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Review

Five Seasons in the Mussoorie Hills and Beyond

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title:  Scenes from the Magic Mountain: Five Seasons from the Mussoorie Hills and Beyond

Author: Ruskin Bond

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Recently Ruskin Bond turned ninety-two and from the various interviews he has been giving, one finds a single word that recurs in different forms in his interaction with his interviewers and that is ‘solitude.’ The recently published non-fiction book titled Scenes from the Magic Mountain: Five Seasons in the Mussoorie Hills and Beyond, captures this solitude and his deep, lifelong love for the Himalayas. It is a gentle, meditative reflection on the changing seasons, nature, and the quiet rhythms of daily life in Landour and Mussoorie, a place that he himself states to be his home for the last sixty-one years.  He had moved to Mussoorie in the early 1960s to write full time. In the ‘Introduction’ he tells us about how he moved into a cottage called Maplewood Lodge after renting a room from a lady called Ms. Bean and settled for good in these hills. The old and isolated cottage was tucked away in the shadow of a hill, but it brought him close to nature and helped him develop a rapport with it in all seasons. The open window of the small living room exposed him to the forest outside that seemed full of possibilities and the birdsong.

The book is not a novel or a continuous narrative; rather, it is a collection of vignettes, journal entries, and remembered moments.  It allows readers to experience the mountains exactly as Bond does, observing the nuances of the landscape over the course of five distinct seasons. Most of the entries are very brief, the lengthier ones are hardly more than a page in length, but through them Bond manages to give his readers his very close observations of the place as he experiences it through the five different seasons of the year. He divides the book into six parts, and the last part is called ‘The Eternal Season’. Each section begins with a suitable prologue borrowed from the Australian traveller John Lang’s mid-nineteenth century travelogue Wanderings in India (1869), a book which Bond had retrieved from oblivion and edited for the benefit of future readers.

Bond organises his observations into a seasonal framework, detailing the subtle shifts in his environment. In the first section ‘Spring’ we get detailed description of how the first tender leaves appear, bringing a sense of tentative warmth and new beginnings. Through his very perceptive and minute observations, we get visual images of the small birds that arrive to bathe and drink in the little pool beneath the walnut tree, water beetles and tiny fish that lurk in the shallows of the pool. The different varieties of birds that he has observed include two delicate little willow warblers, the whistling thrush, the wild ducks, eagles that fly high on the mountain, the cheeky mynah birds meeting under the eaves of the roof, and sparrows that flutter in and out of the room at will. Spring comes with its varieties of flowers with splashes of colour and Bond rightly describes how “the infection of spring spread simultaneously through the world of nature, and made them one”. The honeybees and butterflies also add to the beauty of the place and as he rightfully states, they do not recognise any “man-made border”.

The vignettes of summer have details of long, insect-filled, sun-drenched days that invite slow walks and quiet afternoons. Summer for Bond “was never entirely solitary”. As he sat in the window seat in his cottage and spent his mornings turning out stories, poems, essays, children’s tales and anything that came to his mind, he looked out upon a sociable gathering of trees that provided a recreation ground for different kinds of birds too. Very evocative descriptions of the mangoes, lichis as the fruits of summer and also the ice cream are drawn from his memories. He writes how as a boy he was engulfed in loneliness, and as a man in solitude. On some mornings when he carried his small table, chair and typewriter outside on to the knoll below one of the oaks, the different birds helped him with his punctuation. For his reflective and descriptive writing, he looked into the distance, at the purple hills merging with the azure sky; or examined a fallen leaf as it spiralled down from the tree and settled on the typewriter keys. The summer sun bathes everything with clear, warm light and the camera-eye of the narrator records everything to the minutest detail. He tells us about other prolific writers who were busy writing their books during this period while he produced not so much as a paragraph.

The monsoon is a defining feature of the hills, bringing mist, heavy downpours, and the lush abundance of the forest. “The first monsoon rain always felt like a beginning,” writes Bond and how this season is one of the most beautiful times of the year in the Himalayas. As the forest dripped and it rang with birdsong, Bond found it always worthwhile tramping through the forest above the stream to feast his eyes on the foliage that sprang up in tropical profusion. He tells us how the rains also heralded some seasonal visitors like leopards and several thousand leeches, and snakes as well as insects like grasshoppers, crickets and cicadas who produced different kinds of music.

When autumn arrives, burnished light, ripening fruit, and a golden hue take over the landscape and according to Bond it is the best time of the year in the hills. Now more than any other time of the year, the wildflowers come into their own and it is the best time for taking long walks. An atmosphere of peace and harmony descends on the hillside, and Bond watches the spectacular sunset as its faint glow spreads across the whitewashed walls of the ageing cottage, as though a part of that spectacular sunset has been left behind only for them. This season also occasionally brings in bears who come to the village to eat pumpkins, flying foxes sweeping across the roads and leopards circling the houses along with dogs. The cool, uplifting autumn breeze always stirred him to the marrow and Bond thought it to be the best aphrodisiac in the world.

Winter brings with it old silences, snow-laden trees, and the beauty of the serene Himalayan peaks against a clear blue sky. During Christmas when it was bitterly cold outside, the blazing wood fire in an old-fashioned fireplace made him enjoy the experience. Again, one day, after being cooped up in his room for several days, he set out for an enjoyable tramp outside in the snow-covered countryside with hardly anyone on the way. He also reminiscences about his school days when he took the train ride from his boarding school in Shimla to come to Dehradun and find occasional snowfall there. He also remembered the first time it snowed in Maplewood. From the windows he could see, up at the top of the hill, the deodars clothed in a mantle of white. “It was a fairyland: everything still and silent.”

The eight selected entries for the last section titled ‘The Eternal Season’ describe the quiet renewal that begins where all endings meet. Here Bond reflects on renewal and the passage of time across sixty years of living in the mountains, examining how the landscape remains wondrous despite changing times. All through his life he says he had been plodding along, singing his song, telling his tales in his own unhurried way and it didn’t matter if he hadn’t managed to get to the top of the mountain. He had lived his life at his own gentle pace and his long walk had brought its own sweet rewards; buttercups and butterflies along the way. He had been observing the natural world—along forest paths, during walks, storms, solitary afternoons, and shared silences.

