Tag: Germany

An Unfinished Memoir

Title: Janaki Ballav Patnaik: An Unfinished Memoir

Author: JB Patnaik

Translated into English from Odia by Bhaskar Parichha

Publisher : BK Classics

Chapter 17 A Journalist across Continents

My association with Prajatantra[1] also opened doors to experiences beyond the country. In 1959, the British Information Services invited four journalists from eastern India to visit England. From Odisha, I went as the editor of The Eastern Times. Along with me were representatives from The Statesman, Amrita Bazar Patrika, and Searchlight of Patna.

Our visit to England proved deeply enriching. We toured institutions such as University of Oxford and University of Cambridge, and also visited the British Parliament. At Bristol, we paid our respects at the tomb of Raja Ram Mohan Roy. We were taken to an atomic energy plant, a steel factory, and even a coal mine in Wales. On London’s Fleet Street, where most of the major newspapers were published, I had the chance to observe the workings of the Daily Telegraph office—its news gathering systems, teleprinter composition, and massive printing machines. We also engaged in discussions with British journalists about our experiences and about Indo-British relations.

We had arrived in England in June. One day, the temperature rose to ninety degrees Fahrenheit. By Indian standards, it was nothing remarkable, but in a country accustomed to cold weather, it was almost unbearable. News came of workers in several factories halting work due to the heat. We visited places like Buckingham Palace and the bridges over the Thames, taking in as much as we could of London’s historic landscape.

From London, I felt a strong desire to visit Germany. It was not uncommon for distinguished Indian journalists visiting London to be invited onward, so I approached the German Embassy and expressed my interest. To my pleasant surprise, they promptly invited me for a fifteen-day visit and granted me a visa.

I reached Frankfurt around ten in the morning. There, I was warmly received by Dr. Reikel, secretary of the Indo-German Association. With a smile, he informed me that the annual session of the German Indologists’ Association was being held that very day in Essen, and asked if I would like to attend. I readily agreed.

At the conference, nearly four hundred scholars of Indology had gathered—an impressive assembly devoted to the study of India’s past. After the session, during lunch, I was greeted by a former German Consul General who had once served in Calcutta. He asked me which city in India I came from. In an affected English accent, I replied, “Bhubaneshwar.” He smiled gently and said, “You must have just returned from England. The correct pronunciation is ‘Bhubaneswar.’”

I felt a moment of embarrassment. But he went on to say something that stayed with me. He told me that it was in Bhubaneswar, while visiting the Rajarani Temple, that he had first met his future wife. Then, with quiet warmth, he added that the German people held India in great affection. “You have seen it yourself,” he said, gesturing toward the gathering. “Hundreds of scholars here are devoted to studying ancient India. Wherever you go, you will find a spirit of friendship.”

And indeed, that is what I felt—a sense of India’s presence, respected and cherished, far beyond its own shores.

From there, we took our leave and travelled to Bonn, then the capital of West Germany. Bonn, I found, was much smaller than Berlin. In those days, Berlin stood divided—one part belonging to West Germany and the other to East Germany, which claimed it as its capital. Surrounded entirely by East German territory, West Berlin remained cut off, an island of a different world.

Dr. Reikel next took me to a refugee camp in West Germany. There, day after day, people fleeing from East Germany sought shelter. Pointing them out to me, he explained that East Germany was a communist state, almost a satellite of the Soviet Union. Life there, he said, had become so difficult that many risked everything to escape into Berlin and beyond.

We then visited West Berlin. I was struck by its prosperity. It was hard to imagine that this thriving city had once been reduced to rubble by bombing during the war. The transformation was astonishing—order, wealth, and vitality had returned. Except for one ruined church, left deliberately unrestored as a reminder of the World War II, there was little visible trace of destruction.

Curious to see the other side, we boarded a tourist bus to East Berlin. The bus carried visitors from many countries. As we entered, the conductor announced that we could now compare capitalist Berlin with communist Berlin. The contrast was stark. East Berlin appeared plain, almost austere, lacking the vibrancy of its western counterpart. Many buildings stood incomplete, as if time itself had slowed. One could immediately understand why people were fleeing from East to West.

From Berlin, we flew to Hamburg, the principal port of West Germany and a city rich in history and beauty. Its City Hall, harbour, and music halls left a lasting impression on me. Later, I also visited Wildbad.

At a hotel there, I noticed the Indian national flag fluttering. For a moment, I wondered if some distinguished visitor from India had arrived. Dr. Reikel smiled and told me that there was no one else—it had been hoisted in honour of me, their guest. Not long before, he added, another Indian guest had stayed there—Narayan Dutt Tiwari, who too had been invited by the Friendship Society.

While I was still in Bonn, an incident occurred that touched me deeply. A professor of philosophy had come to my hotel and left behind a card for me. On it, he had written a simple yet profound message: that he had come to pay his respects to my country—the land of Mahatma Gandhi and of the Upanishads.

It was a quiet gesture, but one that reminded me how India lived in the imagination of distant lands—not merely as a nation, but as a civilisation.

Everywhere I went in Germany, I felt a genuine warmth—an unmistakable atmosphere of friendliness. Even in an ordinary park, if one happened to meet a passerby, he would acknowledge you with a gentle nod of greeting. It was a small gesture, yet it spoke volumes about the people.

From Hamburg, I travelled to Munich by train. From there, I was to take a flight onward to Paris. The margin between the train’s arrival and the flight’s departure was barely half an hour. I asked Dr. Reikel, half in doubt, what would happen if the train were delayed. He replied with quiet confidence that it would not be late even by a second. And indeed, it arrived precisely on time.

I took leave of him there. For fifteen days, he had been my constant companion, guiding me through the principal cities of West Germany with a warmth that felt almost familial. He was a widower, deeply patriotic, critical of Adolf Hitler, yet appreciative of the discipline and courage of the German army of that era. The German people, I observed, were extraordinarily industrious. Whether worker or employer, all seemed united by a culture of hard work. Strikes were rare, almost unheard of.

At the time of my visit, Konrad Adenauer was the Chancellor of Germany. There was a popular saying that captured the spirit of the nation’s recovery—that the Chancellor had asked every worker to add just one extra hour of labour to their day, and that this collective effort had helped rebuild Germany. Whether apocryphal or not, the sentiment reflected the ethics of the people.

From Germany, I travelled to Paris—a city steeped in history, as ancient in its own way as London. Paris had witnessed the rise and fall of monarchies, the turbulence of revolutions, and the flowering of culture. In terms of civilisation, it was often regarded as the cultural capital of Europe; in matters of diplomacy, some even called it the capital of the world. And when one spoke of fashion, Paris stood unrivalled.

Above all, Paris carried the legacy of the French Revolution—an event that became a beacon for oppressed people everywhere. From that revolution emerged the enduring ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity—principles that have guided countless movements across generations. The revolution of eighteenth-century France remains one of the most profound and unforgettable turning points in human history.

I stayed in Paris for three days, in a modest yet elegant little hotel. By then, I was no longer an official guest of any government, as I had been in England or Germany. I was simply a traveller, left to discover the city on my own. And for that, the first necessity was a map. With it in hand, I resolved to begin from the city’s most prominent landmarks.

The most striking modern monument of Paris was, of course, the Eiffel Tower, followed by the imposing Arc de Triomphe. Guided by my map, I made my way from the hotel to the Arc de Triomphe, that grand arch built to commemorate the victories of Napoleon Bonaparte. Not far from there stood the Élysée Palace, the residence of the French President.

Paris, as I observed, bore the imprint of careful planning. During the time of Napoleon III, the city had been redesigned with remarkable foresight. From central points like the Arc de Triomphe, avenues radiated outward in all directions. Standing atop the monument, one could see twelve grand avenues stretching out with striking symmetry—a vision of urban elegance.

Near the lane where I stayed stood a well-known theatre, the Folies Bergère, famous for its ballet performances. The area around the Arc, however, was a ceaseless whirl of motion. With twelve avenues converging, traffic flowed endlessly from all directions, leaving hardly a moment for a pedestrian to cross.

Perplexed, I approached a policeman and asked—in English—how one might reach the monument without traffic lights. He offered no reply. Whether he chose not to understand or simply did not wish to respond, I could not tell. The French, I soon realised, take immense pride in their language; even if they understand English, they are often reluctant to use it.

Finding no answer, I half-humorously tried speaking in my own mother tongue, Odia. The policeman looked at me, puzzled, and remained silent. That, too, was an answer of sorts.

Over those three days, I explored the notable sights of Paris on foot. Along the way, I was joined by two fellow Indians—students from London studying accountancy. Together, we wandered through the city until one day we encountered a gentleman from Malaysia. At first glance, he might easily have been mistaken for an Indian; such was the resemblance. He turned out to be a senior official in his country’s archaeology department. From the next day onward, he became our companion.

One afternoon, as we strolled along the banks of the Seine River, he pointed out that the famed Louvre Museum was nearby. There, he said, we could see the celebrated painting of Leonardo da Vinci—the Mona Lisa.

We entered the gallery and stood before it. The painting’s fame, I realised, lay not merely in its artistry but in that enigmatic smile—so subtle, so elusive. Wherever one stood, it seemed as though her gaze followed. It is often said that no other portrait in the world carries such a delicate curve of expression.

At that moment, a line from the Odia poet, Jadumani Mahapatra, came to my mind, describing a smile of pure, almost celestial beauty—untouched by earthly colour or artifice. It felt as though that poetic vision had, in some distant way, come alive before my eyes in that quiet hall of the Louvre.

As I stood before the world-renowned Louvre Museum, gazing at Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, I found myself drawn not merely to the painting, but to the mystery of her smile—subtle, elusive, and impossibly pure.

It was then that a line from the witty Odia poet Jadumani Mohapatra surfaced gently in my mind:

“Chandi nishi dhaba dhabale mishichi adhavala jyoti kuranga
Kshira sagara udara adarichi naba mudira jyoti sanga
Bishuddha hase ramara
Nilimaara nahi sanchara
Emanta kirti jara shuddha kara ehi kala bichara.”

(A tint of blue, a trace of blemish, haunts all that exists—
the moon carries its stain; upon Shiva’s stainless form lingers the azure of his throat; and in the Ocean of Milk, Vishnu shines in a cloud-hued grace.
Yet, in the smile of a beauteous maiden, no shadow ever falls—
it remains the purest radiance of all.
Only those whose hearts mirror such unsullied purity
are truly worthy to partake of this poem.)

The essence of these lines struck me with renewed clarity in that moment. The poet reflects on how, in this world, even the most luminous and sacred entities bear a trace of imperfection—
the moon carries its blemish.

In that quiet gallery in Paris, an Odia poet’s verse and a Renaissance masterpiece met—across centuries—and spoke the same silent truth.

Paris seemed to carry its beauty with a quiet, unmistakable pride. The graceful flow of the Seine River, the wide and elegant boulevards, the triumphal monuments raised in memory of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the countless churches—along with the place where Napoleon himself lies buried—all stood as living testimony to the city’s grandeur.

One day, we found ourselves standing by the roadside, not far from the magnificent Notre-Dame Cathedral. As we lingered there, a few American women tourists approached us. They seemed a little lost and asked, in English, where Notre-Dame was. We simply raised our hands and pointed—it was right there, almost within sight.

They thanked us warmly, but then, with a hint of amusement and mild irritation, remarked that the French were rather peculiar. “We ask them in English,” they said, “but no one answers.” English, they insisted, was the most important language in the world—surely the French must know it. Yet, perhaps out of pride, they pretended otherwise, choosing silence over response. Still, in hotels, we noticed, the staff spoke English quite comfortably—practicality, it seemed, softened pride.

Three days later, my journey carried me to Zurich in Switzerland. The country’s two principal cities, Zurich and Geneva, each held their own significance. Geneva, in particular, stood as an international hub, housing several offices of the United Nations and serving as the headquarters of the International Labour Organization. Every year, representatives—labour ministers and worker delegates—from across the world gathered there for its annual conference.

Zurich, however, captivated in a different way. Adorned with serene lakes and set against a tranquil landscape, it was a city of quiet beauty. Its streets were lined with shops displaying exquisite timepieces—especially wristwatches—for which Switzerland is renowned. The country’s reputation also extended to its health resorts, places of rest and recovery nestled in pristine surroundings. Remarkably, during both the World Wars, Switzerland had declared itself neutral, and the storms of war had left it largely untouched.

I stayed in Zurich for just a day before setting out again—this time toward Rome.

