Tag: Colombo

“Words became my dwelling place”

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date August 14, 2025
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A conversation with Neeman Sobhan

Neeman Sobhan, born in the West Pakistan of Pre-1971, continues a citizen of both her cultural home, Bangladesh, and her adopted home, Italy. Her journey took her to US for five years but the majority of times she has lived in Italy – from 1978. What does that make her?

She writes of her compatriots by culture – Bangladeshis — but living often in foreign locales. Her non-fiction, An Abiding City, gives us glimpses of Rome. These musings were written for Daily Star and then made into a book in 2002. Her short stories talk often of the conflicting cultures and the commonality of human emotions that stretch across borders. And yet after living in Rome for 47 years – the longest she has lived in any country – her dilemma as she tells us in this interview – is that she doesn’t know where she belongs, though her heart tugs her towards Bangladesh as she grows older. In this candid interview, Neeman Sobhan shares her life, her dreams and her aspirations.

Where were you born? And where did you grow up?

I was born in Pakistan, rather in the undivided Pakistan of pre-1971: the strange land we had inherited from our grandparents’ and parents’ generation when British colonial India was partitioned in 1947 down the Radcliffe line, creating an entity of two wings positioned a thousand miles apart on either side of India! The eastern wing, or East Pakistan was formerly East Bengal, and my cultural roots are in this part of the region because I come from a Bengali Muslim family. But I was born not there but in West Pakistan, which is culturally and linguistically distinct from Bengal, comprising the regions of Western Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan and the NWFP (North-West Frontier Provinces, bordering Afghanistan), where the official language is Urdu.

So, my birthplace was the cantonment town of Bannu in the NWFP, (now KPK or Khyber Pakhtunkhwa).

Perhaps my life as the eternal migrant, living outside expected geographical boundaries started right there, at birth.

My father’s government job meant being posted in both wings of Pakistan. So, I grew up all over West Pakistan, and in Dhaka, whenever he was posted back to East Pakistan. Much of my childhood and girlhood were spent in Karachi (Sindh), Multan and Kharian (Punjab) and Quetta (Balochistan).

How many years did you spend in Pakistan?

The total number of years I spent in undivided Pakistan (West Pakistan, now Pakistan, and East Pakistan, now Bangladesh) is about two decades, or one year short of twenty years. From my birth in 1954, my growing years, till I left the newly independent Bangladesh in 1973 when I got married and came to the US at the age of nineteen.

What are your memories about your childhood in West Pakistan? I have read your piece where you mention your interactions with fruit pickers in Quetta. Tell us some more about your childhood back there.

I have wonderful memories of growing up in West Pakistan, in Karachi, Multan and Kharian of the late 50’s and early 60’s (despite the era of Martial Law under Field Marshall Ayub Khan, and later his military-controlled civilian government). However, the political environment is invisible and irrelevant to a child’s memories that center around family, school and playmates, till he reaches the teen years and becomes aware of the world of adults. Since, my father’ job entailed us going back and forth between West and East Pakistan, by the time we arrived in Quetta in late 1967, it ended up being my father’s last posting, because by then Ayub Khan’s regime was tottering under protests in both wings of Pakistan; and by the time (I should say in the nick of time) we left for Dhaka, it was already the turbulent year of 1970, which turned Pakistan upside down with General Yahya Khan becoming the new Marshall Law administrator. When we returned to Dhaka, it was the beginning of the end for Pakistan, with preparations for the first democratic general elections, and the blood soaked nine months war of independence for Bangladesh about to be staged.

But as a child, growing up in a Pakistan that was till then my own country, what remains in my treasure trove of memories are only the joys of everyday life, and the friendships (with those whom I never saw again, except one school friend from Quetta with whom I reunited in our middle age in Toronto, Canada!)

Also precious are the road trips with my five siblings and our adventurous mother, as we always accompanied our father on his official tours, across the length and breadth of West Pakistan.

But if I start to recount all my precious memories, I will need to write a thick memoir. And that is exactly what I have been doing over the years: jotting down my recollections of my past in Pakistan, for my book, a novel that is a cross between fact and fiction. The happy parts are all true, but the sad ones relating to the war that my generation underwent in 1971 as teenagers is best dealt with from the distance of fiction.

What I can offer is a kaleidoscopic view of some random memories: the red colonial brick residence of my family in the 60’s in Multan, one of the hottest cities of Punjab, known for its aandhi — dust storms — that would suddenly blow into the courtyard of the inner garden in the middle of the night as my sister and I slept on charpoys laid out in the cool lawn under a starlit sky, and being bundled up in our parents’ arms and rushed indoors; tasting the sweetest plums left to chill in bowls of ice; being cycled to school by the turbaned chowkidar weaving us through colourful bazars to the Parsi run ‘Madam Chahla’s Kindergarten School’ or on horse drawn tanga (carriages); learning to write Urdu calligraphic letters on the wooden takhta (board) with weed Qalam(pens) and a freshly mixed ink from dawaat (ink pots); and to balance this, my mother helping us to write letters in Bengali to grandparents back in East Pakistan on sky-blue letter pads, our tongues lolling as pencils tried to control the Brahmic alphabet-spiders from escaping the page.

In Karachi, returning home on foot from school with friends under a darkening sky that turned out to be swarms of locusts. Learning later that these grain eating insects were harmful only to crops not humans (and Sindhis actually eat them like fried chicken wings) does not take away the thrill of our adventure filled with exaggerated, bloodcurdling shrieks to vie with the screen victims of Hitchcock’s The Birds, viewed later as adults in some US campus. Picnics and camel rides on the seabeaches of Clifton, Sandspit, or Paradise Point. Near our home, standing along Drigh Road (the colonial name later changed to Shahrah-e-Faisal after King Faisal of Arabia, I later heard) waving at the motorcade of Queen Elizabeth II passing by with Ayub Khan beside her in a convertible with its roof down. That was in the 60’s. Later in 1970, embarking with my family on the elegant HMV Shams passenger ship at Karachi port for our memorable week long journey back to Dhaka across the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, with a port of call at Colombo in what was still Ceylon, to disembark at Chittagong port, not knowing then that we were waving goodbye not just to the Karachi of our childhood but a part of our own country that would soon become the ‘enemy’ through its marauding army.

But I reset my memories and bring back the beauty and innocence of childhood with images of my family’s first sight of snowfall in Quetta, the garden silently filling with pristine layers of snowflakes piling into a cloudy kingdom under the freshly tufted pine trees, as we sipped hot sweet ‘kahwa’ tea, and cracked piles of the best chilgoza pine-nuts and dried fruits from Kabul. And since Quetta was our last home in Pakistan, I leave my reminiscences here.

There are so many ways to enter the past. Photographs in albums discolor after a time, but words keep our lived lives protected and intact to be accessible to the next generation. I hope my novel-memoir will provide this.

How many countries have you lived in? Where do you feel you belong — Bangladesh, Pakistan, US or Italy — since you have lived in all four countries? Do you see yourself a migrant to one country or do you see yourself torn between many?

I have indeed lived in four countries, for varying lengths of time. In the sense of belonging, each country and stage of my life has left its unique impact. But I have still not figured out where I belong.

Although I lived in Pakistan and Bangladesh from birth till I was nineteen, these were the formative years of my life, and I feel they have coloured who I am fundamentally. The culture and languages of the subcontinent is fundamental to me as a human being. Also, having shared my parent’s experience of being almost foreigners and expats in their own country, trying to speak Urdu to create a Bengali lifestyle at home in a culturally diverse world of Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis or Pathans, I know it made them (and us as a family), different from our compatriots in East Pakistan who never left their region and had only superficial understanding of the West Pakistanis. My introduction to a migrant’s life and its homesickness started there, observing my parents’ life.

When I moved to the US after my marriage in 1973, it was to follow my husband Iqbal, to the Washington-Maryland area, where he had moved earlier as a PhD student after giving up, in 1971, his position in the Pakistani central government where he was an officer of the CSP (Civil Service of Pakistan) cadre. These were the days of being newly married and setting up our first home, albeit in a tiny student’s apartment, because more than as a home maker, I spent 5 years attending the University of Maryland as an undergraduate and then a graduate student. We thought our future might be here in the US, he working as an economist for a UN agency, and I teaching at a university. A classic version of the upwardly mobile American immigrant life.

But before we settled down, we decided to pursue a short adventure, and Iqbal and I came to Italy in 1978, from the US, on a short-term assignment with FAO, a Rome based agency of the UN. The mutual decision was to move here, temporarily! We would keep our options open for returning to the US if we did not like our life in Italy.

Well, that never happened! And given the fact that since then, we have spent the last 47 years in Italy, the Italian phase of my life is the longest period I have ever spent in any country in the last 71 years!

Meanwhile, we slowly disengaged ourselves from the US and it was clear that if we had to choose between two countries as our final homes, it would be between Bangladesh, our original home country, and Italy our adopted home.

Still, living away from ones’ original land, whether as an expatriate or an immigrant, is never easy. Immigrants from the subcontinent to anglophone countries like the US, UK, Canada, Australia etc, do not face the hurdles that migrants to Italy do in mastering the Italian language. I am still constantly trying to improve my language skills. Plus, there is the daily struggle to create a new identity of cultural fusion within the dominant and pervasive culture of a foreign land

So, in all these years, though I love Italy and my Roman home, I do not feel completely Italian even if my lifestyle incorporates much of the Italian way of life. For example, after a week of eating too much pasta and Mediterranean cuisine my husband and I yearn for and indulge in our Bengali comfort food. Although I enjoy the freedom and casual elegance of Italian clothes, I look forward to occasions to drape a sari, feeling my personality transform subtly, softly.

Yet, I cannot conceive of choosing one lifestyle over the other. The liberty to veer between different ways to live one’s life is the gift of living between two or more worlds.

The only incurable malaise, though, is the chronic nostalgia, especially during festivals and special occasions. For example, when Eid falls on a weekday, and one has to organise the celebration a few days later over a weekend, it takes away the spontaneous joy of connecting with one’s community, forcing one instead to spend the actual day as if it were an ordinary one. I miss breaking my fasts during the month of Ramadan with friends and family over the elaborate Iftar parties with special food back in Dhaka or celebrating Pohela Boishakh (Bengali new year) or Ekushey February (21^st February, mother language day) in an Italian world that carries on with its everyday business, unaware of your homesickness for your Bengali world. Over the years, when my sons were in school, I made extra efforts for. But you know you cannot celebrate in authentic ways.

