We have started feeling the impact of climate change with a bevy of natural disasters this August. Glacial ice melts, peat fires, haze, rising seas, more storms, warmer climes and fires wiping out greenery are just a few that come to the mind. But, long ago, our ancestors — without the support of technology — survived climate events. Göbekli Tepe (Turkey), an ancient human settlement, more than 11,000 years ago was lush and green. People moved as it turned arid. Humankind was nomadic then. They moved with shifting riverbeds. In Europe, humans survived the last glacial age, about 20,000 years ago. Then, now when we are faced with the reality of climate change, why is it we tremble with trepidation? We even have technology in hand. Ideators and writers like Asimov found solutions. In Caves of Steel (1954), Isaac Asimov had humanity move underground to survive unfriendly surface conditions. He created a huge city underground for humanity while some moved into other planets. Perhaps, the time has come for us to think out of the box. And that is what we hope all of you will join to do in Borderless.
September has thrown up varied content. We have non-fiction which reflects on how changes are a part of human lore and how diverse cultures can co-exist to enrich each other. Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri dwells on this idea while talking of Nazrul’s approach to the Persian Ghazal. He writes, the poet through his adaptation of this form “showed how a culture can absorb another culture without losing itself, and how, in the process, both cultures can become something larger than they were before.” And perhaps from that largeness of thought will emerge a one-world community — that Yatish Kumar S espouses. Maybe from people who think beyond borders, we will find the solution to tackling and adapting to climate change. We have an essay from Charudutta Panigrahi where he attempts to arouse the survival instinct in humans. Young Shruti Keskar writes of how she finds a new lease to life by accepting and adapting to changes while Farouk Guslara philosophises on living and possessions. We have Meredith Stephens adding to the vivacity of non-fiction with a recount of her sailing adventures with wonderful photographs by Alan Noble. And Devraj Singh Kalsi brings in sardonic humour with his piece on art and artists.
A story-poem by Tagore, Swopno (Dream), has also been brought to us in English. An interesting memoir by Kallol Lahiri centring around his childhood in Bengal has been translated by V Ramaswamy. Translations offer fiction from Isa Kamari. He has transcribed in English the second chapter of his Malay novel, The Throne. The novel focussing on psychological torment is being serialised in Borderless.
Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed a rare book-centric memoir by Shanta Gokhale. He tells us, “Of Ancestors and Friends: A Life with Booksis an unusual kind of literary memoir. It is neither a conventional autobiography nor a conventional work of criticism. Instead, it occupies an intimate space between the two, tracing a life’s intellectual and emotional history through books.” Meenakshi Malhotra has discussed the renowned historian Romila Thapar’s memoir, Just Being, a book that reflects not only her own journey but the freedom and outreach that privilege and capability can bestow on women in South Asia. On the other hand, Mudassar Javed Baryar refers to the plight of birongonas, war time widows during the 1971 conflict that birthed Bangladesh, while discussing Saima Begum’s The First Jasmines. He reflects: “Begum’s profound innovation is to turn the narrative back not just to these women’s trauma but to their ‘humanity, resilience and heart’, depicting them as ‘architects of family and community’.” Somdatta Mandal has praised Omair Ahmad’s novel, Homecoming.
We have also featured Kanuprya Dhingra, who has written a book on a unique book bazaar. In a candid exchange, she tells us her non-fiction, The Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, “is for the reader in Singapore, or Mumbai, or London, or Lahore who has their own version of this informal, unruly, necessary space and sees it reflected here. It is a book about books, the people who read them, and the people who make that possible…the book is for everyone.” It’s an interesting read almost inviting you to stroll into the serendipitous democratic reading space full of local colour and stories.
We would like to thank not only Dhingra but all our contributors for their wonderful work. Huge thanks to the fabulous Borderless team for their input and to Sohana Manzoor for her artwork. Thank you all — without all of you and our wonderful readers, it would be difficult to have a journal. In the spirit of ubuntu, heartfelt thanks.
Do pause by our September content’s page. And let’s look forward to the hope for happier climes and times.
“A journey is not so much a place, but a new way of seeing.” — Pico Iyer
Travel has always been my passion. From childhood, the love for exploring new places was instilled in me by my parents. They believed travel was not just recreation, but education.
Every school vacation, my father would plan a month-long trip, taking us across cities, temples, forests, and historic landmarks.
By the time I stepped into adulthood, the entire stretch of Gujarat and Saurashtra was familiar terrain — Dwarka, Porbandar, Jamnagar, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Surat, Rajkot.
We traveled across the country too, exploring Calcutta in the east and venturing north to Kashmir, Amritsar, Agra, Delhi and Jaipur, Jodhpur and Jaisalmer in the Northwestern part.
Along the way, each place offered its own unforgettable charm — the serenity of the Golden Temple, the fragrant rose gardens of Jodhpur, the majestic palaces of Jaipur, the golden deserts of Jaisalmer, and the shimmering beauty of Dal Lake in Srinagar.
Each journey painted my childhood with stories, sights, and memories that would stay with me forever.
Perhaps that is why, when I was finally given the opportunity to travel abroad on a business trip to Singapore, my excitement was indescribable.
But beneath that excitement was a quiet nervousness — it was my first international trip, a solo journey, and I had to navigate visas, documentation, and the unfamiliarity of foreign travel.
I still remember the night before my flight — the quiet hum of anticipation, the open suitcase neatly arranged with formal wear and presentation notes, and the flutter in my heart that felt both brave and uncertain. This wasn’t just another professional assignment — it felt like a rite of passage.
Singapore was my first glimpse of a world beyond India — an island nation I had only encountered in business magazines and travel columns.
As the aircraft lifted off the runway, I felt something shift inside me. Beneath the official purpose of the trip lay something more personal: the realization that I was crossing a threshold that would reshape the way I saw work, people, and myself.
The first few days were busy with meetings and deliverables, yet my Singapore-based colleagues made sure I didn’t miss the beauty of their city.
Over weekends, they took me to Gardens by the Bay, Sentosa Island, Universal Studios, Little India, and shopping districts filled with light and energy. Their warmth made the newness less intimidating.
I experienced my first metro journey abroad — taking the MRT from Ang Mo Kio to Raffles Place — and was amazed at the punctuality, efficiency, and discipline that seemed to pulse through the city’s transport system.
Gardens by the Bay left me mesmerized; Sentosa offered calm and peace, while Universal Studios was a burst of color, joy, and laughter.
Singapore’s friendliness, cleanliness, and multicultural harmony made a deep impression on me.
It was a place where professionalism coexisted effortlessly with warmth, where discipline didn’t suppress diversity but strengthened it.
When I returned home, friends and colleagues asked about the presentations, the meetings, and the outcomes.
But what stayed with me long after the trip was not just the work accomplished — it was the inner shift.
Singapore taught me that stepping outside our comfort zone widens our world in ways we never expect.
That first flight did more than carry me across countries — it carried me into a broader way of thinking, observing, and belonging.
It showed me that growth often begins at the edge of comfort, and that the world is much larger and more welcoming than our fears allow us to believe.
“Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” — Miriam Beard
What Singapore Taught Me
Every first step into the unknown teaches us something essential about ourselves.
Singapore showed me that courage doesn’t always roar; often, it’s the quiet decision to board a plane alone and trust that you will find your way.
In every MRT ride, every unfamiliar street, and every new conversation, I discovered the subtle power of openness — the willingness to learn, adapt, and embrace difference.
When we travel with curiosity instead of fear, the world responds with generosity.
And sometimes, one journey becomes the beginning of a much larger unfolding — a reminder that confidence grows one step, one city, and one experience at a time.
Reflection: The First Flight Within
We often believe that courage lies in grand actions — but sometimes, it lies in handing your passport to an immigration officer with shaky hands.
My first flight taught me that courage is a journey too.
That every time we step out into the unknown, we return home a little braver.
A little wiser.
A little more ourselves.
About the Book:
When the Road Becomes the Teacher: A Reflective Memoir of Wisdom Gained Around the World is a memoir about how travel can transform the way we see the world and ourselves. Drawing on four decades of journeys across India and beyond, Shubha Apte reflects on the experiences, encounters, cultures, and unexpected moments that shaped her understanding of resilience, confidence, leadership, cultural intelligence, and personal growth. From her first international business trip to Singapore to later journeys across Japan, Norway, Malaysia, Europe, and the United States, each destination became more than a place to visit—it became an opportunity to learn. Part travel memoir and part reflection on personal transformation, the book invites readers to look beyond destinations and discover the lessons that every journey can offer.