Rome, the capital of Italy, seemed to breathe history at every step. Its past stretched deep into antiquity. There was a time when the Roman Empire stood as one of the greatest powers the world had known, extending from Britain across the Mediterranean to the edges of West Asia.

Rome is counted among the most ancient cities on earth. It is said to have been founded in 753 BCE, and with its origins comes a legend—one both strange and enduring. Two twin brothers, Romulus and Remus, were, according to lore, nurtured by a she-wolf who fed them with her own milk. In time, a quarrel arose between the brothers, and Romulus killed Remus. The city he founded thereafter came to bear his name—Rome.

The history of Rome unfolded in many forms: it began as a monarchy, transformed into a republic, later came under the rule of the Popes, returned again to monarchy, and eventually became a republic once more. Its story, like the city itself, is layered, dramatic, and endlessly fascinating.

From the first century, Christianity found its way into Rome. Saint Peter, one of the foremost disciples of Jesus Christ, is regarded as among the earliest preachers of the faith, and tradition holds that he too was martyred. After him, through the passage of centuries, a succession of Popes carried forward the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church.

Within Rome itself lies a distinct and remarkable entity—the Vatican City. It is the residence of the Pope and the spiritual centre of Roman Catholicism. Though enclosed within Rome, it stands as an independent state, and like Switzerland, it maintained neutrality during both World Wars. During my visit to Rome, I made it a point to see this sacred enclave.

The most imposing structure there was St. Peter’s Basilica—a vast and awe-inspiring church that seemed to embody centuries of faith and devotion. Equally captivating was the Sistine Chapel, whose ceiling is adorned with masterpieces by the great artist Michelangelo. Standing beneath those paintings, I felt a quiet sense of wonder, as though art and divinity had merged into one.

In the history of the world, two names stand out as champions of freedom and republican ideals—Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi. They were inspirations not only for Italy but also for many Indian freedom fighters. Though the republic they envisioned did not endure for long, their efforts eventually led to the end of papal rule and the unification of Italy under a monarchy, which lasted until 1922. Thereafter came the era of Benito Mussolini and fascist rule; and after the Second World War, Italy finally emerged as a republic—a system that continues to this day.

Rome is also famed for its fountains—countless works of art in flowing water, built over nearly two thousand years. Wherever one walks in the city, one encounters these graceful structures. The city is equally rich in historical monuments: the ancient Colosseum, the timeless Pantheon, the broad Spanish Steps, and the many sculptures and paintings associated with masters like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. The Vatican Museums, too, draw countless visitors from across the world.

Rome has long been called the “Eternal City”—a name that feels less like a title and more like a quiet acknowledgment of time itself. Through cycles of rise and fall, glory and ruin, the city has endured, carrying its past within its present. In that sense, I could not help but think of Varanasi—or Kashi in India—another ancient soul that has survived the ages with an unbroken continuity.

In its earliest days, Rome was ruled by a succession of seven kings, one after another. Then came the birth of the Republic, and governance passed into the hands of a Senate—an institution whose echo we still hear in modern democracies. The very word “Senate” travelled across time and continents, finding place in systems like that of the United States Congress, composed of the Senate and the House of Representatives, as well as in the parliamentary traditions of United Kingdom and India, with their respective upper and lower houses.

In Rome, however, the Senate was once the singular centre of authority, and from its ranks emerged powerful dictators—figures entrusted with absolute authority in times of crisis. Among them, Julius Caesar stands preeminent. His life and death were immortalized by William Shakespeare in the play Julius Caesar, and later revisited by George Bernard Shaw in Caesar and Cleopatra.

The Roman Republic itself took shape around 510 BCE. Interestingly, around the time of Gautama Buddha, India too had republican states—Vaishali being one of the most notable, governed by the Licchavis.

Then, in 27 BCE, power took another decisive turn. Augustus—also known as Octavian—rose to authority through the Senate and declared Rome an empire. Under him, the vast dominion of Rome expanded and, in time, came to be divided into the Eastern and Western Roman Empires. The eastern capital, Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), would go on to become one of the great cities of history in its own right.

During the reign of Augustus, the Roman Empire reached extraordinary heights, stretching across much of Western Europe. He was not merely a ruler but a patron of culture—supporting art, sculpture, and music. His court was adorned by great minds, among them the poet Virgil, whose Latin works continue to be celebrated.

Latin itself, like Sanskrit in India, is an ancient and foundational language. From it have flowed many modern tongues—English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and others—each carrying faint echoes of that old Roman voice.

Before arriving in Rome, I had heard a caution—one must be careful, or one might easily be deceived. I had my own small lesson in this.

One afternoon, I stepped into a restaurant and ordered a thick vegetable soup. It was hearty and satisfying. Like in Paris, many restaurants in Rome spill out onto the streets, with tables and chairs arranged outside. I sat there, quietly enjoying my meal, when an Indian lady approached. She was from Bombay—a Parsi—and, noticing me, paused as if recognizing a familiar presence in a foreign land.

Watching me eat, she remarked gently, “You may be overcharged.”

And indeed, I was. The restaurant billed me five pounds for the soup—an amount far beyond its worth in those days, when even one or one-and-a-half pounds would have been reasonable. It was a small deception, yet it stayed with me.

Later that evening, in another restaurant, I encountered something entirely different. The owner, upon learning that I was from India, asked with a certain warmth, “You come from the land of Mahatma Gandhi?”

He spoke of Gandhi with deep reverence. “When my father died, I did not cry,” he said, “but when Gandhi died, I wept.”

I was struck by the contrast—here, in a distant Roman eatery, stood a man whose life had never touched India, yet whose heart had been moved by Gandhi. It reminded me how far the influence of a great soul can travel—beyond borders, beyond language, into the quiet corners of human feeling. When Gandhi passed, it seemed, the world itself had paused in grief.

Rome, in its own way, continues to remain connected to the wider world. It serves as the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organization, just as Geneva houses the International Labour Organization, and Paris hosts institutions like UNICEF. In these cities, history and modern purpose seem to meet—quietly shaping the world, even today.

I stayed in Rome for three days, and each day I walked nearly twenty to twenty-five kilometres, exploring these places on foot. I did not use any vehicle, for I have always believed that a city reveals itself best to those who walk through it.

A curious incident from those days often returns to my mind. When I was a Member of Parliament, Jagjivan Ram was serving as the Union Minister for Food and Agriculture. He had travelled to Rome to attend an international conference related to his department.

After his return, the matter came up in Parliament. From the benches of the Utkal Congress, Surendra Mohanty, the Lok Sabha member from Kendrapara, raised a calling-attention motion and began criticising the visit. Jagjivan Babu, with a touch of wit, replied, “I am not quite sure whether the honourable member is speaking about Rome or rum.”

The remark drew laughter, for Surendra Babu—celebrated writer though he was—was also widely known for his fondness for drink. During the Kendrapara elections, a popular slogan had even circulated: “Surendra, Surendra in Kendrapara—one a socialist, one for hire.”

In the 1971 Lok Sabha elections, the contest in Kendrapara had been particularly close. Surendra Nath Dwivedy of the Praja Socialist Party and Surendra Mohanty of the Utkal Congress stood against each other. In the end, Mohanty won—by the narrowest of margins, a single vote. Such was the drama of democracy.

From Rome, my journey next took me to Cairo, then the capital of the United Arab Republic (Egypt). At that time, the country was led by Gamal Abdel Nasser—a towering figure in the Arab world, regarded by many as a liberator and a voice of dignity for his people.

Nasser was also a close friend of Jawaharlal Nehru. Along with Josip Broz Tito, the three of them stood at the forefront of the Non-Aligned Movement, guiding newly independent nations through the uncertain currents of the Cold War.

What struck me most about Nasser was not merely his stature, but his simplicity. Despite being President, he lived in a modest two-storeyed house, leading the life of an ordinary, disciplined, and devout man.

I had long been drawn to Cairo—not only because of Nasser and his revolution, but also because of the ancient pyramids. As fate would have it, the day before my visit, the anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution was being celebrated—a reminder of the country’s transition from monarchy to republic.

I stayed in Cairo for two days, determined to see the pyramids. When I asked the hotel manager how best to get there, he arranged a guide for me, advising that we settle the charges beforehand. A camel was hired, and I set out—riding across the sands—toward one of the world’s most enduring wonders.

Soon, I stood before the Giza Pyramid Complex—those immense triangular structures rising out of the desert like frozen time itself. Among them, the Great Pyramid of Giza remains the most renowned, a monument not just of architecture but of human ambition.

Egypt’s history stretches back into a past so distant that it almost feels mythical—thousands upon thousands of years before Christ. The Pharaohs, anticipating death, built these pyramids as their tombs. Within them, their bodies were preserved with remarkable care—wrapped in layers of cloth and treated with substances that allowed them to endure across millennia.

Many such tombs have since been excavated, revealing mummified remains still intact, silent witnesses to a vanished age. Yet, alongside history, there lingers legend: it is said that those who disturb these resting places invite misfortune—even untimely death. And, strangely enough, there have been occasions when such stories seemed to find unsettling echoes in reality.

Standing there, before those ancient stones, I felt both awe and unease—as if I had stepped, briefly, into the deep and watchful memory of civilization itself.

Returning from the pyramids of Giza, I stood by the window of my hotel and let my eyes rest upon the quiet, flowing beauty of the Nile. It struck me then how often the English, in their time, had altered the names of cities and rivers across the world. The Nile, for instance, they had called “Nile”, while its truer name, as my guide gently corrected me, was simply Neel—the blue river.

When I mentioned the “Nile,” my guide smiled and asked why I used that word at all. “That is an English distortion,” he said. “Its real name is Neel.” And indeed, as I looked at its waters, they seemed clear and faintly blue—much like the Ganga appears in Varanasi during the autumn months. Even the Ganga, he reminded me, had been turned into “Ganges” by the English.

The thought stayed with me. Names like Munger becoming “Monghyr,” Cuttack remaining “Cuttack,” Bhubaneswar once pronounced differently, Calcutta instead of Kolkata, Bombay instead of Mumbai—these were all echoes of a time when language itself had been reshaped by foreign tongues. Some places, like Kolkata and Mumbai, had since reclaimed their original identity, though others still lingered in their altered forms.

My guide frequently used a word—sabr—urging patience, asking me to wait. It was an Arabic word, one that had found its way into Urdu as well. There is a saying built around it: “Sabr ka phal meetha hota hai”—the fruit of patience is always sweet. In that distant land, the familiarity of such words felt strangely comforting.

My stay in Egypt lasted only two days, but within that short time, I visited another remarkable place—the old museum of Cairo. There, the grandeur of ancient Egyptian civilization unfolded before my eyes. Golden statues of the Pharaohs, intricate ornaments, and objects of daily use—all fashioned in gold—spoke of a culture both opulent and enduring.

Among the other notable places were the grand mosque of Muhammad Ali, with its vast domes and imposing structure, and Al-Azhar University, one of the greatest centres of Islamic learning in the world. It was here, I was told, that Maulana Abul Kalam Azad had once studied.

At one point, my guide led me through a narrow lane, famous for Egyptian attar—perfumed oils known for their rich fragrance. “One must buy some attar when visiting Cairo,” he insisted. I obliged, though it seemed to me that, like many guides, he was not entirely free from a touch of commerce.

Two days later, I left Cairo and returned to India via Mumbai, carrying with me memories of an ancient land where history seemed to breathe through every stone and street.

The following year, another journey beckoned. An invitation arrived from the Ford Foundation, under the auspices of the United States government—a two-month visit to America.

About the Book:

From the Translator’s Note

An Unfinished Memoir (Asamapta Atmalipi) by Janaki Ballav Patnaik is more than the recollections of a public figure. It is also a record of the political, social and cultural changes that shaped Odisha and, in many ways, modern India. The memoir takes us through different stages of his life—from childhood and education to journalism, public life and politics. Along the way, we meet the people who influenced him and encounter events that left their mark on the Odisha of his time. The book is valuable not only for its account of public events but also for its glimpses of everyday life. Patnaik writes about teachers, friends, colleagues, political associates and ordinary people, often beginning with a small personal memory and moving towards a larger reflection. This movement between the personal and the public gives the memoir much of its character.

My primary aim in translating the memoir from Odia into English has been to remain faithful to the original while preserving the author’s voice. A translation should convey

more than the literal meaning of words. It should also carry the tone, mood and character of the original. I have therefore tried to retain the simple and reflective quality of Patnaik’s writing, particularly in passages dealing with people, places and memories from his younger years.