Of course, these are minor matters. And I am aware that by virtue of the fact that I have dual nationality (I’m both an Italian citizen, and a Bangladeshi), I cannot consider myself a true and brave immigrant — someone who leaves his familiar world and migrates to another land because he has no other options nor the means to return; rather, I feel lucky to be an ex-patriate and a circumstantial migrant — someone who chooses to make a foreign country her home, with the luxury of being able to revisit her original land, and, perhaps, move back one day.

Meanwhile, I feel equally at home in Italy and in Bangladesh because we are lucky to be able to make annual trips to Dhaka in winter.

Whether I am considered by others to be an Italo-Bangladeshi or a Bangladeshi-Italian, I consider myself to be a writer without borders, a global citizen. I feel, I belong everywhere. My home is wherever I am, wherever my husband and my family are. My roots are not in any soil, but in relationships.

I often quote a line by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz. “Words became my dwelling place.” It resonates with me because for me often, it is neither a tract of land, nor even people, but language, literature and my own writings that are my true sanctuary, my homeland. I feel blessed to have the gift of expressing myself in words and shaping my world through language. My home is etched on the written or printed page. My books are my country. It’s a safe world without borders and limits.

Maybe it’s the conceit of a writer and a migrant, nomadic soul, but I think our inner worlds are more substantial than our external ones.

When I read your writing, I find a world where differences do not seem to exist among people in terms of nationality, economic classes, race or religion. Is it not far removed from the realities of the world we see around us? How do you reconcile the different worlds?

I believe and trust in our common humanity, not the narrowness of nationality, race or religion. Nationality particularly is limiting, dependent on land, and boundaries that can shift due to physical or political exigencies. Nationality by conferring membership also necessarily excludes on the basis of manmade criteria, while humanity is boundless, all encompassing, and inclusive, based on shared natural, biological, and spiritual traits.

In my case, I consider the whole world my family. I say this not just as idealistic hyperbole and wishful thinking, but from the fact that I have a multi-cultural, multi-racial family. Only my husband and I are a homogenous unit being Bengali Muslims by origin, but both my sons are married outside our culture, race and religion. One of my daughters in law is Chinese, the other has an English-French father and a Thai mother. So, through my grandchildren, who are a veritable cocktail, yet my flesh and blood, I am related to so many races. How can I bear malice to any people on the globe? The whole world is my tribe, my backyard, where we share festivals and food and rituals and languages. We celebrate unity in diversity.

Kindness and caring for others are values I hold dear in myself and others. I believe in sharing my good fortune with others, and in peaceful co-existence with my neighbours, wherever I live. I believe in living with responsibility as a good citizen wherever I find myself. And so far, the world that I see around me, perhaps narrow, is peopled with those who invariably reflect my own sense of fraternity. Maybe I am foolish, but I believe in the essential goodness of humanity, and I have rarely been disappointed. Of course, there are exceptions and negative encounters, but then something else happens that restores ones faith.

Love is more powerful than hate and generates goodness and cooperation. Change can happen at the micro level if more people spread awareness where needed. Peace can snowball and conquer violence. The human will is a potent spiritual tool. As is the power of the word, of language.

Literature is about connections, communications, bridges. It can bring the experiences and worlds of others from the margins of silence and unspoken, unexpressed thoughts and emotions into the centre of our attention. It brings people who live in the periphery within our compassionate gaze. Language is one of the most effective tools for healing and building trust. Responsible writers can persuasively break down barriers and make the world a safe home and haven for everyone, every creature.

You have a book of essays on Rome, short stories and poems set in Rome. Yet you call yourself a Bangladeshi writer. You have in my perception written more of Rome than Bangladesh. So which place moves your muse?

Any place on God’s beautiful earth can move my muse. Still, the perception is not completely accurate that I have written more of Rome than Bangladesh. It is true that many of my columns, short fiction or poems are set in Rome, but they are not necessarily just about Italy and Italians. In fact, my columns and poems were written from the perspective of a global citizen, who celebrates whichever place she finds herself in.

Poetry, in any case, is never just about any place or thing, but a point of departure. It always goes beyond the visual and the immediate and transcends the particular to the philosophical. The sight of a Roman ruin may jumpstart the poem, but what lifts it into the stratosphere of meaningful poetry is the universal, the human. For example, even when my poem speaks of a certain balcony in Verona, the protagonist is not a girl called Juliet but the innocence of first love, in any city, in any era.

My book of short stories, even when located in Rome, actually concern characters that are mostly Bangladeshi. In fact, it is my fiction that makes me a Bangladeshi writer, because my stories are ways for me to preserve my memories of the Bengali world of my past and an ephemeral present. I write to root myself. I often feel that I should write more about the new Italians, the Bangladeshi immigrants generation, rather than the expats of my generation, but my writing stubbornly follows its own compass.

Regarding my book of essays, my original columns for the Daily Star were written about many other cities I travelled to, including Dhaka and places in Bangladesh, and encounters with people in various countries not just Italy. Constrained to select columns from two decades of weekly writing, for a slim volume to be published, I narrowed the field of topics to Italy and Rome. But I had many essays and travel pieces concerning China, Russia, Vietnam, Egypt, Brazil, Spain, Netherlands and many other European cities and Asian capitals. In the end, a handful of columns about Italy became my book An Abiding City: Ruminations from Rome.

However, in the preface I said: “I must remind that the scope of the book, as suggested in the title, is ‘Ruminations FROM Rome’ not ‘Ruminations ON Rome’ with a tacit emphasis on ‘from’ because the writing relates to matters not just concerning ROME but also encompasses reflections of a more general kind. This is a collection of writings from a columnist who, within her journey through the Eternal City, also attempts to share with her readers her passage through life. I wish my fellow travellers a smooth sojourn into my abiding city, the one WITHIN and WITHOUT.”

I know that had I not lived in Rome but, say, Timbuctoo, I would find something to inspire me to write about. Of course, I am privileged to have lived in Rome and Italy, but nature is beautiful everywhere, in its own way, and there are other civilisations with rich cultures, histories, arts, cuisines, poetry and philosophy that can inspire the sensitive observer and writer.

My elder son lives in Jakarta, my younger son in Bangkok and in all the years of visiting them, I am blown away by the culture and beauty of the Indonesian and Thai worlds, and I have a notebook full of unwritten essays. And there is still so much of the world I have not seen, yet every part of this wondrous earth including my backyard is a chapter in the book of human knowledge. So, had I never left Bangladesh I would still have written. Perhaps “Doodlings from Dhaka!”

What inspires you to write?

Many things. A face at a window, a whiff of a familiar perfume, an overheard conversation, a memory, a sublime view…. anything can set the creative machine running. Plus, if I’m angry or sad or joyous or confused, I write. It could become a poem, fiction, or a column.

The writer in me is my inner twin that defines my essential self. I am a contented wife of 52 years of marriage, a mother of two sons, and a grandmother of four grandsons (aged 8-7-6-5). These roles give me joy and help me grow as a human being. But my writer-self continues on its solitary journey of self-actualisation.

Yet, I write not just for myself, I write to communicate with others. I write to transmit the nuances of my Bengali culture and its complex history to my non-Bengali and foreign readers and students, but more importantly to my own sons, born and brought up in Italy, and my grandchildren, whose mothers (my daughters-in-law) are from multi-cultural backgrounds, one a Chinese, and the other a combination of English, French and Thai. I write also for the younger generation of Bengalis, born or raised abroad, who understand and even speak Bangla, but often cannot read the language, yet are curious about their parents’ world and their own cultural heritage.

What started you on your writerly journey? When did you start writing?

I have always written. As an adolescent, I wrote mostly poetry, and also kept a journal, which I enjoyed reading later. It created out of my own life a story, in which I was a character enacting my every day. It clarified my life for me. Interpreted my emotions, explained my fears and joys, reinforced my hopes and desires. Writing about myself helped me grow.

My columnist avatar is connected to this kind of self-referral writing, but in real life it emerged by accident when I was invited to write by the editor of the Daily Star. The act of producing a weekly column was a learning experience, teaching me creative discipline and the ability to marshal my life experiences for an audience. I learnt to sift the relevant from the irrelevant and to edit reality. What better training for fiction writing? For almost two decades my experience as a columnist was invaluable to my writer’s identity.

Soon I concentrated on fiction, especially short stories that were published in various anthologies edited by others in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India. I now realised that while column writing was about my life in the present tense and about the daily world around me, my fiction could finally involve the past. The result was my collection of short stories: Piazza Bangladesh.

Ironically, it was my book of poems, Calligraphy of Wet Leaves that was the last to be published.

Your short stories were recently translated to Italian. Have you found acceptance in Rome as a writer? Or do you have a stronger reader base in Bangladesh? Please elaborate.

Without a doubt, as an anglophone writer, my reader base is better not just in Bangladesh, but wherever there is an English readership. However, books today are sold not in bookshops but online, so these days readers live not in particular cities or countries but in cyberspace.

But living in Italy as a writer of English has not been easy. The problem in Italy is that English is still a foreign and not a global language, so very few people read books in the original English. Every important or best-selling writer is read in translation. This is unlike the Indian subcontinent where most educated people, apart from reading in their mother tongues, read books, magazines and newspapers in English as well.

This is why I was thrilled to finally have at least one of my books translated into Italian, and published by the well-known publishing house, Armando Curcio, who have made my book available at all the important Italian bookstore chains, like Mondadori or Feltrinelli. Also, through reviews and social media promotion by agents and friends, and exposure through book events and literary festivals in Rome, including a well-known book festival in Lucca, it has gained a fair readership.

That’s all I wish for all my books, for all my writing, that they be read. For me, writing or being published is not about earning money or fame but about reaching readers. In that sense, I am so happy that now finally, most of my Italian friends and colleagues understand this important aspect of my life.

You were teaching too in Rome? Tell us a bit about your experience. Have you taught elsewhere. Are the cultures similar or different in the academic circles of different countries?