About the Author:
Shubha Apte is an author, executive coach, and leadership consultant with over 35 years of corporate experience. She is the author of multiple books including the Amazon Bestseller, When the Road Becomes the Teacher. Her writing blends real-life insight with storytelling, exploring themes of resilience, purpose and human connections.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
The year was 1816. On the 21st October, Reverend Robert Sparke Hutchings, as part of his life mission to civilise the natives, started an English School free from the interference of royalty and wealth. The Penang Free School was opened to all people of Penang who wanted to learn. Hutchings’ idea of a school was not for free, as in charity, but free for all children of different races and creeds to mingle.
That year, too, the modern world first realised how closely connected it was. This was long before the world had known the song ‘It’s a Small World after all!’ A year earlier, Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) expelled megatonnes of volcanic material into the skies. It was the world’s most explosive eruption in recorded history, and its effluents lingered in the atmosphere for a full year, giving the air a permanent, greyish, dirty tinge. As a result, the European winter in 1815 was extreme.
By the following year, its effect became apparent. 1816 became the ‘Year without a Summer’. Global temperature plummeted as the sun’s rays were blocked by volcanic ash. Harvests across much of Europe and North America failed miserably. The change in global temperatures also disrupted the monsoon pattern in India. Famine ensued following a poor harvest. To add salt to the wound, the temperature change gave rise to a mutated form of cholera in Bengal. In Southern Europe, a typhus epidemic was seen. An event triggered in one corner of the planet had a devastating effect on the other side, thousands of miles away.
Food prices skyrocketed, sparking riots, arson and looting in Germany. The summer of 1816 in Europe was miserable. In Switzerland, it was cold and wet for many Europeans who wanted to spend the summer by the scenic lakes. The glacier took a long time to melt, resulting in ice jams where chunks of ice blocked river flow, causing rivers to overflow their banks and cause floods.
In that situation, Lord Byron hosted a group of friends at Lake Geneva for the summer. The inclement weather had left them homebound, and they decided to hold a writing competition. They were to write something scary after hearing someone read a ghost story. Byron’s physician, John Polidori, wrote a short story about Lord Ruthven, a charming, upper-class vampire. It was published later and evolved into a vampire figure associated with Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula. Mary Shelley recreated a scary dream she had the night before, which eventually led to the novel the world knows as Frankenstein.
An environmental disaster can indirectly give rise to the literary roots of a new genre: horror fiction.
Climate has long been blamed for many cataclysmic events on Earth . Because climate is so intertwined with vegetation, and thus with our food, its role cannot be brushed aside. Famines that result from crop failure invariably change ruling regimes. French peasants were not bemused when told to eat cakes; instead, they crushed the monarch, stormed the Bastille, and declared a Republic. The revolutionaries in the streets of Moscow brutally murdered the Romanov family and eventually placed a communist regime to rule over them. Many ancient Empires, including the Akkadian and Aztec civilisations, went extinct in the same way, through severe climate change and famine.
With modernisation, humans thought it was imperative to slash forests, denude vegetation, and create concrete jungles in place of a balanced environment where plants and animals lived in symbiotic harmony. This, in turn, had devastating effects on greenhouse gas emissions and increased global temperatures. The civil society noticed these subtle changes in our environment. As awareness was raised, people became more mindful of global warming caused by trapped heat. This phenomenon, later correctly termed climate change, became the buzzword of modern life. Climate change encompasses the heating of the planet, the melting of the Arctic ice caps, and the rise in sea level that could submerge many island nations.
Climate change not only shrinks our summer beachwear but also makes outdoor living impossible. Additionally, it’s proving to be more expensive to consume anything. Many advanced economies are imposing a carbon tax on every ton of carbon used by their citizens. Unfortunately, there is discordance in how these taxes are collected and dispersed. As shown during the 2005 Yellow Vest Riots in France, people protested rising fuel prices. The poor people from the countryside were taxed for using fossil fuels. This revenue was paradoxically used to subsidise green technology, benefiting affluent metropolitan dwellers, who least required assistance.
Green technology, an initiative that found its impetus after the Arab world held the rest of the world to ransom with the oil embargo way back in the 1970s, has been around for the longest time. More than half a century after its inception, the technology has not shown fantastic returns on investment. Germany, one of the pioneers in renewable energy, is still paying the highest electricity rate.
Some people subscribe to the idea that this whole scare about climate change is just scaremongering. They defend their conviction with research from climate scientists who present statistics that run counter to the mainstream understanding of the subject. These sceptics profess that global temperature trends merely mirror similar 80- to 90-year solar cycles in the solar system. They also question the 10- to 20-year lag in temperature rise after a burst of CO₂ production, such as during the Industrial Revolution or a world war.
Whether our weather change is man-made or a natural occurrence due to the restless tectonic plates that shape our planet, our climate will change the way we live. It will change our culture, maybe our food, our population migration demography, as the people gravitate towards a comfort zone, and probably change our leadership. If what the scientists say is correct, Mars and Venus once held water and an atmosphere. The way these planets appear today is a cautionary tale of what could happen when greenhouse gas accumulation goes overdrive. Oceans will evaporate, turning our planet into a wasteland.
Still, like Reverend Hutchings, who, despite the calamities associated with the ‘Year without a Summer’, decided that building a school was necessary, life had to go on amidst all the uncertainty surrounding climate change. The human race is stronger and has more plasticity than we think. We shall overcome. When life gives you lemons… make lemonade!
Photo Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara
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
Somdatta Mandal explores six dance-dramas by Tagore translated from Bengali andBrajbuli by Indrani Haldar
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1841) watching a performance of his nritya natya or dance drama: From Public Domain
The translation of different genres of Rabindranath Tagore’s works into English remains unabated till date. The translations of his novels, short stories, poems, non-fiction, and travelogues have been coming out at regular intervals, and multiple translations of some texts by different people, both professional and amateur, justify his popularity among all classes of readers, scholarly or mundane. Interestingly enough, compared to the other genres, drama happens to be a slightly neglected area in the world of Tagore translation and readership.
Throughout his life, Tagore experimented with different forms of plays – allegorical, symbolic, historical, comedies, and a kind of comic and witty plays known as ‘hasyakoutuk’. Again, there are some plays that focus more on dialogue than be dramatic enough to be enacted on stage. Apart from the various forms of plays that Tagore wrote and experimented with in his lifetime, there is another sort of play which does not have any antecedents, where the three aspects of acting, songs and dance have developed into a local form of opera. In plays like Mayar Khela, Shapmochon, Shyama, Chitrangada, Chandalika or Kalmrigoya and Tasher Desh [1](these last two plays of course have prose and songs in the dialogue), Tagore uses dialogue through the use of songs. The power that these plays generate as plays per se can be an interesting area of discussion, but these latter operatic types of plays, except for Bengali speaking readers, are hard to find and be appreciated by a pan-Indian or non-Bengali readership.
This is where a present set of six very aesthetically produced slim volumes (published in 2024 and 2025) all of them beautifully translated into English by Indrani Haldar, a retired professor of English at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, gains significance. The very first book in this translated series is entitled Bhanusingha Thakurer Padabali [2] and Rabindranath had composed the lyrics as a young writer only sixteen years old under the pseudonym of Bhanusingha Thakur. Dedicated to the memory of his sister-in-law Kadambari Debi who was his one-time playmate and companion, the twenty-one lyrics presented in the book are written in the Vaishnava Padabali tradition initiated by the Maithili poet Vidyapati in the 15th century and which gained impetus in the 16th century in Bengal under the cultural and religious influence of Shree Chaitanya Deva’s revival of Vaishnavism. Built around the love-legend of Radha and Krishna in both material and mystical forms, these lyrics are composed in brajabuli, (a mixture of Maithili and Bengali and Sanskrit) and the language in which the early padabalis had been written. Later in life, Rabindranath was not enthusiastic about these songs and spoke about them as being somewhat enclosed within the limits of a particular thought-system. The bilingual version of this volume, also becomes the books USP.