Translating a work rooted in Odisha’s language and culture presents its own challenges. Many Odia expressions, idioms and references do not have exact equivalents in English. This is especially true of words associated with local customs, festivals, social practices and everyday life. Where a literal translation seemed inadequate, I have tried to convey the sense and spirit of the original. Certain words, names and cultural references have been retained because translating them would have diminished their flavour or meaning.

I have also tried to preserve the historical character of the memoir. Some political terms, institutional references and descriptions belong to an earlier period of Indian public life. Rather than unnecessarily modernising the language, I have sought to make these passages clear while retaining their original context.

The title Asamapta Atmalipi itself is significant. It suggests a record of the self that remains unfinished. The memoir was left incomplete, and that incompleteness is part of its character. It does not present a neatly concluded life story. Instead, it offers fragments of a long journey—memories, encounters, experiences and reflections that together provide a picture of both the man and his times.

For readers familiar with Janaki Ballav Patnaik, the memoir may bring back memories of an important period in Odisha’s public life. For younger readers, it offers an opportunity to see that period through the eyes of someone who lived through and participated in many of its developments. For readers outside Odisha, it provides an introduction to a political and cultural world that deserves wider attention. No translation can reproduce every shade of another language. There will always be expressions, associations and rhythms that resist being carried across. My effort has simply been to build a bridge between the Odia original and the English reader, without coming between the author and his readers. I hope this translation will allow a wider readership to discover Janaki Ballav Patnaik not only as a political leader, but also as a journalist, observer, traveller and chronicler of his times—and to encounter, through his unfinished memoir, a part of Odisha’s own journey.

About the Author

Janaki Ballav Patnaik (1927-2015) lived in many worlds at once—politics, literature, journalism, and public life. For more than five decades, he remained close to some of the defining events and personalities of post-Independence Odisha, while pursuing a parallel life of books, ideas, and language. ‘An Unfinished Memoir’ is an attempt to look back on that journey. From his childhood and student years to his early political awakening and long career in public life, the memoir brings together people, places and encounters that shaped him.

Unlike a conventional autobiography, this is a personal narrative—insightful, candid and observant of the world around him. It offers glimpses of the making of a public figure while revealing the writer, scholar and observer behind the politician. It is at once a record of a remarkable life and a window into an important period in the history of Odisha and India.

Part memoir, part history and part reflection, the memoir is a cherished account of a life lived in public.

About the Translator

Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author based in Bhubaneswar, with a professional career spanning over three decades. He writes in both English and Odia on politics, society, people, and culture. His work reflects sustained engagement with Odisha’s heritage and its contemporary transformations. An incisive observer of public life, he has authored nine books. Through his journalism and writing, he continues to chronicle the evolving story of Odisha and its place within a rapidly changing India.

[1] Democracy

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Essay

When Life gives us Lemons, make Lemonade!

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date August 21, 2026
No Comments on When Life gives us Lemons, make Lemonade!

By Farouk Gulsara

The year was 1816. On the 21^st 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!

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.

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Essay

Tagore’s Dance-Dramas in Translation

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date July 14, 2026
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Somdatta Mandal explores six dance-dramas by Tagore translated from Bengali and Brajbuli 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 15^th century and which gained impetus in the 16^th 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.

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.

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.

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.

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In Memoriam

The Verandah, The Voice Note, and You, Abba

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date May 14, 2026
2 Comments on The Verandah, The Voice Note, and You, Abba

By Mubida Rohman

Dear Abba[1],

Weeks have passed since you left us, and today I write to you with the quiet certainty that love does not vanish when a life ends. Somewhere beyond time and space, words spoken with affection still find their way.

I do not know how such messages travel. Through memory, perhaps. Through silence. Through the small things you left behind, which now seem to carry more meaning than they once did.

Still, I write, trusting that words offered with love are never truly lost.

I had known of you long before I truly knew you.

We had spoken briefly on the phone before my wedding, while planning it and in the days just after. If one were to count the actual days we spent in each other’s presence, they would seem very few. Yet what remains in my heart is not the brevity of those days, but the curious feeling that I had known you for much longer than time would allow.

The heart, perhaps, keeps a different calendar.

Growing up, we are taught to fear our sasurbari (in-laws’ house). And not without reason. Women grow up hearing stories, witnessing them, and carrying the inherited caution of those who came before us — our grandmothers, our mothers, our sisters, and the countless unnamed women whose griefs have travelled silently through generations.

Apprehension becomes a companion. It settles somewhere inside the body, as though the bones themselves remember old warnings.

Be careful.
Do not trust too soon.
Do not expect too much.

And so when I crossed the threshold of your home in Guwahati, I carried that same silent apprehension with me.

When my family left me there, my uncle said softly,

“Amar suwali apunalukok gotalu.”
(We entrust our daughter to your family.)

And you replied, with a certainty that asked for no ceremony,

“Sinta nokoribo, taai etiya amar suwali.”
(Do not worry, she is our daughter now.)

At that moment I did not yet know how deeply you meant those words, or how faithfully you would live by them.

The days after the wedding passed quickly. Guests filled the house and laughter moved from room to room. Conversations, rituals, food, and movement seemed to blur together until everything felt as though it was happening at once.

In the middle of it all, you would appear from time to time. Sometimes to offer a witty remark. Sometimes simply to observe the proceedings with soft amusement. Sometimes to express mild annoyance that I had not yet eaten dinner at the proper hour.

You had apparently told Amma[2] that I must be given dinner before seven in the evening, because that was the time I had always eaten. I had never told you this myself. Zubair had mentioned it in passing. Yet you had taken note of it and remembered it with that careful tenderness that says more than elaborate affection ever can.

Two days after the wedding we sat together on the verandah, soaking in the winter sun before another day of guests began.

I remember saying casually that someday, during long holidays, I would like to return and sit there with you and Amma and listen to all your stories.

You smiled and said,“Aitu tu birat bhal kotha.” (That is a very wonderful idea.)

Something about that moment stayed with me.

Zubair and I then came back to my mother’s place for our reception. We sent you updates on WhatsApp, and you replied promptly. Your replies were never long or dramatic, but they carried a steady warmth. You were always thinking of us and making sure everything was going well.

After the reception, Zubair had to leave. Duty called, as it always does. I stayed back with my mother for a few more days, planning to return soon to my sasurbari and spend some time with you and Amma.

Somewhere in my heart, the urgency to rush back to Germany had softened. Something within me felt that I needed more time there, on that verandah with you, beneath the shade of the pink and white bougainvillea, where light fell in warm golden strips through the leaves and unruly branches. The bottle gourd creeper climbed along with a strong resolve. A few stubborn tendrils seemed determined to encroach our sitting space.

And then there was your small but ingenious arrangement: a bowl tied to a string, which you would lower and pull back up to send money to the beggars who passed by so often. Climbing the stairs had become difficult, but kindness, as always, found its way.

Then came 27 January 2026, the day I landed at Guwahati airport. You insisted on coming to receive me despite your poor health and ailing heart.

The WhatsApp messages we exchanged that day, and the voice note you sent on your way to pick me up, have now become precious fragments of memory.

I listen to that voice note almost every day.

When I was young, I envied children whose fathers arrived on scooters or motorbikes, got down, looked at themselves in the rear-view mirror, combed their hair, and then walked in to attend the parent-teacher meeting. Even when I grew older, and though my mother and uncles often came to receive me at airports and stations with warmth and smiles, my eyes would often drift toward girls who ran to their fathers, shouting Papa or Baba.

There was always some unfulfilled corner in me that looked toward that scene, for I was far too young when my father left us for his heavenly abode.

That day you messaged,“We will reach in 15 minutes, Inshallah. I will ring you when to come out.”

Just as I picked up my luggage and stepped outside, you called.

And there you were, waiting with your walking stick in hand, your clothes neatly ironed, wearing that warm smile on your face. You laughed and said what a lucky coincidence it was that you had arrived at the airport just as I stepped out, so neither of us had to wait long. Perhaps, you added with a smile, we might even escape the parking fee.

That image of you standing there, smiling, will remain in my heart forever.

Without even knowing it, you fulfilled one of the deepest wishes I had carried since childhood.

On the drive home, we talked without a pause. We talked about Satyajit Ray’s work, the Assamese literature you said I must read someday, and about Zubair’s childhood in that affectionate way only a father can.

The days that followed passed quietly.

Every morning after tea we sat together on the verandah. You recited the Quran and then turned to the newspapers. I sat beside you, struggling to pronounce the long words in the Assamese paper, until you gently took it from my hands and passed me The Hindu instead.

We peeled oranges and pomegranates together. We ate your favourite jujubes while butterflies drifted slowly through the winter air.

Those days felt brief while they were happening. Now they feel immeasurably large.

You shared stories of exam anxieties and enduring friendships, of staying out past midnight to shop for a friend’s son’s wedding, and of the night you ran for your life, and of the family during an attack in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid riots.

I learned about the difficulties of your engineering days and your years in the Water Resources Department — supervising drilling sites across Assam and travelling through landscapes where rivers could nourish a village one season and destroy it the next.

Perhaps that is why water held such meaning in your life.

At home you conserved it with almost scientific care.

The water used for washing vegetables watered the plants. The water from the handwashing basin became water for flushing. I became cautious at home, often worrying that I might be wasting water. You would gently reassure me that the water that could be saved would find its way to be saved.

Only after your passing did we begin to understand the full shape of your life, and the extent of all that you had set in motion.

People began arriving at our home from distant towns and villages. Many of them were strangers to us, but not to you.

With them came stories. Stories of Md. Ziaul Islam, of a life we had only seen in parts.

We learnt how you once took a bus after work and stayed with a friend through the night, helping him prepare for a bank examination. The next morning, you boarded another bus and went straight to your office, reporting for duty as though the night had asked nothing of you.

Someone spoke of the vegetable seller you would take to the cancer hospital. Amma fed him liquid food when his body could no longer accept anything else. After he passed away, you travelled to his village and helped build a house for his wife and children, ensuring that his family would not be left without shelter.

The security guard remembered his persistent cough, and how you took him repeatedly to the doctor until his treatment was complete and he recovered from tuberculosis.

We heard from the ones you taught and from their families. We heard from the orphanages you had quietly supported. Slowly we began to understand how many futures you had helped set in motion.

We met your former students who remembered the lessons you gave them after returning home from work. Others spoke of the classes you continued to take even after retirement, long after your body had begun to grow frail.

You expected nothing in return — only one hope that education might help them grow and rescue them, even if slowly, from the economic conditions into which they had been born. You never spoke about these things.

You often said that charity should be given in such a way that the left hand does not know what the right hand has spent. In that belief there was dignity, restraint, and a deep understanding of human pride, of how help must be given without diminishing the person who receives it.

In a world where charity is often displayed and recorded, your way feels rare. We wonder now whether we will ever be able to walk the path you lived. We know we may fall short.

Be our guiding star, so that even in our smaller and imperfect ways, we may follow where your life pointed.

Even while living in the same house, we continued exchanging WhatsApp messages whenever I stepped out. Those messages came to a halt on 4^th February 2026, the day we admitted you to the hospital for your surgery.

In the hospital, I saw another side of you: the steadfast fighter determined to recover, someone who, even in pain and exhaustion, worried about the well-being of the people around him. I also saw the child within you, your vulnerability, your stubbornness. your sweetness.

It made me feel as though I was the guardian of that child, not only on hospital documents, but also in my heart.

You let me comb your hair the way I liked. You laughed at my silly jokes even though you were in pain. You drank the tasteless tea I made without complaint.

Sometimes you had to be coaxed to eat. Your stomach resisted, and at the sight of the daliya khichdi [3] and oats your expression would change instantly. Even now, I can still hear your tired voice saying, “Aru nuwarim niki khabo ma.” (I don’t think I can eat anymore, dear.)

You wanted nothing more than to return home. To the verandah, to your chair, to the familiar light.

I think often of how little time we had together. How I wish I had not given in when you kept asking me to book my tickets quickly after your discharge. So many times I wish I could stretch the small timeline we shared and make room for all that could not happen.

Perhaps somewhere in another universe, that version still exists. In that version you sit beneath the bougainvillea on the verandah, surrounded by your family. You recite lines of Ghalib and Gulzar from memory, smiling with the gentle pleasure of remembering something beloved. Beside you lies a small pile of books you had hoped to read after discharge. The Prophet rests in your hands as you continue from where you left off, pausing now and then to marvel at Gibran’s words.

