungry. He yearned for ilish –thick wedges of the delicate fish — some fried crisp in its own fat, some nestling in a rich spicy mustard curry and some in a sweet and tart sauce. He fell hungrily on the food as soon as it was served. Pouring the fried fish along with its oil on a mound of smoking rice he crushed some sharp green chillies into it and ate big handfuls with noises of relish. When the last course, the sweet and sour fish, came he cleaned the thala with his fingers and licked them, “Yesterday’s fast has left me very hungry,” he said, “I’ve never enjoyed a meal so much.”
He spent the whole afternoon talking to some visitors, who had come to the mathh, without betraying a trace of uneasiness or fatigue. But the moment he retired to his room for a rest he exclaimed, “Why is it so hot in here? And so dark? Is there a storm brewing outside?”
His face was streaming with sweat and he was breathing in loud painful gasps. Throwing himself on the bed, he commanded his young disciple Brajen, “Open all the windows, Byaja, and fan me.” Despite the strong breeze that blew in from the open window and Brajen’s frenzied fanning, he cried over and over again, “I’m sizzling all over. This heat is killing me.” Suddenly his head slid from the pillow and fell over the edge of the bed. Brajen leaned over his guru and shrieked in fear. And now, before his amazed eyes, Vivekananda straightened his head slowly and lay on his back. A deep sigh escaped him…then all was still.
In a few minutes the room was full of people. The doctor was sent for. But no one thought of informing Nivedita…
The news reached her the following morning. Snatching up a shawl she ran out of the house, just as she was, and came to Belur. Swamiji’s room was crammed with people, weeping, chanting Ramakrishna’s name and talking in agitated whispers. They made way for her as she walked in softly, on bare feet, and knelt by the bed. He looked exactly as he had yesterday except that his eyes were as red as hibiscus and runnels of blood had congealed around his nose. Asking for some damp cotton wool she wiped the blood tenderly away.
Around two o clock in the afternoon someone said to her. “You must rise now. It is time.” Nivedita moved away without a word. Fingers of ice clutched at her heart as she watched the disciples bathe the body in gangajal and dress it in new saffron robes. Then they carried their guru to a sandalwood pyre set up under a huge bel tree in front of the mathh. Nivedita looked on as the sanyasis[25] chanted mantras and placed his belongings, one by one, on the pyre. Among them was the shawl he had worn the day he had come to see her. “Can I have that?” Nivedita asked the senior most disciple, Saradananda, timidly. “As a keepsake?” Saradananda hesitated a little. “Everything a sanyasi had used in his earthly life is supposed to burn with him. But if you are very keen…”
“No, no,” she said hastily. “There’s no need to break the rule.”
The pyre was lit, and the flames rose to the sky. Nivedita noticed that no one was talking to her. No one had offered her any consolation. She was an outsider already.
Hours went by. The sun changed from a white-hot blur to a ball of fire that resembled the dancing flames on which Nivedita’s eyes were fixed. Suddenly she felt a warmth, a melting in her ice locked heart. Startled, she looked down. A piece of the shawl she had wanted as a keepsake had come flying from the pyre, grazed her breast, and fallen into her lap.
Aruna Chakravartihas been the 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 fourteen published books on record. Her novels Jorasanko, Daughters of Jorasanko, The Inheritors, Suralakshmi Villa have sold widely and received rave reviews. The Mendicant Prince and her short story collection, Through a Looking Glass, are her most recent books. She has also received awards such as the Vaitalik Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and Sarat Puraskar for her translations.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Summer is DyingBowl of Black PetuniasPhotographs provided by Michael Lee Johnson
SUMMER IS DYING
Outside, summer is dying into fall,
and blue daddy petunias sprout ears—
hear the beginning of night chills.
In their yellow window box,
they cuddle up and fear death together.
The balcony sliding door
is poorly insulated, and a cold draft
creeps into all the spare rooms.
BOWL OF BLACK PETUNIAS
If you must leave me, please
leave me for something special,
like a beautiful bowl of black petunias—
for when memories leak
and cracks appear
and old memories fade,
flowers rebuff bloom,
sidewalks fester weeds
and we both lie down
separately from each other
for the very last time.
MEMORIES PAST
(Hillbilly Daddy)
I settle into my thoughts
zigzagging between tears
my fathers’ grave—
Tippecanoe River
Indiana 1982.
Over now,
a hillbilly country
like the flow
catfish memories
raccoons in trees
coon dogs tracking
on the river bank,
the hunt.