Photo Courtesy: Somdatta Mandal
The second book in this series is titled Free Waterfall. It is a translation of Muktodhara. Written in 1922, it is a sombre and singularly focused play, perhaps the most powerful of Rabindranath’s dramatic output. The background of the play is of course the nation-wide Non-Cooperation Movement launched by Mahatma Gandhi and the political backdrop of this can hardly be ignored. This symbolical and allegorical play has two prominent figures namely, Dhanajay Bairagi and the Crown Prince, Abhijit. Despite their appeal to the masses, both are misunderstood and persecuted figures, pursuing their ideals and visions alone and of choice. Both are determined and steadfast in their stand while rejecting violent options. The ideals pursued and values inculcated include a disapproval of machines misused by humans to enhance political power, to dominate the powerless and increase their suffering, and to harm and destroy the forces of nature which shape a beneficient environment. Though the play ends with the tragic death of the prince, as most often in Rabindranath’s creative work, hope, love, courage and compassion are attainable at the end of the dark tunnel.
The third book published in this series is Tasher Desh, titled The Kingdom of Cards. Written in 1933, and dedicating it to Subhas Chandra Bose, while remembering that he had “taken up the sacred task of inspiring new life and soul” of India, Tasher Desh is a complex play resisting any straight-jacketed or single interpretation, thus necessitating a multi-dimensional approach. Tagore’s travels to Europe and the United States in the early 1930s were necessarily reflected in his creative work. It is interesting to surmise that the state-sponsored regimentation that the sensitive poet must have been aware of on his European tour, especially in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, the half-suppressed state of fear prevailing, and the claustrophobic atmosphere stifling creativity, has found expression in this play. In the play, the Prince, in search of new world, lands up after his shipwreck, in a country where people have been flattened geometrically into mindless cards, unable either to think or act, leave alone create, on their own, a condition of mindless subservience. The play of course ends in a paean to new life, a freedom from fear, a ‘breaking open’ of all closed doors. Tagore therefore stresses the importance of eternal human values which he hopes will return to a world hell-bent on losing them.
Photo Courtesy: Somdatta Mandal
The two dance-dramas Chitrangada and Shyama, though creatively separated by three decades, are the most popular of Tagore’s works, and present his continuous quest for and questioning of the multi-dimensional character of love. Both the women protagonists in these plays are strong characters, outstripping their male counterparts in impact. Chitrangada (1891) an early verse-play, is based on a subsidiary story gleaned from Mahabharata. In the play both Arjun and Chitrangada progress from sensual attraction to a realisation of the innate substantial qualities of love, from romantic obsession to a deeper relationship between lover and beloved. Shyama, on the other hand, has antecedents in a Buddhist tale from the Jatakas. Revised and perfected by Tagore in the final decade of his creative life, the approach is more paradoxical and ambiguous. Though as strong a character as Chitrangada, Shyama is self-centeredly willing, even eager, to compromise basic human values like compassion or sympathy in her sudden all-consuming passion for Bajrasen. According to the translator, the rationale for bringing together these two remarkable plays under a single cover is because in all his explorations into the manifestations and vicissitudes of human love, the poet has been able to emphasise its inherently paradoxical nature.
Balmiki Pratibha (The Genius of Balmiki) and Kalmrigaya (The Fatal Hunt), two early plays by the youthful, newly West-returned Tagore were written as experiments in fusing music with theatre as in the Western operating tradition and the Indian usage of kathakata[3]. They initiated the trail of musical plays which weave themselves into the writer’s creative work though the poet was to admit later, in Jibonsmriti (Reminiscenses), that he was never again to experience as much enthusiasm as he did in writing these two plays. The story in Balmiki Pratibha was culled from the Ramayana, as was Kalmrigaya, though the former play has a more elaborate storyline and involves several ideological constructs, some shared with the latter. Human emotions, like anger or compassion found a more dramatic expression when coupled with music, the poet-dramatist felt. According to the translator, these two musical plays should be considered together for the similarities they reveal in both technical and thematic aspects.
Photo Courtesy: Somdatta Mandal
The sixth and the latest volume in this translation series contains three plays, Mayar Khela, Shapmochan and Chandalika. This trio of plays offer insights into the entire range of Rabindranath Tagore’s creative work at the centre of which rules love, sensual or spiritual, transformational and divine, or of the earth, earthy. The three plays in this anthology, separated from each other by decades, present an epic range of emotions, from desire to sacrifice and compassion, and are a testament to the writer’s analytical and ideological concerns and actually complement each other. Mayar Khela, the earliest of these romantic verse-plays, follows Tagore’s early experiments in fusing music and theatricality. Presenting a multitude of characters, each exhibiting an aspect at variance with the others, they move around in interweaving circles, ranging from calm, sacrificing acceptance to erratic detachment. In Shapmochan, a clear viewpoint is presented in the emphasis laid on a love that transcends physicality to reach beyond appearances. In the final geetinatya[4], Chandalika, the love of an untouchable woman for the Buddhist monk, Ananda, transforms her entire world. Here Rabindranath depicts not just the impulsive force of love but also its ability to transform and transcend mere physicality.
As mentioned earlier, this series of translations brings fresh light on Tagore’s works, and we expectantly wait for many more such productions in the near future.
[1]Mayar Khela – The Game of Illusion: Shapmochan – The Breaking of a Curse: Kalmrigoya –The Fatal Hunt: Tasher Desh—The Kindom of Cards. Shyama and Chitrangada are named after the protagonists.
[2]Bhanusingha Thakurer Padabali – The verses of Bhanusingha Thakur
[3] Art of religious and mythological storytelling rooted in folklore.
[4] Translates to song-play … what we refer to as dance-dramas too.
.
Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a retired Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Lily West in front of Mount FujiPhotographs provided by Suzanne Kamata
In Lily West’s travel memoir West goes East she recounts venturing from her native England overland toward India in the early 1970s with an impulsive American named Ed, a pro-Palestine fellow hippie whom she meets en route, on a shoestring budget. With the brazenness that comes with youth, they become entwined with all sorts of shady characters, finding themselves the guest of a charming conman in Amman, and being mistakenly deposited in a brothel in Cairo. Among other adventures, they rescue a polar bear from heat stroke in a zoo in Khartoum, are arrested twice in Egypt (and not for climbing to the top of a pyramid, which they do), and find themselves spectators at a public hanging in Iraq.
Many of the places they visited, such as the West Bank, Sudan and Afghanistan, are even less accessible now. West, by the way, is one of the few people who have traveled to every country on earth recognised by the UN. Although she made these travels as a man, she now lives in Japan as a woman. This award-winning book is a wild ride into the treacherous terrain of a bygone era. Lily generously agreed to answer a few questions.
Suzanne Kamata: First of all, congratulations on launching this book into the world! It has had a very positive reception, including an award for NomadMania Best Travel Book 2024. In the introduction you write that you hadn’t intended to write a book about traveling with your friend Ed, and that the idea came to you decades later. Can you tell us about the writing process? Also, how did you manage to recreate the scenes so vividly?
Lily West: I had often been urged to write a book, but never found the time or energy to do so. Then a friend introduced me to a publishing agent from English Agency Japan, who on hearing some of my travel stories, begged me to write a sample chapter which I eventually did. Then he demanded another and another until somehow after a year the book was finished. I guess the scenes in “West goes East” had remained vivid in my memory, because I had had some fifty years to remember them.
SK: Could you tell us a bit about the road to publication?
LW: The road to actual publication was a long one. My agent took six years only to come up with two concrete offers from publishers. Lots of offers that turned out to be pie in the sky though! I rejected both, the one because they wanted to edit the book down to half its size, the other because they wanted the chapter about Israel and all mention of Palestine removed. No! So, the manuscript continued to sit in my computer. Then Harry Mitsidis, the founder of the NomadMania extreme travel group, and arguably the world’s most travelled man, came over to Japan to verify that I really had been to the 193 UN member countries and thus was qualified to join the group. He was amazed that I was so easy to verify. Luckily, I had sent a postcard to my parents from every country I had been to. And my parents had kept them all! So, we became friends; I mentioned to him that I had written a book, and he asked me to send him a couple of chapters. He was so impressed that he said he would write a foreword and get the book published on Amazon. (This was technically beyond my ability!)