In that other stretch of time, the days are fuller and longer. Mosquitoes circle lazily while I chase them with the electric racket, each spark sounding like a tiny firecracker. You watch, amused, and say again with a smile,

“Waah, iman futise.”

(Wow, such crackings!)

Abba, thank you for letting me into your heart, even if, measured by human calendars, it was only for a few days.

Thank you for answering when I called you Abba, and for replying so often, “O ma…[4]”

Thank you for the smiles, for the concern hidden in your messages, for coming to the airport to receive me.

You did not speak of love often. But you practiced it in enduring ways: on duty, by being attentive, remembering small things, living simply and giving quietly.

Love does not always arrive in grand declarations. Sometimes it lives quietly inside habits, inside responsibility, inside the steady rhythm of a life lived with integrity.

Sometimes it lives in the smallest gestures, where the deepest reservoirs are held.

And so your story does not end with your passing.

In many ways, it begins here, in the slow unfolding of all that you were.

The boy who grew up in the shadows of Partition, his childhood shaped by a divided homeland and families torn apart by a line drawn on a map over a lunch break: the boy whose mother wrote down the names of books she longed to read and sent him searching for them through the town of Shillong. And the man he became, a civil engineer who measured rivers, listened to birds, loved books, carried a Yashica camera, and believed that life’s gifts must be shared.

This pause here does not mean an end. One day, all of us return to where we came from — to the interiors of collapsing stars from which we are made.

Until that day, Abba, we will keep finding you in small places — in the sunlight falling across our verandah, in the rustle of the pink and white bougainvillea, in the sweetness of oranges, pomegranate seeds, and jujubes, in the trees and plants you tended for generations beyond your own, in the pages of the books you held.

And sometimes, unexpectedly, in the sharp crackle of a mosquito racket.

For a moment it sounds like a tiny firework, and it almost feels as though you are still sitting nearby, smiling softly and saying,

“Waah, iman futise.”

And if love can survive in voices, gestures, verandahs, books left half-read, and in the habits of those who remain, then perhaps you have not gone very far at all.

Perhaps you are still here, just beyond the reach of our hands, but never beyond the reach of the heart, where winter light falls gently, where butterflies drift slowly, where the conversation has not ended, only moved, perhaps, to a quieter room where we have yet to learn how to listen.

Lovingly yours,

Your newly added daughter,

Mubida

[1] Father

[2] Mother

[3] A porridge made with broken wheat, pulses and vegetables

[4] My dear

Mubida Rohman is a writer, photographer, and intercultural coach from Assam, currently based in Berlin. Her work explores memory, culture, and the intimate textures of everyday life, often weaving personal narratives with a deep sense of place. She writes on her blog Cultureyogi.in

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

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

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Tags Assam, Babri Masjid, Berlin, Germany, Guwahati, Mubida Rohman

Essay

The Untold Stories of a Wooden Suitcase

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date January 14, 2026
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By Larry S. Su

On the first day of college in today’s China, train stations and campuses unfold like a modern spectacle. Students step off high-speed trains, wheeling sleek polycarbonate suitcases or expandable fabric cases, an impressive display of China’s transformation and prosperity—worlds apart from the scene when I started college in the 1980s. Back then, students from the countryside, like me, arrived weighed down by clumsy, hand-built wooden suitcases—boxy, awkward, sometimes nailed shut or painted over in dull brown or red. Despite their lack of style and ease, these suitcases held far more than just clothes and books. They carried the weight of individual and family expectations, sacrifices, and the deep conviction that education was the key to a better life.

I was admitted to college in 1983, just six years after China resumed its national college entrance exam, which was halted during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. For an entire decade, higher education had vanished like a dream interrupted. When it returned, it did so with urgency and hope. Admission rates hovered in the single digits, and every name on the list felt like someone hitting the million-dollar jackpot.

In my village of 150, tucked between dry hills and narrow paths, I was the first to make it to college. The news spread like wildfire down the dusty lanes, from the threshing fields to the courtyard kitchens. Old friends came by to shake my father’s hand. My mother quietly wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron. For families who had known only toil, harvests, and ration coupons, the word college opened the door of paradise.

For years, we had lived under the gaze of quiet scorn of certain snobbish and well-off villagers. Our poverty was visible in our patched clothes, our sunburnt skin, and our empty grain jars. Other villagers had watched us with indifference or pity. Now my college admission lifted my family’s status in a way nothing else could. I was no longer just a poor farmer’s son; I was a future cadre, or ganbu, with a guaranteed salary, a ration book, and an iron rice bowl that would never crack. No one else in the village had ever crossed that threshold.

For more than a decade, my family had invested everything—hope, sacrifice, and a few Yuan they could scrounge into my education. On days when the journey felt too long or the hunger too loud, they were the ones who kept me going. I remember one winter during high school when I was short of just one dollar of my tuition. My homeroom teacher, stern and unmoved, made me walk five miles home and warned me not to return without the full sum. My parents went from house to house in the village, humbly pleading for a small loan just for a week or two. Most turned them away, murmuring about their own hardships, but a few, out of pity or quiet admiration, handed over a Yuan or two. By late afternoon, the small offerings had added up. I returned to school at dusk, the cold wind at my back and the full tuition folded carefully in my coat pocket. This incident, instead of shaming and destroying me, further strengthened my conviction that no matter what price my family and I had to pay, I would go to college.

To prepare for my departure to college, my father did something he had never done before. He hired a carpenter from a neighboring village to build a wooden suitcase. It was a costly decision, one that must have weighed heavily on him. We were truly poor. There were days when even salt felt like a luxury, when my siblings and I wore the same mended clothes year-round, and when my mother bartered eggs for school supplies. When unused, our tattered clothes were wrapped in a faded cloth, stored in the corner of the kang, our raised earthen bed connected with the earthen stove.

To have a suitcase made, father first had to find wood for the suitcase. The lumber did not come from a store, nor from a tidy stack delivered by truck, but from the raw ribs of the mountains five miles away, remote, rugged, and indifferent to human need. It was hewn not with ease, but through toil born of necessity, from a land where poverty pressed against every doorstep like a hungry wolf.

In the villages near the foot of those mountains, the stooped peasants in worn jackets would venture up the steep trails in search of timber, not for craft, not for trade, but for survival. When harvests failed or granaries stood bare, they turned to the forest as their last resort. Trees were cut and sold in the black market for bread. A good haul of wood might mean a sack of corn to keep a family fed for another week.

But obtaining the wood was no simple act. The journey was long and unforgiving. They would rise before dawn, axes slung over their shoulders, climbing through thickets and boulder-strewn paths, deep into the mountain’s silence. There amid the mist and the call of unseen birds, they would fell the chosen trees, their sweat mingling with sap and soil. Because it was illegal to cut down the trees, the peasants had to keep alert not to be spotted by the forestry workers who, though sparse in number, might show up on the roadside, so they often chose dark evenings to carry the lumber home.

The return was even harder. The logs, heavy with sap and sorrow, pressed into their backs. When the burden became too great for one person, they’d cut the timber into several smaller chunks, but even then, each required the strength of two men to carry. They would strap it to a thick bamboo pole pressured on their shoulders like a yoke of hardship.

Then the carpenter had to be hired.

In the last century, craftsmen were highly revered, especially in rural areas. A person with a particular skill was often treated as an honoured guest. As a result, there were many craftsmen at the time, covering every trade such as stonemasons, carpenters, roof tilers, lathe workers, scale makers, locksmiths, blacksmiths, and so on.

Most rural carpenters didn’t have a permanent workshop. Instead they traveled from home to home, carrying a heavy tool chest on a shoulder pole, often walking long distances between villages. A carpenter might spend days or weeks at a client’s home, eating and sleeping there, crafting everything from furniture to roof beams.

Electricity was rare in villages, so all labour was done by hand. Precision was essential; there was no room for error, and the quality of joints, mortises, and finishes distinguished a true master even though the tools they used were heavy and primitive such as chisels, hand planes, ink markers, hand saws, clamps, files, oiling pads, and so on.

The carpenter my father hired was an elderly man clad in a worn-out black shirt. He exuded the quiet dignity of a lifetime spent in manual labor. His silver hair was cropped neatly, and his glasses rested securely on his nose, an emblem of careful, measured craftsmanship. Every detail of his posture spoke of experience: His back slightly hunched in concentration, his grip firm yet practiced, and his face calm but focused as he drove a wooden peg into place with a mallet. His labour, a simple wooden suitcase for college, was held together by mortise and tenon joints. Tools lay scattered around him, not as clutter, but as trusted companions making rhythmic movements guided by repetition, trial, and intuition.

It took him a few days to prepare the timber and to complete the suitcase. It was crafted from elm with a thick lid and slightly raised base. It was built to survive train rides, jostling, and years of storage in dormitories or small rented rooms. He used metal corners and hinges, often made of blackened or rust-resistant steel, to reinforce its solidity. He fixed a metal lock plate to the front where I would attach a small padlock. The box rested on a slightly elevated base, not decorative but practical, to prevent moisture from seeping up through concrete or earthen floors. The inside was unlined, raw wood, rough to touch. It was rectangular and boxy, about 70 cm long, 40 cm wide, 40 cm high, and weighed over 10 kilograms when empty.

When the suitcase was completed, my father carried it on his shoulder to a village a few miles away to have it painted by a painter. Being a painter in rural China in the 1980s was a life marked by ingenuity, hardship, and quiet artistry. While cities were beginning to modernise and reform under Deng Xiaoping’s opening-up policies, the countryside remained largely poor and traditional. In that setting, rural painters were admired for their skill, often called mister, xiansheng, or master, shifu, yet they were rarely paid well. Their payment might be in kind—a few eggs, a meal, or a bag of grain. Many painters did manual labor or farming to survive.

These rural painters, to be sure, are not professional artists painting landscapes or portraits for galleries. They were locally recognised for their talent in New Year prints, nianhua, paper cuttings, or village murals. They painted gods, animals, good luck symbols, or local mythologies on temple walls or household altars; they also painted shop names, price boards, wedding banners, walls, furniture, doors, and coffins.

As bleak and barren as the region often felt, the village painters still found ways to infuse life with colour and meaning. With brushes dipped in leftover paint and hope, they adorned rough wooden furniture with scenes that reached beyond hardship. Floral patterns bloomed across cabinet doors. On headboards and chests, magpies took flight, dragons curled in motion, and phoenixes danced in pairs, each stroke a whisper of good fortune, power, or harmony.

The painter who adorned my suitcase turned a rough wooden box into something radiant, almost otherworldly. He coated it in a deep, lacquered red, and on its front panel, he conjured a scene of quiet enchantment: A still pond cradled by green reeds, golden fish drifting in lazy arcs beneath the surface, and birds poised on willow branches, their beaks open in mid-song as if singing to the silence. It was a landscape none of us had ever truly seen, except in schoolbooks or village tales whispered under oil lamps.

When my father brought the suitcase home days later, the sun hit its polished surface and sent a soft glow across the dusty courtyard. The red shimmered like embers, the painted water seemed to ripple in the light, and for a brief moment, the box did not look like something made for travel, but for reverence. It felt as though something sacred had entered our home, something beautiful and too delicate for hands weathered by fieldwork and ash. For most peasant families in the 1980s, such a thing was unthinkable, a luxury far beyond reach.

The day I left for college arrived under a weeping sky. Rain had fallen for weeks without pause soaking the hills and fields. The autumn wheat sowing, so crucial to the coming year’s harvest, had been delayed again and again, the absorbed fields swallowing the farmers’ footsteps as if resenting their labor. The dirt roads had turned into narrow canals of mud, where every step threatened to pull a shoe clean off your foot and suck it into the earth, but that morning there was no time to think of planting. I was to leave for college, six miles from the train station. We had no way to get there but on foot.

Everything I would need for the new life: My quilt and bedding, summer shirts and padded winter coat, two pairs of shoes, a few notebooks, and my admission documents, were packed neatly into the lacquered wooden suitcase, now wrapped tightly in sheets of plastic sliced from emptied fertilizer bags. The suitcase was too large and heavy to carry alone. No buses ran from our village to town; no donkey cart would dare the mire. My elder brother and I did what necessity demanded: We slid a bamboo pole through the knots tying the box, hoisted it between us, and prepared to carry it to the station in the rain.