I taught Bengali and English for almost a decade at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the University of Rome, La Sapienza., till I retired, and it was an enriching experience.

I studied for a year at the University of Dhaka before I got married and came to the US in 1973, where I continued my studies at the University of Maryland, earning my B.A in Comparative Literature and M.A in English Literature. I mention this because these experiences gave me the basis to compare the academic cultures in the Bangladeshi, American and Italian contexts.

I discovered more in common between the Bangladeshi and Italian academic worlds, especially regarding the deferential attitudes of students towards their teachers. In Italy, a teacher is always an object of reverence. In contrast, I recall my shock at the casual relationships in the American context, with students smoking in front of their teachers, or stretching their leg over the desk, shoes facing the professor. Of course, there was positivity in the informality and camaraderie too, between student and teacher. But with our eastern upbringing we cannot disregard our traditional veneration of the Guru and Master by the pupil.

In Italy it was rewarding for me to have received respect as a ‘Professoressa’ while teaching, and even now whenever I meet my old students. However, some of the negative aspects of the academic world in Italy linked to the political policies that affect the way old institutions are run, cause students to take longer to graduate than at universities in the UK or US for example.

Are you planning more books? What’s on the card next?

I have a novel in the pipeline, a fusion of fiction and memoir, that has been in gestation for more than a decade. Provisionally titled ‘The Hidden Names of Things’, it’s about Bangladesh, an interweaving of personal and national history. It’s almost done, and I hope to be looking for a publisher for it soon. Perhaps, it has taken so long to write it because over the years while the human story did not change much, the political history of the country, which is still evolving through political crises kept shifting its goal posts, impacting the plot.

Most of my writings illustrate, consciously or inadvertently, my belief that as against political history our shared humanity provides the most satisfying themes for literature.

To share my stories with a readership beyond the anglophone one, my collection of stories ‘Piazza Bangladesh’ was translated into Italian and published recently in Italy, as ‘Cuore a Metà’ (A Heart in Half) which underlines the dilemma of modern-day global citizens pulled between two worlds, or multiple homes.

Meanwhile, my short stories, poems and columns will be translated into Bengali to be published in Dhaka, hopefully, in time for the famous book fair in February, Ekushey Boimela. Then my journey as an itinerant Italian-Bangladeshi writer will come full circle and return home.

(This online interview is by Mitali Chakravarty)

Click here to read an excerpt from An Abiding City: Ruminations from Rome

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

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

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

Review

A Hiding to Nothing

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: A Hiding to Nothing

Author: Chhimi Tenduf-La

Publisher: Hachette India

Let me be honest enough. When I received this book for review penned by a Sri Lankan author, I expected it to be a debut novel written by a person who is one of the many new voices that keep on emerging in sub-continental English fiction every other day. But the unusual name of the author made me enquire a little further to find out that he was half Tibetan and half English, educated at Eton and Durham in England, and has been managing an international school in Sri Lanka for thirty years. All these issues account for and contribute to the background of the novel’s setting. More surprise was in store when I found that Chhimi Tenduf-La has been writing fiction for the past ten years and his first novel, The Amazing Racist, was published way back in 2015. Since then, he has penned two more books and now his fourth book, A Hiding to Nothing, is what he himself defines as his “first domestic thriller.”

Such background information therefore definitely helps the reader to understand the nature of this present novel, which is set in Colombo’s manicured gardens owned by rich, elite and sometimes dicey people, and simultaneously moves to the activities set in England in Durham’s cobblestone streets.

The central issue of the story revolves around the miscarriage of Neja Pinto after she marries Ramesh in England and her subsequent inability to conceive which results in taking recourse to surrogacy. Believing in the stigma of South Asian sensibilities when a woman is looked down upon if she cannot give birth to her own off-spring, they want to keep the entire matter as secretive as possible so that they can come back from England to Sri Lanka and claim the child, Devin, as their own biologically born offspring till a point when the child is kidnapped by unknown people. From this point begins a lot of questions like who would dare take Devin – and why? As the incidents of the story march forward at electronic speed, creating the right atmosphere of a well-devised whodunit, the novel is crowded with innumerable characters, some unique, others quite stereotypical, but none out of suspicion. Is it the swimming coach Neja gets too close to? Could it be the ghosts of their past – the ruthless creditors Ramesh deceived in a Ponzi scheme, now back for blood? Or is it the enigmatic Dr Haksar who helped them have a child? And what of the mysterious woman from the British High Commission, whose probing questions hint at knowledge she shouldn’t possess? As the whispers grow louder, one name resurfaces with terrifying weight: Satya Basu, who actually bears the child in lieu of money. Is she back to settle an old score?

As mentioned earlier, at the centre of the story are the protagonists Neja and Ramesh Pinto, who are now husband and wife, but are also portrayed in their pre-marital days in England. Then there is Ramesh’s mother Loku Madam who is a stern and powerful woman with complete control over her son, which results in a sort of mother fixation. Loku Madam is planning a fourth marriage with a rich tea garden owner.

There is a swimming pool trainer called Johnny Dias with whom Neja has a fling resulting in several complications in the plot; the child Devin who disappears after he is kidnapped and from where many more eventful activities take place in the story; then there is Mercy Mbangwa who works at the British High Commission but also takes too much of an interest in the affairs of Neja and Ramesh Pinto. The Pintos take on names as Nita and Ravi Ponniah when they live in Durham because they want to remain incognito and take possession of a surrogate child in the making by another character called Satya Basu ( I am surprised because though ending with an ‘a’, in Bengali Satya is usually a male name and not a female one), Dr. Haksar and several other characters, all of whom are illegal immigrants in England. There are bartenders, hustlers and many other minor characters that crowd the scene too.

Chhimi Tenduf-La unravels a suspenseful tale where the truth is elusive – and the cost of uncovering it may be too high to bear. He brings in all possible locations and situations with very intense visual details which makes us feel it to be the right ambience for a Netflix movie. The novel is architecturally very carefully set through fifty-six chapters (some as short as one and a half pages) to others slightly longer, and the chapters are very carefully juxtaposed by alternating between Sri Lanka, 2024 and London/England 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018. In fact, the last chapter brings us to the present Sri Lanka in 2025 where finally all the mysteries are unravelled and the author hints at a positive and optimistic note where all the sound and fury is resolved to a quiet ending.

The racy speed at which the author takes the readers through this 310 page-turner mystery at times makes one confused and it seems that since he is attempting a new sub-genre of what he calls a first attempt at a ‘domestic thriller’, he has attempted to put in as many things as possible. Some of that could probably have been avoided. But his innovative style and deft handling of the English language needs special mention, and this reviewer strongly recommends everyone to read and appreciate the novel.

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

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

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

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International

Tags A Hiding to Nothing, British High Commission, Chhimi Tenduf-La, Colombo, Durham, England, English, Eton, Hatchette India, London, Santiniketan, Somdatta Mandal, Sri Lanka, Tibetan, Visva Bharati

Contents

Borderless, January 2025

Editorial

“We are the World”… Click here to read.

Translations

Jibanananda Das’s Ghumiye Poribe Aami (I’ll Fall Asleep) has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

Roll Up Not the Mat by Ali Jan Dad has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.

My Father’s Jacket, a poem by Ihlwha Choi has been translated from Korean by the poet himself. Click here to read.

Probhat or Dawn by Tagore has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.

Poetry

Click on the names to read the poems

Michael R Burch, Kirpal Singh, Afsar Mohammad, Michelle Hillman, Kiriti Sengupta, Jenny Middleton, G Javaid Rasool, Stephen Druce, John Grey, Aman Alam, George Freek, Vidya Hariharan, Stuart McFarlane, Rhys Hughes

Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes

In Midnight Tonight, Rhys Hughes gives us humour and horror together. Click here to read.

Musings/Slices from Life

Not Quite a Towering Inferno

Farouk Gulsara gives an account of an experienced hotel fire in Colombo. Click here to read.

Do we all Dance with the Forbidden?

Nusrat Jahan Esa muses on human nature keeping in mid Milton’s Paradise Lost. Click here to read.

Musings of a Copywriter

In Banking Ideas?, Devraj Singh Kalsi explores the idea of writers and banking. Click here to read.

Notes from Japan

In Weekend in Futaba at the Japan Writers Conference, Suzanne Kamata writes of the inception of the event and this year’s meet. Click here to read.

Essays

Well Done, Shyam! Never Say ‘Goodbye’!

Ratnottama Sengupta gives an emotional tribute to Shyam Benegal, focussing on her personal interactions and his films. Click here to read.

Roquiah Sakhawat Hossein: How Significant Is She Today?

Niaz Zaman reflects on the relevance of one of the earliest feminists in Bengal. Click here to read.

Morning Walks

Professor Fakrul Alam writes of his perambulations in Dhaka. Click here to read.

Stories

Nico’s Boat Sails to China

Paul Mirabile weaves a story of resilience set in Greece. Click here to read.

Anand’s Wisdom

Naramsetti Umamaheswararao relates a story set on pathways amidst Andhra villages. Click here to read.

The Forgotten Children

Ahamad Rayees gives us a poignant story set in Kashmir. Click here to read.

The Heart of Aarti

Priyatham Swamy gives a story about an immigrant from Nepal. Click here to read.

Persona

Sohana Manzoor wanders into a glamorous world of expats. Click here to read.

Conversation

In conversation with Kiriti Sengupta, a writer and a director of Hawakal Publishers. Click here to read.

Book Excerpts

An excerpt from S. Eardley-Wilmot’s The Life of an Elephant. Click here to read.

An excerpt from Contemporary Urdu Stories from Kolkata, translated by Shams Afif Siddiqi and edited by Shams Afif Siddiqi and Fuzail Asar Siddiqi. Click here to read.

Book Reviews

Somdatta Mandal reviews Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s Kaleidoscope of Life: Select Short Stories, translated from Bengali by Hiranmoy Lahiri. Click here to read.

Malashri Lal reviews Basudhara Roy’s A Blur of a Woman. Click here to read.

Basudhara Roy reviews Afsar Mohammad’s Fasting Hymns. Click here to read.

Bhaskar Parichha reviews Razeen Sally’s Return to Sri Lanka: Travels in a Paradoxical Island. Click here to read.