But he made it a condition that I include an epilogue about Lily’s much harder and longer journey, the journey to be accepted as the woman I knew I was. To be honest, I wasn’t very keen on this, because nowhere in the travel book do I mention or hint that I am a “transgender” woman. In fact, in 1972, the year the events in the book happened, it was still my Big Secret, something which could never be divulged to anyone, so I can understand its absence. However, as requested, I wrote the epilogue, which I have heard has caused some readers to cry. Naturally, Harry also wanted Lily West to be credited on the cover as the author, which was fair, because Lily had written the book!
SK:What was the first foreign country you ever visited? What activated your wanderlust?
LW: Well, I was brought up in England, but my mother was German, so we went there most summers. But I think you mean the first country visited by myself. I’ll give you two. I HATED the cruelty of school so much that at 17, I ran away and hitchhiked to Madrid which improved my Spanish enormously. Then that summer the local Education Committee paid for me to spend three months in the Soviet Union studying Russian. My German grandfather collected stamps, interesting enough, but what fascinated me were the names of the countries. Not just looking at the exotic names, I knew I wanted to go and actually see them! So, after I graduated, I said goodbye to England and set off on my second overland trip to India, as described in West goes East, but this time with no intention of returning.
SK:Early on in the book it becomes clear that Ed has the potential to get into trouble. You write that you were unlikely traveling companions, with very different personalities, and yet you stuck together. Was there any point in your travels that you at least considered going your own way?
LW: Yes, in Baghdad over the Donkey Boy incident! I was so angry with him! But we had gone through so much together that it would have been difficult to split up. Of course, I knew we would part in Delhi, and I would be going off on my own, which eventually landed me in Japan. (After I had been there just under a year, Ed arrived with his wife and son.)
SK: What does it mean to you to be a UN master (one who has visited all 193 countries recognised by the United Nations)?
LW: The end of one lifelong journey! This April, I took part in the largest gathering of UN Masters ever. 64 of us in Azerbaijan! Some had taken considerably less time than the 49 years I had taken, but Harry Mitsidis explained that many more people had been in space or climbed Everest than had visited every country in the world, so we had achieved something very special. Now I do appreciate meeting people from every country and know I can chat about their homeland. 2016 was a significant year for me, as that was when I finally visited No.193, Equatorial Guinea. I was very happy that I had managed this, but to put things into context, something more meaningful for me happened two months later when I was invited to join a 500-strong group of foreign women in Japan. Actually, that was more important for me!
SK:You’ve visited every country in the world recognised by the United Nations, but some have changed greatly since you first visited them. Are there any such countries that you would like to return to? And why/why not?
LW: There are some countries I don’t want to return to, because war has changed them almost irreparably. It would be too sad to see Syria, Iraq, Palestine, or Afghanistan. Or for that matter my two visits to Israel sufficed for me to see what this country was like. Whereas others such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Uzbekistan or Peru have become too touristed and I would rather remember them as they were. I visited Africa 30 times, but on my final visit in 2017, I survived a bad car accident in the Comoro Islands, in which my head broke the windscreen. Surely the Gods were telling me that’s enough!
SK:What is Ed up to now? Has he read the book? If so, what was his response?
LW: Sorry to say that Ed passed away suddenly in 2022. Yes, he had read the book at the insistence of my agent. I knew he would not be happy, even though his full name and where he came from are never mentioned. He wanted all reference and memories of his hippie past erased. For instance, he destroyed all the photos he had taken as well as his diaries. He never told his wife about my book; in fact, she only learned of it from me after his death. She bought the book, read it and then paid me the biggest compliment anyone ever has regarding West goes East: “Thank you so much, Lily. You brought Ed back to life!”
SK: You mention in your epilogue that female Japanese students responded to you differently as a woman; “less daunting,” you wrote. Have you noticed any difference in how you are treated when traveling as a woman versus traveling as a man?
LW: Yes and no. Generally, I find people, especially women, are kinder and more friendly to Lily. Of course, it’s always easier to talk to someone of your own gender. Also, I’m more outgoing and confident in myself as a fellow woman in the company of other women.
But like any other woman, I find myself much more on my guard, while not being paranoid about men, just more watchful in their presence. Luckily, Japan is safer for women than let’s say the UK or the US, but as a woman, I can’t take that personal safety for granted as I would if I were a man.
SK:I realise that this is a book about your travels with Ed, but you drop tantalizing hints about other episodes in your travels. For example, in the epilogue, you write that you and your Japanese partner were taken hostage on a trip to the Central African Republic. What???? Could you share a bit about that?
LW: Very long story from 1996. Fifteen of us were on an overland truck going from East Africa to West Africa. We had budgeted 10 days to go through Congo, but the “roads” were that awful, little but bog holes and mud, that it took us 56 days. During which time three passengers died: snakebite, malaria and cut to pieces by our own tyre chains. However, we felt lucky it had not been more!
Within two weeks, there were no more shops and as cook, I had to go into the villages and exchange stuff for food. Luckily, I found they wanted empty bottles in which to store the poison they used for hunting. I was the cook, but I wouldn’t use meat because I am a vegetarian. One evening, the two Australians who did most of the digging came back from a village with some meat, which they barbecued. A couple of days later, we ran into the first Westerner we had seen, a Belgian in the lumber business. He invited us to eat with him. One of the Australians started to tell him about the meat they had had. The Belgian asked where the village was, then he raised his and asked “Did it have fur?” No. “Did it have a hoof?” No. “I think you ate a baby!” One Australian just vomited, but the other said: “Tasted OK!”
And so, in such a dilapidated state, we finally reached the ferry over the Congo River to Bangui in the Central African Republic. By this time, we were down to 9 or 10 functioning members, for this didn’t really include a French Canadian, our only native French speaker. But he had lost his mind, and would never speak to anyone again during the rest of the trip. So that left me as the only actual French speaker. Anyway, we were at last on the ferry, chattering away about which hotel in Bangui we were going to stay in and really excited about having a shower as opposed to bathing in rivers with crocodiles and snakes.
We parked our truck on some waste ground by the river and I went exploring. The town of Bangui seemed eerily quiet as I found my way to the Novotel. Entering the hotel, I knew all was far from well when I saw a cloud of flies buzzing around the dead man at the check-in desk. Back at the truck, I told the others about the hotel and that we had better leave Bangui first thing in the morning. Everyone agreed, but at about 4 o’clock in the morning, soldiers arrived and started to knock down our tents and force us on to our truck. Those who argued or were too slow were jabbed with their rifles.
So off we went with two armed soldiers on the truck to guard us, but where were they taking us? Back to Congo or somewhere to shoot us?
We hastily formed an escape plan. At a given signal, the two hefty Australian diggers knocked the soldiers to the floor and stood on their guns, while the driver drove like mad overtaking the accompanying jeeps. I had found where the US Embassy was and it was there we headed. All other embassies were closed. We had one American in our group, so we figured that was our best chance. At five o’clock in the morning, our English driver smashed into the gates of the US Embassy at full speed. But the gates were so sturdily made that they did not give way!
In the shock, the soldiers recovered their guns and were screaming “Tirez-le!”, (Shoot him!). The driver got out of his cab window, flung himself into the embassy grounds and hid behind a wall. The soldiers opened fire and lights came on the embassy. They forced the co-driver to turn round and we were taken to a large building where we were all herded into an underground cell at gunpoint. To make matters worse, we could hear the screams of someone being tortured.
At noon, our driver arrived accompanied by personnel from the US Embassy and the Central African Republic Army as well as government officials. Slowly I pieced things together.
The soldiers who had captured us had taken part in a failed coup d’etat and now needed us as human shields to get past the checkpoints and out of Bangui. A deal was struck. They would take us 700km to the Cameroon border where they would set us free. Everyone shook hands and we set off. It took several days to drive, for we had to stop along the way many times as the soldiers constantly tried to intimidate us. Once they lined us up firing-squad style, but shot over our heads. Their idea of a joke, I guess.
However, after 500km, we reached the town of Bouar, which was rebel-held territory, so they felt safe and saw no reason to release us. They kept us in the camp, under guard with no indication as to what might be our fate. After ten days or so, I determined to try to find a way to get out of this camp. Most of the others seemed to sunk into despondency or were just too sick to move.