Thoughtful, attentive and reflective, he offers the seasons not as events to be marked, but as a way of living in time.  In the penultimate entry he states: “In spite of all indications to the contrary, I have survived – as a writer, as an individual, as a breadwinner, as a lover of beauty. So many failure and setbacks along the way; but I suppose my inner stubbornness saw me through… And here I am, ninety-one, my own person, determined to live and love till my last breath.”

This aesthetically produced hard-bound book is not to be read chronologically from beginning to end but can be opened by the reader at leisure from whichever page or season he feels like, and he can go back to it again and again. It is a collector’s delight and also one to be gifted and recommended for anyone who loves to read about Ruskin Bond’s deep and lifelong love for the Himalayas. Bond’s poetic prose can hardly be imitated and some of the spontaneous poems that abound in the collection speak immensely of his ability to cross over genres of prose and poetry with utmost ease. The black and white interior illustrations that abound in the book also add extra charm and help the less-perceptive reader gain better understanding of the particular image or scenery that Bond talks about. One is also fascinated by his exquisite sense of subtle humour, that includes the ability to even laugh at oneself.

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

Click here to read the book excerpt.

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Categories
Poetry

Monsoon Afternoons

By Aardhra Chandran

MONSOON AFTERNOONS

The first heavy drops hit the dry clay tiles,
smacking a cracked blue plastic bucket left out in the yard.
Mud splatters the hem of an old lungi.
Under the veranda, the concrete stays dry and cool.

An old brass vessel catches the steady leak from the eaves,
clinking a slow, uneven rhythm into the small room 
where the fluorescent tube flickers and dies.

A neighbour drops off a bundle of jackfruit chips wrapped in newspaper,
asking when your train leaves, her voice loud against the sudden thunder.
The wet ink bleeds old headlines across her thumb like a bruise.

The smoke of a green mosquito coil rises from a tin plate,
making our eyes smart in the sudden dark.

We sit on the woven mat, measuring the exact inch of cold air
left between our shoulders against the red oxide wall,
waiting for the sky to clear so you can step out,
leaving three flattened stalks of straw unravelling where you sat.

Aardhra Chandran is a poet and postgraduate student from Kerala, India. Her work has appeared in Active Muse, Eunoia Review and anthologies, exploring everyday life and quiet emotional spaces.

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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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Review

Celebrating the Monsoon

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: The Fragrance of Rain: A Brief History of the Monsoon

Author: Stephen Alter

Publisher: Aleph Book Company  

Stephen Alter has long established himself as one of India’s finest chroniclers of landscape, memory, and the natural world. In The Fragrance of Rain: A Brief History of the Monsoon, he turns his attention to the phenomenon that has shaped the subcontinent more profoundly than perhaps any other force of nature—the monsoon. The result is a richly textured work that combines travel writing, environmental history, natural science, and cultural reflection into a compelling narrative that celebrates India’s most anticipated season.

At its heart, the book is a journey. Alter traces the progress of the monsoon from the southern coast of Kerala through the Western Ghats, the forests of Goa, the plains of North India, and the mist-covered hills of Mussoorie. Yet this is not merely a geographical expedition. It is also an exploration of the countless ways in which rain has influenced the lives, livelihoods, imagination, and history of the people of the Indian subcontinent. The monsoon emerges not simply as a weather system but as a civilisational force that has determined agricultural cycles, guided maritime trade, nurtured ecosystems, inspired artistic expression, and shaped political destinies.

A key strength of the book is Alter’s ability to weave together diverse strands of knowledge without losing narrative momentum. He moves effortlessly from meteorology to mythology, from ecology to economics, from history to literature. Readers encounter perfumers in Kannauj who preserve the scent of rain in tiny bottles, fishermen who read the skies with remarkable precision, scientists tracking elusive amphibians and glowing fungi, and artists whose works reflect humanity’s enduring fascination with clouds and storms. These encounters lend the book a vibrant human dimension and prevent it from becoming a purely academic study.

The prose is among the finest aspects of the work. He writes with the sensitivity of a naturalist and the observational acuity of a seasoned traveller. His descriptions of rain-laden landscapes are evocative without becoming sentimental. Whether portraying the first monsoon clouds gathering over the Arabian Sea or the dense mist enveloping Himalayan ridges, he captures the sensory richness of the season with remarkable clarity. Readers can almost smell the damp earth, hear the distant thunder, and feel the coolness that follows a long spell of summer heat.

The title itself points to one of the book’s central concerns: the emotional and sensory experience of rain. Alter understands that the monsoon occupies a unique place in the Indian imagination. It is a season associated with longing and fulfilment, romance and renewal, abundance and uncertainty. Across centuries, poets, musicians, painters, and storytellers have celebrated its arrival. The author explores these cultural representations with insight, demonstrating how the monsoon has become a recurring metaphor for transformation, desire, and hope.

At the same time, The Fragrance of Rain does not romanticise its subject. Alter acknowledges the monsoon’s unpredictability and its capacity for destruction. Floods, landslides, crop failures, and storms are integral to the story. As climate change intensifies weather extremes, the monsoon has become increasingly erratic, raising urgent questions about environmental sustainability and human resilience. Without becoming alarmist, the author highlights these concerns and encourages readers to appreciate the delicate balance upon which ecosystems and communities depend.

The book also succeeds as a work of environmental writing because of its deep attention to biodiversity. Alter’s fascination with wildlife and natural habitats is evident throughout. His encounters with rare species and fragile ecosystems reveal a world that thrives because of seasonal rainfall yet remains vulnerable to ecological disruption. These passages add depth and reinforce the idea that the monsoon is not merely a climatic event but a life-giving process that sustains countless forms of existence.

The Fragrance of Rain is much more than a history of weather. It is a meditation on nature, culture, memory, and belonging. Stephen Alter has produced a work that is informative, beautifully written, and deeply engaging. By blending personal observation with historical and ecological insight, he reminds us that the monsoon remains one of India’s most powerful and defining experiences. Like the season it celebrates, the book is refreshing, nourishing, and lingering in its impact—a rewarding read for anyone interested in India, nature, or the intricate relationship between climate and civilisation.