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

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International

Tags A Blur of a Woman, Afsar Mohammad, Ahamad Rayees, Andhra, Basudhara Roy, Bengali, Bhaskar Parichha, Bibhubhushan Bandhopadhyay, Colombo, Contemporary Urdu Stories from Kolkata, Devraj Singh Kalsi, Dhaka, Fakrul Alam, Farouk Gulsara, Fasting Hymns, Futaba, Fuzail Asar Siddiqi, G Javaid Rasool, Ghumiye Poribe Aami, Greece, Hawakal Publishers, Hiranmoy Lahiri, Ihlwha Choi, Japan, Japan Writers Conference, Jenny Middleton, Jibanananda Das, John Grey, Kaleidoscope of Life: Select Short Stories, Kashmir, Kiriti Sengupta, Kirpal Singh, Kolkata, Korean, Malashri Lal, Michael R Burch, Michelle Hillman, Milton, Mitali Chakravarty, Naramsetti Umamaheswararao, Nepal, Niaz Zaman, Nusrat Jahan Esa, Paradise Lost, Paul Mirabile, Priyatham Swamy, Probhat, Ratnottama Sengupta, Razeen Sally, Return to Sri Lanka: Travels in a Paradoxical Island, Rhys Hughes, Roquiah Sakhawat Hossein, S. Eardley-Wilmot, Shams Afif Siddiqi, Shyam Benegal, Sohana Manzoor, Somdatta Mandal, Stephen Druce, Stuart McFarlane, Tagore, The Life of an Elephant, Towering Inferno, Vidya Hariharan

Review

Travels in a Paradoxical Island

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date January 14, 2025
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Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: Return to Sri Lanka: Travels in a Paradoxical Island

Author: Razeen Sally

Publisher: Simon & Schuster India

Sri Lanka’s culture is characterised by several paradoxical aspects that reflect its rich history, diverse population, and the complexities of contemporary society. Here are some notable contradictions: Home to various ethnic groups, including Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims, each has its distinct languages and traditions. However, there is a prevailing sentiment among some that prioritises Sinhalese culture over others, leading to tensions and conflicts regarding national identity and rights.

While Sri Lanka has a history of female activism and women hold significant positions in politics (e.g., former President Chandrika Kumaratunga), gender inequality persists in many sectors. Women often face societal pressures that limit their roles despite their contributions to the economy and community. The tiny country has made strides in economic development and infrastructure, yet significant poverty remains, particularly in war-affected regions like the North and East. This disparity highlights the uneven benefits of economic progress across different communities

The island is also known for its religious diversity, with Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam practiced by its citizens. However, this coexistence is often marred by sectarian violence and discrimination, particularly against minority groups during political upheavals.

As Sri Lanka embraces globalization and modern influences, there is a tension between adopting new lifestyles and preserving traditional customs. This cultural clash can lead to generational divides within families and communities.

Razeen Sally’s book, Return to Sri Lanka: Travels in a Paradoxical Island, explores these complexities and contradictions. The memoir combines personal narrative with historical and political analysis, offering readers an immersive journey through various regions of Sri Lanka—from the bustling capital of Colombo to the tranquil beaches and verdant hill country. Sally reflects on his childhood experiences while addressing the island’s tumultuous history, including its colonial past and the long-lasting effects of civil war.

Razeen Sally, the son of a Sri Lankan Muslim father and a Welsh mother, was raised in Colombo and educated in the UK. After teaching at the London School of Economics, he now teaches at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore. In his early forties, he felt a strong urge to return to Sri Lanka for the first time since childhood and has spent the past ten years exploring the island.

Sally viewed Sri Lanka as a paradise during his childhood, but conflict soon disrupted their lives, fracturing his family’s connection to the island. Return to Sri Lanka tells the story of his journey towards reconciliation in the twenty-first century, as Sally, now an academic and political adviser, revisits his birthplace. This travel memoir addresses significant political issues and is rich in beauty and profound reflections, written by someone who feels like both a local and a visitor.

The words, “Paradoxical Island”, in the title encapsulates the duality of Sri Lanka, where hospitality coexists with high rates of violence and societal divisions. Despite interactions among ethnic groups like Tamils and Sinhalese, underlying tensions often surface, revealing deep-seated issues regarding rights and representation.

Sally provides insight into how historical events, such as the policies of successive governments and the impact of colonialism, have shaped contemporary Sri Lankan society. He discusses significant political figures and movements while critiquing policies that have led to economic challenges, including a brain drain among educated youth.

The book highlights Sri Lanka’s diverse cultural landscape, examining how various religions and ethnicities contribute to both its charm and its conflicts. Sally emphasises the importance of understanding these dynamics to appreciate the island’s true essence.

Return to Sri Lanka is not just a travelogue but a profound exploration of a nation grappling with its identity. Sally’s reflections offer hope for reconciliation and progress, urging readers to engage with Sri Lanka’s complexities while appreciating its inherent beauty. These paradoxes illustrate the complexities of Sri Lankan culture, where historical legacies continue to shape contemporary realities, creating a vibrant yet challenging social landscape.

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

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Slices from Life

Not Quite a Towering Inferno

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date January 14, 2025
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By Farouk Gulsara

We were told to be ready for dinner by 6 p.m., so we had one and a half hours to kill before gathering at the lobby. My varsity mates and I, fourteen of us, on our regular bromance outing, had decided to embark on a six-day tour around Sri Lanka. Colombo was our last stop.

I told myself there was time for a shower. I thought I heard the yell of two men. They must be at the heights of merry-making, I reckoned. Nothing wrong. After all, many were holidaying in Colombo, like us, in what was hailed as paradise on Earth. Maybe they took the celebrations too far. It was then that the lights went off. Then I thought I heard a barrage of a loud bang. Did somebody drop something heavy? Then came the indistinctive smell of burning rubber.

Then it clicked. Everything fell into place. Damn. There must be a fire somewhere! I open my room door. I could see a hint of smoke whirling at the ceiling.

What happened to the fire alarm and emergency light or water sprinklers? This is not a rundown half-grade hotel. This is a reputable hotel with its rich Scottish tradition plastered all over its walls, tartans, Scots family insignia and all. Even though we think the British ruled India, the Scottish served in the East Indian Company in big numbers as well. They, too, joined the bandwagon to usurp wealth from unsuspecting natives through their mercantile activities.

As a matter of reflex, I got into the drill. The passive learning from watching all those disaster movies had to be put to good use. Like a child regurgitating what he learnt from rote learning, I fell in line.

“Relax, said the night man!” The first thing that came to mind was, “Don’t panic!” Earlier there had been a blackout. I was too relaxed to think of sitting through the outage and letting the electricians sort it out. That was the wrong move.

Learned experience from flight stewardesses was “in case of emergency, leave behind your belongings and head to the exit”. I realised that it may only work sometimes. Stuck in a third-world country, running around to the fancy of their bureaucracy is not my idea of a holiday. I stuffed my passport, wallet and mobile phone into my jeans and headed out of the room without my luggage. Again, another mistake, I thought.

I remember reading, “Do not use the elevator in case of emergency,” during those long hours spent waiting for lifts. Keeping that in mind, I headed to the stairs. Wow, so far, so good. I began wondering how everything was working like clockwork. Are people so desensitised after watching so many reels on YouTube that they just know what to do? The hotel staff must have been bombarded with so much footage of disasters elsewhere that they could perform the next course of action half asleep.

To be fair, the hotel staff were on their toes, guiding guests down to the exit with the light of their phones. Without their help, the stairs would have been pitch dark. Now, what happened to the emergency lights along the stairway?

Going down was easy, but there was mayhem once I reached the ground floor. Visibility was almost zero, and the lobby was filled with thick smoke. For the first time, panic was palpable. People were coughing and shouting. My first instinct was to pull up my T-shirt to cover my mouth and crouch down as low as possible to minimise smoke inhalation. I switched my mobile phone light on to guide my way forward. My foot hit upon what was the Christmas tree. Huh! I remember observing a giant Christmas tree in the lobby very near the entrance while checking into the hotel. The only differences were it was then brightly lit and covered with fake snow. Now it is dull and grey. I knew the exit was nearby. I followed the steady traffic of the crowd herding out.

Still, the thick smoke was overwhelming, and the pungent smoke slowly irritated my throat. I continued the rest of the journey in anaerobic mode, trying not to inhale more smoke than I had already ingested. Luckily, the way out was short.

It was hard to stay relaxed when everybody else was not. Somehow, I made it out, patting myself for staying calm. What greeted me outside was a crowd surrounding the perimeter of the hotel, directing me to an area nearby. They were pointing up at the building that was supposed to be my two-night stay. There was thick smoke bellowing from its 7th floor.

News spreads like wildfire in this digital world. People were engrossed in getting the best angle for the personal shot with their devices. Soon, the footage would grace their social media and, perhaps, be potentially ‘viralled’. Photographers with zoom lenses were already there as if they had purposely ignited a fire to film it. Curious onlookers with work clothes were locked in their gaze, in awe, as if it were the second coming. I followed.

I could see one elderly gentleman out at the window. Yes, I had seen that man before when checking in. He was then struggling to move. He must have opened his window to let the smoke out of his room. But luck had different plans. The smoke had grown in intensity and was blowing directly at his window. Desperate, he climbed out of his window and wanted to jump out against the pleading and yells of onlookers, including me. Maybe it was the confusion of inhaling carbon monoxide; he must have thought the fast out of his misery was to jump down without a safety harness.

A modern fire engine moved in just then, much to everyone’s relief. In a jiffy, an aerial ladder was summoned to whisk the victim from the window. Applause ensued, and the victim was quickly stretchered to a nearby ambulance.

Firemen at work. Photo Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

The bellowing smoke quickly settled down, and my friends and I sighed in relief. Though one of my friends went on a tirade of cough. Even before the start of the holiday, he had been recovering from a nasty dry cough. The smoke must have made it worse. The paramedics checked on him, too, and took him in for overnight observation.

The hotel was cordoned off with yellow tape and classified as a crime zone. The police had to investigate to rule out arson. Until then, our luggage was the property of the Sri Lankan Police Department, and no one could go in or out.