Father rose early that morning, long before the faintest hint of light broke through the slate sky. He cut two makeshift raincoats for us from the same plastic sheeting, covering them loosely around our shoulders. They rustled with every movement, thin as cellophane, barely enough to keep the water out. For himself, he wore nothing. There was no extra plastic, and we had never owned an umbrella. He insisted on walking part of the way with us.

His cloth jacket was already damp before we reached the edge of the village, his cotton shoes dark with moisture, but he showed no sign of discomfort. He walked beside us quietly, his eyes fixed not on the muddy road but on the box, on the sum of so many sacrifices, so much hope, now swaying with each step as we bore it forward. Eventually, he stopped and said he would go no farther. “It’s your journey now,” he said simply.

It took close to three hours for my brother and me to carry the suitcase to the train station. It rode with me for seven hours to my college. It was indeed a prized possession handcrafted with care, a costly item that had occupied an honoured place in our home, but within days of arriving on campus, my affection for the suitcase began to falter. What once felt like a treasure now felt like a burden, heavy not just in weight, but in meaning. It stood there beside the dormitory beds, squat and old-fashioned, its lacquered wood and painted pond strangely out of place among the glossy synthetic trunks or sleek leather cases of my classmates who came from cities. Its sturdy bulk, once a symbol of care and craftsmanship, now seemed to shout my difference in the echoing corridors.

I had already felt the sting of dislocation—my homemade shirts hung too loosely, my accent turned heads for the wrong reasons, and my soles were so thin I could feel the gravel beneath them. The suitcase, with its rural weight and painted dreams, added another layer to my growing unease.

I dreaded the glances and the unspoken judgments. Would they smirk at the rough wood, the iron clasps, and the makeshift lock? Would the women in our class notice it when they visited our dorm? I imagined whispers, sideways glances, and quiet laughter. The suitcase suddenly seemed not like a carrier of dreams but of shame. It was a marker of poverty, of distance, and of the village accent still in my voice and the callouses still on my palms.

I tried to silence that shame by reminding myself what the suitcase had cost my family not just in money, but in care, pride, and hope. And yet despite my best efforts, a quiet sense of isolation would creep in, uninvited. I told myself to be grateful. Still, beneath gratitude lived an ache: The fear that no matter how far I had come, I would never truly belong.

In graduate school, my relationship with the old wooden suitcase quietly shifted. By then, I was no longer the anxious, self-conscious undergraduate who feared that the worn, bulky trunk might betray my rural background. I was now one of four graduate students sharing a cleaner and bigger dormitory room, markedly better than the ones assigned to undergraduates. The simple fact that I had made it to graduate school granted me a certain dignity and status, something visible in the way others addressed me and in the quiet respect I began to feel in myself. With that change came a subtle emotional distance from the suitcase that had once embarrassed me. It no longer defined me.

I began to see the suitcase not as a social burden but merely as a functional storage box. Its outdatedness did not offend me. I no longer examined it with self-doubt or compared it with others’ modern luggage. It just sat in a corner, silent and sturdy, holding things I didn’t need every day. I had more important things to think about: coursework, research, passion in literature, and my future beyond campus. The emotional weight the suitcase had once carried of family expectations, inferiority, and identity began to loosen its grip. I stopped resenting it. I told myself it was old-fashioned and coming from a different era, but I was now moving beyond it. I believed, with growing confidence, that better things lay ahead: lighter luggage, freer choices, and a life not weighed down by symbols of poverty but propelled by the quiet strength and sacrifice that wooden box had always represented.

By the time I became a university faculty member, my relationship with the old wooden suitcase had become almost purely practical, stripped of the emotional charge it once held. I shared a dorm room with only one colleague, a considerable upgrade from the four-person graduate setup, and my financial situation had improved dramatically. I could now buy what I wanted like new clothes, books, even a suitcase in any style or color. If I had wanted to replace the wooden trunk with a sleek, fashionable one, I could have done it without a second thought. But I didn’t. I had reached a point in life where I no longer needed to prove anything through objects. I had become what I once dreamed of becoming: A university professor.

After I got married in 1992, my relationship with the old wooden suitcase entered its final, quiet stage. As my wife and I began setting up our new home, one of our first major purchases was a large modular furniture set made up of three sections. The middle part held our television and decorative items, while the tall cabinets on either side were designed for hanging clothes and storing household essentials. It was modern, elegant, and capacious, a clear symbol of how far I had come. The suitcase, once essential, now served no practical function. I placed it in the deep corner of the closet. Its role in my life had come to a quiet close.

Though the suitcase now rests on a shelf, its meaning and the stories it carries remain alive. Remembering it brings back the life my father and his generation endured. My father was born in 1938. When I entered college in 1983, he was 45, supporting a wife and five children, the youngest only seven. By the time I finished graduate school in 1990, he was 52, still living a hard life. I could send home a few hundred to a few thousand Yuan for seeds, fertiliser, or wedding gifts—small relief for him, though never enough. From 1990 to 1997, as a university faculty member in China, I sent as much as I could; life was still tough for him, but at least the family had enough to eat.

When I left for the United States in 1997 to pursue further studies, I lived on assistantships and could send nothing home. I knew they had food but still struggled to afford the most basic supplies. In 2004, when I secured a full-time, tenure-track professorship in an American college, I began sending money regularly. Three years later, in 2007, my father died at 69. I could not return for his funeral, but I sent enough to cover all expenses. I wanted him to be buried with dignity, for without him, there would be no educated professor named me.

Remembering the suitcase, I cannot help but think of my father and the sacrifices he made so I could become educated. He remains an unending source of inspiration. His stance toward life, his defiance in the face of hunger and humiliation, and his resilience against the weight of helplessness guide me every day. The hardships I have endured—four years of boarding school sustained by meagre food brought from home, the inability to pay even a few dollars of tuition, the shame of wearing threadbare clothes in public, and over a decade of isolation from my family while living in a foreign land—are nothing compared to what he faced. Because of him, I have always found the strength to forge ahead no matter the obstacles, carrying in my mind the unwavering gaze of my father as if to say, “If I could do it, so can you.”

Now, at sixty, I have reached an age when I can slow my pace and begin to savour life. How different my days are from those of my father! As a professor at an American institution of higher learning, I can say without hesitation that I have lived my American dream. I am well-fed, well-clothed, and surrounded by all I need. When I buy food, it is not merely to stave off hunger; I choose wholesome meats, fresh vegetables, and ripe fruits—luxuries compared to the corn, potatoes, and sweet potatoes on which my father and his family relied for more than a decade. For him, the simple gift of wheat bread once a day would have been a source of deep contentment. My clothing, too, tells the story of this contrast: Nike shoes, Ralph Lauren shirts, Banana Republic trousers, each item costing enough to feed my father’s household for half a year or more.

In addition, I have the luxury of traveling internationally. Between the ages of fifty-four and sixty, I have visited France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Monaco, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, and Turkey. I can say, without boasting, that I have walked the streets of distant lands, savoured their foods, immersed myself in their cultures, and broadened both my horizons and my perspective.

The contrast with my father’s life could not be starker. For most of his years, his movements were limited to the fields near home. Occasionally, he traveled three miles to the rural market to sell produce or buy supplies, and only rarely journeyed twelve miles to the county township to exchange goods for cash. Never did he have the luxury of dining out, attending a show, or taking a day off from the relentless toil of farm life. Seen in this light, that simple wooden suitcase of his era captures the noble, heroic, and sacrificial spirit of my father and of an entire generation.

Unless someone has lived through such hardships, it is hard to grasp how unforgiving life can be for some. I tell the stories of my school years to my son constantly, and I never fail to mention the wooden suitcase, a thing he has never seen. We brought him to the United States when he was close to five. He never experienced the life of my father’s generation, or even mine. Growing up in one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world, he naturally takes much for granted, and I do not blame him.

Our purpose in coming here was to create a better life for him and for us. On the first day of college in the fall of 2014, my wife and I packed all his necessities into our Honda CR-V and drove him to Northwestern University. He needed no suitcase, certainly not a cumbersome wooden one, yet he never forgot the stories I had told him about my wooden suitcase or the depth of its significance for my family and my generation.

He made the most of his college years, graduating in 2018 with a double major in statistics and economics, fully prepared for the career he now has at a Fortune 500 company. In this way, hardships and difficult journeys become wells that nourish the mind and soul of the next generation. And the stories of the suitcase, like a quiet legacy, will continue to inspire his children and his children’s children.

The wooden suitcase that traveled with me from 1983 to 1992 is far more than a piece of luggage; it is a vessel of hope, a keeper of dreams, and a silent witness to the shifting tides of my family’s life. Built and painted by calloused hands in lean years, it carries not only my possessions but also the love, expectations, and unspoken sacrifices of my family, especially my father. For those of us from villages along dusty roads, such a suitcase embodies the weight of our origins and the transformations we endured. Over time, its meaning deepens. It comes to represent not only my personal journey but also the shared story of a generation of rural college students who, rising from poverty, saw their futures irrevocably changed by the power of education. It also stands as a tribute to the previous generation, who gave everything so their children might leave the parched soil behind and begin anew in the cities. Even now, the worn corners of these wooden suitcases seem to murmur stories of struggle, resilience, transformation, and gratitude—tales not only of my own life, but also of a family, a village, and a nation in motion.

Larry S. Su has been a professor of literature and writing for the past thirty years. He has also been a passionate reader and ardent writer since college. He writes both in Chinese and English, and his writings have appeared extensively in the Chinese and English publications, mostly in the form of articles and essays.

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Stories

After the Gherkin

A Mrs Tadpole Mystery by Deborah Blenkhorn

Parry Lines was an ordinary fellow, so much so that even his friends couldn’t be bothered to find out his actual name and were content to call him “Parallel,” his nickname since childhood. Regular, indeed nondescript features were surmounted by his trademark bald pate; the most you could say was that occasionally he wore a bright plaid shirt in neon pastels to liven things up a bit.

Ten weeks A.G. (After Gherkin)

Yet his death (by gherkin) caused a butterfly effect that changed the world. Until the incident with the gherkin, the most notable thing that had ever happened to Parry was when his surprisingly dashing teenaged son had consumed an entire teacup full of gravy during Thanksgiving dinner. Honoured guests had watched in horror as Parry Jr. (PJ for short), notable for his twinkling hazel eyes and flowing chestnut hair, gulped down the rich, brown fluid–though they should have expected something of the kind when he poured the gravy from the pitcher on the table into the China cup ready at his place setting for after-dinner tea.

Present at that event, and at the gherkin incident as well, was Mrs. Honoria Tadpole, English professor and amateur sleuth. Her demure, conservative appearance (she always wore a smart, tailored suit–or at least the best the local thrift shop could provide–and had her silver-blonde hair cut in a perky, short bob) and her self-effacing manner and diminutive (if plump) stature belied the sharpest mind north of California. It would fall to her to unravel the complicated mystery that the local paper dubbed “Gherkingate.”

Interviewed by the features’ editor, as the criminal trial of the alleged murderer dragged on, Mrs. Tadpole was asked the inevitable question of how it had all started. The interview took place in Mrs. Tadpole’s well-appointed parlour, a room replete with Victorian bric-a-brac. With characteristic hospitality, she poured out a strong brew of BC Bold to accompany the delicate sandwiches (ham, egg, and cucumber) and homemade oatmeal cookies that were her signature “high tea,” known to local islanders as a four o’clock tradition at the old manse where Mrs. Tadpole rented a small suite.

“Now, Mrs. Catchpole, I understand you were part of the original party that travelled to Moany Bay,” the interviewer began.

“Tadpole,” Mrs. Tadpole corrected. A veteran instructor of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds, she was used to misspellings and mispronunciations. Marpole, Rumpole, Toadpole: she had heard and seen it all, and could make the necessary correction without even flinching anymore. She cast her mind back almost three months to a mid-summer weekend off British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast.

She began with an allusion to classic culture: “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip…”

Sadly, the features’ editor of the Island Gleaner failed to catch the reference to Gilligan’s Island, one of the best sit-coms of the 1960s. Mrs. Tadpole had been a toddler when the series was first aired, but its popularity throughout her childhood made it a touchstone for, really, almost everything in life, according to her observations. She knew that some people accorded such a status to the iconic, original Star Trek, but what did Captain Kirk have that “the Skipper” did not? Not much, thought Mrs. Tadpole.

The premise of Gilligan’s Island was classic: a small number of people, randomly-assorted, stranded on an island together with no real prospect of deliverance. After all, wasn’t that just the paradigm of human existence? You didn’t need to be an English proffessor (though Mrs. Tadpole was one, of course) to figure that out.