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

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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Categories
Essay

One Soul, Two Seas

By Charudutta Panigrahi

Goa
Odisha
From Public Domain

There is a cartographic trick that India plays on the careless observer. Place a finger on Goa, cradled in the lap of the Western Ghats where the Mandovi meets the Arabian Sea. Now drag that finger clean across the peninsula — past the Deccan plateau, past the red laterite and the black cotton soil — until it arrives at Odisha, where the Mahanadi fans into the Bay of Bengal. The distance is vast. The terrain changes several times over. And yet, when you finally arrive, you feel, inexplicably, that you have not travelled at all. You have merely walked from one room of the same house into another.

Goa and Odisha are India’s fraternal twins, stationed like sentinels on opposite coasts, facing outward toward different oceans but turning inward toward an almost identical soul. They share no border, no common neighbour, no obvious historical corridor. And yet their resemblances are so startling, so layered, that they make a quiet mockery of the assumption that east and west shall never meet. In this country, at least, they have been meeting all along.

The Plate That Speaks First

Begin where all honest cultural inquiry must begin — at the table. In both Goa and Odisha, the grammar of a meal is written in two words: rice and fish. The xitt-kodi of a Goan Catholic household — rice with fish curry — is a mirror image of the bhata-machha that anchors every Odia thali. The curry leaves may change, the tamarind may yield to kokum, but the fundamental covenant between grain and sea remains unbroken.

Both states worship the coconut with equal fervour. It thickens their gravies, sweetens their desserts, oils their hair, and thatches their roofs. And in both places, the humble samosa — that deep-fried triangle of spiced potato — enjoys a curious and disproportionate celebrity, sold at every bus stand, every temple gate, every rain-drenched evening stall, as if it were the official snack of the coastline itself.

Weavers of Light

If food is the first language, cloth is the second. Odisha’s handloom tradition is among the most sophisticated in the world. The Sambalpuri ikat, with its geometric precision born of a tie-and-dye technique older than memory, is a textile that calculates like mathematics and sings like poetry. The Bomkai of Ganjam, the Kotpad of Koraput — each weave carries a district’s autobiography in its warp and weft.

Goa’s handloom heritage is no less poignant. The Kunbi saree, woven by the indigenous Kunbi community in checks of red and maroon, is a garment of earthy defiance — a refusal to vanish beneath the weight of colonial and commercial textile culture. In both states, the handloom is not an industry. It is an act of inheritance.

The handicraft traditions run parallel with uncanny symmetry. Odisha’s Pattachitra — those luminous scroll paintings rendered on cloth with pigments drawn from stone, earth, and lamp-black — find a philosophical cousin in Goa’s azulejos-inspired tile art and the painted terracotta work of its hinterlands. Odisha’s silver filigree from Cuttack, those impossibly intricate webs of metal that seem to have been spun by patient spiders, speak the same aesthetic dialect as the filigree and brass work of Goan artisans.

Temples, Tides, and the Slow Pulse

Both states are drenched in divinity. Odisha shelters the Jagannath Temple of Puri, whose Rath Yatra rolls through the world’s imagination every year, and the Konark Sun Temple, a stone chariot frozen mid-gallop toward the dawn. The Lingaraj Temple of Bhubaneswar presides over a city that was once a forest of a thousand shrines. Goa, often misread as merely a beach destination, guards some of the oldest Hindu temples in western India — the Mangeshi Temple, the Shanta Durga Temple, the Mahalasa Narayani, the Tambdi Surla — alongside the Basilica of Bom Jesus, where the remains of St. Francis Xavier lie in baroque silence. In both states, the sacred is not a Sunday affair. It is the air.

And then there is the pace. Both Goa and Odisha move at a tempo that the hyperventilating metros of India find baffling. The Goan susegad — that philosophy of contented ease — is a first cousin of the unhurried dignity with which Odisha conducts its daily life. Long before the global “slow living” movement became a wellness-industry buzzword, these two states had been practising it for centuries, not as aspiration but as instinct.

Songs in Different Scales

The musical traditions reveal yet another layer of kinship. Odisha gave the world Odissi — both the dance and the music — a classical tradition of astonishing fluidity, shaped by poets like Jayadeva, whose Gita Govinda remains one of the supreme lyric achievements in any language. The folk traditions — Dalkhai, Gotipua, the tribal Dhemsa — pulse with a rhythmic vitality that no concert hall can contain.

Goa’s musical soul lives in the Mando, a slow, swaying ballad of love and longing born from the encounter between Konkani sensibility and Portuguese fado. The Dulpod, faster and more festive, is its playful sibling. And beneath the tourist-facing trance and EDM, Goa’s folk traditions — Fugdi, Dhalo, Dekhni — carry the same rooted, communal energy that Odisha’s village squares have known for generations.

Goa’s Tiatr and Odisha’s Jatra are born of the same impulse — raucous, deeply local theatre traditions that turn village squares into stages, blend music with social satire, and have for generations served as the people’s newspaper, courtroom, and concert hall rolled into one.

The Literary Mirror

The literary parallels are quietly profound. Fakir Mohan Senapati, the father of modern Odia literature, wrote Chha Mana Atha Guntha — a searing, ironic novella about land, power, and peasant dispossession — in the 1890s. Across the map, Goa’s literary tradition in Konkani, shaped by figures like Bakibab Borkar (the poet-laureate of Konkani verse), Ravindra Kelekar, and Damodar Mauzo, has grappled with similar themes of identity, colonial memory, and the tension between tradition and modernity. Odisha’s Pratibha Ray and Goa’s Mauzo — both Jnanpith laureates — wrote in languages the literary mainstream often overlooks, yet carved from Odia and Konkani respectively a body of work so luminous that the nation’s highest literary honour had no choice but to find its way to their doors. Both literatures are enormous in depth and criminally under-read outside their states.

Even the economies rhyme. Both states sit on vast mineral wealth — iron ore in Goa, iron ore, bauxite and coal in Odisha — and both have built significant chapters of their economic story on extraction. Mining has been, for decades, a genuine engine of revenue and employment. But prosperity extracted from the earth exacts its own price. Both states have watched hills reshaped and rivers thickened with slurry, and both have grappled with the same difficult question that every resource-rich society must eventually face: where does sustainable use end and irreversible damage begin? The Dongria Kondh resistance in Odisha’s Niyamgiri hills and Goa’s prolonged civic movement against unregulated mining are stories of communities recognising that the wealth beneath their feet should not come at the cost of the world above it. In both states, the mandate is the same: to mine responsibly, restore what can be restored, and find an economic imagination that honours both the ledger and the landscape.