We were left out like refugees with only our pants and clothes on our backs.

“… but we have our luggage stuck upstairs. We need them!” we told the hotel staff.

As expected, the reply was, “Sorry, Sir. Nobody can enter the building. But don’t worry, Sir. We will take care of your things.”

We were later given rooms in a nearby hotel, which was better and newer than the drab one we had been given earlier.

We soon left to bury our sorrows in some Ceylonese comfort food: apom[1] and coconut milk-rich crab curry. We had enough action for the day.

In retrospect, leaving the luggage behind was a wise move. Chugging the bags along the dark stairs and smoke-filled foyer is quite daunting. Sleeping with the clothes on our backs without toiletries must have been a trade-off for smoke inhalation and hospital admissions.

Overnight, we had become stars of sorts. Everywhere we went, it became the ice breaker. We became the talk of the town as the ‘guys who cheated the hotel fire”. Of course, we did nothing like that. Still, it spiced up our holiday and gave us friends of more than forty years something to reminisce about in our twilight years.

We only had access to our bags the following morning, which also meant we could not personally enter the premises to collect our belongings. Only designated hotel staff could do that. The hotel was still a crime investigation zone, which must mean we were considered potential arsonists who could tamper with evidence. The police personnel were still busy taking samples and photographs of the crime scene.

Luckily, the fire was localised, and the firefighters did not need to hose the whole building down. Hence, our baggage was dry. My room was on the second floor, while my other friends were on different floors. The fire had been on the seventh. Even though most of our rooms were far from where the fire allegedly started, the retrieved luggage came with a grimy layer of soot, compliments of the furious, fiery invader. Even the garments and bags gave a whiff of smoke for days afterwards, even after sunning it in the open.

Imagine how it would have been if I had waited a little longer. What is damage to property when, above all, health and life matter most? Going back without the luggage is better than returning in a body bag.

[1] apom – soft, sweet and fluffy traditional pancake from Southern India and Sri Lanka.

Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.

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

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

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Tags Christmas, Colombo, East India Company, Farouk Gulsara, India, Rifle Range Boy, Sri Lanka

Essay

Bottled Memories, Inherited Stories

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date August 14, 2024
1 Comment on Bottled Memories, Inherited Stories

By Ranu Bhattacharyya

I hear the scents whisper. Familiar fragrances of clove and cinnamon, imbued with spicy notes of pepper and eucalyptus beckon and tease. Elusive murmurs of mysterious oils and herbs tinge the air as I walk along a narrow-paved lane in Old Dhaka, overshadowed by looming walls on either side. I ignore the press of prying eyes and inquisitive bodies that accompany my passage. The call of the scents is irresistible, and I feel strangely unafraid of what lies before the next turn in the path ahead. These were the scents of my childhood — of summer afternoons spent secretly exploring the forbidden depths of my grandmother’s closet, the kaancher almarih[1] where her medicines were stored in shiny glass bottles with peeling labels.

The narrow lane spills into a small courtyard hemmed by buildings on three sides. Everything is closed because it is Friday, the day of prayer in Bangladesh. Peering through grimy windows, I see gigantic iron cauldrons, cavernous kansa kadhais[2], their gold gleaming in glimpses amidst sooty splatters, huge ladles and enormous tongs. Some vessels perch on hand-crafted mud stoves, their sides smoothened and baked by fires. Wooden logs are stacked in the corner along with bulging sacks of coal. Nearby, some large pieces of cloth, perhaps used for straining, are hung out to dry. In the shadowy recesses, shelves stacked with glass bottles glisten with reflected light. It seems almost staged, like a theatrical representation of a medieval kitchen and yet the evidence of daily use is undeniable.

The fourth side of the courtyard has an open doorway. A sudden urge, an inexplicable pull, lures me towards it. I feel I know what lies beyond its brink. Yet how could that be? In this alien city, situated in a land scarred by a brutal Partition, from where does this knowing come? Concentrating on lifting the edge of my saree as I step across the threshold, it takes me a moment to lift my eyes to see what lies ahead. A painting of a pot-bellied man seated cross legged on an asana[3], a sacred thread adorning the vast expanse of his chest, looks solemnly back at me. Before me was the same face I’d seen on countless bottles in that medicine cupboard of my childhood — the same glossy hair, oiled and parted with precision, the same curled moustache, the same narrow bordered white dhoti[4].

The author with her great grandfather’s portrait in Dhaka. Photo Courtesy: Ranu Bhattacharyya

I find myself before a life-size portrait of my great grandfather, Mathura Mohan Chakraborty, founder of Shakti Aushadhalaya, the Ayurvedic pharmacy famed in the streets of Dhaka, Calcutta, Patna, Benaras and Rangoon at the turn of the 19th century. The kitchen behind me was the pharmacy’s karkhana[5] to prepare medicines of his formulations. His portrait hung before the inner sanctum of the temple he had dedicated to the revered Bengali saint, Lokenath Baba. Legend claimed that the mystic had whispered the recipe of the first medicinal formulation to his most faithful disciple — my great grandfather.

Ever since I arrived in Dhaka as an expat, I had been searching for the Shakti Aushadhalaya premises. Everyone knew of the company; yet nobody seemed to know where it was located. I was introduced everywhere as a young scion of the family. And though whispers followed me at gatherings and smiles broadened on hearing I was the great granddaughter of Mathurababu, my questions regarding the whereabouts of the company drew blank stares and confused responses. In horticulture, the word scion, refers to the detached living part of a plant that is cut to be grafted onto another plant. The sundering of this particular scion had been so complete, over so many generations, through such a series of violent events that it seemed my search for the original plant would remain elusive.

It was only through persistent enquiry that I found myself in Swamibagh Road in Old Dhaka where the manufacturing unit of Shakti Aushadhalaya was located. Mathurababu had founded the company in Patuatuli, Dhaka, in 1901. Family lore suggests Lokenath Baba inspired him to venture far from his origins as a schoolteacher in Bikrampur. The ascetic recognised his potential, unusual in those times, as a graduate versed in three languages — Bengali, Sanskrit and English. Starting from humble beginnings in the family kitchen, peddling hair oil and tooth powder in his neighbourhood, Mathurababu’s prescient business acumen saw his enterprise flourish. The company produced and supplied quality Ayurvedic medicines at low prices. Mathurababu also established an Ayurvedic institute, attached to his manufacturing unit to popularise Ayurvedic knowledge. The institute taught Ayurveda and philosophy in Sanskrit. Students were offered free tuition, boarding, and lodging.

Ayurveda, considered the oldest existing health science in the world, is believed to have originated in India 5000 years ago. The journey of Ayurveda from ancient times to its present incarnation is a fascinating story that follows several simultaneous trajectories, embracing geopolitics and history, trade and commerce, science and industry, technology and travel.

It is with a sense of wonder that I encounter my great grandfather’s name in journals and books that describe the history of Ayurveda in India. He was among the earliest entrepreneurs to transition towards production of Ayurvedic drugs for the market. Directly involved in all aspects of his company, Mathurbabu immersed himself in the study of Ayurveda and had an extensive library of rare treatises on ancient Indian medical traditions, including a prized copy of Susruta Sanhita[6].

He noticed that Western medicines advertised their products in newspapers and journals. Following this model, he embraced a similar practice for his own company. An advertisement published in Muhammadi in February 1940 included endorsements from freedom fighter Chittaranjan Das, Lord Lytton, the Viceroy of India, and Lord Ronaldshay, the Governor General of Bengal. In the vintage advertisement, Lord Lytton wrote: “I was very interested to see this remarkable factory which owes its success to the energy and enthusiasm of its proprietor Babu Mathura Mohan Chakravarty B.A. The preparation of indigenous drugs on so large a scale is a very great achievement. The factory appeared to me to be exceedingly well managed and well equipped &c. &c.” In the same advertisement, in Bengali, Chittaranjan Das endorsed that nothing could surpass the production processes for medicines at Shakti Aushadhalaya.

Since the mid-19th century, several eminent leaders of the Indian freedom struggle visited Mathurbabu’s factory in Dhaka. On June 6, 1939, in the company’s visitor’s book, Subhash Chandra Bose wrote, “I visited the Sakti Oushadhalaya[7], Dacca, today and was very kindly shown around the premises. Indigenous medicines are prepared here on a large scale and in accordance with Ayurvedic principles. The institution reflects great credit on Babu Mathura Mohan Chakravarty, whose enterprise has brought Ayurvedic medicines within the reach of the poor. I wish him all success to the institution which he has built up after so much enterprise and hard labour for a long period. The success of Sakti Oushadhalaya, Dacca, means the popularity of Ayurveda throughout the country and this in its turn means the relief of suffering humanity.”

When my parents visited us in Dhaka a year after our arrival, we went back to Swamibagh Road. Our visit included a trip to the shop where the medicines of Shakti Aushadhalaya were sold.

Despite being taken over by the Pakistan government in 1971 and subsequently acquired by a private entrepreneur, the company remains operational in Bangladesh to this day with 37 branches nationwide. Though Mathurababu’s portrait is no longer on the medicine bottles in the shop, the names of the formulations inscribed, are still recognised by my mother. As we browse through the offerings, a crowd begins to form around her, hailed and welcomed as Mathurababu’s direct descendant. Much to my mother’s delight, the crowd guided her to his house, a now derelict mansion hidden in the by-lanes of Old Dhaka.

We entered the property through an ornamented gatehouse that opened to a large courtyard. On one side was the Baithakghar, the public receiving room with the Nat Mandir, the family temple in front of us. On the other side was the majestic mansion with tall columns, topped with ornate capitals. Next to the Nat Mandir was a small doorway that led to a shaded courtyard with a well, meant for the family’s private use. Beyond was yet another courtyard, enclosed with buildings on three sides.

Parts of the ancestral home. Photo Courtesy: Ranu Bhattacharyya

As I climbed the stairs leading to the second floor, I had a feeling of déjà vu. I felt I had been here before through my grandmother’s stories. Her small feet must have climbed these stairs. There was the arched windows she had said she gazed out of, and the vast veranda with colonnades, where she played with her eight siblings. Wandering through the rooms, I hear her voice narrating tales of her childhood — kite races on the terrace, indolent boat rides on the Padma, and the indulgence of choosing sarees from the weavers who came all the way from Benaras.