That fateful weekend, when the seeds of the gherkin incident was sown, had been rife with undertones of Gilligan’s Isle.

Breathing deeply of the fresh Pacific breeze, the passengers sat out on the deck of the vessel as it hugged the rugged BC coastline. The rushing water behind the Skirmish flumed out into a fan of spray, while the murky depths offshore spat out seals and sealions–even the occasional humpback whale–with random irregularity. Black bears hid among the rocks and evergreens in the uninhabited areas; cabins dotted the beaches in the populated areas of cottage country. On the way up the coast, the party of friends and family had composed their own version of the theme song, with each member of the group assigned to a role from the original cast. Mrs. Tadpole was the Professor, of course. Never mind that the community college where Mrs. Tadpole worked had opted not to accord academic titles to their teachers, or that the original Professor in the TV series was a man. (As Mrs. Tadpole had been known to say to her first-year college students, we live in a post-gender, post-glass-ceiling world. And if we don’t, we should).

Aboard the Bayliner, Skirmish, Parry Lines was the Skipper, and his hapless, gravy-drinking son was typecast as the irrepressible Gilligan, full of mischief and ridiculous ideas. Mrs. Tadpole could only hope that her adorable niece, Mary Anne (same name as her Gilligan’s Island counterpart!), was immune to his sauce-swilling charms.

The Millionaire role was assumed by the reclusive entrepreneur Deadhead, Mickey Garcia (if that were in fact his real name), accompanied by his charming wife, Penelope, a voluptuous brunette. Together they had built an empire founded on tribute bands and biopics. The rumour mill had it that there was trouble in paradise, but no one outside his immediate family had seen Mickey for years, so it was difficult to substantiate the gossip.

The cast was fleshed out (so to speak) with a bona fide movie star, the internet sensation who began as one of the central figures in a YouTube series called Project Man Child (“For the price of a cup of coffee… you can buy this underemployed househusband a cup of coffee!”) and had gone on to a viral barrage of TikToks under the sobriquet of “The Naked Gardener”. Mrs. Tadpole was relieved (as no doubt were the others) to note that all the passengers aboard the Skirmish, including this one, appeared to be fully clothed.

At least, all whom she could see wore conventional travelling attire: Mr Garcia, recovering from surgery and groggy with heavy opiates, was shrouded in a blanket and wearing dark glasses. He slumped a little to the side, and his heavy breathing attested to a well-earned reputation for napping as a pretense in order to ignore his surroundings.

As Mrs Tadpole later told the Gleaner interviewer, the real concern of the trip quickly emerged: not the rapprochement of Mary Anne and Parallel Jr., but the burgeoning, even violent antagonism between Parry Sr. and Penelope Garcia, whom the latter insisted on calling “Cherry” with a suggestive leer while her husband languished in his bunk. “Is he grateful? Or just dead?” quipped Lines. One night, Penelope went so far as to brandish a knife in Lines’ general direction and had to be restrained by Mrs Tadpole and Mary Anne in tandem.

Although Madame Garcia was the only one to meet his taunts with open animosity, no one was spared the self-proclaimed wit of Parallel Lines.

He had the nerve to call Mrs Tadpole’s beloved niece, whose sunny disposition was outshone only by the sweet, fair face that perched above her perfect figure, “Mistress Mary, Quite Contrary” –nothing could have been further from the truth! Of course, Mary Anne merely smiled and shrugged it off, as if no insult could penetrate her cheerful exterior … but others were less armour-clad.

The bully referred mercilessly to the Naked Gardener as “Jamie Oliver, the Naked Chef” (whom he slightly resembled) a slur that obviously got under the man’s skin (“I couldn’t boil an egg to save my life!” he protested angrily. “That’s not my brand at all! He’d better watch his back…”).

Even Mrs. Tadpole (surprisingly resilient after having been bullied through her shy youth as resembling a chubby little toad) came in for her share of abuse, rechristened as “Mrs Toad” after making her one of specialties, toad-in-the-hole, for her shipmates. (Once she discovered that the galley of the Bayliner was stocked with a potato ricer and La Ratte potatoes, there was no holding her back. A ring of caramelized onions surrounded each serving dish, with two nut-brown sausage-ends sticking out of the centre, for all the world like a couple of froggy eyes.) “No one calls me Toad,” she intoned ominously.

Cruelly and unaccountably, Parallel Lines saved his worst tirade for his own son. Recalling that terrible moment of youthful folly, that mind-gripping shame that only time could heal, the father saluted the son like a champion hog-caller summoning his prize sow. “Sooooo-Eeeeee! Want some gravy with that?” Alternatively, he would break into song to the tune of ‘Hey, Jude’:

"Au jus,
Just make it fat,
Take some gravy
And make it wetter..."

It was pitiful to see the boy’s response, especially in front of Mary Anne. His pale face was suffused with a ruddy glow beneath his chestnut fringe, and hot, angry tears rose in his sensitive, hazel eyes.

“I’ll kill him,” PJ muttered under his breath.

And now the tranquil Mary Anne, who couldn’t have cared less about any vitriol directed her way, was at last roused to fury in defense of her maligned and helpless friend. “I’ll do it for you!” she offered. “By G—!”

Two Hours B.G. (Before Gherkin)

Suffice it to say, no one was all that distressed when Parallel Lines failed to return to the Skirmish after an afternoon in the seaside village of Egmont (pronounced with an “egg” and not an “edge”).

Penelope had steered Mickey off in a collapsable wheelchair they had stowed on the boat; “the millionaire and his wife” were off for lunch al fresco, heading for a picnic table in an accessible, though private, spot. Roast beef sandwiches and condiments, along with champagne and a couple of plastic flutes, had been assembled into a decorative yet sturdy straw basket which the amazon-like Penelope slung easily over one arm as she manouevred the wheelchair down the forest path.

The movie star had gone in search of Egmont’s famous cream cheese cinnamon buns, hoping to be recognised at the Forest Cafe by someone who would do a double take and exclaim, “Hey! Wait! Aren’t you that man child?”

Mrs Tadpole and her niece decided to go for a refreshing swim in the brisk waters of the bay, washing off the grime of shipboard life before stopping at the Village Green Room for a bowl of veggie curry soup and some fresh, hot rolls.

As for PJ, he declared himself too upset to leave the Skirmish, and was hoping to curl up with a graphic novel, a diet soda, and a bag of Doritos, to forget all his cares for a few hours while the rest of the party looked around Egmont Village.

But where was Parallel? It was time to cast off. If they didn’t leave soon, they wouldn’t make it to the Coastal Lodge before dark. And–not to mention–P. Lines was the skipper!

“I’m perfectly capable of getting us there,” insisted PJ, fortified by his power nap. “I’ll bet you anything, dad’s holed up at the Drifter Pub, and he’ll crash at the hotel there. I’m sure he’s as tired of us as we are of him. Let’s just go. We’ll all have cooled off by tomorrow morning, and I’ll swing back and get him then, bring him up to the Lodge for the rest of the weekend.”

The plan sounded good, and all agreed to it willingly. Off they set for the rustic cabin someone had dubbed the Coastal Lodge in hopes (quite justified, as it turned out) of charging a tidy sum in AirBnB rates. Never mind that it featured a remote outhouse and a camp kitchen; the setting was beyond beautiful, and the (now) congenial group looked forward to beach and forest walks, blazing bonfires, and midnight swims. Mrs Tadpole insisted on taking charge of the outdoor kitchen: she had brought the ingredients for her famous moussaka and looked forward to the challenge of cooking it in a casserole dish on the barbecue. PJ and Maryanne diced feta, tomatoes, onions and cucumbers for a Greek salad, while the movie star tried in vain to get a cell signal and the millionaires played cribbage by the big bay window in the cabin.

Parallel Lines could cool his heels at the Drifter until morning, thought PJ and crew.

G.T. (Gherkin Time)

“So,” said Mrs. Tadpole to her interviewer, “Can you guess who did it?”

“Uh,” said the Features editor. “Nope.”

“I’ll give you a hint: don’t ask who was the perpetrator. Ask who was the victim!”

“Well, that would be Mr. Lines, would it not?”

“Would it? What if the wheelchair-bound invalid, Mr. Garcia, was really Parallel Lines in disguise?”

“But–”

“He was wrapped in a blanket, wearing dark glasses and a mask, slumped in his chair. And there was a switcheroo.”

“A what?”

“A switch. In the forest.”

“Well, I’ll be jiggered. Why haven’t you said anything?”

“Blackmail.”

“You’re blackmailing the unlikely lovers? Parry Lines and Madame G?”

“No, they’ve been blackmailing me. But it’s time to come out. My trans-formation is at hand!”

“Mrs Tadpole! What a story for the Gleaner–and for the world! May I be the first to congratulate you?”

“You may.”

Deborah Blenkhorn is a poet, essayist, and storyteller living in Canada’s Pacific Northwest. Her work fuses memoir and imagination, and has been featured in over 40 literary magazines and anthologies in Canada, the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Brazil, India, and Indonesia.

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Poetry

Poems by Angshuman Kar

Angshuman Kar has translated some of his shorter Bengali poems to English

RULE
 
A river wants
pebbles on its bosom.
Only then the water will get a jolt,
the current will be visible.
 
The wind wants
a few trees to stand against it.
Only then it will whiz,
the speed will become visible.
 
A word also wants a few antonyms
in opposition.
Only then can it sparkle like a jewel!
 
Nature wants opposition
 
A boss slavery…
 

GROUP PHOTO 

Father is gone. Uncle is gone.
Grandma is gone. Tikla is gone.
I am still here. Tukai is here.
Looking at a forty-year-old group photo,
it becomes clear that people take pictures together
only to realise, someday,
that in a cruel world made of black stone,
they are alone.
 
UMBRELLA 

A broken rib.
The plastic handle is partly cracked.
It holds back the drizzle,
but when the rain pours hard,
it gives up.
From head to toe, I get drenched.
 
And so, the monsoon comes, the monsoon goes.
 
Looking at the umbrella, sometimes
it seems,
it is my father from the distant past.
 
Always hesitant.
 
 
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE 

One can immediately identify the other
the moment the two meet.
 
One understands the other.
Understands the pain, the suffering, their causes–
everything.
 
The two drink coffee together.
Gossip. Quarrel.
Together they watch the young couples
pass by.
 
Boarding the same bus, then,
they go back home together.
 
One solitary man, still,
can never become the friend of
another.
 
 
LOVE

The wind is blowing gently
and the leaves of a tree
are shivering.
It seems
a deaf and dumb boy
has fallen in love
with a girl, deaf and dumb.
 
 
 THE WIND

 Those who think you are a friend
 are fools.
 You just touch and pass–
A foreigner in every land.

Angshuman Kar, a Bengali poet and novelist, is Professor of English at University of Burdwan, West Bengal. He was also the Secretary of Sahitya Akademi, Eastern Region. Kar is the recipient of several prestigious awards including Paschim Banga Bangla Akademi Puraskar, Krittibas Award, Bangiya Sahitya Parishad Puroskar and Shakti Chattopadhyay Samman. He has read his poems in Scotland, Germany, America and Bangladesh. Wound Is the Shelter is a collection of his poems translated to English.

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Tags America, Bangaldesh, Bangiya Sahitya Parishad Puroskar, Bengali, Germany, Krittibas Award, Paschim Banga Bangla Akademi Puraskar, Sahitya Akademi, Scotland, Translations, University of Burdwan, West Bengal

Musings

What is Great Anyway?

By Farouk Gulsara

It all started with a Facebook post which quoted Churchill and read, “If you are twenty and not a Communist[1], you don’t have a heart. But if you are forty and still a leftist, you do not have a brain.” That snowballed into a literary discourse on the word great and what constitutes greatness. The funny thing is that Churchill never said anything to that effect. The closest one gets to that quotation is Otto von Bismarck, the first Chancellor of Germany who may have uttered, “He who is not a socialist at 19, has no heart. He who is still a socialist at 30, has no brain.” By the way, Bismarck’s brand of politics earned him the title ‘Iron Chancellor’. How do we classify something or someone as great or otherwise?

As written by the victors, history also designates Churchill as a great leader and statesman. A towering figure, he stood steadfast with the people, with his oratory skills, during ‘The Darkest Hour’[2], as London was bombarded by German fighter planes. Surprisingly, he was also voted out of office after World War II. He was mentioned to have said, “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”[3] I do not think that the family members of the 1943 Bengal famine victims will consider him anything but great – a racist, a bigot and a white supremacist, maybe.

