Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne…
The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) by Chaucer, Prologue
This is the month Asia hosts sprays of new years across multiple regions. Many of these celebrate the fecundity of Earth, spring and the departure of bleak winter months. Each new year is filled with hope for the coming year. The vibrant colours of varied cultures celebrate spring in different ways, but it is a welcome for the new-born year, a jubilation, a reaffirmation of the continuity of the circle of life. Will the wars, especially the shortages caused by them and felt deeply by many of us, affect these celebrations? Had they impacted the festivals that were celebrated earlier? These are questions to which we all seek answers. We can only try to gauge the suffering caused by war on those whose homes, hopes, families and assets have been affected other than trying to cope with the senselessness of such inane attacks. But, in keeping with TS Eliot’s observations on Prufrock, most of us continue our lives unperturbed and as usual.
Some of us think and try to dissent for peace and a world without borders with words – prose or poetry. To reinforce ideas of commonalities that bind overriding divides, we are excited to announce a poetry anthology mapping varied continents with content from Borderless Journal, Wild Winds: The Borderless Anthology of Poems. We are hugely grateful to Hawakal Publishers for this opportunity and to Bitan Chakraborty for the fabulous cover design. We invite you all to browse on the anthology which is available in hardcopy across continents.
Our issue this month is a bumper issue with the translation of Tagore’s Roktokorobi (Red Oleanders) by Professor Fakrul Alam. It’s the full-length play this time as earlier we had carried only an excerpt. The play is deeply relevant to our times as is Somdatta Mandal’s English rendition of his story, ‘Daliya’, set in Arakan. We also have also translated Tagore’s response to the idea of mortal fame and deification in poetry. Kallol Lahiri’s poignant Bengali story about the resilience of an ageing actress has been brought to us in English by V Ramaswamy. Isa Kamari brings us translations of his Malay poems exploring spirituality through nature.
But what really grips are the fables that Hughes will be sharing with us over four months. He calls them Rhysop Fables, after the ancient ones from Aesop’s with the ancient author himself being mentioned in one of the short absurdist narratives this time. In fiction, our regular fable writer, Naramsetti Umamaheswararao explores a modern-day dilemma, that of social media intruding into the development of children. Jonathon B Ferrini glances at resilience and mental disability while, Sangeetha G looks into societal attitudes that still plague her part of the world. Oindrila Ghosal gives a story set in Kashmir.
From Kashmir, Gower Bhat shares a heartfelt musing on being a first time father. Mohul Bhowmick writes of Eid in Hydearbad (Hari Raya in Southeast Asia) — echoing themes from Kamari’s poems — and Anupriya Pandey ponders over the quiet acceptance of mundane life that emphasises social inequities. Jun A. Alindogan brings home issues from Phillipines. While we have stories about Vietnam from Meredith Stephens, Suzanne Kamata muses about Phnom Penh, mesmerised by Cambodian dancers.
Farouk Gulsara writes of his cycling trip from Jaipur to Udaipur bringing to life dichotomies of values and showing that age can be just a number. Chetan Poduri reinforces gaps created by technology as does Charudutta Panigrah, a theme that reverberates from poetry to fiction to non-fiction and much of it with a light touch. Devraj Singh Kalsi sprinkles humour with his strange tale about hiring a bodyguard.
Keith Lyons has brought in Keith Westwaters, a soldier-turned-poet who seems to find his muse mainly in New Zealand. We have also featured an author who overrides borders of continents, Marzia Pasini. Her book, Leonie’s Leap, has a protagonist of mixed origin and her characters are drawn out of Russia, India, Bulgaria and many other places.
This rounds up our April issue. Do visit our content’s page and explore the journal further.
Huge thanks to the wonderful team, especially Sohana Manzoor for her art. They help bring together the colours of the world to our pages. Huge thanks to contributors who make each issue evolve a personality of its own. And heartfelt thanks to readers who make it worth our while to write.
An introduction to Leonie’s Leap (published by Atmosphere Press) by Marzia Pasini and a conversation with the author
Maria Pasini
Leonie’s Leap by Marzia Pasini is a novella that explores the inner recesses of a teenager’s mind till he finds clarity, perhaps a kind of bildungsroman, if realisations can happen in thirteen days! Leonie technically leaps to self-realisation as he tries to run away from an exploitative orphanage somewhere in Hungary.
It’s an unusual story, with a commentary by an inner voice which addresses the fifteen-year-old Leonie as “dearheart” and leads the teenager towards self-realisation. With a background in Philosophy and a Master’s in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics, Pasini began her career in international development and has moved on to become writer and life coach. This is her second book which she has dedicated to her two children, William and Maria.
The narrative travels through Leonie’s subconsciousness to his coming to realisation about his life’s choices. Colours are woven into the tapestry of his subconscious experiences with a Buddhist monk called Hridaya, Leonie’s own mysterious Indian mother who might have an interesting backdrop, colourful circus characters — Isabelle who plays violin to her elephant named Grace, Astrid, the chief of the circus’s daughter who wants to be a ballerina, clowns, a lady that wrestles with a tiger, a Russian oligarch and more. Young Leonie meanders through an adventure of his own making, a bit like Pinocchio’s experiences in the circus except the teenager soul searches where the puppet was just mischievous.
The plot is simple you realise at the end of the book, but as you meander onwards, you pause to wonder if it’s child labour, underage marriage or unsafe working conditions you’re grappling with. The conclusion is clear cut. You realise you have been led along a maze. All the action was in Leonie’s subconscious.
For all those, who like to discuss spiritual development and growth, this book could well be like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (1943), though in that the author reached out to not just within an individual but to pertinent social issues. Leonie’s Leap is more about personal growth — about the teen taking a leap towards adulthood — perhaps because Pasini has opted for a career as a Life Coach who has travelled many countries to make a home in India. Let’s ask her to tell us more:
What led you to write this book?
For many years, I felt called to explore the journey back to the heart—not as an idea, but as something lived. The kind of return that happens when roles fall away and you are left with your body, your breath, and a reality you can no longer sidestep.
The book took shape after a life-altering health crisis that brought me close to death. Writing was no longer optional. It became a responsibility to the life still moving through me and to the vow I made: if I am still here, I will not delay what is mine to live.
You started out as a master’s from London School of Economics in comparative politics, worked for the royal family of Jordan, and then became a life coach. Tell us a bit about why you made these choices and what stirred your muse towards becoming a writer.
I’ve always wanted to be of service. Studying comparative politics at LSE came from a desire to understand how power moves and decisions shape lives. Working for the Jordanian royal family and the UN was a natural extension of that impulse.
In my late twenties, my health redirected that trajectory. It pulled me into myself with no escape. Though I had always been drawn inward, I could no longer outrun what I was being asked to face.
Over time, it became clear that all real possibility begins within. The shifts I later supported in others were first ones I had to move through myself. Writing became the place where I let the truth hold me.
What made you leave Italy? Why did you opt to live in India? What has your journey through six countries done for you and your writing?
I’ve always been adventurous. I left Italy at fifteen to attend boarding school in the UK, driven by a curiosity to discover something larger than the life I knew. Looking back, I see I was chasing aliveness, perhaps even a kind of magic I believed lived somewhere else.
Life later carried me across six more countries. My husband’s work with the United Nations placed us in the Middle East, South America, and eventually India. Each relocation reshaped me, dismantling the illusion that identity is fixed.
India, in particular, asked for radical honesty. There was little room to hide. In that rawness, I began to see where I wasn’t fully inhabiting myself.
That changed my writing. The listening deepened. Stories became less about what happens and more about what is revealed beneath the surface. Today, I carry many worlds inside me. Home is no longer a place.