The house is now home to several families who regard our arrival with wary welcome. “Where are the Italian painted tiles?” I ask eagerly. The story of the tiles imported by her father from Italy were amongst the kaleidoscope of stories that my grandmother had shared with me. Whisperings and murmurings ensue amidst the crowd and then a hefty cupboard was pushed aside to reveal the tiles in all their faded glory.

Slowly it dawns upon me that the silent bottle in my grandmother’s cupboard had encoded stories that belied its seemingly mundane materiality. To uncover these lost stories, I embark on a renewed search for those old medicine bottles of my childhood. Their fragrance lingers at the edges of my memory, offering tantalising glimpses to fragments of knowledge. The sense of smell is our oldest sense. My memories of stories narrated by my grandmother were inextricably connected to the scents locked in that bottle. Would holding the bottle in my hand peel back the layers of my memory, answer some unanswered questions about my grandmother’s roots, help me map the route of our family’s journey? But alas! Those bottles are lost to time. My grandmother’s generation is gone and I search among Mathurababu’s scattered grandchildren and great grandchildren to no avail.

My grandmother left Dhaka in 1936, never to return. Mathurbabu’s house on Calcutta’s Central Street was completed that year, and it is there he moved with his wife and three youngest unwed daughters, including my grandmother. His older son remained in Dhaka to oversee the factory and drug production, while Mathurbabu focused on controlling the distribution from a central office in Calcutta. Till his death in 1942, despite his ailing health and flagging energy, he visited the company’s distribution centres spread across Calcutta everyday, accompanied by his faithful retainer Nathu. Probing for reasons for this abrupt migration, my uncle gave me a solitary clue. He recalled that my great grandfather had felt his family was unsafe in Dhaka. With this obscure clue in hand, I delved into history books for elaboration. I read about the rise of communal tensions in Bengal from the mid-1920’s. The Dhaka riots of 1930 targeted several well-established businessmen and involved loot and arson of their business and personal properties.

In 1947, there was yet another wave of migrations far more existential and grimmer. After the borders were drawn between the newly formed nations of India and Pakistan, the remaining family fled Dhaka overnight, leaving behind the factory, the mansion, in fact, all their material possessions in a land suddenly hostile to their continued habitation. Unable to exercise control over their properties in East Pakistan, there was an initial attempt by Mathurbabu’s heirs to establish a factory in Chandernagore. Without my great grandfather at the helm, this nascent enterprise floundered and ultimately sank. Cut from its moorings in Dhaka, Mathurbabu’s inheritors could not keep the business afloat in India. Slowly his legacy dissipated. The Shakti Aushadhalaya head office in Calcutta’s Beadon Street closed and the shops in Calcutta, Karachi, Kabul, and Colombo lowered their shutters.

Through generations of migration and resettlement, we are left with only scattered memories and fragmented stories. These intangible remains are my inheritance today. These intangibles are bound neither by form, nor by time. Instead, they offer limitless possibilities for exploration, crafting and archiving. Memory, nourished by the repeated telling of stories, provides continuity. These intangible wisps of legacy — a remembered glimpse of a peeling label, the stories heard from my grandmother, the whispered whiff of a familiar fragrance, open a door to the past and invite me to connect it to the present. “Listen to us,” the scents call. “Let us tell you our story.”

[1] Glass cupboard

[2] Bronze woks

[3] A rug for prayers

[4] A cloth wrap for the lower half of the body

[5] Workshop

[6] Ancient Sanskrit text on medicine, dated to 12^th-13^th century

[7] Pharmacy

Ranu Bhattacharyya, author of The Castle in the Classroom: Story as a Springboard for Early Literacy, Stenhouse, 2010, is an educator and writer who has lived and worked across the world, exploring and archiving narratives that connect people and cultures.

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

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Editorial

Seasons Out of Time

...the horror of dark red sky – the gates of hell opened wide so they say that even atheists prayed to save the souls of the dead...

— Lizzie Packer, 'Hot Dry Summers'

The description in ‘Hot Dry Summers’ is not of hell but what is perceived as happening on certain parts of Earth due to global warming or climate change. Forest fires. Nearer the equator, the storms have become harsher with lightning strikes that seem to connect the Earth to the sky. Trees get uprooted as the soil is softened from excessive rain. Sometimes, they fall on passers-by killing or injuring them. There is no rain in some places, forest fires or flooding in others… The highest temperatures touched 55 degrees Celsius this year. Instead of worrying about losing our homes lodged on land masses to the oceans that continue to rise, becoming dark heat absorbers due to loss of white ice cover, we persistently fight wars, egged on by differences highlighting divisive constructs. It feels strange that we are witness to these changes which seem to be apocalyptic to doomsday sayers. Are they right? Our flora, fauna and food will also be impacted by global climate change. How will we survive these? Will we outlive these as a species?

Keeping the myriad nuances of living on this planet in mind, we have writings from more than a dozen countries showcased in this issue, with a few highlighting climate change and wars — especially in poetry. Michael Burch has given us poetry on weather. John Grey has celebrated nature. Other than Lizzie Packer, Mitra Samal has a subtle poem on climate change. Stuart McFarlane and David Mellor bring the disaster of war to our doorstep. Jared Carter, Kirpal Singh, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Averi Saha, Shamik Banerjee, David Francis, George Freek, Rakhi Dalal and more have reflected on the varied nuances of life. Rhys Hughes has brought in humour and a comment on our perspectives, with his poem ‘Devil’s Bridge to Istanbul’… Can a shortcut be found across continents with the magic of a signboard?

Poetry in our translations’ section travels to Balochistan, from where a Hafeez Rauf translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch, talks of burning tyres, again conflicts. It takes on a deeper hue as Ihlwha Choi translates his poignant poem from Korean, reflecting on the death of his mother. We have a translation of Tagore’s less popular poem, Mrityu[1], reflecting on the same theme. His reflections on his wife’s death too have been translated by Professor Fakrul Alam who has also shared a song of Nazrul, written and composed on the death of Tagore. Another lesser-known poet but brilliant nonetheless, Nirendranath Chakraborty, has been translated for us by Debali Mookerjea-Leonard. And what a tremendous poem it is when the person called Amalkanti wanted to be sunshine! We have a story too — ‘Speech Matters’ by Naramsetti Umamaheswararao translated by Johny Takkedasila.

Our stories as usual travel around the world — from Holland (by Paul Mirabile) to Hyderabad (by Mohul Bhowmick) and with a quick pause at Bangalore (by Anagha Narasimha). Travels in the real world are part of our non-fiction. Sai Abhinay Penna takes to a the second largest mangrove forest in the world and Ravi Shankar to Colombo. Madhuri Bhattachrya gives us a glimpse of an Indian summer and Snigdha Aggrawal explores the impact of climate change in her part of the world. Farouk Gulsara actually writes his reflections at a traffic junction. And it reads droll…

We have an in memoriam by Keith Lyons on Morgan Spurlock, the documentary maker who ate McDonald fare for a month and then made a film on it. We have two tributes to two legends across time. Wayne F Burke has given a brief piece on the iconic illustrator, Norman Rockwell. And Aruna Chakravarti, the queen of historic fiction who brought the Tagore family alive for us in her two very well researched novels, Jorasanko and Daughters of Jorasanko, has given us a fabulous tribute to Tagore on the not-so common aspects of him.

We have excerpts from another historical novel set in Bengal of Tagore’s time, Dan Morrison’s The Prince and the Poisoner: The Murder that Rocked the British Raj and Hughes’ The Sunset Suite, a set of absurd tall tales that make you smile, squirm or wonder… Reviews of Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Somdatta Mandal and of Arundhathi Subramaniam’s Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry by Basudhara Roy bring two latest books to our readers. Navleen Multani reflects on Mapping the Mind, Minding the Map, edited by Basudhara Roy and Jaydeep Sarangi. And Bhaskar Parichha tells us about a group of men called Pundits during British Raj, “In the closed files of the government of British India, however, they were given their true designation as spies…” in his review of Derek Waller’s The Pundits: British Exploration of Tibet and Central Asia.

Suzanne Kamata, the novelist who does a column from Japan for us normally, has spoken to us about her new novel, Cinnamon Beach, which overrides multiple manmade constructs. It’s an interesting read from someone who lives her life across multiple cultures and transcends many boundaries.

This is a bumper issue, and it is difficult to convey the vibrant hues of words that colour this edition. Please do pause by our contents page for a more comprehensive look.

This issue would not have been possible without all our fabulous contributors and a wonderful, dedicated team. We are delighted that Rakhi Dalal — who has done many reviews and shares her poetry with us in this issue — has agreed to be a writer-in-residence with us. A huge thanks to all of you, and especially Sohana Manzoor for her artwork. I am truly grateful to our readers for popularising our efforts to put together an online space with free and vibrant reads.

I would like to end with a few lines that gives me hope despite climate change, wars and doomsday predictions.

There’s more to life,
he says to me,
than what you choose to see. 

— George Freek, 'The Imponderables'

Enjoy the reads.

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

[1] Death

Click here to access the content’s page for the July 2024 Issue.