Even then, many in the United Kingdom thought Churchill was not a statesman but a foul-mouthed drunkard. At a function, a female guest of aristocratic standing, obviously not his fan, berated him and his politics. She is said to have said, “Sir, if you were my husband, I’d poison your tea.” Without a single pause, the witty Churchill quipped, “Madame, if you were my wife, I’d drink it!” [4]

When Churchill was informed about the Bengal Famine, he was infamously quoted as saying, “Serves them right for breeding like rabbits and, by the way, why isn’t Gandhi dead yet?” [5]

My point is that one man’s great leader may be another’s mortal enemy. This is especially true in a world where power and wealth are used as a yardstick of prosperity. We often forget that these commodities are finite; the losses of one side exactly offset the gains of the other.

Alexander may be ‘Great’ for putting a small region called Macedonia on the world map. With all the carnage and misery he spread over the lands he and his army traversed, it took only the might of a tiny mosquito to bring him down. At least, that is one of the likely ways he died. Other contenders include alcoholic liver disease, depression and strychnine poisoning.

Alexander The Great On His Sickbed, By Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (c. 1783 – 1853). From Public Domain

Like Alexander, many monarchs with the suffix ‘The Great’, such as Peter, Catherine, and Frederick II, left behind an enormous body count and a trail of devastation.

The Great ‘state-of-the-art’ Titanic was marketed as ‘unsinkable’, and itself was a lifeboat with tight watertight compartments, giving ample time for ferry passengers to be rescued by rescue vessels. Hence, the need for an adequate number of lifeboats was deemed unnecessary. We all know about the irony of its disastrous maiden journey, which is still spoken about a century later as one of Man’s greatest miscalculations.[6]

Indians of the 20th century honoured Karamchand Mohandas Gandhi as a selfless soul who chose a life of poverty to stir the masses’ consciousness towards self-rule. The people thought it appropriate to address him as Mahatma (the Great Soul) or the Father of the Nation. Today, an increasing number of Indians are having second thoughts. Perhaps they may have been taken for a ride and got the short end of the stick from the British. It is amusing that Gandhi’s son, Harilal, despite the reverence of the people of the subcontinent towards his father, also did not hold his father in high regard. Disillusioned with the senior’s move to block his law scholarship to England, Harilal became a rebel, spiralling into alcoholism, eventually becoming a public nuisance and falling into oblivion.[7]

The Great War, also known as World War I, was touted as a necessary battle to end all wars. We know it never ended anything, but its post-war deals remain a nidus for World War II and the turmoils that persist even today.

The Great Gatsby exposes the fallacy of the American Dream and the notion of a successful life under capitalism. F. Scott Fitzgerald shows that success-based materialism and trying to relive a nostalgic past will not lead to fulfilment. Instead, it will lead to a decadent path and disappointment. [8]

In a world so entrenched in wealth acquisition, we have heard of many families afflicted with the misfortune of striking it rich in the lottery and seeing their family spiral into an abyss.

The Great Train Robbery in 1963, the UK’s biggest heist, where the robbers scooted off with the present-day value of £62 million, ended with none of the culprits laying their hands on the loot, but mostly just behind bars. [9]

Just look at Trump and his track to the White House using the ticket which promises to ‘Make America Great Again (MAGA)’. The illusion of the blissful past only morphed into civil unrest, which required the deployment of National Guards and Marines to use flash-bang grenades and tear gas to squash down their own citizens. If that was not enough, now there is talk of MIGA — Make Iran Great Again, perhaps returning Iran to its glory days of the Persian Empire! [10]

When we describe something as great, we usually refer to it in a positive light, as something extraordinary pushing human abilities beyond normal boundaries. It is a subjective assessment. One man’s greatness is another’s failure. It can serve as a cautionary tale for those who have fallen.

It’s just food for thought. After having a bad day at the office when nothing went right, we returned to find that we had forgotten the house key at work and had to go all the way back to the office to retrieve it. What do we say? “Great!”

[1] ). Even though this quote is often referred to as coming from Churchill, it may have been originated from Otto von Bismarck, the first Chancellor of unified Germany between 1871 and 1890. He could have said, “he who is not a socialist at 19, has no heart. He who is still a socialist at 30, has no brain.”

Katycarruther’s.com

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Otto_von_Bismarck#Unsourced

[2] Speech and 2017 bmovie, which included the speech called ‘The Darkest Hour’

[3] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/4611-history-will-be-kind-to-me-for-i-intend-to

[4] People probably put words into Churchill’s mouth. It may be a misquotation. The conversation may have taken place between Lady Astor and Churchill’s aide.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/illustrious-history-misquoting-winston-churchill-180953634/

[5] Churchill’s policies contributed to the 1943 Bengal famine – study.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study

[6] Did Anyone Really Think the Titanic was Unsinkable? The makers probably oversold it.’

https://www.britannica.com/story/did-anyone-really-think-the-titanic-was-unsinkable

[7] Father to a nation, stranger to his son.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/aug/10/india

[8] The reality was not what success for everyone in America.

https://www.ewadirect.com/proceedings/chr/article/view/9147

[9] The men behind the Great Train Robbery

https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20250410-the-men-behind-the-great-train-robbery

[10] MAGA to MIGA.

https://www.wionews.com/world/from-maga-to-miga-donald-trump-suggests-regime-change-to-make-iran-great-again-1750631822282/amp

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are solely that of the author and not of Borderless Journal.

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Review

A Technocrat Who Tended Many Gardens

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date June 16, 2025
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Book review by Satya Narayan Misra

Title: Honest John – A Life of John Matthai

Author: Bakhtiar K Dadabhoy

Publisher: Penguin Random House

John Matthai’s name has little resonance for today’s generation, but he was one of the brightest stars in the firmament of his time, and even in retrospect. He cultivated many gardens, starting his life as a lawyer and later becoming a professor, administrator, banker, corporate leader, and Minister. In this delightful biography of Matthai, whom Nehru called “Honest John”, Bakhtiar K Dadabhoy tells us of the different hats worn by him. For his students in Madras, he was a shy professor who was one of the most lucid exponents of a dry subject like economics. JRD Tata would always turn to him for sagacious advice.

For Nehru, who greatly respected his ability and integrity, Matthai filled two cabinet posts, even though the parting was somewhat unpleasant when Matthai resigned as Finance Minister, as he feared that the newly created Planning Commission would be a ‘parallel cabinet’ and would be in perennial conflict with his department. CD Deshmukh, the redoubtable civil servant who succeeded him as FM in the Matthai Memorial Lecture said: “He was one of the most cultured products of India, having a perceptive and thoughtful mind, a sobriety of judgment of men and affairs, a rare concern for principles, scholarliness, with its flames kept lit by regular reading.”

He was the first Indian to get his DSc from LSE in 1916 and worked under Professor Sidney Webb, a Fabian socialist, who was at the height of his powers and fame. Though Webb was his guide, he was at no time a Leftist or socialist Professor of Economics. He had a thorough understanding of what free enterprise could do. He was one of the principal authors of the Bombay Plan, a memorandum submitted to the government in 1944 led by Tata, Birla and Thakurdas.

The Bombay Plan represented a search for a new style of capitalism that would chart a middle path between state-led planning and private enterprise. This was in the background of a fierce intellectual debate fought in England between two towering economists, Hayek and Keynes.

While Keynes advocated active state intervention and the desirability of state-funded programs, Hayek favored non-interventionism and free trade. It was to the credit of Matthai that the planners envisaged a mixed economy, in which the state and the private sector would play a complementary role, thus proposing a visionary compromise between two systems, free market and state control.

Ironically, he resigned as Finance Minister after failing to reconcile with Nehru on the setting up of the Planning Commission. According to historian Rakesh Ankit, it was an individual and an institution that made the widening differences unbridgeable. It was Trone, born to Jewish parents and an engineer with General Electric involved in an electrification drive in the USSR, who impressed Nehru with his All India Plan of a ‘managed mixed economy’ that was sufficiently controlled to ensure equity.

While Nehru was taken by Trone’s view that a Planning Commission would reflect regional aspirations and diversity, and his view that Indian capitalists were only out to make profits, Matthai did not share his enthusiasm. In a letter to Nehru, he wrote that the Indian economy was like a “damaged ship and our job is to repair it and not as naval architects but experienced, competent workmen.” Nehru responded by defending planning as ‘a positive active policy’, giving examples of planned progress made by England, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, and Japan since the war.

Unlike Patel, who was a hard-headed realist, Nehru loved the abstract argument and delighted in drawing generalised inferences from situations that offered the slightest provocation to his nimble mind. Speaking six years later, after the Planning Commission was formed, Matthai said that “the planning commission has become a body of amateurs, with whom, for all practical purposes, the final decision rests in matters of economic development.” Most of Matthai’s fears about the Planning Commission proved to be well-founded. Critics like Kripalini and Rajagopalachari openly showed their displeasure. Rajaji founded the anti-socialist party.

Dadabhoy also gives a glimpse of how Liaquat Ali Khan, as FM in the interim government, proposed a business profits tax, an increase in corporate tax, a dividend tax, capital gains tax and a high-powered tribunal to deal with tax evasion. Matthai was the only non-league cabinet minister to defend the budget in public. But Patel and Rajgopalchari, who made no secret of being pro-capitalist, saw the budget as a way of harassing businessmen.

Ventilating his frustration with the hegemony planning enjoyed, he wrote to Nehru: “I fear a church is growing around the God of Planning”. However, planning remained the master narrative, and the plans laid the foundation for infrastructure in sectors like steel, fertilizers, cement and chemicals, promoting agricultural self-sufficiency and focusing on inclusive growth and social justice.

Wavell noted in his diary on 5th March 1947, “Nehru, Patel & Bhabha find that the budget is not popular with their big business supporters and are trying to rat or hedge.”Matthai abolished the capital gains tax and reduced super taxes. Pandit Kunzru doubted, “If such reductions would lead to greater productivity. A time has come if free enterprise is to be given a free hand or the country should opt for a socialist economy.” It was only a decade ago that Prime Minister Modi abolished the Planning Commission without any discussion.

Matthai had an unconventional approach to budget presentation. He is the only railway minister to deliver a budget speech without a prepared text. In 1950, he chose to deliver his Union Budget speech extempore. Dadabhoy also brings out unknown facets of Matthai’s personality. He approached Nehru and Patel to bail out his son, who had run over someone while driving his car in Allahabad. Nehru was reluctant to help, but Patel intervened, and Matthai’s son was bailed out and quietly sent to England to escape the net of law. Matthai was known for his honesty and uprightness, but his fondness for his son blinded him to those values.

Matthai, despite his serious differences with Nehru on the issue of the Planning Commission, was a great admirer of Nehru. He wrote after his first meeting with him, “If he ever asked me to go to prison with him, I should find it difficult to refuse.” Mathai considered his long association with the Tatas to be the happiest period of his life. Sir Homi Mody, a Tata luminary later to become the governor of Uttar Pradesh was known for his wit. Homy contended, “Matthai had all the advantages of face, figure, manner, and voice and invested everything he said with an air of profundity. Matthai was a technocrat of different timber who did not mix personal respect with policy differences.”

Though trained under Fabian socialist, Sydney Webb, whom Nehru adored, he did not jump into the trap of socialism. He was a pragmatist who looked at India’s damaged ship, post-Partition, through the lens of competent workmen. Judging a visionary like Nehru and a pragmatist like Matthai can be a nightmare for any biographer. However, Dadabhoy skirts the issue with skill.

Professor Satya Narayan Misra is a distinguished expert in Public Procurement & Contracts with over three decades of experience in the Indian Economic Service & Indian Defence Accounts Service. He has made significant contributions in drafting a manual for defence procurement and bolstering self-reliance in critical technology. He has authored seven influential books and published 127 research articles, including 18 in prestigious Scopus-indexed journals such as the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) and Defence Studies (UK). He looks at macroeconomic issues through the lens of Constitutional expectations. He is a Professor Emeritus and a sought-after speaker on public policy, budget, development issues, and Constitutional Cases.

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Conversation

From Outhouse to Backwaters

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date April 14, 2025
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Ratnottama Sengupta tracks the journey of Leslie Carvalho over a quarter century

It seems like only the other day. The International Film Festival of India, IFFI, 1998 was on. Along with a colleague, I was seated on the steps outside Siri Fort I auditorium connected to a long corridor going to Siri 2. Someone introduced Leslie Carvalho. “Aha! The young filmmaker from Mangalore?” I responded. “There’s a write up on you in The Times of India today. It says there’s a lot of expectation from The Outhouse.”