Snapping turtles
in the boat
offline—
river flakes
to ice—
now covered
thick snow.
Michael Lee Johnson lived ten years in Canada during the Vietnam era. Today he is a poet in the greater Chicagoland area, IL. He has 284 YouTube poetry videos. He is aa published poet in 44 countries, a song lyricist, has several published poetry books. He is editor-in-chief of 3 poetry anthologies, all available on Amazon, and has several poetry books and chapbooks. He has over 453 published poems.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Vanitas Still Life, painting by Evert Collier(1640 –1708). Courtesy: Creative Commons
Back home in Madrid, having abandoned Adamov Plut to his posthumous fate, I was a bit surprised that neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post reported anything about the murder, not even a paragraph, or as the French so imagitively put it, an entre-filet ! I soon realised, due to this journalistic silence, that the time had come for me to give a full account of my relation to Mr Plut ; that the time had come for me to expose, publicly, by way of this revelation, his ‘mysterious murder’.
My information is of the surest sources for the simple reason that it was I who had Mr Plut murdered ! Yes, I ! And for reasons that shall be shortly disclosed. A mysterious man he might have been; however, his methods of acquiring priceless books and other inestimable valuables can hardly be called mysterious: Mr Plut was a vulgar thief, a scoundrel, an ingenious trickster whose singular flair caused much grief to many individuals, enraged those whose trust had been flouted.
It was in Istanbul, where I was invited to sojourn with an Armenian merchant, that I witnessed Mr Plut’s dupery. And if my naive friend fell for his crooked smile, I certainly didn’t swallow his high tale of returning to pay him for the two illuminated manuscripts my friend had graciously offered the blighter on condition that he be held accountable for them. His thick, coarse lips translated a smile that held contempt and disdain towards those who trusted him. So infuriated and insulted did I feel on behalf of my friend that that I reacted on a lightning urge and decided to follow him. I said nothing of this to my disbelieving companion, but left immediately in pursuit of my game — and game it was — for I, to tell the truth, had nothing more substantial to do at the moment and felt disposed for a good hunt.
I said that Mr Plut was a genius. Yes, in his own way. However, genius has its limitations. His arrogance and haughtiness knew no bounds, although he knew that his foul doings had attracted the attention of police and Interpol. Some may surmise that a certain paranoia drove him to invent individuals tracking him down like a wild boar or moose. No, no one was tracking him down except me, and that as subtlety as possible. In Uzbekistan, I actually chatted with him over a cup of coffee on two occasions disguised as a professor of Slavic philology, dressed in a quilted chapan robe and silk embroidered tubeteyka cap. There we sat in Samarkand, sipping our thick beverages in the vaulted bazaar at one of the storied cafés that dot the town. He was all smiles, obsequious and gold-toothed. I had the impression that I was dealing with a child or a mentally-dwarfed man whose sense of reality lacked all discernment or sagacity. I concluded that he had come into quite a bit of money, and never having had to work for a livelihood, traipsed about the world at his leisure, buying or stealing books, cheating people out of their invaluable collections. So self-indulgent and confident was he that he never saw through my masquerade as we conversed in broken Russian.
It was at that café where I learned about his fabulous treasure, as he called his book hoard. Only an idiot would have divulged this information to a perfect stranger, but as I said, Mr Plut’s contemptible demeanour caused him to fall into the most infantile traps. Traps that I began laying out for him, and that would lead to his downfall. For I had begun to design my own plan to relieve the rogue of his fabulous possessions, all the more so since he also let slip that his parents had passed away, and he had inherited the house. How I would make his treasure mine and ‘disinherit’ the owner still remained vague in my mind.
We departed as ‘friends’, as two strangers seeking an answer to the mystery of their existence. Or so I made him believe. Mr Plut appeared to me a dying species, a worldly aesthete, in spite of his extreme vulgarity and ponderous gait, whose debonair demeanour masked a loathing for his victims, a bent for the lowest duplicity, a gratification in spinning the most treacherous stratagems in order to allay his desire to prevail.