There were 30 soldiers holding us and I tried reaching out to those who seemed a bit more friendly. I persuaded two of them that we were running out of food, so they took me into the market. The next day, I asked them to take me in again, this time with Takako, my partner. Then while they were drinking beer in a bar, she and I ran for it to another bar which I had spotted the day before.
Were there any foreigners in Bouar, I asked. Yes, there were two and someone offered to take us to their house. The two foreigners turned out to be French Jehovah’s Witness missionaries! By this time, I would have joined! And as I hoped, they had a radio. It was hidden under the floorboards and they let me use it to contact the US Embassy. “You still there”, was the surprised response. “We’ll get you out in the morning,” they promised.
Very early in the morning, a helicopter landed and after more bargaining, the rebels finally let us drive to the Cameroon border. We crossed the border and those of us who could still walk were in the very first bar on the Cameroon side celebrating. Suddenly, in walked the rebel soldiers still with their guns! Oh, no, surely not, I almost exclaimed! Then, the two I had befriended came up to me and asked me to translate. “Don’t worry! We’re so glad we didn’t have to shoot you and would like to buy a beer for you all.” I answered: “We’re also very glad you didn’t shoot us!” To general laughter, everyone raised their beer bottles: “Salut!”
Three days later we arrived in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon. With our driver, I went to the British Embassy to report the three deaths, all Commonwealth citizens. The Ambassador listened as we told our story.
Then he stood up and shook our hands: “Jolly good show, chaps! Let me get you a drink!” The brandy was welcome.
Takako and I were able to contact our families for the first time and reassure them that we were not dead as they feared. We flew to Europe from Cameroon and then on to Japan, arriving three months late. Astonishingly, I was able to keep my job. While I know I went to Africa for adventure, sometimes you can get more adventure than you bargained for!
SK:Wow! What a harrowing experience! Thanks for sharing that! Are there any other travel memoirs or travel writers that you admire and would recommend?
LW:The Roads To Sata by Alan Booth, In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin, An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie.
SK:What’s next? Will there be another book?
LW: I could write another book, yes, but I doubt that I am able to write another book that would be as good as this one. I feel that this is my masterpiece. Every time I look through it, I think, wow, I wrote this! Many travel books nowadays have the author writing about doing many different trips over the years, one chapter per country. I certainly could do one of those too, but I, and others, think that a major strength of West goes East is that it is a story of one continuous journey rather than many short ones. It describes eight months of travelling overland from Syria to India via Afghanistan in 1972, in a world that no sadly longer exists and the people we met along the way, both locals from those countries and other Westerners.
SK:Thank you so much! I, for one, am glad you got this book out into the world.
Lily West and her Japanese students. Photo provided by Suzanne Kamata.
Suzanne Kamatawas born and raised in Grand Haven, Michigan. She now lives in Japan with her husband and two children. Her short stories, essays, articles and book reviews have appeared in over 100 publications. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, and received a Special Mention in 2006. She is also a two-time winner of the All Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest, winner of the Paris Book Festival, and winner of a SCBWI Magazine Merit Award.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Keith Lyons in conversation with Helen Townsend, an environmental entrepreneur and a plant enthusiast
Helen Townsend speaking to women at Girls-in-STEM that aims to close gender gap in science in 2026. Photo sourced by Keith Lyons
Helen Townsend has spent her career uncovering the connections between people, plants and the planet. From working with herbarium collections in Nepal and Bangladesh to leading campaigns against single-use plastics and creating nature-based toys for children, the environmental entrepreneur has come to see climate change, biodiversity loss and waste as deeply interconnected global challenges. In this interview, she reflects on the power of plants, the importance of global responsibility, and why reconnecting children with nature may be one of our greatest reasons for hope.
Keith Lyons (KL): How did you find yourself in Nepal and Bangladesh, and what did you do there?
Helen Townsend (HT): In 2006 I was working in the herbarium of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh on a project digitising African plant specimens. The aim of the project was to increase African botanists’ access to their countries’ important specimens which had been collected during colonial exploration and taken to the UK. In 2009, the project expanded to Asia, and I went to Nepal to train staff and set up the digitising project at the National Herbarium of Kathmandu. I also spent six months in Bangladesh volunteering at a girls’ school in Dhaka.
KL: How were your experiences in those places influence your awareness of environmental issues which are both linked with modern society and global?
HT: While growing up in New Zealand and living in the UK, I knew we used too much plastic packaging and tried to avoid it but it was when I was in Nepal and Bangladesh and saw plastic rubbish on the streets and in the rivers that I started to realise the scale of the plastic pollution problem. In New Zealand we produce so much more rubbish than people in Nepal and Bangladesh but because it’s collected weekly and taken away, we never have to confront the environmental impact of our purchasing choices.
KL: What fascinates you about plants?
HT: Plants are beautiful, especially trees! But the more I learn about them the more interesting they become. Plants are often seen as the backdrop to a scenic view or ‘nice to haves’ for people living in cities but they are absolutely essential not only for the survival of all life but also for our physical, mental and emotional well-being.
How has this interest run through your study, work and approach?
HT: Both of my businesses have tackled systemic issues by providing alternatives to single-use plastics and reconnecting kids with nature. These issues are directly related to protecting the environment and helping parents pass on their love of nature to their kids.
KL:What broader lessons have you learned from working with plant collections, botanical gardens and herbariums?
HT: Working on projects to return botanist’s access to plant specimens taught me how interconnected societal problems are and how our current problems are grounded in colonial and capitalist thinking. Europeans taking plant specimens from Africa and Asia in the 1800s directly impacts the work of today’s botanists from those areas. In the same way, climate change and the biodiversity crisis have been caused by rich countries’ exploitation, again taking more than their share of nature and resources.
KL:Waste is often seen as a local issue, whether it be plastic, uncollected rubbish, dumping, or pollution in waterways. Why do you see it as a global issue?
HT: Billion-dollar companies headquartered in the USA or Europe take oil from the Middle East and turn it into plastic to be made into products in China which are then shipped to New Zealand. After we’ve used the product, we put our plastic ‘recycling’ out to be collected, and it’s shipped to Indonesia where it contributes to enormous landfills contaminating the land, water ways, oceans and health of communities we will never visit.
This is not an accident. It is a planned devaluing of the global south so rich countries can continue to consume overpackaged and unnecessary junk to make a few people extremely wealthy. If we look at waste as a local issue, we can pat ourselves on the back for taking part in a beach clean-up, while ignoring the capitalist system that created the inequality and environmental destruction of countries we do our best not to think about.
KL:What initiatives have you been involved in which have looked for solutions to problems, and how did you go about turning ideas into action?
HT: After returning to New Zealand, I set up a company called ‘The Rubbish Whisperer’ to provide replacements to single-use plastics. I made reusable produce bags and introduced paper straws to cafes and restaurants in New Zealand, advocating for straws on request. Providing reusable alternatives was an important component in the grass roots movement to eliminate single-use plastics. Working alongside activists, scientists and community groups, we were successful in achieving New Zealand’s 2019 ban on single-use plastic bags and restrictions on plastic straws.
Now I have a company called ‘Sustained Fun’, the world’s first climate change focused toy company. Toys are vital to climate change because they teach social norms and shaped how kids see the world. The toy industry works on a fast fashion business model and is training kids to be over-consumers of cheap, disposable plastic junk. If we want adults who care about the environment, we need kids to learn how to love nature. Luckily all this entails is to get kids out into it! We make fun and sustainable toys and games that encourage kids and families to connect with nature.
Anthea Bell and Helen Townsend, co-founders of Sustained Fun with their reusable water-balloons. Photo sourced by Keith Lyons
KL: When it often seems that environmental problems can feel overwhelming, what gives you hope?
HT: This is something I struggle with a lot. It doesn’t always feel like things are getting better. I make an effort to seek out positive news and connect with others who are excited about nature and are making a positive impact. Running ‘Sustained Fun’ also gives me hope as I can help to create a more positive future for kids and families.
KL:What helped shaped your perspective and desire to make a difference?