Stone, Laterite, and the Architecture of Belonging

The buildings of Goa and Odisha could not, at first glance, look more different. Odisha’s architectural glory resides in the Kalinga style of temple building — a tradition that flowered between the sixth and thirteenth centuries and produced some of the most breathtaking sacred structures on the subcontinent. The Rekha Deula, with its curvilinear tower soaring heavenward, the Pidha Deula, with its stepped pyramid, and the barrel-vaulted Khakhara Deula — each is a masterclass in proportion, carved from sandstone and laterite without a drop of mortar, held together by iron dowels and the sheer precision of stone cut to stone. The Lingaraj Temple rises a hundred and eighty feet; the Sun Temple at Konark was conceived as a stone chariot for Surya himself.

Goa’s architectural signature, meanwhile, is the Indo-Portuguese house — the balcão-fronted villa with its oyster-shell windows, its Baroque churches, its colour-washed facades in ochre and cerulean and terracotta. Where Odisha built upward in devotion, Goa built outward in conviviality.

And yet the kinship runs deeper than surface style. Both traditions are rooted in laterite — that rust-red, iron-rich stone quarried from the earth itself — and in an instinctive dialogue between structure and climate. Goan houses, whether Hindu or Catholic, were designed around the monsoon: thick laterite walls to absorb the heat, sloping roofs of Mangalore tile to shed the deluge, courtyards to channel light and air. The traditional Hindu house in Goa, with its rajangan (courtyard) and its Tulasi Vrindavan (holy basil) at its centre, is an inward-looking sanctuary not unlike the courtyard homes of rural Odisha, where domestic life orbits an open-air heart and thatched or tiled roofs slope against the same seasonal fury. In both states, the house is not merely shelter. It is a cosmology — oriented by Vastu[1], shaped by rain, and built from the very ground on which it stands.

The Sacred as Daily Bread

Spirituality in Goa and Odisha is not a compartment of life; it is the wallpaper. In Odisha, they say Bara Masa re Tera Parba — thirteen festivals in twelve months — and this is not hyperbole but arithmetic. From Rath Yatra to Raja Parba, from Nuakhai to Kumar Purnima, the Odia calendar is a procession of devotion, agriculture, and communal joy so tightly woven that one cannot tell where worship ends and daily life begins. The festivals are tied to the rice cycle — seeding, sowing, harvesting — so that the act of farming itself becomes a prayer. Odisha is a land where Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism have coexisted and cross-pollinated for millennia, leaving behind the cave monasteries of Udayagiri and Khandagiri, the Buddhist stupas of Ratnagiri and Lalitgiri, and the Shakti temples that dot the landscape like exclamation marks of feminine divinity.

Goa answers with its own brand of sacred pluralism. Here, Hindus light candles at the Basilica of Bom Jesus, and Catholics offer prayers at the Shantadurga temple at Fatorpa. The feast of Our Lady of Miracles gathers both communities under the same roof, exchanging oil and candles between church and temple as naturally as neighbours exchange sugar. The Zagor celebrations and the Shigmo festival are not Hindu events attended by Christians out of politeness; they are Goan events, full stop. In both states, religion is not a doctrine to be debated but a rhythm to be lived — embedded in the morning’s first lamp, the evening’s last bell, and every meal served between.

The Farmer and the Monsoon

Rice is not merely the staple food of Goa and Odisha; it is the organising principle of their rural civilisations. In Odisha, paddy covers nearly seventy per cent of cultivated land, and the entire social calendar revolves around its seasons — Akshaya Tritiya marks the seeding, Raja Sankranti the completion of sowing, Nuakhai the first tasting of the new harvest. The traditional beushening method — broadcasting seed and then tilling post-emergence — speaks of a farming intelligence shaped by centuries of reading the monsoon, the soil, and the floodplain.

In Goa, the ingenuity takes another form: the Khazan system, an ancient network of bunds and sluice gates that reclaim low-lying coastal land from the tides, allowing farmers to cultivate salt-tolerant rice varieties and rear fish and prawns in the same fields. It is an act of ecological engineering so elegant that modern agronomists study it as a model of sustainable land use.

Both states grow coconut, cashew, and areca nut alongside their paddy. Both rely overwhelmingly on the monsoon — Odisha’s irrigation covers barely a third of its cultivable land, and much of Goa’s paddy is rainfed. Both are lands of small and marginal farmers, where the average holding is modest and the relationship between cultivator and earth is intimate, personal, and unmediated by large-scale mechanisation. And in both states, a quiet revolution is underway: Odisha’s Millets Mission and Goa’s growing organic farming movement are attempts to reclaim indigenous crop diversity from the grip of high-yield monoculture — to remember that the land, like the people, thrives best when it is allowed its full vocabulary.

The Playing Field

In a nation drunk on cricket, Goa and Odisha are the two states that have had the audacity to fall in love with other sports. Goa is India’s football heartland. The game arrived with an Irish priest in 1883 and never left. Clubs like Salgaocar, Dempo, and Churchill Brothers have won national titles; six Goans have captained the Indian football team. During the FIFA World Cup, Goan streets erupt into a carnival of flags and giant screens, and the village tournament — barefoot boys on a laterite pitch — remains as sacred as Sunday Mass. Football in Goa is not a sport. It is an identity.

Odisha’s sporting soul beats to a different drum — the hockey stick. The state has produced legends like Dilip Tirkey, Amit Rohidas, Sunita Lakra, and Deep Grace Ekka, and became the first state government in India to sponsor the national hockey team. The Birsa Munda International Hockey Stadium in Rourkela, which hosted the 2023 World Cup, is a monument to Odisha’s commitment. But what unites both states is not the particular sport but the underlying defiance: a refusal to accept cricket’s monopoly on the Indian sporting imagination.