Has your own life impacted the diverse colours of humanity in this book? Please Elaborate.
I write about the human journey—the longing to belong, the fear of stepping into the unknown, the courage it takes to choose oneself. These are not experiences confined to one story.
My life shaped the book because I have known those edges, too. Uncertainty. Illness. Loss. Love. Each deepened my understanding of what it means to be human, and that depth gives my characters their colour.
The story could have taken place anywhere in the world. Why did you choose Hungary as the locale for your story over all other places?
Hungary sits at a crossroads between East and West, carrying beauty alongside a sober melancholy. When I walked around Budapest, I sensed an emotional gravity that resonated with Leonie’s sense of in-betweenness.
There is also a long tradition of Hungarian acrobatics. The circus in the novel isn’t just spectacle; it represents the inner balancing required to hold contradiction, leap without certainty, and trust oneself first.
Is this book impacted by your choice of career — being a life coach? Please explain.
My work as a life coach has given me a deep respect for the inner process. Leonie’s Leap invites readers into wonder, inquiry, and direct seeing. It isn’t a self-help book in the traditional sense, but it engages questions that draw the reader back to their own heart.
The “dearheart” letters woven into the narrative are not instructions. They are a voice that sits beside you and says, stay. It is tender here. You are not alone.
Did you imagine all the characters in Leonie’s journey towards self-hood or were they based on some experiences? Please elaborate.
I don’t believe we ever write from a neutral place. Even when characters are fictional, we create through our perception—our wounds, our longings, our questions. The characters in Leonie’s Leap are imagined, yet carry the landscapes I have traversed. They hold the mess of being human and the possibility of grace.
Leonie’s mother would have had a back story—a lonely Indian woman. Is she an illegal immigrant? Where’s his father then? What would be her story? Is Leonie an immigrant?
I left her backstory intentionally open because some spaces don’t need to be filled. Leonie’s mother is a woman who lived a complicated life, marked by abandonment, illness, and loss. What matters most is the imprint she leaves on Leonie—a gentleness and fierceness that fuel his longing for freedom.
Your book has a discussion on fear in chapter one. Your first book, Satya and the Sun, also dealt with fear. Does overcoming fear become a theme in both your books? Is the first one also a psychological adventure? Why is overcoming fear so important to you?
Fear has been central to my life. I have been in more surgeries and hospital beds than I can count. In those moments, fear became breath. Today, I no longer see it as an obstacle to overcome, but as a catalyst for deeper embodiment.
Satya and the Sun is also a psychological adventure, though written for children. It follows a girl afraid of the dark who sets out to find a place where the sun never sets. Inspired by my own fear of going blind, it explores what happens when we turn toward what terrifies us and discover that light exists even there.
Are you on the way to writing more books? What are your plans going forward?
I recently completed a poetry collection centred on devotion and heartbreak—an exploration of love when it strips you to your essence. I have also begun a new novel set in the Amazon—a story of initiation, surrender, and what survives when identity falls apart.
(This review and online interview by email is by Mitali Chakravarty)
Title: The Tree Within: The Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz’s Years in India
Author: Indranil Chakravarty
Publisher: Penguin Random House India
‘For me, India was an accident.’ – Octavio Paz
The Mexican Nobel laureate poet and essayist Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was a writer of lightening insights and electric intelligence. His impassioned poetry is meditative, with a precision of language that is imbued with a strangely sensuous quality. In fact, language and poetry per se were some of his key thematic concerns. The announcement on the cover of this book states that The Tree Within is the enchanting story of Octavio Paz’s passionate love-affair with India where he served as Mexico’s ambassador in the 1960s but reading through this very detailed 518 pages well-researched biography of the Nobel Laureate poet one realises that it is a lot more.
Immersing himself in India’s rich cultural life and contemplative traditions, Paz travelled widely, forged deep friendships with some of India’s finest minds, and produced several of his most inspired poetry and essays. It was here that he met the love of his life and until the day he died, he continued to refer to India as the place where he experienced what he called his ‘second birth’. It is difficult to find similar cases in our history when a major creative figure from abroad drew inspiration from India’s culture for one’s own works over such an extended period. His writings became a bridge between continents, blending Eastern and Western sensibilities in ways that enriched the literary landscapes of both. In India, where the erotic and the sacred blend in ecstatic union – unlike in the West, where the two are scrupulously kept apart – he saw the possibility of a new synthesis through the dissolution of dualities. Interestingly, Mexico belongs to the western hemisphere but is generally considered non-West, like India. Blending biography, cultural history, and literary criticism, The Tree Within is a luminous testament to the enduring alchemy between India and the world through one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
The book is divided into ten stand-alone chapters, and one can move to the topic of one’s choice. The first two chapters entitled ‘Family and Nation’ (1914-36) and ‘Paz Before India’ (1936-1951) serve as the background of Paz’s lineage, his growing up, and his passionate engagement with India can be understood in terms of the seeds planted early in his life through his family as well as the national cultural ambience where the idea of India was inscribed. All of them played a role in reinforcing his attraction towards the country. Unlike T.S.Eliot, Paz became politically active from an early age, with an initial inclination towards anarchism and Marxism and a subsequent rejection of Communism. He witnessed the Spanish Civil War firsthand, and he also had a close relationship with the surrealists in France.
It is only in the third chapter, ‘The First Sojourn’ (1951-52), that India is physically present when in 1951 Paz, then 37-years old, was assigned the task of opening a new embassy in New Delhi. It recounts his long sea-journey to India and his experiences and poetic output during that brief period of six months. To some extent, he externalised his inner unhappiness on India during his first trip. India of that time had little to offer him by way of intellectual excitement or fulfilling companionship. Things were in disarray when under Nehru as the new nation-state had just been born a few years ago. In New Delhi, Paz stayed at the Imperial Hotel, which became his residence during his entire stay. He also carried a lot of baggage in terms of Western cultural prejudices towards India. India not only smothered his senses; the grinding poverty and rigid mores of life left him disgusted.
In Chapter Four, ‘Paz and Satish Gujral: In Light of Mexico’ describes the personal friendship between Paz and Satish Gujral, one of India’s leading painters and how Paz shaped his development as an artist by inserting Gujral among the maestros of the Mexican mural movement. In fact, the influence of the Mexican mural movement on modern Indian art through Gujral would not have been possible without Octavio Paz’s decision to send him to Mexico. The meeting with Nehru and Indira Gandhi through Satish’s brother I.K. Gujral also offers interesting information. The following chapter, ‘Coming Home, Going Away’ (1953 -62) traces Paz’s life and creative evolution from the time he left India to the time he was sent to India as Mexico’s ambassador in 1962. This ten-year period between his first sojourn in India in 1952 and his return as the Mexican ambassador in 1962 involved many defining moments in his personal and professional life which shaped his creative evolution as a writer. The extent to which he had already immersed himself in Indian philosophy is evident from the ways he assimilated his experiences and insights of his first stay in the writings of the next decade even when their themes had little to do with India.
‘Making Poetry, Making Love’ (1962 -68) is an account of Paz’s travels through the Indian subcontinent (he was given additional charge of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Ceylon), his relationship with Bona Tibertelli with whom he spent an idyllic vacation across the Indian subcontinent, his unhappy marriage with Elena Garro, his meeting and eventual marriage with his second wife, Marie-Jose Tramini, and the poetry that grew out of that amorous experience – all find ample space in this chapter. The way in which their love affair unfolded is wrapped in secrecy. It is also said that he developed some unsavoury practices for a man of his position. Nevertheless, it was the most bountiful period of an unimaginably productive life.