HT: I’m not sure. I don’t understand why everyone wouldn’t want to make a difference? We all want swimmable rivers, clean beaches, forests, amazing animals and breathable air. And, especially for those of us from rich, privileged countries, it’s our responsibility to make sure a healthy environment is there for all people and the next generation.
KL:If someone could see the world through your eyes just for one day, what do you think they would notice differently?
HT: Plants! Instead of seeing plants as a green backdrop, they would see them as the view, noticing which ones are native and which are invasive. They’d look at deforested hillsides and imagine them covered in mature forests. They’d look at a polluted estuary and see it teeming with life. Wherever I go, I imagine what it used to look like before we cut down the trees and what it will look like again, once we’ve restored them.
KL:What kind of world would you hope today’s young people inherit?
HT: I would love it if every year wildlife numbers increased so that when young people look back at 2026, they are amazed at how far we’ve come. I can’t wait for my grandchildren to say to me ‘I can’t believe you were excited to see one whale in the harbour, I often see hundreds’.
KL:If you could leave one message for readers around the world, regardless of where they live, what would it be?
HT: Do more and speak up. We need to move swiftly and urgently to prevent the worst effects of climate change and stop biodiversity loss. Whatever your skills, experience and profession, turn them to protecting the environment. And if you have kids, teach them to love the environment by getting them out into nature as often as possible!
Heen hugging moss in UKHelen treking in NepalPhotos sourced by Keith Lyons
Keith Lyons (keithlyons.net) is an award-winning writer and creative writing mentor originally from New Zealand who has spent a quarter of his existence living and working in Asia including southwest China, Myanmar and Bali. His Venn diagram of happiness features the aroma of freshly-roasted coffee, the negative ions of the natural world including moving water, and connecting with others in meaningful ways. A Contributing Editor on Borderless Journal’sEditorial Board, his work has appeared in Borderless since its early days, and his writing featured in the anthology Monalisa No Longer Smiles.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Nazrul’slyrics ofMor Ghumogore Elo Monohor (In my Sleep, Came the Enchanting One) has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.
Four of his ownMalay poems have been translated by Isa Kamari. Click here to read.
The Heartless, a Balochi story by AbdulQayum Sarbazi, has been translated by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.
Dragonfly 2 has been composed and translated from Korean by Ihlwha Choi. Click here to read.
Tagore’s poem, Amra Choli Somukhpane(We Look Forward and March), has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Clickhere to read.
Pandies Corner
Songs of Freedom: Pink Dreams is an autobiographical narrative by Priyanka, written and compiled by Deeksha Vats. These stories highlight the ongoing struggle against debilitating rigid boundaries drawn by societal norms, with the support from organisations like Shaktishalini and Pandies. Clickhere to read.
Larry S Su, who migrated from a mud cave in Shaanxi province to America, shares his story of the changes he sees during three visits to his home and muses on the gaps he has observed between these two places. Clickhere to read.
Summer, Dune in Zeeland by Piet Mondrain (1872 – 1944)
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.
‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets (1941) by TS Eliot
If we look back in time, we have a better life than that of our ancestors. Though conflicts rage and climate change is a reality that we all dread, it can safely be said, we have progressed beyond the imagination of those who lived a hundred years ago. The fact that some books from the past still reverberate with echoes of what the present holds says much for the outliers or authors who could think out of the box. Despite this complex intermingling of ideas and times, perhaps the world will change more now than before. We do not know anything for sure though experts are always predicting a future that for most of us remains unknown. What we can present is our own estimate of what can be and a definite assertion of what is. Truth as such is a matter of perception. That complicates it further. However, one of the changes that is definitely here to stay is climate change and our changing environment. Given that this is the month that homes World Environment Day, we have a smattering of writings that revolve around nature and also the human spirit that defies age.
We have featured a writer who revels in nature and is an ageless voice that bridges multiple cultures, Ruskin Bond. As he turned ninety-two last month, he published multiple new books. We have an excerpt from one of them, Scenes from the Magic Mountain: Five Seasons in the Mussoorie Hills and Beyond, a brilliant collection of snapshots of his interactions with nature over time — be it frogs, snakes or just trees. Some of the vignettes are humorous and some, as all classics are, thought provoking. Bond puts into words how he chose to work in Landour (a small town in Himalayas) and continued to write from there for sixty years. He talks of the spell the mountains cast on him, “I like to think that I have become a part of this Magic Mountain; that by living here for so long, I can claim a relationship with the trees, wild flowers, even the rocks that are an integral part of this landscape.” The other book excerpt is a contrast to Bond’s, a non-fiction called Burnout Highway by Anmol Diddan. It explores the collective suffering of stress at work where achievements distance humans from nature and a fulfilling life and urges readers to be open to changes.
In keeping with the theme of environment, Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed Stephen Alter’s The Fragrance of Rain: A Brief History of the Monsoon. He tells us: “The Fragrance of Rain is much more than a history of weather. It is a meditation on nature, culture, memory, and belonging… Like the season it celebrates, the book is refreshing, nourishing, and lingering in its impact…” While Rakhi Dalal expresses her delight with Shyam Manohar’s The Cold War of Sadanand Borse, a novella translated from Marathi by Jerry Pinto, Meenakshi Malhotra revels in Giti Chandra’s debut book of poems, Setting Traps for Light.
In translations, Professor Fakrul Alam has captured the flavours of Nazrul’s Bengali lyrics, which also echo of the rainy season or monsoons. Isa Kamari brings to us more of his Malay poems in English and Ihlwha Choi shares a rendering of his Korean poem, ‘Dragonfly 2’, into English. One of Tagore’s poems from Balaka (Flight of the Cranes, 1916) has found its way into this issue after being translated. We also have a touching Balochi story around social gaps from the late Abdul Qayum Sarbazi, brought to us in English by Fazal Baloch.
Hughes has continued sharing his short fables, which are absurd but also, comical! A sensitive story about the natural world mingled with Maori concepts by Keiran Martin seems so much in sync with the oceans while Jeena R Papaadi has woven a strange narrative located in a land that only one man could visit. Plamen Vasilev shares a human-interest story set in Europe and Rabiya Rehman takes us to Lahore in quest of a missing destination! Naramsetti Umamaheswararao’s narrative takes us back to a village that opted for trees, thus enriching the environmental lore in this issue.
We have a real life heart rending story from a young girl in our Pandies Corner, written and related by Deeksha Vats, based on the story told by a victim of familial violations and violence.
Our non-fiction section homes Larry Su’s essay on how his life took him from a rural mud cave in Shaanxi province to the glamour of Chicago. Reflecting on the changes he has experienced on his rare visits to his original homeland, Su muses on the cultural and socio-economic gaps he has observed between the two places. Charudutta Panigrahi – as if in direct opposition — shares similarities between two diverse geographies.
Suzanne Kamata explores a custom which may not be that eco-friendly in her column from Japan. Jun A. Alindogan brings home the impact of climate disasters while dwelling on blessings with his narrative about a narrow escape from the Typhoon Ondoy (2009). While Meredith Stephen writes of sailing to Timor Sea with photographs by Alan Noble, Farouk Gulsara takes us on a cycling adventure around the mountains of Titiwangsa. In another musing, he also explores the idea of good and evil in a sardonic tone while Sai Abhinay Penna dwells on the grandeur and vastness of the universe over his morning jog. Gowher Bhat writes of a man for whom age seems to be just a number as he publishes his debut book at 93! One wonders at the frequency of such occurrences — we have writings about two authors above ninety in the June issue. In contrast, Devraj Singh Kalsi brings in mortal fears while writing of visiting doctors with a soupçon of humour – some of it directed at himself.
Perhaps, laughter is really the best medicine to keep well! Ruskin Bond makes us laugh and writes of nature in a way that touches hearts and makes us forget the contrasting glitzy world, where we suffer stress and burnout. Our environment makes a difference, doesn’t it?
With that we wrap up our June issue. Huge thanks to our fabulous team, especially Sohana Manzoor for her wonderful artwork. To all our contributors, heartfelt thanks — we are because you are. And gratitude to our readers who make it worth our while to write and publish here.
We will next meet you during the monsoon months of South Asia though, near the equator, it rains almost every day and, in the Southern Hemisphere, it will be peak winter!