The “delightfully sweet” film had lived up to the expectation of the critics. It was bestowed the Aravindan Puraskaram, presented by the Kerala Chalachitra Film Society to commemorate the iconic Malayalam director, and the first Gollapudi Srinivas award, another national level award to recognise filmmakers marking their debut in Indian cinema. So I was not surprised to meet him next as a co-member of the jury for the National Film Awards 2000.

The Tennis coach who is also a German language teacher with a passion for painting has now published his first novel, Smoke on the Backwaters. It centres on Rosa, a twenty-year-old from Mangalore, who is forced to flee overnight because of the storm of gossip, fear and shame unleashed by a single incident in her life. Her unexpected journey across continents becomes a path of healing. Seven years later, armed with education and maturity, she returns home, determined to pursue her purpose in life. But how much had the town she left altered from its old ways?

RS: Leslie, before we talk Backwaters, can we briefly revisit The Outhouse? From where did you derive its content? And what was your compulsion for choosing that subject?

LC: The Outhouse was a simple, linear narrative about moving on in life despite the odds. A young mother’s need to gain economic independence to supplement the family income; the help she received from her financially independent sister; a kind hearted Bengali landlady’s generosity which causes stress and violence in the Anglo-Indian couple’s day to day life, and how it affects the two children growing up.

RS: Why did you choose this subject as your debut vehicle? If you were to travel in a time machine, would you choose a ‘mainstream’ subject?

LC: I chose this subject as my debut vehicle as I had seen quite a bit of violence in the Anglo- Indian community in the Lingarajapuram area of Bangalore I grew up in.

I was itching to make a movie after my six-month course at the New York Film Academy. As I was working on a very tight budget, I just stuck to what was taught — to keep it simple, straightforward and just tell a story using the various tools of cinema — in short, to make it cinematic.

If I were to go back in time, I don’t think I would have chosen a ‘mainstream subject’. I derived immense satisfaction along with the cast and crew as we felt we were working on something we were passionate about. We all felt drawn towards the characters, the story and the theme of the film.

RS: How did you get interested in cinema? And what were the problems you faced while filming The Outhouse – in terms of funding, casting, shooting location, distribution?

LC: I grew up watching Tamil, Kannada, Hindi, a couple of Konkani and lots of Hollywood films. My mother tailored clothes at home, and she taught a whole lot of women stitching. They were fans of Tamil cinema, especially of Sivaji Ganesan, MGR, and the heroes of Kannada cinema, Dr. Rajkumar and Vishnuvardhan. She also enjoyed the Hindi films of Rajesh Khanna, Dharmendra, Hema Malini, Amitabh Bachchan, Sanjeev Kumar, Jaya Bhaduri and Rekha — that is the popular cinema.

And my father, being an Army person, took us to see English films, like The Ten Commandments, The Bible, Hatari, To Sir, With Love[1]. Also, St. Germain’s School where I studied, screened English films every Friday afternoon in the Hall, from spools off a projector that made a jarring sound. It was an amazing experience — black and white Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy films and also Patton with all the bad words. Later, when in college, we would bunk classes to watch most of the popular Hindi and English movies.

At the New York Film Academy, I was exposed to an entire range of the world’s best in cinema. Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Antonioni, John Ford, William Wyler, Fellini, Jean Renoir… And I watched a whole lot of films on the American Movie Chain (AMC). There I discovered all of Spencer Tracy’s films and fell in love with his sense of timing and under playing. It was also a time when I discovered Guru Dutt and marveled at his brand of filmmaking from Pyaasa, Kaagaz Ke Phool, Chaudhvin Ka Chand, Sahib Biwi Aur Ghulam to Aar Paar and Mr & Mrs 55[2].

It is hard to believe I began the shoot for The Outhouse on September 18, 1996, and completed it in 14 days – on October 1. After we went through the rushes, we required two more shots to link the gaps. Since I was on a shoestring budget of a few lakh rupees, I had rehearsals with the cast for close to three months. I doff my hat to them in gratitude as 90% of the film was canned on first takes. I could not afford retakes, and I worked with a brilliant cameraman, S Ramachandra, who was very supportive and encouraging. He shot most of B V Karanth, Girish Karnad, and Girish Kasaravalli films as well as the popular tele-serial Malgudi Days[3]. A number of first-time directors like myself, had benefitted immensely by his generosity and patience.

Since it was an independent film, whatever little finance I had, I sunk into the film. And then it took me a year to complete post-production for lack of finance.

I was particular about the casting. I wanted the Anglo-Indian look, feel, mannerisms, costume, interiors to be authentic. I met each cast member and spoke to them at length about the vision I had for my film. Almost all of them were from the Bangalore English Theatre, and all of them were cooperative. Moreover, Cooke Town is a quaint little place with many English bungalows and outhouses. After some struggle, I found one on Milton Street which suited my story perfectly.

After The Outhouse was selected for the Indian Panorama in IFFI ’98 and received the two national awards, I just walked into Plaza Theatre on MG Road in Bangalore and met the owner, Mr Ananthanarayan. He had heard about the film and asked me to meet the distributor, Nitin Shah of Hansa Pictures in Gandhi Nagar, the biggest distributor of English films. He put it on for a noon show for three weeks while Fire was on for the matinee and evening shows. The distributor then put it in Mangalore and Udupi for a week. And when I received the Gollapudi Srinivas National Award in Chennai, Aparna Sen was one of the honoured guests. She saw a small portion of the film and said that she would speak to Mr Ansu Sur to screen it at Nandan in Kolkata — founded by Satyajit Ray to help screen small independent films. A theatre owner in Kolkata recommended a person who took the film to the North East. It was also screened in parts of Kerala.

Coincidentally, this April 30^th, The Outhouse will be screened in the leafy neighbourhood of Cooke Town next to the outhouse where the film was shot.

Still from *The Outhouse*, provided by Ratnottama Sengupta

RS: In the last 50 years we have seen films by directors like Aparna Sen, Ajay Kar, Anjan Dutt. Even before these, Ray had touched upon Anglo Indians in Mahanagar. These are all films made in Kolkata. Is it because this is the erstwhile capital of the Raj?

LC: Many of the films on Anglo-Indians were based in Calcutta. It was the influence of the British Raj and its culture that was so much a part of their long history of ruling there. Of course their influence was in other parts of the country as well like Madras, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Whitefield and Kolar Gold Fields, the railway colonies all over the country, the hill stations, and many other cities which has pockets of Anglo-Indians.

RS: I remember one Hindi film, Julie that had an Anglo-Indian protagonist. How has the community been projected in popular culture? Was it lopsided or biased?

LC: Throughout our film history Anglo-Indians have played bit roles here and there. Some significant roles came their way in Bhowani Junction, the teleserial Queenie, 36 Chowrighee Lane, Bow Barracks Forever, Bada Din, Cotton Mary, The Outhouse, Saptapadi, Mahanagar, Julie, and Calcutta I’m Sorry[4].

Some of the characterisations have been quite biased; some not well fleshed out; some in passing fleeting moments of drunkenness, prostitution. The song and dance sequences have not helped the community, sadly.

RS: What led you to writing? The screenplay for The Outhouse?

LC: I wrote the screenplay of The Outhouse on plain A4 sheets of paper, on both sides. This is not done but I did it to save on cost. I gave the screenplay to my cinematographer S. Ramachandra, and in his generosity he understood my purpose. I went by what was taught at the New York Film Academy. Of course, I had to combine all the elements to make it whole. The idea of the screenplay came to me while I was at the film school in 1995.

RS: What was the trigger for writing Smoke in the Backwaters?

LC: As an artist, filmmaker, and writer, I have tried to combine all the elements of story-telling – fact and fiction — keeping in mind the flow of ideas, pace and momentum to engage and interest my audience and readers.

I remember beginning to write the novel two decades ago when my mother — who studied in Kannada medium — said, “I hope you will write it in simple English so I can read it too.”

And I wanted it to be reader friendly with regard to the font size, the brightness of the paper, the spacing, the clarity and the size of the book. I was lucky my publisher ‘Anglo-Ink’ was supportive and combined well to find that centre.

RS: How are you marketing the book? Through Litfests? Bookstore readings? Airport bookstalls? A H Wheelers?

LC: Since Anglo-Ink is a small-time publisher, we’ve had a dream launch in my hometown Bangalore at the Catholic Club. My book seller is Bookworm on Church Street in the heart of Bangalore and for people in Cooke Town it is in The Lightroom’ library.

We are looking at launches in various cities as well, through book readings, LitFests, Airport book stalls, AH Wheelers, readings at schools and colleges.

Since a major portion of the novel is set in Germany, we are looking at translating it into German. I hope to get it translated in a few Indian languages as well.

RS: Since the sunset decade of 1900s, Anglo Indians have been migrating to Australia and Canada. What triggered this migration? Economics or politics?

LC: The migration of Anglo-Indians was inevitable. It was bound to happen for reasons more than one, be it political, economic or social. First under the ‘Whites Only’ policy, many fair skinned Anglo-Indians migrated — the brown and dark skinned were left behind. Slowly they opened up and even they left. Some felt they would adapt better to a western culture, and have adopted their new country as their homeland.

RS: You were a big support for me when my son joined NLSUI in 2000. Again, when I curated Anadi, the exhibition of paintings by Contemporary and indigenous artists from MP and Chhattisgarh. Bangalore has since become an international megalopolis. How has life changed for the locals?

LC: Bangalore has changed dramatically and drastically. The change was bound to happen because of its growing prominence of an International City. The IT industry brought jobs, slowly other industries, started picking up from real estate, fashion, digital technology and social media platforms, start-ups, academics, sports, games, recreational and tourism.

The moderate climate was a huge bonus that attracted people from all over. Bangalore has always been cordial, encouraging and accommodative of people from all over through their mild manners, hospitality and gentleness.

Today Bangalore is unrecognisable. Still, some pockets retain that old world charm of neat, clean and green Bengaluru from the old Pensioners Paradise of Bangalore.

[1] The Ten Commandments (1956), The Bible (1966), Hatari (1962), To Sir, with Love (1967)

[2] Pyaasa (Thirsty, 1957), Kaagaz Ke Phool (Paper flowers, 1959), Chaudhvin Ka Chand (The Full Moon, 1960), Sahib Biwi Aur Ghulam (The Master, the Wife and the Slave, 1962), Aar Paar (This shore or that, 1954), Mr &Mrs 55 (1955).

[3] From 1986 to 2006.

[4] Bhowani Junction (1956), TV miniseries Queenie (1987), 36 Chowrighee Lane (1981), Bow Barracks Forever (2004), Bada Din (1998), Cotton Mary (1999), Saptapadi (Seven Steps, 1981), Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963), Julie (1975), and Calcutta I’m Sorry (2019)

Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and write books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award.

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Tags 36 Chowrighee Lane, Aar Paaar, Ajay Kar, Akira Kurosawa, Amitabh Bachchan, Anglo-Indian, Anjan Dutt, Antonioni, Aparna Sen, Australia, B V Karanth, Bada Din, Bangalore, Bengali, Bhowani JUnction, Bow Barracks Forever, British Raj, Calcutta I am Sorry, Canada, Charlie Chaplin, Chaudhvin Ka Chand, Cotton Mary, Dharmendra, English, Fellini, German, Germany, Girish Karnad, Guru Dutt, Hatari, Hema Malini, Hindi, Hyderabad, IFFI, Indian, Ingmar Bergman, Jaya Bhaduri, Jean Renoir, John Ford, Julie, Kaagaz ke Phool, Kannada, Kerala, Kolkata, Konkani, Laurel & Hardy, Leslie Carvalho, Madras, Mahanagar, Malayalm, Malgudi Days, Mangalore, media, MGR, Mr & Mrs 55, Nation Film Awards, New York Film Academy, photography, Pyaasa, Queenie, Rajesh Khanna, Ratnottama Sengupta, Rekha, relationships, Sahib Biwi Aur Ghulam, Sanjeev Kumar, Saptapadi, Satyajit Ray, Sivaji Ganesan, Smoke on the Backwaters, Spencer Tracy, Tamil, tennis, The Bible, The Outhouse, The Ten Commandments, The Times of India, To Sir with Love, Travel, William Wyler