Mr Plut slipped out of Uzbekistan without my knowing it. He probably used his Russian passport, one of the four of five in his possession. I felt a twinge of misgiving. Had the fat fellow got on to me? After many enquiries, I finally discovered that he had crossed into China at the Xinjiang border, and was hastening towards the Yunnan. Why ? I hadn’t the faintest idea …
His brief sojourn in the town of Lijiang enabled me to catch up with him. My Chinese was fluent enough not only to query his whereabouts in that lovely town, but more important still, to learn of his new ‘purchases’, once I had questioned the director of the Dongba Museum of Culture. Mr Plut had planned to gone there to acquire several Naxi pictographic sacred books, which he did from a rather corrupt priest with whom he had been corresponding for some time, using a special code so as not to be unmasked by the Chinese authorities of the Centre. The director only learned of this a week after the unlawful negotiations had occurred, and three or four very valuable Dongba liturgical books had been stolen. It goes without saying that the rapacious priest was severely punished.
I immediately left Lijiang much to my displeasure for it was indeed a quiet, pleasant place, and set out in hot pursuit of the marauder. I followed his all too familiar scent through Nepal into North-western India to the Zanskar region where he put up for a while at the Phuktal Gompa[1], a strange spot to make a halt. But a perfect hideout to gain time in order for planning his next move, whilst at the same time inveigling in the most repulsive manner his generous hosts.
The monastery is nestled in the most remotest of valleys, ensconced within a cliff of tuft of fairy chimneys, crags and honey-combed spires which bulge black and red against the background of sandy, dazzling ash and cinerous tones of hemp. I had trekked there from Lamayuru in twenty days, and as I was to learn, Mr Plut had arrived there three days ahead of me, but by way of Padum. To gain the main entrance of the gompa, the pilgrim had to climb a steep path, keeping his or her right shoulder to the seventeen chortens[2] that mark the steep climb towards the vaulted entrance. I had shaved my head, grown a long beard and donned a woollen chuba tightened around my waist with a long colourful sash. It kept me warm, for in spite of it being Summer, the nights were very cold, and my cell had only a small wood-burning stove to keep me warm.
I spent three weeks at the monastery, sleeping on a ratten matting, eating skieu, tsampa and chappatti, drinking steaming salt-buttered tea off a chopsey — a low, small table — reading or gazing out of the little window that offered me a full view of the dusty, treeless courtyard below, where monks would mutter their mantras, and beyond into soundless nights whose stars were generally veiled.
Without Mr Plut’s slightest suspicions, I assisted at all the ceremonies, mornings and evenings, even vigils, while in the afternoon, I would venture out into the monastic complex, twisting and turning in the warren of lanes, under the low archways and high ladders, at times pursuing my promenades upon the rather precipitous mountain paths. As to Mr Plut, he hardly left his cell, and when we did cross paths, he most probably took me for a Buddhist pilgrim. Once or twice I sat near him in the prayer hall in the meditation grotto, but he never attempted to communicate with me, albeit he did not seem very deep in prayer or contemplation. He was probably scheming his next miserable move. His face had become terribly pale and flabby. His darting, black eyes seemed to have sunk deeper into their sockets. Unable to sit cross-legged on the low benches at the back of the prayer hall, he sat ‘western style’, staring off into the clusters of chanting monks, tilting his huge, bobbing head every so often to the banging drums, blowing ox-horns and tinkling triangles. Observing him from afar, I sought to sound his soul, to wring out his innermost thoughts, to extract from his evident lassitude and apathy his flight from both his victims and himself. But Mr Plut was a sphinx. Would he rise out of his own ashes when his hour came ?
I left the good monks three days after his departure, a hasty one indeed. And they were furious! The scoundrel had stolen several pustuks[3] and thangkas, and failed to pay for the prayer masks that he ‘purchased’. They implored me to find the culprit, inform the police and recover their stolen property. It was perhaps the beseeching words of the infuriated monks, after having received such incomparable hospitality from them, that my plans to have the thief killed began to germinate ! The theft was not only gratuitous, it exposed the very ugliness of the man’s heart, blackened by greed, cynicism and remorselessness. It would only be a matter of time before he tasted a soupçon of his own medicine.
Meanwhile the cat would play with the mouse, a rather fat mouse at that ! I boarded the cargo ship that took the fugitive from Karachi to Oakland via Japan. On the long, monotonous voyage across the Pacific, my ominous shadow crossed his at the most unsuspecting moments. Attired as a Pashtun merchant, bearded, long-haired and turbaned, Mr Plut sensed an onerous presence whenever he laboriously carried his huge body across the decks. How many times had my eyes penetrated his anguish, his torment, his pangs, not of compunction, but of incomprehension. He scented a sleepless menace pressing him. Fear inflamed his dark, beady, mirthless eyes like the burning incision of the trenchant knife.