There is a cartographic trick that India plays on the careless observer. Place a finger on Goa, cradled in the lap of the Western Ghats where the Mandovi meets the Arabian Sea. Now drag that finger clean across the peninsula — past the Deccan plateau, past the red laterite and the black cotton soil — until it arrives at Odisha, where the Mahanadi fans into the Bay of Bengal. The distance is vast. The terrain changes several times over. And yet, when you finally arrive, you feel, inexplicably, that you have not travelled at all. You have merely walked from one room of the same house into another.
Goa and Odisha are India’s fraternal twins, stationed like sentinels on opposite coasts, facing outward toward different oceans but turning inward toward an almost identical soul. They share no border, no common neighbour, no obvious historical corridor. And yet their resemblances are so startling, so layered, that they make a quiet mockery of the assumption that east and west shall never meet. In this country, at least, they have been meeting all along.
The Plate That Speaks First
Begin where all honest cultural inquiry must begin — at the table. In both Goa and Odisha, the grammar of a meal is written in two words: rice and fish. The xitt-kodi of a Goan Catholic household — rice with fish curry — is a mirror image of the bhata-machha that anchors every Odia thali. The curry leaves may change, the tamarind may yield to kokum, but the fundamental covenant between grain and sea remains unbroken.
Both states worship the coconut with equal fervour. It thickens their gravies, sweetens their desserts, oils their hair, and thatches their roofs. And in both places, the humble samosa — that deep-fried triangle of spiced potato — enjoys a curious and disproportionate celebrity, sold at every bus stand, every temple gate, every rain-drenched evening stall, as if it were the official snack of the coastline itself.
Weavers of Light
If food is the first language, cloth is the second. Odisha’s handloom tradition is among the most sophisticated in the world. The Sambalpuri ikat, with its geometric precision born of a tie-and-dye technique older than memory, is a textile that calculates like mathematics and sings like poetry. The Bomkai of Ganjam, the Kotpad of Koraput — each weave carries a district’s autobiography in its warp and weft.
Goa’s handloom heritage is no less poignant. The Kunbi saree, woven by the indigenous Kunbi community in checks of red and maroon, is a garment of earthy defiance — a refusal to vanish beneath the weight of colonial and commercial textile culture. In both states, the handloom is not an industry. It is an act of inheritance.
The handicraft traditions run parallel with uncanny symmetry. Odisha’s Pattachitra — those luminous scroll paintings rendered on cloth with pigments drawn from stone, earth, and lamp-black — find a philosophical cousin in Goa’s azulejos-inspired tile art and the painted terracotta work of its hinterlands. Odisha’s silver filigree from Cuttack, those impossibly intricate webs of metal that seem to have been spun by patient spiders, speak the same aesthetic dialect as the filigree and brass work of Goan artisans.
Temples, Tides, and the Slow Pulse
Both states are drenched in divinity. Odisha shelters the Jagannath Temple of Puri, whose Rath Yatra rolls through the world’s imagination every year, and the Konark Sun Temple, a stone chariot frozen mid-gallop toward the dawn. The Lingaraj Temple of Bhubaneswar presides over a city that was once a forest of a thousand shrines. Goa, often misread as merely a beach destination, guards some of the oldest Hindu temples in western India — the Mangeshi Temple, the Shanta Durga Temple, the Mahalasa Narayani, the Tambdi Surla — alongside the Basilica of Bom Jesus, where the remains of St. Francis Xavier lie in baroque silence. In both states, the sacred is not a Sunday affair. It is the air.
And then there is the pace. Both Goa and Odisha move at a tempo that the hyperventilating metros of India find baffling. The Goan susegad — that philosophy of contented ease — is a first cousin of the unhurried dignity with which Odisha conducts its daily life. Long before the global “slow living” movement became a wellness-industry buzzword, these two states had been practising it for centuries, not as aspiration but as instinct.
Songs in Different Scales
The musical traditions reveal yet another layer of kinship. Odisha gave the world Odissi — both the dance and the music — a classical tradition of astonishing fluidity, shaped by poets like Jayadeva, whose Gita Govinda remains one of the supreme lyric achievements in any language. The folk traditions — Dalkhai, Gotipua, the tribal Dhemsa — pulse with a rhythmic vitality that no concert hall can contain.
Goa’s musical soul lives in the Mando, a slow, swaying ballad of love and longing born from the encounter between Konkani sensibility and Portuguese fado. The Dulpod, faster and more festive, is its playful sibling. And beneath the tourist-facing trance and EDM, Goa’s folk traditions — Fugdi, Dhalo, Dekhni — carry the same rooted, communal energy that Odisha’s village squares have known for generations.
Goa’s Tiatr and Odisha’s Jatra are born of the same impulse — raucous, deeply local theatre traditions that turn village squares into stages, blend music with social satire, and have for generations served as the people’s newspaper, courtroom, and concert hall rolled into one.
The Literary Mirror
The literary parallels are quietly profound. Fakir Mohan Senapati, the father of modern Odia literature, wrote Chha Mana Atha Guntha — a searing, ironic novella about land, power, and peasant dispossession — in the 1890s. Across the map, Goa’s literary tradition in Konkani, shaped by figures like Bakibab Borkar (the poet-laureate of Konkani verse), Ravindra Kelekar, and Damodar Mauzo, has grappled with similar themes of identity, colonial memory, and the tension between tradition and modernity. Odisha’s Pratibha Ray and Goa’s Mauzo — both Jnanpith laureates — wrote in languages the literary mainstream often overlooks, yet carved from Odia and Konkani respectively a body of work so luminous that the nation’s highest literary honour had no choice but to find its way to their doors. Both literatures are enormous in depth and criminally under-read outside their states.
Even the economies rhyme. Both states sit on vast mineral wealth — iron ore in Goa, iron ore, bauxite and coal in Odisha — and both have built significant chapters of their economic story on extraction. Mining has been, for decades, a genuine engine of revenue and employment. But prosperity extracted from the earth exacts its own price. Both states have watched hills reshaped and rivers thickened with slurry, and both have grappled with the same difficult question that every resource-rich society must eventually face: where does sustainable use end and irreversible damage begin? The Dongria Kondh resistance in Odisha’s Niyamgiri hills and Goa’s prolonged civic movement against unregulated mining are stories of communities recognising that the wealth beneath their feet should not come at the cost of the world above it. In both states, the mandate is the same: to mine responsibly, restore what can be restored, and find an economic imagination that honours both the ledger and the landscape.
Stone, Laterite, and the Architecture of Belonging
The buildings of Goa and Odisha could not, at first glance, look more different. Odisha’s architectural glory resides in the Kalinga style of temple building — a tradition that flowered between the sixth and thirteenth centuries and produced some of the most breathtaking sacred structures on the subcontinent. The Rekha Deula, with its curvilinear tower soaring heavenward, the Pidha Deula, with its stepped pyramid, and the barrel-vaulted Khakhara Deula — each is a masterclass in proportion, carved from sandstone and laterite without a drop of mortar, held together by iron dowels and the sheer precision of stone cut to stone. The Lingaraj Temple rises a hundred and eighty feet; the Sun Temple at Konark was conceived as a stone chariot for Surya himself.
Goa’s architectural signature, meanwhile, is the Indo-Portuguese house — the balcão-fronted villa with its oyster-shell windows, its Baroque churches, its colour-washed facades in ochre and cerulean and terracotta. Where Odisha built upward in devotion, Goa built outward in conviviality.
And yet the kinship runs deeper than surface style. Both traditions are rooted in laterite — that rust-red, iron-rich stone quarried from the earth itself — and in an instinctive dialogue between structure and climate. Goan houses, whether Hindu or Catholic, were designed around the monsoon: thick laterite walls to absorb the heat, sloping roofs of Mangalore tile to shed the deluge, courtyards to channel light and air. The traditional Hindu house in Goa, with its rajangan (courtyard) and its Tulasi Vrindavan (holy basil) at its centre, is an inward-looking sanctuary not unlike the courtyard homes of rural Odisha, where domestic life orbits an open-air heart and thatched or tiled roofs slope against the same seasonal fury. In both states, the house is not merely shelter. It is a cosmology — oriented by Vastu[1], shaped by rain, and built from the very ground on which it stands.