Both states also share a love for traditional and community games — Kho Kho and Kabaddi [2] are played at village festivals in both, and both have ISL football franchises (FC Goa and Odisha FC) that draw passionate, roaring crowds. The playing field, it turns out, is yet another room in the same house.

Rivers, Mangroves, and the Shared Ecology

The ecological parallels between these two states are no less striking. Both are coastal, riverine, and monsoon-fed. Both shelter significant mangrove ecosystems — the Khazan mangroves along Goa’s estuaries and the Bhitarkanika mangrove forests of Odisha, one of the largest in India. Both are biodiversity hotspots: Goa’s Western Ghats forests are a UNESCO heritage site, while Odisha’s Simlipal and Satkosia reserves harbour tiger, elephant, and crocodile populations of national importance. The Olive Ridley sea turtles that nest on Odisha’s Gahirmatha beach have cousins that occasionally visit Goa’s Morjim. Both states understand, in their bones, that the sea is not merely a border but a livelihood, a deity, and a defining force — and that the mangrove, the estuary, and the fishing village are not the periphery of civilisation but its very foundation.

And then there is the matter of diaspora. Both Goa and Odisha are states whose people have scattered across the world yet remain fiercely tethered to home. The Goan communities of Bombay, the Gulf, the UK and Lisbon mirror the Odia communities of US, Europe, Surat, Hyderabad, and beyond. In both cases, the expatriate carries the cuisine, the festival calendar, and the mother tongue like a portable homeland — and returns, without fail, for the annual feast or the harvest celebration, as though the umbilical cord to the village were made not of flesh but of something altogether more durable.

Goa and Odisha do not need a bridge between them. They already are the bridge — two ends of a single cultural arc that bends across the Indian landmass, proving that civilisational kinship does not require geographical proximity. They are proof that identity in India is not merely a function of latitude and longitude but of something deeper: a shared covenant with the sea, with rice, with the loom, with the slow and sacred act of living.

If India is a house with many rooms, these two states are the twin balconies — one facing the sunset, the other the sunrise — built from the same stone, painted in the same light, listening to the same tide.

East and West do not merely meet here. They embrace.

[1] science of architecture in alignment with natural forces

[2] Local community games which involve teams

Charudutta Panigrahi writes on culture, geography, and the quiet connections that maps forget to draw.

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

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

Categories
Excerpt

Burnout Highway

Title: Burnout Highway

Author: Anmol Diddan

The Education System

Think about a time when you felt stuck or stifled with the options that your professional path presented. Do you remember your general thoughts and emotions at the time? What expectations did you have when you started on that path? Do you wish you could go back and change some choices you made along the way?

I’ve felt this “stuckness” many times through the various stages of my career as a generalist, evaluating different paths, most recently when I secured permanent residency in the US after a 14-month hiatus of being unable to work in America. I was faced with the choice of taking my career in a different direction or trying to rejoin the corporate path where I left off.

During such ponderings, I’ve usually been able to break my feelings down into an expectations versus reality equation. While I’m sure that isn’t the most insightful thing you’ve heard, think about why the mismatch between that expectation and reality might have occurred in your own life. It is because the expectations you had of your path in two, five, ten, or twenty years, and the reality of that path, in terms of your own perception of reward and fulfillment, don’t match. Thinking of your life as a predefined path, with milestones and comparisons, makes you constantly ponder over this existential expectation versus reality equation, steeped in arbitrary milestones. The challenge, especially in this modern world obsessed with exceptionalism, is that our paths offer the false promise of infinite possibility and underestimate the reality of finite choices.

The Pressure to be on a Path

Remember that favorite interview question we’ve all asked or been asked: Where do you see yourself in five years?

Now think about yourself, your industry, or the job you did five years ago. Has all of that changed beyond recognition? The job I did as recently as 2016 is now basically done by a button. Software developers, who commanded the highest-paying jobs till only a few years ago, are being rapidly challenged by AI or scrambling to become AI engineers, reduced to supervisory roles. Subscriptions as a primary business model, for example, was only adopted in the last five years or so. AI wasn’t a word in the public consciousness till 2023, and today, we’re told we should let it run our lives, from making us breakfast to writing our resumes and picking candidates for jobs!

So, if companies themselves do not know their paths, why is there that pressure on individuals? Based on my own experience, that interview question itself is ill-advised. Someone who is extremely sure of their path, despite knowing how rapidly their context may evolve, is already a bit stifled.

This stifling, myopic path, especially if you’re not fulfilled by it, again brings with it a sense of constant jadedness and exhaustion. It is that exhaustion, coupled with a perceived lack of agency over your path, that eventually manifests as full-blown burnout. Being flexible and adaptable, and rebuilding agency over your own skills are key to building long-term careers today, especially in a time when the AI, internet, and gig economy is truly enabling infinite possibilities at an individual level.

While human beings need structure in their lives, society starts laying out that structure for us from the moment we barely attain consciousness, not leaving too much room for exploration. Remember that question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? I’m guilty of asking this question myself to my nine-year-old niece. She insists she wants to be a vet, which is adorable. I think I wanted to be a cricketer back then. Those questions gave me and my niece structure to explore our personalities, but had I stuck to that path, given the context of my life (my state didn’t even have a team back then), I probably wouldn’t have made a career out of it!

As a 16-year-old, I could have never imagined living in four countries, traveling to over 60 countries marrying an American woman, and attaining financial independence, all before or around 30 years of age. And I am so glad I had the openness to explore divergent paths while still committing to a fairly traditional corporate path. Metaphorically speaking, I knew that I wanted to sail west in the Atlantic, but I was open to landing in Brazil, Mexico, the US, or Canada. That openness has enabled me to start afresh, after 11 years at Google, through this book, and through a coaching and workplace culture consultancy, WideWorldView.com, while continuing to positively engage with the corporate world.

While predefined paths are great to give our expeditions structure, we still need to adjust our sails as per the direction of the winds and currents. As a society, we are too eager to forcefit people into paths, generally very early in life. Thinking about your life and identity as one thing or one path stifles you from exploring all other potentially more fulfilling identities. Despite the rapid changes in societal structures and expectations, the corporate ladder is still largely not set up for individuals to be able to adjust their sails to changing winds, without making radical shifts in course. What if these paths that society puts us on and we often unquestionably follow weren’t meant for us at all?