Chapter Seven named, ‘The Poet as Diplomat (962-68), recounts his role as a diplomat and his pioneering bridge-building efforts. His life stands as a shining example of how the advantages of diplomatic life can be used for maximizing literary output. The title of the next chapter ‘Paz’s Indian Friends: Surrounded by Infinity’ is self-explanatory. It recounts Paz’s close personal friendships with major Indian painters, musicians, writers and thinkers. We are given details of the close relationship with Indira Gandhi, and Paz throws interesting light on Indira by contrasting her with Nehru: “Indira was concrete and sober. She never forgot the old maxim that politics was the art of the possible…”
Among the literary figures, mention is made of Santha Rama Rau, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Satchidananda H. Vatsyayan, and many others. The story of Paz’s dramatic resignation in October 1968 over his own government’s massacre of students at the Plaza de Tlateloco is explained by the author through studying archival documents. The next chapter ‘Under Western Eyes: Visiting Writers and Artists’ tells the story of famous international writers, musicians and painters who met Paz in India and forged lifelong bonds and collaborations based on their common love for India.
The final chapter ‘Paz After India’ (1968 -98), traces the continued presence of India-related themes in Paz’s body of work, particularly his prose, ever since his departure from the country. Leaving India was not easy for Paz and Marie-Jose. Over the next three years, he would drift around the world, accepting fellowships, residencies and lecture assignments. Though Indian themes gradually faded out of his poetry, in prose it continued to engage him till his last days, thirty years after leaving India. Even in old age, Paz continued to maintain epistolary contact with his Indian friends and welcomed distinguished Indian visitors to Mexico with his characteristic Latin American warmth. ‘Cantata’ tells the knotty story of Paz’s legacy in Mexico and how India has periodically remembered him, one as late as February 2023, at a large international conference held in IIC[1], New Delhi, on the cultural links between India and Latin America. There was unanimity in the acknowledgement that the Mexican poet had created a permanent, direct bridge between India and Latin America that no state-led enterprise could have done.
Before concluding, a few words need to be said about the author of this book. An academic and a filmmaker by profession, Indranil Chakravarty’s interest in Hispanic literature and culture comes out clearly through the translations he made of Paz’s poems. His enormous labour to bring out this volume comes out in the manner he reconstructs the inner journey of the poet by delving into multilingual archives, declassified diplomatic files, personal letters, and intimate interviews. The labour that has gone into selecting the innumerable photographs that don almost every page of the book, many borrowed from the website zonaoctaviopaz.com (an ongoing repository of photographic and news material on Paz put together by a group of Mexican scholars) clearly exemplifies the author’s emphasis on visual imagery too. In Acknowledgements, he clearly mentions that he has merely tried to fill up the missing information on the poet’s India-years. He entirely agrees with Ramchandra Guha’s contention that an autobiography or memoir must be understood as a pre-emptive strike against a future biographer. The poet’s memoir of India elides most of the aspects that are interesting to us today.
The other day I had a tough time explaining mobile telephony and its advancements to my dad who’s around 85 years old. Both of us are highly educated. Neither of us knew modern technology well. Nevertheless, me being a self-taught-geek-or-engineer-or-technologist-of-sorts keep explaining the advancements in technology at regular intervals to my father.
My father, 85, is still actively practicing in a nearby trust hospital. He retired from government service almost two decades ago. Ever since he has been actively consulting patients in local private hospitals. He always says that keeping oneself active (physically or professionally) is more than sufficient to keep ourselves healthy.
“No exercises needed”, he would say whenever someone asked him, and would add, “there isn’t any beach or a lake resort in the arid Hyderabad to sit back and relax. So, the patients give me some avocation to pass my time”.
I must also confess that my father has been using hearing aids in both the ears since he was 50 years old, and amnesia slowly started getting the better of him four years ago…
*
Six years ago, another problem cropped up…
In December 2019, as you all know this planet was plagued by the COVID-19 pandemic. Amidst this hullabaloo, China made a small significant technological advancement – China silently unrolled 5G mobile telephony[1] in Wuhan.
As March 2020 neared, Indian government announced harsh restrictions, prominent amongst them are the lockdowns. To complicate the matters, my dad’s patients desperately needed to consult him for whatever…
… So, literally imprisoned at home my father embarked on video consultations to patients through WhatsApp. That represented the flashpoint between my dad and me.
Dad started complaining that his video conferences were not working properly.
The self-taught engineer in me explained that for proper video streaming and conferencing the mobile handset needs to have certain amount of memory in its RAM and storage all of which must be compatible with the ‘xG’ mobile telephony the government or service provider is offering (where ‘x’ represents a whole number like 2, 3, 4 or 5 and in near future can be 6 also). Like a true technocrat, I explained all the technology I knew with appropriate diagrams and flow-charts.
“What’s this RAM and storage?” asked my dad
“Well, I think RAM means Random Access Memory…”, I quipped peering through the edge of my glasses.
“What’s with the storage?”
“Well, everything your mobile handset receives, be it SMS or any other notifications or photographs you click with your mobile camera, it needs to keep somewhere. It needs a filing cabinet. That is called storage. If your handset has something called an SD card, it is external storage while every handset is sold initially with some storage called ‘internal storage’…”
“So … how much area does this storage take”
I casually replied, “Usually it is measured in GBs (giga bytes) … Your handset, I guess is some 16 GB or so… Mine’s about 32 GB…”
It’s been six years since we have had this discussion. The then government complicated the situation in our house by announcing that in another six months it will roll out 5G services in India to compete with Chinese …
“Ok! That’s alright but why are my phone calls not up to the mark. What does it have to do with storage? I understand if it is missing SMS, photos, storing and retrieving videos, etc… But why is the voice of the caller invariably broken or videos not clear?”
“Well, you might be using a 3G handset. Presently, the service providers are offering 4G+ services. Maybe you need to change your handset”
“Do I look like a fool? On one hand you are saying my phone is 16 G and on the other hand you are saying that government is offering only 4G services. Are you trying to ridicule me?”
Dumbstruck I tried to convince my dad. “Daddy, telephony G is different from storage GB … G of telephony means Generation and GB is giga bytes… 4G is different from 16 GB”.
“I know… I know… If government is offering only 4G and I have a 16 G handset, and there are two SIM cards in my handset 4G multiplied 4G is 16 G… then why is my handset not working properly?”, dad said angrily.
As an adolescent, I always felt that my father was very poor in mathematics and that’s perhaps why he asked me to opt for Biology stream in college. Had I known then that he knew how to square 4, I would’ve opted for mathematics stream giving many-a-CEOs a good run for their money…
“No!” I yelled, “theG in xG is different from GB”
“Now… Now… Now… My hearing aids are working properly… no need to shout… unnecessarily you’ll be disturbing the neighbours… Tell me, if my handset is 16 G why is it not working in 4G technology?”
I tried to pacify myself, “guess he has a hearing problem with letter ‘B’…”
“This G is not the same as that GB… Both are different…,” I said at the top of my voice
“Ok… But how to solve the problem?”
“Change your handset to something that can support 4G services…”
“But it is lockdown now… So… what’s the alternative?”
“The only alternative is to wait till they relax the lockdown and buy a new one until then endure the faulty video and audio calls… No other way out…”
*
Twenty years ago, in 2002, I bought my first mobile handset – a Nokia 3100 for about Rs3000. I was in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh then. There was a delayed roll-out of mobile telephony in North-western India and Kashmir regions of India for obvious reasons of them being very next to enemy nations, China and Pakistan. It was 2G technology then. Subsequently, a number of cheap Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese and Korean mobile handsets invaded India.
Back in 1991 CE, when India liberalised its economy, India was invaded by a number of international products in all spheres of life. Many Chinese and other Asian national companies also released their wares. This gave the average Indian at least four options.