Oakland … Sacramento … Reno … Tombstone … Boulder … Santa Fe … Saint Louis … Chicago … New Orleans … Birmingham … Miami … Atlanta and finally New York. Yes, New York, where the curtains would finally fall on this tragic fat figure. Where upon the stage of 8 million walk-ons, and against the backdrop of the grottiest of hotels, the last act of Mr Plut’s abominable performance would be played out.
His infatuation with Louis Wolfson amused me, as well as his grandiose project to write twelve stories in twelve different languages signed by twelve different authors. I found all this quite pompous and pathetic. A real exercise in self-indulgence to say the least. All this information I culled when I ‘accidentally’ met him in the ill-lit corridor of that hotel on Water street in downtown Manhattan. In New York, I played the role of a French researcher in mediaeval literature, a field that he completely ignored, in spite of possessing several manuscripts of Anglo-Norman stamp, apparently purchased (so he said ?) from a London book-seller. I pretended to be interested, taking the opportunity to study him closely. Besides, he was such an inveterate liar how could one believe anything he said ? He lied to curry favour and win confidence, only to swindle and steal from the naive and simple-hearted. Better to observe his eyes, his gestures, his bouncing from one tongue to another. These were all genuine signs of his distorted psychological make-up. To play my part well, I sported an immaculate white suit, orange tie, a pair of silver-rimmed glasses and spanking new alligator shoes. I had shaved my beard and moustache and had my hair cut very short, leaving a few gossamer wisps which touched the tips of my ears and fell bouncily on my forehead.
Every day I followed his Humpty Dumpty gait as he waddled to and from the public library, in and out of Central Park. And it was there, in Central Park, that I noted two blond-haired rough fellows slouching on a bench, eating the remains of fried chips or chicken sandwiches, cursing and making gross signs at the passers-by, drinking beer and spitting. They were seated at the same bench daily — the bench that Mr Plut walked by every day. They seemed to know him because they would hoot at him, call him names and ask for money. Fatso passed by without even a glance at them.
One Saturday, I decided to approach the two ruffians. They sized me up with obvious contempt, and made it perfectly clear that I was intruding on their ‘territory’. I sat down none the less, and exposed my scheme to be rid of Mr Plut once and for all, explaining how the culprit had cheated and robbed so many people. The two burly blokes, former marines in the Green Beret (or so they vaunted!) listened attentively as I unfolded my plan: Three thousand dollars for each if they would simply walk up to his room in the early morning hours, the night porter always being asleep, knock at his door and kill him, however, without any blood shed or theft of his belongings. It must be a murder without reason, without any sign of bestial violence. One of them suggested strangulation. Yes, excellent idea. It would thus be a ‘clean’ murder.
And so it was, very professional at that I must say. They were paid off, as agreed. And I left New York two days later, as planned, a very satisfied man indeed …
This all happened five years ago. Now … well, here is where my account ends and my confession begins. For you see, Mr Plut was never really murdered ! Those two ‘ruffians’ were in fact F.B.I. agents who had been trailing me since disembarking in California. To tell the truth, Interpol and local police had been following me since the Istanbul affair. How and why they began doing so I cannot say. During my trial neither the judge nor the prosecuting attorney afforded any information as how the F.B.I. learnt of my scheme, nor why they had decided, at one point in time, to cooperate with Plut. What was I convicted of ? What was my indictment ? As to my appointed lawyer, a young short-sighted clerk more than a seasoned lawyer, who could be easily cajoled by the ‘evidence’ against me, pliantly manipulated by the prosecutor, after he had taken the floor and had made an absolute fool of himself. He let out a sigh of relief when the judge pronounced a sentence of fifteen years instead of twenty-five! The wigged judge, a grotesque figure studded with huge warts, yawned throughout my lawyer’s deplorable speech for the defense, as well as during my feeble plea. There was no jury either to lament or to applaud his verdict. It was a trial held at ‘huis clos’[4], military style. I buried my face in my hands. As expected, my lawyer made no effort to appeal.
Had Plut sensed my innermost aversion towards him ? Or seen through my many disguises ? He was a clever man, and probably had hired detectives to learn why I was following him. The hotel room murder was staged. Plut lay recumbent on the floor, waiting for me to steal his papers so that I would be indicted for premeditated murder (although there was no murder!), of paying off hoodlums to commit this murder (although they were F.B.I. agents!) and the theft, which indeed it was (but fifteen years for that?) of his household papers, keys, and other official documents concerning his inheritance … and that vile short story of his.