What if we followed those paths because we constantly felt a stifling opportunity cost? What if those paths were designed to stifle innovation and exploration at a personal level? And what if the expectations our paths set for us were never based in reality? Who made us feel that these paths were the only ones we had? The answer is largely rooted in our modern education system, which is designed to prioritize “getting a job” over self-discovery.

ABOUT THE BOOK

You know the feeling: chronic workplace stress along with a nagging sense of ineffectiveness. That’s burnout. Burnout Highway demystifies this increasingly collective suffering by exploring the larger context that runs all our lives—the systems within which we make decisions, the milestones we were taught to desire, and the feelings of fulfillment we thought they would provide.

From pursuing grades and achievements to landing ‘dream jobs,’ the India Shining generation was promised a clear and straightforward path to success. However, this journey can feel exhausting, especially with India ranking among the countries with the longest working hours and the highest rates of burnout.

Anmol examines how societal conditioning, corporate ladder dynamics, and economic pressures influence our work and presents readers with a systematic framework for navigating the challenges of burnout while fostering the development of fulfilling and emotionally sustainable careers. This is an invitation to prioritize work that aligns with your values and addresses your emotional well-being, ultimately helping you break the cycle of burnout.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anmol Diddan is an advocate for emotionally sustainable careers and the founder of World Wide View. Raised Sikh in the complex geopolitics of the Northeast, Anmol spent his early years in Shillong before moving to Mumbai at sixteen to study Economics; an experience that exposed him to both the promise and pressure of ambition in modern India. His thirst for learning through experiences led him to a global career in behavioural and cultural research, working with Google across India, Ireland, Singapore, and the United States. Now based in New York City, he draws on his dynamic background to explore how the intersection of economics, psychology, and culture affects all our lives, with a focus on wellbeing in the modern workplace. He works 1:1 to help professionals tackle burnout and career transitions, all across the world.

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

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

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pandies' corner

Songs of Freedom: Pink Dreams

A real life narrative by Priyanka (pseudonym), written and compiled by Deeksha Vats

Songs of Freedom bring stories from women — certainly not victims, not even survivors but fighters against the patriarchal status quo with support from the organisation Shaktishalini.

–Sanjay Kumar, founder, pandies’1

Savoury samosas. From Public Domain

I loved eating samosas, always. I must have been 15 years, or younger. I cannot recall anymore. But samosas were always my favourite. And chocolates. Chocolates were always the best. I couldn’t do without them. That was my pink dream, nothing more, nothing less. A husband who would take care of me, a child I could love more than my life, a happy family, and some chocolates in the mix. 

I am Priyanka. I must have about fifteen years old when my mother told me that I could not go to school anymore. I wasn’t the best student or particularly fond of learning, but I knew that school was important and would do me good. But we needed more money at home, and someone had to work. Well, I was the one chosen to get the money, while my brothers continued to study. I was happy to help, but what I didn’t know at that time was that I was being discriminated against. Why? Because I am a woman. What started in my teenage, hasn’t stopped even today after all these years. 

I was happy to have a job. I had something to do. It was good work. All I had to do was cook and clean for a family that turned out to be quite wonderful. They were great to me, treated me like family. One day when didi[1] went to her parents’ house, her husband touched me inappropriately. I had just gotten my period. It was celebrated like a festival, and he knew it. He tried doing more than just touching me at places I did not like. And I was afraid something bad would happen.

When didi came back, I told her that I wanted to go back home. She asked me why. I did not want to break her heart but I burst out crying when she continued to insist. I was taken back home, given chocolates, and asked to keep my mouth shut. Their reputation was at stake, and my parents got what they had needed as barter. 

I was glad to be back home. Living with the people I loved was getting tougher by the day. But the happiness didn’t last long. I was sent away to another home in the city to work at and this time I accepted it as my own home. Auntie, whom I looked after, was gentle and had welcomed me like family. They were good times. I made money, saved some, and bought furniture for my home back in our village. And soon after I found a boy I fell in love with. 

It was a beautiful feeling. I had never felt that way before. It was as if butterflies had decided to make a home in my heart, fluttering every moment of the day. Not a minute went by when I did not think of him. Every time he came to auntie’s house, he would ring the bell of his bicycle. I would rush to the gate and every time I looked at him my heart jumped. It was magical. 

Life was getting better with each passing day. One good news after another, and I couldn’t believe I was the recipient of all this joy. My family had begun to feel the need to find me a husband. They found a boy and it was time for us to meet. I did not know how to feel or what to do. I was in love with another man. It so happened that the man my family had found for me was the same man I was in love with. That day my happiness had no limits. 

We got married in no time and built a beautiful life together. It was like a dream come true. Soon enough we had a daughter together. My husband was everything a woman could ever ask for. He was loyal, cared for me, loved me, and understood me. He was happy to just let me be. I was finally free. Free to live my life on my own terms. 

I started glowing, started smiling more. I made new friends, one of whom I grew particularly close to. He understood me too. Steadily enough he became my confidante. I could talk to him, hang out with him, sometimes even drink with him. And my husband, the lovely man I loved more than my life, never objected. What more could I have asked for? 

Life was good, when one day everything came crashing down. I found a nude photograph of myself on social media. It was visible to my entire family including my husband. His heart broke. My friend had laced a drink, taken a nude photograph of me, and posted it online. I begged him to take it down, I offered him every penny I had, but he refused. I wept bitterly. I told my husband that I had been tricked and that I had never even touched this man, but he refused to believe me. My husband, the love of my life, beat me and turned me out. Before I could even realise, I was ordered to not see my daughter. I did not have a family anymore. 

When I came back to my mother’s home, I was blamed for what I had never done. I was punished for trusting a man whom I called a friend. The only solution now was to marry him instead. I was married off again to a man who was responsible for shattering my home, for breaking my hopes and dreams into tiny pieces. I did not know how to feel, all I knew was that I had to accept it in order to survive. 