The first option of buying highly priced superior quality original products from the Western Countries. The second option is that of the cheap lookalikes mostly from oriental countries like China, Taiwan, Vietnam and Korea. These were commonly referred to as duplicates. A third reasonable and genuine option was also offered by the liberalised Indian market – the Japanese products. These Japanese products, particularly the watches and calculators, were diametrically different from either the Western or the Oriental country products. They were priced somewhere in between and offered technology products with graceful designs. No matter what happens, these Japanese goods exceed your expectations. The fourth option was the local Indian products. These were rather crude in their design, usually low in quality and may or may not work testing your luck.
Chinese products, the duplicates, looked more American than the American products themselves but with Mandarin notations. From a distance it is difficult to say which is which. The most popular example in this direction was the copy of popular Batteries. Street vendors used to dispense American lookalike batteries for Rs5 while the original western would cost Rs95. Among the Indian products that stood the test of time were mostly food and dairy items and some watches/clocks.
This period of 90s in India paralleled the European Union’s efforts to revive the defunct industries that were bombed out in World War II. Also, around this time domestic airlines pampered the passengers by giving cheap watches as gifts and souvenirs. Net result: both my father and me developed a passion for collecting watches. My father’s patients would gift him cheap Chinese or so-called duplicates of the popular European watches. While he still collects these cheap watches, I, in due course, fizzled out. Of course, as of today, the pace at which the companies release newer designs outran our passion.
Mobile handsets, particularly the cheap ones that flooded the Indian market, fuelled our passion to collect handsets. So, now both of us have an additional avocation of changing mobile handsets as frequently as possible. Since in 2002 I was in Shimla and my dad was in Hyderabad, it became an unwritten rule between both of us that we appear with a different mobile handset every time we met. This passion continued for about a decade till 2012. By this time, I covered two cities – Shimla and Guwahati in Northeastern state of Assam. My father having retired from active government service lived (and continues to live in, touch wood) in Hyderabad which is in the south Indian state of Telangana.
A neighbourhood mobile vendor used to supply my father with cheap mobile handsets. For some unknown reason he used to call my father ‘Uncle’ and me as ‘Sir’. So, my mother and me used to pull my dad’s legs by calling the mobile vendor as his nephew.
As per our passion, we regularly changed our mobile phones. This continued till sometime… literally till 2018… when the 4G services were launched. Around this time the mobile ‘nephew’ of my father stopped supplying newer versions of handsets to my father.
But when he supplied mobile handsets to my father, he also used to do an additional service to my father: every time my father changed his handset, the mobile ‘nephew’ would somehow do a data transfer from the older handset to the new one. This I call an additional service because my father, as I mentioned earlier, uses hearing aids. So, the mobile handset must also be connected to the hearing aid through Bluetooth or other reliable technology. This is followed by a calibration of the hearing aid with the audiologist. All this took at least 2 – 3 days and multiple visits to both the mobile vendor and the audiologist. The mobile ‘nephew’ was very enthusiastic and never complained about any inconvenience. Other mobile shop owners would bluntly ask my father to get the calibration done elsewhere or with the service centre present at the other end of the city.
In one of the exchanges of mobiles, the data could not be properly transferred.
*
In June 2020, I guess, the government relaxed the lockdowns for the first time. Promptly, my father headed to a neighbourhood mobile phone shop and bought a 4G handset as per my recommendation. To my surprise, my father did not go to his mobile ‘nephew’. He went to a high-end mobile shop. My father this time bought an advanced model of a popular company’s handset.
After a day or two, and more video conferences later, my father expressed happiness and thanked me saying that for the first time in his life I gave a correct advice.
But now he needed something from the earlier unfinished data transfer. He wanted the data in the older mobile handset into the new handset. I took both the handsets to the new vendor and requested him to do the transfer. He gave a polished glib talk giving me the impression that the earlier handset is a cheap model from which it is better not to transfer the data. Crestfallen, I dragged myself to my-father’s-mobile-nephew and asked him to do the needful. The nephew told me that he failed to get permission for 4G and 5G so he’s at a loss as to help me.
“…that”, the nephew told me then, “is also the reason why your father no longer procures his mobiles from me”.
*
Two years of COVID restrictions rolled on somehow. For more than a year and a half every Indian was literally imprisoned in their respective homes due to the on-going pandemic.
The technology argument resurfaced between me and my father once again.
Dad said, “…again the problem of poor-quality video and audio…”
“Ah! Our service provider has now upgraded to 5G+ …Your handset is 4G… Change your handset…”
“Hmm… you mean there’s no problem with the handset?”
“Yeah! There’s no problem with the handset. It is just outdated. It is no longer compatible with the existing technology“, I quipped.
“What do you mean?“
I played the cards differently this time.
“We are three people in this house now. How comfortable will it be if suddenly there are 15 people in this house now?”
“If you talk like that, a greater number of people can be made to adjust in the house…”
“But what if everyday 15 people keep coming into the house without vacating?”
“Ah! Then that will be a problem…”
“Ditto for your handset… It is receiving more information from the network than it can handle…”
“The Apps are also freezing occasionally…”
“Same logic… they are receiving more information and upgrading themselves to the new technology… time to change your handset…”
“How much will a basic handset that works will cost me?”
“The one that is compatible will cost you around Rs15,000. The one that is also compatible with your hearing aids will be at the least Rs20,000.”
Well, since my childhood, I always kept myself updated on the prices of the latest in market whether I need those items or not. Wishful thinking, I guess.
“If this is the case then, every year or two even if there is no malfunction, I am forced to change my handset. This is very bad…”
“That’s the flip side of the technological advancement… Whether you like it or not… Whether there’s a malfunction or not, we are forced to change our products leading to huge amounts of pollution…”
“Very bad state of affairs. Think about the laptops then. Unnecessarily we are shelling out truckloads of money just to keep us abreast of the technology…”
“Very bad state of affairs… the technology developers think everybody is a billionaire and everybody’s a computer geek…”
*
Thanks to our passions, every year, me and my dad each spend at least Rs8000 just for the batteries so that our watches are in working condition. The other day, I took an Indian watch of mine for servicing which I bought in 2001 with the first salary I received after my PhD. I bought it for Rs400 then.
The servicing personnel cooed, “Is this watch still working?”
Nostalgically, I asked, “What’s the price of this model now?”
“This model is no longer produced Sir…”
If this episode makes me misty-eyed, my Japanese watch always gives me goosepimples.
In 2010, I found a display board in a watch shop in the Fancy Bazaar of Guwahati that read, “Japanese – EcoFriendly watches”. I walked into the shop and bought the watch for about two thousand bucks. The manual said, “10-year Battery Life”. Believe it or not, it lasted 15 years and this is the only watch which did not give me an opportunity to change its battery.
Good and Honest things in life must be appreciated at the first opportunity.
[1]Telephony is the technology involving telephones for communication (audio or video), and data exchange between distant parties
We are the most connected generation in human history. Is this why does leaving feel so utterly weightless?
There was a ritual. I still remember it distinctly. You probably remember it, or your parents do. The last morning of a visit — to a grandparent’s house, a village cousin’s home, an uncle’s rambling bungalow where the ceiling fans whirred through long afternoons — had a particular texture. Trunks or suitcases were latched. Strolleys hadn’t arrived yet or were on their early novelty days. Bags were piled by the door. And then, invariably, someone wept.
Not a little polite sniffle. Real tears. The kind that came from a grandmother pressing your face into her sari one more time, or an aunt who had spent a week feeding you as though you might never eat again, standing at the gate long after the rickshaw (autorickshaws were not common) or the personal car (Ambassador or Fiat[1] depending on the size of the family mostly) had turned the corner. You waved until you could no longer see her. She stood there until she could no longer see you. That was the goodbye.