So here I sit in my rancid smelling cell in Madrid, having been arrested at the aeroport on my arrival some five years ago, writing out this confession. I do not to repent mind you, I have no intention of atoning for my doings, nor avowing my sins. These words wrenched from my pen seek to vent the animosity and hatred I harbour towards that fat impostor who had the cheek to write me a letter from the Seychelles revealing how he had got on to me since Uzbekistan, and how our little cat and mouse game had amused him greatly : “You thought me a fool, deary, but I sawthrough your pusillanimous scheme in Samarkand ; that was some outfit, but you forgot the galoshes ! Not to mention your pilgrim weeds at Phuktal which truly charmed me, and your blazing orange tie in New York. Come, come, what French professor would ever sport an orange tie with a badly tailored, cheap white suit ?” The vicious irony underlining these sentences, along with a soupçon of cynicism caused me to gag. The blighter added in a post-script that he had sold all his books for a fabulous sum of money, and had retired from the world’s wearisome fair. In the envelope I found a photo of him sipping coconut juice, lying on the golden sands of a crescent-shaped beach under groves of swaying palm trees and an indigo blue sky. I laughed bitterly, and yet, in spite of my nettled nerves, pinned up the blasted photo in my lonely cell, a sort of souvenir of our enshrouded relationship …
One day at the prison library, browsing idly through a dull, detective story, I thought of Plut’s or Hilarius Eremita’s story The Enchanted Garden, which I had taken and read to amuse myself on the aeroplane to Buenos Aires. Had anyone ever published such ridiculous trash? To my horror, the answer came three days later whilst I rummaged through a new batch of literary magazines, some of which contained short stories in English, French and German. And there it was — The Enchanted Garden, by Hilarius Eremita, Plut’s pen name. I couldn’t believe my eyes — someone had published that rubbish ! Plut indeed had the last laugh, adding insult to injury, salt to my festering wounds.
I savagely tore out the pages of his story from the magazine, went to the toilet, ripped them into tiny pieces and flushed the filth down the bowl. So much for hiss ‘first of the twelve’ ! I shan’t be punished for it, no inmate in this prison reads any language besides Spanish, and that with a dictionary … I’m sure it was Plut who sent me that magazine to drive the knife deeper into my wounded pride. The miserable rat !
So here I sit at my iron table, staring at Plut’s photo as he sips his coconut drink under the blue skies and swaying palm trees whilst I sip my wretched thin noodle soup with strips of hard, nervy beef under a cracked, peeling, dirty grey prison ceiling …
[2] The Tibetan word for stûpa, a Buddist shrine which initially housed the relics of the Buddha.
[3] Books used for Buddhist ceremonies written in Tibetan.
[4] Behind closed door without any public participation or observers. It is a French legal term.
Paul Mirabile is a retired professor of philology now living in France. He has published mostly academic works centred on philology, history, pedagogy and religion. He has also published stories of his travels throughout Asia, where he spent thirty years.
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I had always looked forward to visiting Kanyakumari. The idea of standing at the southernmost tip of India and gazing at the vastness of the Indian ocean was irresistible. There is no major land mass till you reach the southern continent of Antarctica. The union of the waters of the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Bay of Bengal make this area, referred to as Triveni[1]Sea, unique.
We wanted to visit the Southern most part – the Vivekananda rock, where Swami Vivekananda meditated before going to Chicago in 1893. However, the gate slammed shut as we rushed to the ferry terminal. It was past four in the afternoon, the hour when the last ferry departs for the rock that was at a point peaceful and calm. With it evaporated our hopes of visiting the Vivekananda rock memorial at Kanyakumari.
We were not deterred by having failed in our endeavour. We decide to continue our exploration on the mainland to see as much as we could. Huge crowds were everywhere. It was school holiday season, and everyone seemed to be travelling. Chaotic was the word that would best describe the situation. As my travel companion, Subhish, and I moved around, we noticed nearly every house in Kanyakumari seemed to have been converted into a restaurant and a homestay though waste management was poor and the toilets – especially in the tourist spots — were unsanitary and unusable.
We went to the Gandhi Mandapam by the Triveni Sea from where the Vivekananda Rock could be viewed. You can get an excellent view of the Vivekananda memorial and the statue from the top floor. In February 1948, Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes were immersed at this intersection. The memorial building houses several old photographs relating to Gandhi’s life but the museum needs maintenance and cleaning.