His family had no love for me. Taunts were served on a platter, through the day. I was always hungry. Every member of their family had a job, but their financial troubles were endless. And I was always hungry. It had been ages since I even saw samosas. I did not want another child. Life wasn’t the same anymore. However, before I could even process everything, I was pregnant again. Even in that vulnerable state, I was always hungry. I dreamt of my favourite food. I craved to eat. I had never slept on a hungry stomach before. But here, in this home of strangers, enough food was a distant dream. I would call my brother, sometimes even my first husband and beg them to send me money just so I could eat a little more than usual. They were gracious enough, and I could buy my samosas every once in a while. 

I did not want my child to be born. I wished to run away once it was born. I would have dreams of abandoning it and escaping. How would I love a child I had never wanted? When I was in labour, I had nobody by my side. I called my husband, the man I had always loved, but he did not want to see me anymore. I found out he had blocked my phone number. My pain meant nothing to him anymore. I was heartbroken, in pain and hungry, with a child on the way. 

My little boy came into the world. It was hard for me to love him. My new husband’s family had become crueler. Once when I talked back to my mother-in-law on my own birthday, my husband beat me black and blue. Once the beating started, it never stopped. Every few days, I would have a swollen lip, a bruised eye, an aching arm. 

Life had become intolerable. I wanted to end it. I had no family, no home. Then one night I dreamt of a pink garden — a garden where dreams still came true, where love did not have to be begged for. When I woke up, I lifted my child in my arms and walked away in search of my garden, to realise my pink dreams. Ever since I left, I haven’t looked back. The search for my garden continues, my pink dreams seem near, my heart has not felt lighter, and my spirit is finally free.  

[1] Elder sister – used to show respect to the employer 

Priyanka (pseudonym), a 28-year-old survivor of intimate partner violence, is originally from northeast India. She had been living with her partner and his family in Bihar, where she experienced violence and abuse. Lacking a support system in Bihar, she sought assistance from Shaktishalini and accessed a safe shelter. Subsequently, she reconciled with her partner and relocated to Madhya Pradesh to live with him.

  1.  “Establishing itself as a premier women’s organisation in India from 1987, Shaktishalini has spread out and deals with all kinds of gender based violence. A shelter home, a helpline and more than that a stunning activist passion are the hallmarks of this organisation. 
    “pandies and Shaktishalini – different in terms of the work they do but firmly aligned in terms of ideological beliefs and where they stand and  speak from. It goes back to 1996 when members of the theatre group went to the Shaktishalini office to research on (Dayan Hatya) witch burning for a production and got the chance to learn from the iconic leaders of Shaktishalini, Apa Shahjahan and Satya Rani Chadha. And collaborative theatre and theatre therapy goes back there. It is a mutual learning space that has survived over 25 years. Collaborative and interactive, this space creates anti-patriarchal and anti-communal street and proscenium performances and provides engaging workshop theatre with survivors of domestic and societal patriarchal violence. Many times we have sat together till late night, in small or large groups debating what constitutes violence? Or what would be gender equality in practical, real terms? These and many such questions will be raised in the stories that follow.” — Sanjay Kumar ↩︎
    ↩︎

Deeksha Vats is a Delhi-based theatre practitioner, writer, performer, and lighting designer. As programmer and producer at Serendipity Arts Foundation, she creates and supports diverse artistic collaborations.

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

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

Categories
Essay

Sam Dalrymple and the Shattered Lands

By Farouk Gulsara

From Public Domain

When the word ‘Partition’ is mentioned, it is always assumed to refer to the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. In fact, the Partition of the British Raj occurred five times.

Not so long ago, as recently as 1928, a vast expanse of land from Aden in the West to Rangoon in the east was united as the Indian Empire, all under British rule. It was the zenith of the British Empire, and it seemed the sun would never set on the Empire. A quarter of the world’s population lived here, from the Red Sea to Southeast Asia, and they all used the Indian rupee. One would travel across the span with an Indian passport. By 1971, in just 40 years, this Empire had been shattered five times, resulting in 12 nation-states.

We should learn to tell stories by listening to how housewives gossip. They narrate intimate personal stories about their neighbours, with vivid detail, as if they were there in the target’s bedroom. It becomes more believable when real characters are added. The same advice applies to telling history, his-story. Sam Dalrymple’s Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia does exactly that. A dry subject like history is turned into an unputdownable book by giving human faces to the people making difficult decisions at the administrative level and to those who have to bear the brunt of those decisions. Perhaps the author’s filmmaking background pushed him towards this style. That makes it very engaging.

The author, Samuel Hew Tantallon Darymple, is a scholar of Sanskrit and Persian, as well as a historian, author, activist, and social media influencer. He co-founded Project Dastaan[1],  a peace-building initiative that uses digital technology to reconnect people displaced by the 1947 Partition of India with their childhood communities and villages.

The five Partitions mentioned in this book are: the separation of Burma from India in 1937; the reclassification of Aden as a British protectorate; the formation of Pakistan; the dissolution of the 550-odd princely states; and, finally, a bloody civil war that led to the formation of Bangladesh.

The Indian idea of ‘Bharat’ is traditionally shaped by the ancient Hindu geography of Bharatvarsha, a triangular landmass stretching from the Himalayas in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south. Notably, Afghanistan, mentioned in the Mahabharata, and Burma, known as Brahmadesh (Land of Brahma), do not fall within this framework. The city of Kandahar in Afghanistan is apparently named after Gandhari, the blindfolded matriarch of the Kaurava clan.

After the 1905 Partition of Bengal and the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, calls for self-governance grew louder. To pacify the Indian public, the Crown sent a group of seven, known as the Simon Commission[2], in 1928 to implement constitutional reforms. It did nothing to advance Indian independence but demarcated Burma as a territory quite separate from British India, and its inclusion in India was an error.  

Coincidentally, this was the aftermath of the 1928 Depression. Before this, Burma was a melting pot of cultures. Its capital, Rangoon, one of the busiest commercial cities in Asia, was labelled the ‘Paris of the East’. It is said that in 1920, there were more traders in Burma than in New York. Rangoon port was an important harbour for the export of rice, teak and petroleum. Its banking services drew people from many regions. It was a multilingual and multicultural city, shaped by large-scale migration. People were heard speaking Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Marwari, Urdu, Chinese, English, and other languages. 