Try to find that scene today. Go ahead. You won’t.
Today, the goodbye is punctuated not by tears but by the brisk choreography of the in numerous selfies.
Phones are raised, filters applied in real time, expressions arranged for maximum glow. The image is uploaded before the car has reversed out of the driveway. The caption reads: Such a beautiful time with family. So blessed. Heart emoji. Heart emoji. Heart emoji and a few ummahs thrown in. Thirty-seven likes in the first eight minutes. Nobody cried. Nobody needed to. You’re already on a group chat together.
The old goodbye made sense in its economic context. Distance, in those decades, was not merely geographical — it was temporal. A cousin who lived two states away or a city even in the same state was, in practical terms, a person you saw once a year, twice if there was a wedding or a funeral nudging the universe into action. Letters arrived weeks after they were written, sometimes smelling faintly of the sender’s home. Trunk calls were events, scheduled and anxious and too expensive to linger over. When you left, you genuinely did not know when you would next sit in the same room.
So the tears made sense. They were a rational response to real absence. Grief, after all, is the tax we pay on love, and those goodbyes had genuine grief in them — not theatrical, not performed, not calibrated for an audience. Just the honest acknowledgement that a period of closeness was ending, and the ending mattered.
WhatsApp changed the mathematics of absence. So did video calls, Instagram, the entire chirping infrastructure of perpetual connectivity. Your cousin in Rayagada is now a voice note away. Your village relatives appear on your screen every Diwali whether you want them to or not. The emotional logic of the old goodbye has been quietly dismantled, brick by brick, by the algorithm’s promise that no one ever really has to leave.
But here is the uncomfortable question: has connection replaced closeness, or merely simulated it? The notifications keep flowing, but something in the texture of relationships has changed. We know more about each other’s lives — the holidays, the promotions, the new kitchen tiles — and feel, perhaps, less. The mystery that once made a reunion electric has been replaced by the tepid familiarity of a continuous feed. When you already know what someone had for breakfast, the surprise of seeing them in person is somewhat diminished.
And then there is the paradox of the modern public display of affection. We live in the golden age of the PDA. Couples announce their anniversaries with slide shows. Families post coordinated outfits for festivals. Friendships are commemorated with “appreciation posts” of baroque emotional intensity. The declarations have never been louder or more frequent. The relationships, statistically, have never been more fragile.
Divorce rates climb. Friendships dissolve over a single inflammatory tweet. Families splinter over WhatsApp forwards. The online performance of devotion seems almost inversely proportional to its durability offline. We have, it seems, confused documentation with feeling, reach with depth, and visibility with love.
There is something almost poignant about this — people posting tribute reels for relationships that are already, privately, ending. The Instagram caption lags behind the reality by about three months. The photograph preserves the illusion the way formaldehyde preserves a specimen: perfectly, and without life.
The old woman weeping at the gate was performing nothing. There was no camera to catch the angle of her grief, no audience to validate it, no metric by which to measure its impact. It existed purely because it was true. That is what made it unbearable and unforgettable in equal measure.
This is not, to be fair, entirely a story of decline. Connectivity has genuine gifts. The grandmother who once waited three weeks for a postcard now receives a video of her grandchild’s first steps within minutes. The cousin separated by continents is present — imperfectly, through a pixelated screen, but present — at the birthday party. Something real is preserved by these tools, even if something else is lost.
And it would be sentimental to pretend that all those old tears were purely authentic. Families are complicated. Some of those goodbyes mixed genuine love with relief. Some of the weeping aunts were also, frankly, exhausting. Nostalgia has a well-known tendency to airbrush the difficult parts.
But what does seem genuinely lost is the cultural permission to let a goodbye mean something. To stand at a gate and feel the weight of separation without reaching for a phone. To let the absence be real, just for a moment, before the notifications begin. The old goodbye taught us that love has a physical grammar — it lives in proximity, in the particular smell of someone’s kitchen, in the specific quality of their silence at the dinner table.
The old goodbye taught us that love has a physical grammar. These things do not transmit over Wi-Fi.
Perhaps the most honest thing we can say is this: we have traded depth for frequency, and we are not entirely sure we got the better deal. The feed is always full. The gate is always empty. And somewhere between the two, a particular kind of tenderness — unrehearsed, unselfconscious, and completely without likes — has quietly slipped away.
No one posted about it. No one noticed it go. Gradual but sudden demise.
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[1] Popular brands of cars in India in the late 1900s and early 2000s
Charudutta Panigrahi is an author. He can be reached at charudutta403@gmail.com.
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Before anyone can enter my building, I have to approve them. The request arrives on my phone through an app. Name. Photograph. Purpose of visit.
It is strange to have this much authority over a door I do not own.
The security guard knows my face now. By the time the office cab turns toward the entrance, my expression has already arranged itself. Chin level. Eyes steady. Mouth resting in that neutral line that suggests I am expected somewhere. I have learned the angle that prevents questions, the slight narrowing of the eyes that reads as purpose instead of uncertainty.
The guard notices before I stop. His back straightens. The chair shifts behind him. For a second we look at each other through glass and distance. Then the small salute. A nod.
I return it without smiling too much.
It gives me an unreasonable amount of happiness. For those few seconds, I feel official. Important. As though I sign documents that matter.
The gate opens without delay.
Bougainvillea spill over the compound wall in disciplined pink. The buildings are painted a respectable beige, the kind that promises longevity. Children cycle in slow circles in the evening. There is a fountain that works on weekends.
I live here.
On paper, it sounds like arrival.
The apartment is on the thirteenth floor. Rented. I correct myself even in my head, as if the walls might overhear arrogance and respond by peeling faster.
My job is stable. The salary comes on time. Most of it leaves on time too. Rent. Loan. Groceries. Wi Fi. Electricity. The arithmetic of adulthood. There is no emergency fund. There is, instead, faith in continuity.
Nothing dramatic must happen.
Before I open my banking app to check the balance, I make a guess. I calculate what should be there. I add a little extra, just in case the universe appreciates optimism. For half a second, before the real number appears, I inhabit that slightly larger life.
My phone buzzes before my eyes are fully open. Emails. Calendars. Deadlines. Proof that I am employable, that I am responsible, that I am, by most standards, doing well.
Doing well is a cage with good lighting.
The fridge is full in a quiet way. Vegetables in transparent boxes. Protein measured. I hit my daily intake. I hydrate. I function. There is a bed that does not sink in the middle.
Doing well is not the same as being free, but it photographs better.
Some days, I am careless. If the milk smells slightly wrong, I throw it away without boiling it into submission. If the coriander wilts, I don’t resurrect it in water. I have, on occasions, ordered cute ceramic coasters because they made the table look like someone more relaxed lives here. When things arrive at this house, I check my account immediately.
In the evenings, when the light falls softly against the balcony grill, I look at the corners of the house and imagine painting them a color that would surprise someone. A blue that does not apologize. A yellow that refuses subtlety. Instead, I search for renter friendly tape. I press frames against the wall gently, as if the plaster is a sleeping animal I must not wake.
There are rules to inhabiting what is not yours.
I was born into caution, into a home where nothing was extravagant, but everything was accounted for. The lights stayed on because someone calculated and paid for the electricity> Dreams were allowed, but only the practical ones. It had to be something with benefits.
I learned early that comfort is rented. That it can be revoked.
Even here, in a gated society with biometric entry and a clubhouse I have never used, I remove my shoes carefully. I wipe the kitchen counter twice. I do not drill without permission. The idea of permanence feels like an overstep.