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Tags Amalkanti, Aruna Chakravarti, Averi Saha, Balochistan, Bangalore, Basudhara Roy, Bhaskar Parichcha, Borderless Journal, British Raj, Cinnamon Beach, Colombo, Dan Morrison, Daughters of Jorasanko, David Francis, David Mellor, Debali Mookerjea-Leonard, Derek Waller, Earth, equator, Fakrul Alam, Farouk Gulsara, Fazal Baloch, Floods, Forest Fires, George Freek, Hafeez Rauf, holland, Hyderabad, Ihlwha Choi, Japan, Jared Carter, John Grey, Johny Takkedasila, Jorasanko, Keith Lyons, Kirpal Singh, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, Korean, Lizzie Packer, Madhuri Bhattacharya, Mangrove forest, Mapping the Mind Minding the Map, McDonalds, Michael Burch, Mitali Chakravarty, Mitra Samal, Mohul Bhowmick, Morgan Spurlock, Mrityu, Naramsetti Umamaheswararao, Navleen Multani, Nazrul, Nirendranath Chakraborty, Norman Rockwell, Paul Mirabile, Rakhi Dalal, Ravi Shankar, Rhys Hughes, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Sai Abhinay Penna, Salman Rushdie, Shamik Banerjee, Snigdha Agrawal, Sohana Manzoor, Somdatta Mandal, Stuart McFarlane, Suzanne Kamata, Tagore, The Prince and the Poisoner: The Murder that Rocked the British Raj, The Pundits: British Exploration of Tibet and Central Asia, The Sunset Suite, Wayne F Burke, Wild Women: Seekers, Wild Women: Seekers Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry

Slices from Life

The Pearl of the Indian Ocean

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date July 15, 2024
No Comments on The Pearl of the Indian Ocean

By Ravi Shankar

A panoramic view of Colombo. Photo courtesy: Ravi Shankar

My impressions of Colombo and Sri Lanka were positive. I was aware of the high human development indicators of the island nation, progress in access to essential medicines and the civil war. Sri Lanka shares many similarities with the state of Kerala in Indian in terms of topography, culture, food habits, high human development, outmigration, militant trade unions and a passion for egalitarian development. I also remembered the recent violent uprising against the former president and the image of the public frolicking in the pool at the presidential palace.

I was happy to receive an invitation to travel to Colombo in July 2023. I was invited to The Colombo Medical School, which was established by the British in 1870 and is one of the older schools in South Asia. It is the premier medical school of the country, and a new tower block has been constructed. The twenty-story tower is spacious and houses various departments. the humanities. The school was the first to start a Department of Medical Humanities (using art in the education of doctors) in South Asia. The physiology department has created a museum consisting of old instruments and apparatus that are no longer used. This is an excellent idea, and you remain in touch with the history of medicine.

The hotel where I stayed was located on Galle Face Road with the beach and the Galle Face green on the other side of the road. The beach was clean, and the park was originally laid out in 1859 by the British Governor General Sir Henry Ward. The Dutch had placed the cannons facing the ocean as a defence against the Portuguese. Sri Lanka had changed hands multiple times among the different colonial powers.

One of the striking features of Colombo is its cleanliness. The buses may be old and crowded but they are colourful. There are also rickshaws in a variety of colours, mainly green and red though yellow ones were less common. The kittul jaggery harvested from the fishtail palm or the jaggery palm is famous and I loved the gingelly rolls made with this jaggery. My second visit was in early January this year. The apartment where I stayed was attached to an old Sri Lankan house. The location was near to all conveniences but away from the noise and traffic.

I visited the Sri Lankan national museum, the largest in the country. It was established by Sir Gregory, the British governor of Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then called) in 1877. The museum is housed in a white, neo-Baroque building and offers a fascinating glimpse into Sri Lanka’s past. The museum is well maintained though it is not air conditioned. The humidity is a constant presence in Colombo. The collection of antiques at the museum is extraordinary.

On my last evening in Colombo, I did some sightseeing. We went to the Gangaramaya temple, the most important one in Colombo. The architecture is a mix of Sri Lankan, Indian, Thai, and Chinese styles. The temple was started by the famous scholar monk Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala Nayaka Thera in the late 19th Century. The temple has a rich collection of Buddha statues and huge collections of ivory that must be worth millions if not billions. Our next stop was the Lotus tower at 351.5 metres, the largest self-supported structure in South Asia. The lotus is a symbol of purity. view of Colombo city from the observation tower at the top is excellent. I could see the Galle Face Road where I had stayed during my last visit. We could see the Sri Lankan railway depots and stations.

Colombo is a fascinating city. There is plenty to see and do. Recent economic events have hit the island hard. During my subsequent visit I plan to explore other parts of this magical country. Serendip/Serendib was the ancient Persian/Arab name for the country. The name is believed to be derived from the Sanskrit Simhaladwipa (dwelling place of Lion’s Island). The lion occupies a prominent place on the Sri Lankan flag.

The three princes of Serendip in an ancient story had the knack of making unexpected discoveries and is the root of the word serendipity in English. Visit Colombo and Sri Lanka, who knows what serendipitous discoveries await you?

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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Slices from Life

Serenading Sri Lanka

Photographs and Narrative by Mohul Bhowmick

Sri Lanka can be savoured best via its street food stalls; the aroma of the spices that emanates from the flurry of dishes left drying in the hot sun is supposed to hold the flavour of the country in its entirety.

Quite appropriately, I step out of the airport in Colombo just as dark clouds assemble overhead for an impromptu November gathering. The path to the bus terminal is waylaid in the melee, and the eventual taxi that comes around is met with immense gratitude for the warmth it emanates from within.

Meanwhile, the clouds have picked up pace and lambasted in full strength upon my flimsy raincoat. As the taxi — a Tata Nano — pulls out of the airport, I read a sign that tells me, rather ominously, ‘Welcome to Sri Lanka!’

But have I arrived? The drizzle accompanies me all day even as I try to venture out northwest from my dorm near the Galle Face Green towards Independence Square and Viharamahadevi Park. The park has a tinge of tenderness that makes me long for home barely six hours after I have left.

The soldier who has been entrusted to protect the monument of Gautama in the centre of the park slights me at first by asking me to put my camera away, but something about my nationality sparks enough curiousity and reverence in him to apologise and show me around its premises.

Named after the mother of the great Sri Lankan king Dutugemunu [161-137 BCE], who united the island under his banner after generations of oppression from Indian invaders, the park is tranquil in a manner that only the moneyed can afford to be. To be welcomed here by a member of the Lankan military seems ironic to me. Quite intrinsically, I discover that the affluent neighbourhood of Cinnamon Gardens is merely a stone’s throw away.

The sunset at Galle Face Green is where I lay my eyes upon the Indian Ocean for the first time; the gentle disappearance of the disk of fire in its graceful attire with lakhs of denizens of the city in attendance is not an event to be forgotten in a hurry.

It strikes me in the bouts of consciousness I still have with me on the start-stop train to Anuradhapura the next morning, which miraculously manages to reach the ancient capital of the island only moments after its scheduled time of arrival despite having spent about fifteen stoppages in the rough-hewn greenery of north-central Lanka.

The Isurumuni Royal Temple, Anuradhapura.

The Vanni, which separates the north from Anuradhapura, begins here, and I do not think I have gathered enough courage to bypass it just yet.

The Maha Sri Jaya Bodhi — a sapling of the Bodhi Tree under which the ascetic Sakyamuni had sat all night in meditation in the fifth century BCE and attained Enlightenment in Gaya — transposes much of the tranquillity one must have felt had Gautama himself been around; instead, hundreds of his lay followers deify his idol and consecrate his ideals with flowers and oaths of incorruptibility.

The compound where the Maha Bodhi stands allows one the permission to whisk the mind away from its constant whirl of thought and towards action based on feeling; its way, as Gautama’s, holds that offering the grant of ‘self-realisation’ to one’s fellow man is far more sumptuous a gift than an endowment of land or capital can ever accomplish.

Novice monks at the Ruwanwella Dagoba in Anuradhapura.

The Ruwanwella Dagoba, which the great Dutugemunu had painstakingly built, offers the refuge that the Maha Bodhi implores one to seek by going inwards. Two quarts of the Buddha’s relics are enshrined here, and the inflow of visitors ensures that the joyful policemen on duty are hard put to shred their visages of quietude, which one would have moments ago thought to be beyond them.

The next morning, with a German fellow traveller — whom I met at dinner while watching India decimate New Zealand on television in the semifinal of the cricket World Cup — I excavate whatever innards of peace and serenity I could from the Isurumuni Royal Temple.

My new friend from Germany tells me of of his experiences while travelling in Japan. He explains how he had made good use of the public parks (greens) at night as the locals did not use them after dark. He did not have money to sleep in hostels/ hotels and used benches in the public parks instead!

I offer him freshly plucked oranges from the gardens abutting the temple, where princes and princesses of an earlier age used to amble while seeking matches.

I get so drawn into the ethics that Gautama’s teachings must have instilled among the laypeople of the island that I almost forget to notice when my landlord — from whom I had also borrowed a bicycle — casually doubles the rate of his homestay when I check out. I learn — only much later — that he is no believer in the path Sakyamuni trod and speaks Tamil.

Sigiriya seems much hotter than Anuradhapura¹ was, and I write this even as the sun goes down and I climb up to a hidden rock far from the one which gives the town its name. The sun sets farther still from the Sigiriya Galla, and along with a bunch of British fellow travellers, I enjoy the last beads of light seeping past the horizon.

My evening is considerably brightened when our guide Vasu points me towards a green-looking hillock supposed to be the one Hanuman brought from the Himalayas as he sought for the life restoring ‘sanjeevani’ herb. While descending, a girl from Cornwall shrieks in considerable awe of the girth of the trunk of the first elephant she has ever seen.

The hike up Kasyapa’s fortress² takes little effort, and the sparse crowd makes it feel worthwhile all the more. My newfound British friends — devoid of the SAARC³ protection of a reduced entry ticket to the top — climb the eastward facing Pidurangala instead. They tell me much later that they found the visage of Sigiriya quite appealing from the top of the latter; in a picture they show me, I cannot help but speculate that the black spot on the top of the rock was my shadow.

A dip in a hidden lake authorised by the owner of the backpacker’s hostel we are in is sprinkled liberally with views of the fortress in the backdrop; even the arrival of a slimy water snake that nibbles at my friend Jackson Price — a former telecommunications manager from Bristol — is not enough to shatter our sense of innate wellbeing.

There is just about enough time to catch the temple near the centre of Dambulla town unawares before Rapahel Nuding — a mechanical engineer from Stuttgart — and I take the bus south to Kandy. The carvings on the rocks inspire us both differently; me to poetry and him to decode how it could possibly have been done without the help of modern-age machinery.

Kandy is damp and misty when we arrive; the flecks of raindrops prance around nicely as neither of us wants to close the window shades of the rusty old bus we are travelling in. The lake can be sensed before we can see it; within an hour, we are back in the area to witness the ceremony at the Temple of the Tooth Relic where the dante dhatu, or the tooth relic, is displayed to laypeople.