Kanyakumari houses ancient history. Our journey had started at the Sree Adi Kesava Perumal Temple, a temple dedicated to Vishnu, a major Hindu God, had been built in the Dravidian style and dates back at least to the seventh century. The stone and wood carvings speak of the deep devotion of the craftsmen.
The Adi Kesava Perumal TempleStone Pillars
Kanyakumari district had been part of the erstwhile kingdom of Travancore. King Marthanda Verma, who lived in the eighteenth century, is regarded as the founder of the Kingdom of Travancore. He had defeated the Dutch East India Company. A staunch devotee of Vishnu, he would pray before all his campaigns. Kanyakumari district had been the granary of the Travancore kingdom and was handed over to Tamil Nadu during the re-organisation of India along linguistic lines in 1956. Subish mentioned how his parents had told him about the fear and violence that existed for several years after the handover. Some of the monuments in the district are still maintained by the Kerala government under a 99-year lease.
Padmanabhan Palace groundsDelicate wood carvings
Just before lunch, we had visited the Padmanabhapuram palace, the capital of the Travancore kings which was rebuilt on an earlier structure from in the sixteenth century. King Marthanda Verma dedicated his kingdom to Lord Padmanabha, a manifestation of Lord Vishnu. The King and his successors saw themselves as Padmanabha dasa or subjects of the lord. The palace was vast and sprawling and situated in a four-kilometre-long fortress. Made entirely of wood, it had exquisite carvings. Though in some places, only the frames remain to suggest a story. There seemed to be massive halls where up to a thousand people could be fed at one time. They suggest a testament to the generosity of the kings. The palace unfortunately does not provide a glimpse into the life of its royal inhabitants. Having visited several museums and palaces elsewhere, I believe serious thought and action may be required on how to present this cultural gem better to visitors.
Pechiparai Reservoir
The Pechiparai Reservoir, where we stopped, has an interesting history. The dam was built across the Pechai River by a British engineer, Mr. Minchin working in the Travancore irrigation department. The site is peaceful, away from the hustle and bustle, and surrounded by green hills. In the 1880s when the dam was being built this would have been a remote location. Mr. Minchin’s grave has a home here – far from his own homeland in Britain.
Mathoor Aqueduct
We also visited structures closer to our times — the Mathoor Aqueduct, built in 1965. This is among the longest aqueducts in India. I was reminded of the Roman aqueducts. The view of the surrounding valley and hills from the aqueduct was spectacular. A rich agricultural area, you can walk along the aqueduct, come down and walk through the garden and playgrounds and then climb back to the starting point.
We drove to Sunset Point to watch the sun dip into the ocean after a hard day’s work. The sunset was spectacular. The few clouds had disappeared. The circular orb slowly sank into the silver sea.
Sunset Point
As dusk set in we started to drive back to Eraniel, Subhish’s hometown where we were staying. Subhish worked in Dubai and was on holiday like me. We stopped at Kilometre Zero on the national highway. The Indian politician, Rahul Gandhi had started his Bharat Jodho yatra[2]here a few months ago. ‘Kashmir to Kanyakumari’ is a popular slogan in India and this spot is a popular starting or ending point for political and other such marches.
Kanyakumari has red bananas everywhere. They grow well in this soil. I am partial to this variety and enjoy them whenever and wherever I can. The district has several ancient Hindu temples. We were now returning from Kanyakumari. Dusk had settled in and there was a huge line of cars going back to Nagarkovil (Nagercoil in English). We were searching for the nongu fruit also known as ice apple, palmyra palm, and by several other names. We eventually located one at a roadside stall. Eating nongu was one of the best experiences of my life. An absolute delight.
Nongu FruitsThe edible part of nongu fruitCourtesy: Creative Commons
Kanyakumari district has seen great progress over the last few decades. People from all over India have settled here. There are several water bodies scattered throughout the land and several wind farms. Tamil Nadu is among the wind energy giants in India. The climate here is less harsh compared to other parts of Tamil Nadu. Indians now have a good disposable income and are eager to explore their vast country. Will the tourism authorities pick up the gauntlet and cater to this population or will they continue along the old self-centred ways? Only time will tell!
[1] Translates to where three sacred rivers – in this case oceans — meet
[2] Unite India March carried out in 2022 by the Congress Party
*Photos by P Ravi Shankar and Subhish, where unacknowledged
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Dr. P Ravi Shankar is a faculty member at the IMU Centre for Education (ICE), International Medical University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He enjoys traveling and is a creative writer and photographer.
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