Sometimes, at night, I stand at the window and look at the other towers — so many lit rectangles, so many people paying on the first. The sameness is almost tender.
I think about the education loan tenure the way some people think about weather forecasts. Eight years if nothing goes wrong. Fewer, if I am stricter with myself. More, if life decides to experiment.
I lower my voice when discussing money, as if the currency might overhear and leave.
I was raised to believe in floors, not wings.
At work, someone talks about buying land on the outskirts of the city. Another mentions investing in something volatile and exciting. I nod. I calculate my remaining EMI[1]. I imagine the first of next month waiting patiently, already hungry.
In the apartment, I light a candle — lavender and patchouli, balance it in a jar. The flame makes the beige walls look intentional. I curate softness because chaos would be irresponsible. I call exhaustion discipline.
The melatonin waits on the nightstand, a small excuse to stop thinking about the math, about parents who age in percentages, about the way one emergency could rearrange everything.
I take it.
In the dark, I do not think about failure. I have met failure. We are acquainted. Failure is loud. It has witnesses. What unsettles me is the possibility of sliding backward quietly. Of losing the salute at the gate, the lift.
I stand in a house that is not mine, eating measured protein, watering plants I cannot root into the ground.
Still, there is a quiet rage — a grief for the woman I could have been if survival had not been my full-time job.
Someone has been living my life overnight and leaving me with the bill — not a crushing debt, just the lifelong payment plan of being almost comfortable.
The gate will open for me tomorrow.
The rent will leave on the first.
The loan will leave on the first.
The job will still be there.
I sign the receipt. Not because I want to, but because I don’t want to know what happens when you do not pay.
Anupriya Pandey is a writer from India. Her work wanders between tragedy and comedy, with a voice that is equal parts self-deprecating and sincere. Her writing has been previously published in Belladonna Comedy, Little Old Lady Magazine, 5 on the Fifth, and more.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Radha Chakravarty is a writer, critic and translator and has now added poetry to her already considerable oeuvre. Her achievements as an academic are impressive. She has co-edited The Essential Tagore and edited Shades of Difference: Selected Writings of Rabindranath Tagore (Social Science Press, 2015). She is the author of Feminism and Contemporary Women Writers (Routledge, 2008) and Novelist Tagore: Gender and Modernity in Selected Texts (Routledge, 2013). She has translated a wide range of literary works by Rabindranath Tagore and works by Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Mahasweta Devi. She has edited Bodymaps: Stories by South Asian Women and co-edited Writing Feminism: South Asian Voices and Writing Freedom: South Asian Voices. She has published poetry widely online and in print.
Professor Chakravarty’s second book of poems, In Your Eyes A River, brings together poems which evoke both real, travelled to and imagined worlds, aiming to bracket and highlight traces of the extraordinary within the ordinary aspects of human experience. They demonstrate a keen and keenly documented awareness of the profound realities that lie beneath the fabric of our daily lives.
The poems in In Your Eyes A River are replete with memories and infused with traces of nostalgia. Particularly moving is the seemingly autobiographical poem about her father, the titular poem: You never left Shyamsiddhi./In your heart you carried a home, / in your eyes a river, in the soles of your feet,/ the swing and shift of a bamboo sanko,/ narrow bridge of precarious crossings/…..the lost ground of your birth,/forsaken foundations of your fast-transforming self, the absent source of mine.”The poem moves towards a sense of closure as she writes: “I stand face to face with your impossible story,/ and find at last the missing opening lines of mine.” The poem is suffused by a sense of nostalgia for a place hardly visited except through the act of imaginative recreation, the mind’s eye.
Some of the poems in this collection demonstrate the poet’s experimentation with some short haiku-like forms and even single-word lines occasionally to create a sharper focus and emphasis. A lot of poems are ample evidence of her meticulous attention to details of the art and craft of poetry. Thus her poem, ‘Blue Gold’ on indigo not only unfolds not only contrapuntally[1] but also encapsulates within itself the dark history of colonialism, slave labour and human suffering.
One poem which particularly resonated with me is about the slowing down of the frenetic pace of life, presumably after years of active service: “no setting the alarm for crack of dawn/no scanning the TV for breaking news /no boiling water for morning tea/ no opening curtains, shaking out sheets/no tidying, dusting, cleaning up/no ironing creases, putting out trash/no catching the train, no rushing to work,/no chasing the tight deadline/no putting on a public mask/to face the measuring gaze.” By the next stanza, the idea of change between two different phases of life acquires an existential dimension. In a changed routine, the poetic persona finds herself moulting and changing, facing and acknowledging her ever changing, unpredictable self, “the mutating stranger that is me.”
In yet another poem, the poetic persona assumes the voice of a renowned female scholar from ancient India, Gargi ,who “thirsts to know” about the “weave of life and the warp that holds all forms of being,/ from the remotest realms of abstract divinity to the limit of human knowing ” muses about posing “the impossible question.”
The figure of the transgressive, rebellious and recalcitrant woman who breaks the mould re-appears in the next poem as well. It draws from a women’s retelling of the Ramayana, that poses a counter narrative to dominant narratives of the epic. In this powerfully and poignantly reimagined poem, ‘Another Story’, the poet draws on the narrative of the 16th century poet Chandrabati, who “questions the unquestionable”, thereby interrogating the hegemonic narrative of Valmiki and the Tulsidas Ramayana. The story narrated by Chandrabati centres around the figure of Sita, telling the reader about Sita’s miraculous birth and later story, instead. Sita’s story is not for “the men in royal courts” “but a “folk song for women in six brief parts.” a song which “shuns the epic scale.” In this version of the epic, Rama is not a divine hero, but a fallible man and a “jealous husband.” Chandrabati’s narrative questions where heroism really lies, whether in warfare and violence or the sustenance of everyday life. Moreover, even if women’s voices have been erased from history, there are women’s songs where “my version of Sita’s story lives on.” Chandrabati’s “unfinished song” also arouses the “critics’ ire” who dismiss it as a fragment, since the male critics police the boundaries of the literary establishment and often become (self-appointed) custodians of it.
Additionally, there are poems of tourism and travel, some of them set in Italy. Tourist spots are visited and reflected on, often providing fuel to fire the imagination. From sunrise in the hills of Kanchenjunga to her visit to Darjeeling, to the volcanoes of Etna and Vesuvius, are all skilfully assimilated into Chakravarty’s poetry.
Chakravarty’s poetic persona is also a witness to history and its outrages. In the poem ‘Wounded Walls’, “scarred walls remember the shots/that brought down the dead.” Yet, it does not “quite go as planned” since a the past resurfaces as a commemorative “unwelcome ghost” who rises from the dead to “haunt the present with/undead questions.” Elsewhere, the poetic persona , battle scarred but resilient, documents “lingering inscriptions/on memory’s skin”, of “battles fought/wounds that healed.” Questions pertinent to the present time are raised as in the poem ‘Ceasefire’: “If captives walk free, will our hearts still/hold us hostage in wild tunnels of hate? If bombs stop dropping, will the shrapnel/of memory vanish, from festering wounds? If the bloodbath halts, will it staunch the grief/that oozes from hearts lately bereaved?”
Sensitively written and meticulously crafted, Radha Chakravarty’s collection of poems is sure to resonate with all those who have struggled, suffered loss and displacement. Her poems help define that which is essentially and indubitably human, in the middle of climate chaos and war, tumult and change. Attentive to history and mindful of its excesses, the poems assert a vision of sanity and of shared humanity, much needed at this point when the global order has descended into chaos and seems to be teetering on the verge of immeasurable destruction.
[1] A contrapuntal poem is one which can be read individually and together, vertically or horizontally simultaneously as a single harmonious or dissonant piece.
Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory. Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.
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After shivering for some time in the winter morning, she mustered courage to pour cold water all over her body. She finished her bath quickly and was out within minutes. Sitting in front of the dressing table she filled the parting-line of her hair with vermillion, moving her hands softly not to make the red and white bangles jingle. She was not supposed to wake up the man who was lying asleep on the bed. The man who was a stranger till the previous day had become the most important person in her life — her husband. She looked at her sleeping husband and smiled coyly. She thought that she had fallen in love with him. In some of the Bollywood films she had watched, the heroines had smiled the same way when they were in love.
Before stepping out of her room, she adjusted the tip of her saree over the head so as to cover the face fully. A woman is not supposed to show her face to her in-laws and the people around. They would only see her bangled hands and her feet. Rest of her body, including her face, would always stay hidden in the complex wraps of the saree.
She walked towards the kitchen with butterflies in her stomach. It was her first day in the house and she had to prove herself to be a traditional daughter-in-law, worthy enough to belong to the house. For years, her mother kept on reminding her that her most important task in life was to become a dutiful daughter-in-law in her husband’s household.
Her aunt had brought the marriage proposal as the groom’s party was known to her. “The groom’s parents are not as greedy as many others in our community. They won’t keep pestering with demands apart from the dowry given at the time of wedding. They have agreed to take her in with a small dowry and haven’t demanded a car. Even the groom does not smoke or drink. Your daughter is the luckiest girl in the community.” The virtues of the groom and his parents lay in things they did not do and not in what they did.
In the kitchen, the mother-in-law was waiting for her. “This is your world now. I have asked the maidservant to stop coming from today onwards. Now that you are here, she is not needed,” she said. She did not acknowledge how good a deal that was — a maidservant who comes with a dowry and works for free lifelong.
“You can make flat bread for noon with vegetables and cooked lentils. Now that it is your first day, we are waiting to enjoy a sweetmeat made by you. If you have any doubt, you can ask me. I will be there in my room,” her mother-in-law said.
Her head covered by the anchal[1] moved in a nod. “How kind is my mother-in-law! She did not talk to me rudely,” she heaved a sigh of relief.
For the next couple of hours, she moved within the kitchen, searching for spices and utensils, kneading the flour, cooking the flatbreads and cutting vegetables. She kept the food ready on the table and informed her mother-in-law. Her husband and father-in-law ate the food without any comments and the father-in-law left a 100 rupee note on the table for her as per the custom of doling out a tip for the first food she cooked. He never had given away that big tip in any restaurant.
After they finished their meal, her mother-in-law ate hers. While she was doing the dishes, mother-in-law told her: “We do not waste food. We are quite strict about it. Whatever food is left from the previous meal, I keep aside in the refrigerator for the maid. She used to happily take them home. But she is not coming now.”
“Don’t worry mom. I will eat them,” she told her mother-in-law, who then retired to her room. She looked at the refrigerator. It was a relic from the century when refrigerators were invented. It was a matter of debate whether the paint or the rust owned the exterior more. The interior was the cheapest mode of having a glimpse of Himalayas as the icicles hung from the roof and glaciers had formed in the corners. The refrigerator had the unique quality of turning any food item into the most unpalatable substance.
She looked into the casserole. There were a few flatbreads left, which were sufficient for her. But as per the instructions, she had to finish those in the refrigerator. She took out the flatbreads from the previous day. They were hard and tasteless like dry wood and when she heated them, they became harder and she could barely chew them. The curries kept in the refrigerator did not even remotely taste like them.
The next day, she made fewer flatbreads. Her father-in-law opened the casserole, looked in and stood up and left for his room without uttering anything. An anxious mother-in-law opened the casserole and hurried towards her in the kitchen. “Did you make fewer flatbreads today?” she asked.
She was horrified to see her mother-in-law looking anxious. “Yes, I had a few old flatbreads in the refrigerator. So I made less,” she stammered.
“What did you do? Your father-in-law wants to see the casserole full of flatbreads. Else, he would sulk and leave without eating,” she said. “Quickly make a few more. I will pacify him and bring him back to the table,” mother-in-law said.
She hurriedly made the extra flatbreads and filled up the casserole. Like the previous day, she ate the old ones and kept the fresh flatbreads in the refrigerator for the next day.
Her days were fully engaged in cooking, washing and cleaning. She was happy that nobody had complaints about her.
At night, she applied kohl in her eyes and adjusted the vermillion and looked at herself in the mirror. She wanted to look her best when her husband would see her without the veil. She wanted him to feel lucky to have got her as his wife and expected a few nice words in return for the day-long work.
As soon as he entered the room, he closed the door behind him and switched off the light. After a few days, she realised that he was not interested in seeing her face. In that house, she moved about cooking, cleaning and washing clothes, without a face. They did not see her hands either. Chopping vegetables and scrubbing vessels were turning them rough and dark and the red and white bangles had lost their sheen.
They did not notice her feet nor her saree. She was nourishing them, providing them clean clothes to wear, keeping their toilets clean and tidying up their rooms. She was everywhere. But, like the air they breathed, she was invisible to them. She stopped applying kohl in her eyes and adorning herself. After some time, she became quite disinterested in seeing herself in the mirror.
She started falling sick quite often. Most days she would have stomach aches, sometimes the belly would bloat up and then at times she would throw up. Most days she did not want to eat. The plate of hard, dry flatbread and stale curries were nauseating. But she would force the food down her throat so as to not throw them in the bin. Dark circles had formed around her eyes and her skin was looking pale and lifeless. Nobody knew anything about what was happening to her until one day she collapsed on the floor.
They took her to the hospital and the doctor asked her husband about her food. “She eats what we eat,” he said. Unsatisfied by that reply, he turned to her and asked: “what do you eat? You seem to be having stomach problems for quite some time.”
“I usually eat stale flatbreads and curries from the previous day,” she said.
“Her stomach is terribly upset. Give her something fresh to eat before taking the medicines,” doctor ordered.
Her husband bought fresh flatbread and lentils. The aroma of the lavishly buttered flatbread and spiced lentils filled the room. She broke a tiny piece of flatbread, dipped it in the lentil curry and chewed it. But the body did not accept that unfamiliar food. It threw up all that went inside.
Sangeetha G is a journalist in India. Her flash fiction and short stories have appeared in Orange Blossom Review, Decolonial Passage, Sky Island Journal, Down in the Dirt, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Kitaab International, Borderless Journal and Indian Review. Her stories have won the Himalayan Writing Retreat Flash Fiction contest and the Strands International Flash Fiction contest. Her debut novel, Drop of the Last Cloud, was published in May 2023.
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Zihan stirred in his sleep. A chill breath passing over his limbs had awakened him. He strained his eyes, still heavy with wine fumes, and looked around. Where was he? This was not his room and this wasn’t his bed. He was lying in what seemed to be a small, confined space under an ornate gilded ceiling in a bed so soft, his limbs were sinking into its depths. The sky was paling with first light and long beams from a dying moon streamed in through the open window. The fragrance of an unknown flower, wild and sweet, filled the room.
He turned his head towards the window. Something, like an opalescent haze, was obscuring his vision. At first, he thought it was a sheet of mist. Then, before his amazed eyes, it started to take a shape and form. It became a woman. He could see her slender limbs, smooth as white satin, shimmering through the garment that swayed and billowed around her form. Diaphanous as a film of gossamer. So light, it seemed woven out of moonbeams. Her face was swathed in mist.
The figure moved from the window and came gliding towards him. He could see her face clearly now. A perfect oval with apricot shaped eyes, brows like strung bows and hair that fell down her back like a sheet of black silk. He stared at the vision of loveliness so long and hard …his eyes began to hurt. He had never seen such beauty in a woman before.