I help Raphael tuck into his — and my first this trip — masala dosa in the hordes of Tamil restaurants near the temple; I wonder if he asks for a second helping of the mango lassi to cool his inflamed tongue down or merely because he has liked the sensation the frozen — and possibly preserved — fruit. He stays back for a day, but I sling my bag to get on the morning train to Nuwara Eliya, having had enough of the cultural capital of Lanka already.

The bitter cold that greets me in Nuwara Eliya is only slightly lessened by the endless cups of tea that keep rolling through the night at the Laughing Leopards backpackers’ hostel. I struggle to explain to Helen Brinkmann, a post-graduate student from Dortmund, why I shall go to bed in tears having watched Australia demolish India in the final of the World Cup; the memories keep plaguing me a few days later in Ella when I sit down to get a grip upon myself and form an understanding of the ill-fated event.

Of the twin haunts of Nuwara Eliya and Ella, it is the journey that fascinates me the most; the rickety old contraption that passes off as a train is as old as I am in spirit and wanders only slightly off the gorgeous trails that have to perforce be left behind. Quite like the train, I am too enamoured by the countryside to trade it for the capital a week later.

The hills that rise from the extensive green wildernesses filled with shrubs of undefinable assortment catch my eye in Ella, and it is some time before I can catch a grip of my sentiments and force myself to sit down. The bats and monkeys that gather in numbers at the Ravana Ella — or Ravana’s cave — scare me out of my wits before I can even put my foot into the mouth of the opening. Outside, the sun shines generously on a creek drifting past the hills in a muted whirr that only the sapient can perceive.

It speaks highly of the natural largesse that Sri Lanka possesses. Within hours of leaving the cool climes and peaks of Ella, I arrive at sea level, and the Indian Ocean peeks in patches to the left when the bus turns right from Matara, the southernmost tip of the isle. Indeed, I have breakfast in the hills and lunch on the coast.

Mirissa, where I am headed next, brags of pristine beaches uninjured by the droves of tourists that fill it during the season. On arrival that evening, I find a rock to the west that garnishes a panorama that is stunning. My first encounter with kottu roti is astride a charitable helping of coconut sambal which my tongue finds excitable, and I tell myself that I am finally in the south.

Excursions are made to the beaches that litter the southern Lankan coast without rhyme or reason, or even distinction to one’s name or creed. Weligama, Midigama, Ahangama, the air force base at Koggala, Habaraduwa and Unawatuna all become names interchangeable with rapture perpetuated by the lack of inaccessibility. From another country, people struggle to reach me on my cell, and their needs stay blissfully away from my purview.

The sun shines on the coast much like it had done when I was in the west; the north and central parts of the country are barraged by untimely rains and I am glad to have left them behind.

Galle, where I am to stay for a night before heading back to Colombo, charms me out of my wits and looks askance as I walk away evincing a wry smile from the preposterous shindig that one might as well call a fort. The cricket ground stirs a longing for a home I have no rush to return to; on account of the goodwill and record I enjoy, I am allowed into the members’ stand for a gracious helping of a local under-19 match.

The entrapments that the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British had all in turn instituted — that now passes off as a spectacle of great pleasure — protect the town of Galle from outsiders, and also, it seems to me, from itself. Inward-looking to a fault, the Sinhalese of Galle have been known to open their hearts and hearths to all but those who have boasted of a skin tone less plentiful than white.

Upon being given to understand the intricacies of such delights and lodging in a palatial mansion owned by a Lankan Muslim family, I exult in the first serious gelato I have had in my life; an egg roti earlier in the day had barely served the purpose it was intended for.

Return to Colombo. I see the capital with eyes that I had not been endowed with when I first landed on these shores; it seems to be a lifetime ago now. The polished highway outside the President’s House, which abut the Chinese-funded port and end up at the imperial inheritance of the Galle Face Green purport me to a world I thought I had left behind in the countryside.

I put it down to my lack of vision but the night creeps up on me unannounced even as I try to trudge out of the humongous man-eating machine they call the One Galle Face shopping mall. It is not without some discomfort that I take flight, aware that it may not be for the last time.

Kingdom of Dutugemunu ↩︎
Built during the reign of King Kasyapa [477-495 CE] ↩︎
South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation ↩︎

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

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Tags Ahangama, Anuradhapura, Australia, Bodhi Tree, Bristol, British, Chinese, Colombo, Cornwall, Dante dhatu, Dortmund, Dutch, Dutugemunu, Ella, Gautama, Gaya, German, Habaraduwa, Hanuman, Himalayas, Indian Ocean, Japan, Kandy, Koggala, Maha Bodhi, Midigama, Mohul Bhowmick, Muslim, Nuwara Eliya, Portuguese, Ravana, Ravana Ella, Sakyamuni, Sinhalese, Sri Lanka, Stuttgart, Tamil, Unawatuna, Weligama, World Cup

Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes

City Life: Samples

Published in 1972, this novel by Italo Calvino explores Marco Polo’s journey to China and is in the form of a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.

Last year I began work on a project called City Life, which will consist of fifty short stories that are each exactly 500 words in length. I don’t know where the idea for this project came from, but I suppose it must have been influenced by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Perhaps my project is a modest tribute to that magnificent author, my favourite writer of fiction, but there are differences in approach. His cities are imaginary; mine are real. I tell the stories of my cities from the viewpoint of the cities themselves.

I feel a little uncomfortable trying to compare myself to Calvino. I stand in his shadow. City Life will never match Invisible Cities, yet I am pleased with my progress so far. I have written 32 instalments to date. I am at present unsure how I will go about finding a publisher for the book when it is completed, especially as my ideal format is for the book to be published in a box, with each individual city on a separate piece of paper, meaning that the tales can be easily read in any order. I will deal with that issue in good time.

Meanwhile, the following two extracts are told in the voices of Bangalore and Colombo.

City Life: Bangalore

Once I was a garden city, full of lakes and trees, an environment with a climate very conducive to good health. But someone in another country discovered the transistor and then the computer chip. How did these technological innovations change me? I rapidly became a major centre for the new industries generated by those inventions. I expanded, lost my original definition, acquired a new one. A human being who expands too rapidly does so because of misapplied greed and a reckless disregard of bodily danger. I had no choice in the matter. I turned into an electronics hub, one devoted to the money that can be made from computers, those miraculous and alarming devices.

Yet my appearance matches no true vision of an imaginary future. Do not suppose that I am clean and beautiful, filled with crystal towers and monorails of gleaming glass. My roads are clogged with traffic, I am dusty, cracked, prone to flooding, polluted and overstressed. My air smells of smoke and chemicals. I am ashamed of my lakes, plastic-choked and foamy with effluent. I have grown huge and ugly, I tremble with the urgency of the commercial transactions taking place inside me, as if I have a nervous disorder, damage to my spinal cord. Yes, I generate enormous wealth, but who for? Not for the majority of the inhabitants who fight for the daily right to survive.

We think of deserts as empty wastelands and we suppose that the addition of a thousand lakes would transform them into paradisal realms. But deserts can be created by intense ambition as surely as by weather patterns and geography. Cut down trees, build roads, pound the ground flat in order to erect buildings, absorb villages on the edge of the sprawl. The process is too late to arrest. It will keep going until I am unable to recognise myself in my dreams. Not that I sleep enough these days for dreams to be common. I am a restless giant. The noise of the traffic is permanent. It reduces at night but never ceases. The coming and going of freight trains keeps me awake.

But I am not yet ready for despair that resembles an infinite resignation. Every desert, even one manufactured for profit, should contain an oasis. Near my heart, at the centre of my flux, there is a certain street and halfway along it can be found the greatest bookshop in the world. Blossom Book House not only has a tremendous selection of titles, it also provides the burning desert traveller with pools of thoughtful quiet. I am a city that contains a bookshop. How can I enter and browse that store without turning myself inside-out? This is a mystery with a solution I intend to keep secret. Perhaps a city’s spirit can enter a human consciousness every once in a while?

I immerse myself in books full of pictures of the way I was. When I was the fairest one of all on my high plateau.

City Life: Colombo

There is crime in all big cities, that’s a law of life, and a certain amount of crime occurs in me too. On the western shores of the island of Sri Lanka I recline, but it is difficult to relax for long. There are sirens, shouts, a scuffle. Someone is robbing pedestrians at knifepoint or breaking into a shop again. What is to be expected? There is even murder on occasion.

The police frequently arrest those responsible, but sometimes the best detectives are mystified by a cunning theft or abduction. They admit defeat. One day there is a spectacular homicide near the ocean. The perpetrator leaves no clues at all. The experts are baffled. At last, a forensics specialist comes up with the ingenious idea of turning the case over to me.

I am the city itself and must be fully aware of every incident that happens within me. If anyone can solve this case, it is I, the capital of my modest nation. When I am approached with the proposal, I agree immediately. There’s no need for me to examine evidence, which is non-existent anyway. The usual methods of the criminologist are suitable for human beings only.

I am a metropolis, not huge but significant enough, and the killing took place inside my body. I tightly shut my notional eyes and concentrate. Where do I feel a peculiar itch? In one of my southern suburbs, in a particular street. I narrow it down quickly enough, to a house and a room in that house. A man is sitting on a chair at a table. He is eating his dinner.

I speak to him. He is so surprised that he drops his spoon. But he is rather a resourceful person, able to recover his composure in a matter of moments, wide grin on his mouth, his eyes full of mockery. It is clear he feels safe from arrest, an assassin who carefully covered his tracks after the deed.

Securing his confession is the only way he can be prosecuted and he has no intention of admitting anything to a disembodied voice, a voice he assumes is his own guilty conscience toying with him in order to test the firmness of his resolve. I ask him questions about his movements on the night of the murder and he answers in an offhand manner.

He doesn’t even pause while eating his meal. He has an alibi, a plausible answer for everything. Half an hour of questioning and I am ready to give up. I tell him this and he smiles thinly and nods. I turn to leave. On the threshold of his consciousness, I suddenly stop and turn.

“Just one more thing,” I say, and I reveal that I am the city of Colombo, that he lives inside me and I’m aware of everything he has done. He is deeply shocked. His confession follows. How could it not? We might betray the people we love, but who willingly betrays their own home?

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

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Tags Bangalore, Colombo, Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, Kublai Khan, Marco Polo, Rhys Hughes