The Sacred as Daily Bread
Spirituality in Goa and Odisha is not a compartment of life; it is the wallpaper. In Odisha, they say Bara Masa re Tera Parba — thirteen festivals in twelve months — and this is not hyperbole but arithmetic. From Rath Yatra to Raja Parba, from Nuakhai to Kumar Purnima, the Odia calendar is a procession of devotion, agriculture, and communal joy so tightly woven that one cannot tell where worship ends and daily life begins. The festivals are tied to the rice cycle — seeding, sowing, harvesting — so that the act of farming itself becomes a prayer. Odisha is a land where Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism have coexisted and cross-pollinated for millennia, leaving behind the cave monasteries of Udayagiri and Khandagiri, the Buddhist stupas of Ratnagiri and Lalitgiri, and the Shakti temples that dot the landscape like exclamation marks of feminine divinity.
Goa answers with its own brand of sacred pluralism. Here, Hindus light candles at the Basilica of Bom Jesus, and Catholics offer prayers at the Shantadurga temple at Fatorpa. The feast of Our Lady of Miracles gathers both communities under the same roof, exchanging oil and candles between church and temple as naturally as neighbours exchange sugar. The Zagor celebrations and the Shigmo festival are not Hindu events attended by Christians out of politeness; they are Goan events, full stop. In both states, religion is not a doctrine to be debated but a rhythm to be lived — embedded in the morning’s first lamp, the evening’s last bell, and every meal served between.
The Farmer and the Monsoon
Rice is not merely the staple food of Goa and Odisha; it is the organising principle of their rural civilisations. In Odisha, paddy covers nearly seventy per cent of cultivated land, and the entire social calendar revolves around its seasons — Akshaya Tritiya marks the seeding, Raja Sankranti the completion of sowing, Nuakhai the first tasting of the new harvest. The traditional beushening method — broadcasting seed and then tilling post-emergence — speaks of a farming intelligence shaped by centuries of reading the monsoon, the soil, and the floodplain.
In Goa, the ingenuity takes another form: the Khazan system, an ancient network of bunds and sluice gates that reclaim low-lying coastal land from the tides, allowing farmers to cultivate salt-tolerant rice varieties and rear fish and prawns in the same fields. It is an act of ecological engineering so elegant that modern agronomists study it as a model of sustainable land use.
Both states grow coconut, cashew, and areca nut alongside their paddy. Both rely overwhelmingly on the monsoon — Odisha’s irrigation covers barely a third of its cultivable land, and much of Goa’s paddy is rainfed. Both are lands of small and marginal farmers, where the average holding is modest and the relationship between cultivator and earth is intimate, personal, and unmediated by large-scale mechanisation. And in both states, a quiet revolution is underway: Odisha’s Millets Mission and Goa’s growing organic farming movement are attempts to reclaim indigenous crop diversity from the grip of high-yield monoculture — to remember that the land, like the people, thrives best when it is allowed its full vocabulary.
The Playing Field
In a nation drunk on cricket, Goa and Odisha are the two states that have had the audacity to fall in love with other sports. Goa is India’s football heartland. The game arrived with an Irish priest in 1883 and never left. Clubs like Salgaocar, Dempo, and Churchill Brothers have won national titles; six Goans have captained the Indian football team. During the FIFA World Cup, Goan streets erupt into a carnival of flags and giant screens, and the village tournament — barefoot boys on a laterite pitch — remains as sacred as Sunday Mass. Football in Goa is not a sport. It is an identity.
Odisha’s sporting soul beats to a different drum — the hockey stick. The state has produced legends like Dilip Tirkey, Amit Rohidas, Sunita Lakra, and Deep Grace Ekka, and became the first state government in India to sponsor the national hockey team. The Birsa Munda International Hockey Stadium in Rourkela, which hosted the 2023 World Cup, is a monument to Odisha’s commitment. But what unites both states is not the particular sport but the underlying defiance: a refusal to accept cricket’s monopoly on the Indian sporting imagination.
Both states also share a love for traditional and community games — Kho Kho and Kabaddi[2] are played at village festivals in both, and both have ISL football franchises (FC Goa and Odisha FC) that draw passionate, roaring crowds. The playing field, it turns out, is yet another room in the same house.
Rivers, Mangroves, and the Shared Ecology
The ecological parallels between these two states are no less striking. Both are coastal, riverine, and monsoon-fed. Both shelter significant mangrove ecosystems — the Khazan mangroves along Goa’s estuaries and the Bhitarkanika mangrove forests of Odisha, one of the largest in India. Both are biodiversity hotspots: Goa’s Western Ghats forests are a UNESCO heritage site, while Odisha’s Simlipal and Satkosia reserves harbour tiger, elephant, and crocodile populations of national importance. The Olive Ridley sea turtles that nest on Odisha’s Gahirmatha beach have cousins that occasionally visit Goa’s Morjim. Both states understand, in their bones, that the sea is not merely a border but a livelihood, a deity, and a defining force — and that the mangrove, the estuary, and the fishing village are not the periphery of civilisation but its very foundation.
And then there is the matter of diaspora. Both Goa and Odisha are states whose people have scattered across the world yet remain fiercely tethered to home. The Goan communities of Bombay, the Gulf, the UK and Lisbon mirror the Odia communities of US, Europe, Surat, Hyderabad, and beyond. In both cases, the expatriate carries the cuisine, the festival calendar, and the mother tongue like a portable homeland — and returns, without fail, for the annual feast or the harvest celebration, as though the umbilical cord to the village were made not of flesh but of something altogether more durable.
Goa and Odisha do not need a bridge between them. They already are the bridge — two ends of a single cultural arc that bends across the Indian landmass, proving that civilisational kinship does not require geographical proximity. They are proof that identity in India is not merely a function of latitude and longitude but of something deeper: a shared covenant with the sea, with rice, with the loom, with the slow and sacred act of living.
If India is a house with many rooms, these two states are the twin balconies — one facing the sunset, the other the sunrise — built from the same stone, painted in the same light, listening to the same tide.
East and West do not merely meet here. They embrace.
[1] science of architecture in alignment with natural forces
The ocean breeze swipes the water page after page turned in waves of succession,
one after another sweeping the air and stirring it in the sounds of coming and going.
The waves move as the wind dictates: some taller, some more shallow, still others less certain.
These are the waves of times, when Fall just begins and the air knows nothing of Summer—
in days blessed by what came but were cursed when they left, with just the newest day now with me,
where only what left is what I wanted— where only waves of its time came and are now over.
Water comes then recedes motion upon motion, each one pulled from the edge of the sea,
each one returned to where it once came. I do not see its subtle direction-change
except its withdrawal, except to see them extracted in distant sentiments of their own.
Can it be that this is what was always meant to be, and did I miss more than I could have remembered?
Did I not notice them when they were there one after another in chances I hadn’t realised were given?
But now I see I was wrong: each day the shore doesn’t forget each wave’s sentiment,
each wave holds its own where there is no end to them, where I’m offered a memory wrapped by the pain
of their leaving, but stays bound to every one where I hold on to the gift each one carried. DESIGNS
so much of what consumes me is mired in redundancy mental gymnastics wound ‘round and ‘round like an old watch spring and even when encased as permanent and making promises of permanence revolve with the earth in an air of inconsistency— both tensioning and reverting
maybe sorrow was designed this way maybe it was honed from some common metal where fissures stayed hidden but are the cause of its denigration over and over daylight comes deepens then fades mired in a cycle where change speaks only to change ‘round and ‘round in steps that hold its own brightness
A STEP AT A TIME
I can’t walk far once sunlight begins leaving, once the sweet music of unnamed birds begins to end, after rain fell again in the morning and clouds regrouped in early evening, the day without a before or after, only itself with two hands giving all I come to breathe— the two of us here in waning sunlight remembering: another day only mine to take, only the day to give— whether I cherished it or had choices when it ended, a day in the light that remains with an intensity of its own.
SR (Salvatore Richard) Inciardi was born in New York City and attended Brooklyn College and New York University. SR Inciardi’s poetry has appeared in the USA and in Europe in various online and print magazines including Green Ink Poetry, Harrow House Journal, Grey-Sparrow Journal, Borderless Journal, Written Tales,among others. He was a contributor to Green Ink Poetry for their publication on Kennings: Equinox Collections: Autumn released on Amazon in October, 2024.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