She stood by his bed for a while gazing into his eyes, then lay down, her body light as a feather against his. Taking his face in her hands, she caressed it with a tenderness that reminded him of his mother’s touch. She drew the silky strands of her floating hair all over his naked body. Across his chest and abdomen, over his genitals, thighs and legs, down to the insteps of his feet. The wildflower scent from her limbs filled his nostrils. Her kisses fluttered on his lips, soft and cold as drifting snow…
The wine, still running in his blood, quivered in his veins. His limbs, untouched by a woman before, heaved luxuriously and his eyes closed in ecstasy. He drifted away…
How long he lay in this state of bliss, he couldn’t tell. It could be minutes. It could be hours. Gradually, an uneasy feeling came over him. Something heavy was pressing against his body. It was squashing his chest and squeezing the breath out of his lungs. He moved aside but the pressure grew in intensity, driving him further and further towards the edge of the bed. And now his heart beat rapidly with an unknown dread. What was happening? Washe still asleep and this a fearful dream? Suddenly his eyes sprang open and what he saw sent currents of ice water rippling down his spine. He felt the hot blood pulsing and pounding in his ears. A muscle twitched and shuddered in his cheek…
The reed-slim body of the woman beside him had bloated to a colossal size. Her eyes, thin slits in the vast globe of her face, glittered with hate. Her mouth was a deep red gash through which yellow teeth, long and sharp as a panther’s fangs, hung to her chin.
The mountain of flesh was growing larger and larger every moment. It was filling the bed. He would fall over the edge any moment now. A scream gathered in his lungs but froze before it could reach his throat…
Suddenly she sprang on him; her nails sharp as claws ripping the skin off his chest and thighs. Digging her teeth into the soft flesh just below the right shoulder, she bit off a large hunk. Zihan’s eyes were glazed with pain and fear. He stared mesmerized as the monstrous creature rose from the bed and swayed and shuffled towards the opposite wall. She wore a garment of sheer white muslin that swelled and surged like waves about her form. Blood dripped from her slavering mouth and fell on the floor as her great body waddled, like a gorilla’s, from side to side. And now, for the first time, Zihan saw the coffin. It was open…
Zihan screamed. Shriek after shriek burst from the throat that had been frozen all this while, hit the walls, and sent fearful echoes all through the house. Then, exhausted and half dead from shock and loss of blood, he lay motionless, whimpering like a child.
Kueilan was a light sleeper and the first to hear the cries. They seemed to be coming from the dead girl’s room. Her heart thudded with fear as she rushed to it and flung the door open. She stood where she was for a while, her eyes glued to the coffin. It stood in the same place but the seal was broken and its open lid rested against the wall. A lily-white hand with long tapering fingers was dangling from the edge. And now the lid began to move downwards. Slowly, soundlessly, it was falling in place. In a few moments it would reach the hand and crush it. A tremor ran through Kueilan’s frame. Her mouth opened in a scream but before she could utter a sound, the hand glided over the edge and slipped into the hollow where the rest of the dead girl lay. Then, before Kueilan’s amazed eyes, the coffin closed, the seal came together and all was as it had been.
‘Published with permission from Penguin Random House India from Creeping Shadows (2026)’.
About the Book:
The stories in Creeping Shadows are spread over a vast canvas, both in terms of time span and locale. A teahouse in ancient China. A brothel in nineteenth-century Calcutta. A forest lodge in Bankura. An old mansion in Bangladesh. A university campus in today’s Delhi. Beginning as human-interest narratives, they end with sudden, unexpected twists that raise hair ends and send trickles of ice water down the spine. Here are tales of shadows, tingles and chills…
About the Author:
Aruna Chakravarti has been principal of a prestigious women’s college of Delhi University for ten years. She is also a well-known academic, creative writer and translator with eighteen published books on record. They comprise five novels, two books of short stories, two academic works and nine volumes of translation. Her first novel, The Inheritors (published by Penguin Random House), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and her second, Jorasanko, received critical acclaim and became a bestseller. Daughters of Jorasanko, a sequel to Jorasanko, has sold widely and received rave reviews. Her novel Suralakshmi Villa was adjudged ‘Novel of the year (India 2020)’ by Indian Bibliography published in The Journal of Commonwealth LiteratureU.K. Her other well-known works include The Mendicant Prince which has been shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize, and Through a Looking Glass: Stories. Her translated works include an anthology of songs from Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitabitaan, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s Srikanta and Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Those Days, First Light and Primal Woman: Stories. Her most recent work is titled Rising from the Dust. Among the various awards she has received are Vaitalik Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and Sarat Puraskar. She is also a scriptwriter and producer of seven multi-media presentations based on her novels. Comprising dramatized readings, interspersed with songs and accompanied by a visual presentation by professional artists and singers, these programmes have been widely acclaimed and performed in many parts of India and abroad.
There were very few things that Sir Mark Tully touched which did not turn to gold. In his later years, disenchanted by journalism, he resorted to making documentaries on steam trains. Accompanied solely by a production crew and armed with the knowledge that comes with instinct, Sir Mark established that the locomotives pulling these trains — running on steam — did exist in India, even if he had to crisscross his way to the western peripheries of Kutch to make his point. By then, the BBC, whose outstanding representative he had become, and whose torch he held aloft in times of crises, had become enamoured by the crony capitalism of the centre-right, which we would go on to see in later years.
Born in the southern suburb of Tolluygunge in Calcutta to parents who were Indian in all but name, Sir Mark was sent to study in England at the age of nine before joining the organisation which would, for better or worse, be the making of him. Known essentially for his factual reporting, albeit with the possession of a nuanced eye that made his stories seem humane, Sir Mark’s passion for conversation with his subjects made him highly esteemed in the eyes of his peers. The added benefit of reporting on events that shaped modern India — the Bhopal gas tragedy, Operation Blue Star, Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, the Babri Masjid demolition, et al — was the ream of concepts he had up his sleeve, and of which he made good use when he started writing books.
Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle was Sir Mark’s first book, but it was No Full Stops In India that embellished him as a legend who could comfortably balance storytelling with a subtle hint of refinement, and who had the repertoire of knowing his subjects inside. Despite being born in the country, he was only given the privilege of being an Overseas Citizen of India (OCI), but this did not deter Sir Mark from his goal — to tell the stories of real Indians and real India to those who did not know where to look. All his life, he rallied behind the cause of religious pluralism and batted for the inclusion of marginalised communities and minorities into the mainstream, but died a man broken by the scars of battle.
Much like the Ashokan rock edicts that were unknown to the ordinary Indian till James Prinsep deciphered the Brahmi script in the early 19th century, Sir Mark’s work went largely unnoticed in the country until he left the BBC. Harassed and harangued by the Indira Gandhi government, he had also been forced to leave the country when the Emergency was imposed. However, return he did, to his country of birth, and stayed loyal — to its people and to the truth — and continued challenging those in power with constant, if gratifying, attacks.
Telling stories with a precision that most remain unaware of despite the possession of all-seeing eyes, Sir Mark’s work remained a terrifying but ambitious challenge for any aspiring journalist to recreate. He left just the way he had wanted to leave, in the country of his birth, known as an Indian who had struck roots in its soil, blossomed in its spring and withered at its dusk. A man ahead of his times by several generations, Sir Mark Tully was an Indian we did not deserve.
Mohul Bhowmick is a national-level cricketer, sports journalist, poet, essayist and travel writer from Hyderabad, India. He has published five collections of poems and one travelogue so far. His latest book, The Past Is Another Country, came out in 2025. More of his work can be discovered on his website: www.mohulbhowmick.com.
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