The turn of the economic tide and the disparity in economic status between the ethnic Burmese and the sojourners sparked a series of unrest. The Chettiars and Bengali houses and shops were targeted. Indians were systematically excluded from Burma, forcing rich traders to become refugees and make a beeline for India. This long march over the Patkai hills to India became a feature again as Japanese soldiers (and the Indian National Army under Bose) advanced during World War 2. The experiences of Mariappan, a Tamil shopkeeper who fled to Tamil Nadu to start anew in Burma because of his lowly caste, and had to run again because of Burmese nationalism, are heart-wrenching. Then there is Uttam Singh, who had to endure a treacherous long march home to Punjab across the hills. Losing everything, it was a miracle that he and his family made it in one piece. Little snippets like these are the real reasons this book grows on readers. 

Caught in the middle are the Naga people, whose land lies precariously between Burma and India. Although its leaders rallied for an independent Naga state, a fifth of the region fell under Burmese control. For decades to come, insurgency remained an issue. On April 1st 1937, Burma was carved out of British India, leaving many unanswered questions and triggering years of attempts to usurp power within Burma, followed by years of military rule and turmoil.

After its capture by the British East India Company, Aden was governed as part of the Bombay Presidency. It was an important coal station for ships. The administrators regarded Arabs as fundamentally different from Indians. To increase efficiency, the British decided in 1937 to rule the port of Aden as a British colony and its hinterland as a protectorate, much to the dismay of many in the Indian community there. The rise of Arab nationalism that followed, with the emergence of dynamic leaders such as Gamal Nasser of Egypt, who promoted Arab patriotism, meant the former Arabian Raj kingdom would no longer be associated with Indians. Indians, once regarded as cultured and civilised, were soon viewed as competitors. By the late 1950s, a reverse exodus began. Indians with deep roots in these Arab lands, including property, businesses, and connections, had to flee helter-skelter back to India and the UK. The Ambanis were one such family affected by this. 

Although Jinnah initially joined the Indian National Congress, his affiliation with the Muslim League grew stronger as he felt that Gandhi was leading the party and the nation towards a more Hindu-centric direction. The way the Congress conducted its meetings was as if they were at a religious ceremony, with chanting of mantras and singing of religious hymns. Muslims began to question how they would be treated in an independent India with Congress at the helm of power. Even though Jinnah appeared as an icon of Hindu-Muslim unity, later events propelled him and other Muslims to push for a two-state solution for post-independent India. 

In a way, as Gandhi promoted his Hindu agenda, the Burmese, with their Buddhist practice, also increasingly felt more detached from India, further fuelling Burmese nationalism.  

The post-WW2 era saw many changes in India. Britain was in debt, and the push for independence and a separate nation for Muslims was in full force. The third Partition was about to take place, but it was preceded by mindless killings and violence in the areas destined to be part of Pakistan. The Bengal region witnessed brutality on Direct Action Day, led by Suhrawardy and his acolyte, Mujibur Rahman, who would later be instrumental in the formation of Bangladesh. Things were no better in Punjab. The confusion created by Radcliffe’s arbitrary carving of the country left people unsure which country they belonged to, even one month after the ‘tryst with destiny’ speech.

There was then a scramble to recruit the 550-plus princely states to join Pakistan or India, or to stand alone. This was the 4th Partition. Recruitment reached feverish heights in states such as Junagadh, Kashmir, and Hyderabad. Junagadh housed two sacred Hindu sites, Dwarka and Somnath, but was ruled by a Muslim Nawab. Kashmir had a Hindu king, but his subjects were predominantly Muslims. The situation was reversed in Hyderabad.

The shattered subcontinent of India has been in constant flux even after attaining self-rule. It has to deal with internal squabbles and hostile neighbours. The situation becomes complicated as the world divides itself into the blue corner of capitalism and the red corner of communism. Marxism and Maoist ideology spread across its states, creating skirmishes here and there.

Pakistan, too, had its own problems. The insistence on using Urdu as the national language was not taken lightly by the Bengali-speaking East Pakistanis. The discord reached a tipping point in 1971, when the Bengali Awami League won the Pakistani elections. Civil war broke out when West Pakistani leaders refused to accept the election results. India sent in its troops to squash West Pakistan’s army and effectively completed the Fifth Partition, the creation of the country of Bangladesh.

The recurring theme throughout the book is that people continue to help one another, regardless of the day’s political climate. Despite ideological differences, people help people. The book highlights numerous heart-stirring accounts of the extraordinary resilience and compassion of everyday people. These ‘unity in diversity’ stories emerge from small acts of kindness that transcend religious, social, and economic boundaries.

It remains to be debated by future historians whether the colonial masters can be blamed for shattering the land that spanned the Arabian Gulf to Southeast Asia. Given the insatiable appetite of human greed for land, wealth and power, are these sequelae inevitable anyway? 

[1]  https://samdalrymple.com/project-dastaan

[2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Simon-Commission

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

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

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

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

Categories
Excerpt

My Summer of Cricket

Title: My Summer of Cricket: Three Tests, One Fan and Decades of Stories

Author: Nikhil Kulkarni

Chapter 4

NEW YEAR’S TEST/PINK TEST, SYDNEY

Days 0 and 1

I’ve never been good at packing, or planning my time well when it comes to packing for trips. For someone who prides himself on colour-coded Google calendar entries and spreadsheet grocery lists, there’s something about stuffing a suitcase that makes me irrationally confident until it’s far too late. Which is how I found myself, on 2 January, standing in my living room with three open bags, a half-zipped duffel and no idea where my power bank was. My flight to India was on 8 January, which was just one day after the Sydney Test wrapped up, and it was starting in less than twenty-four hours. I had somehow left everything till now.

I don’t know if it was the festive lull after New Year’s, or the post-Melbourne daze still swirling in my head, but the realisation hit like a short ball I never saw coming. This wasn’t just a regular trip back home. This time, I was planning to stay for a while. A good month, in fact. Back to my hometown in Karnataka to see family, to catch up with people I’d kept meaning to visit. Which meant not just packing clothes, but packing with purpose – gifts, clothes, souvenirs I spent wayyy too much money on at the MCG, all the good stuff. I panicked a little. Then I panicked a lot. And then, in true form, I threw whatever I could find into the bags, convinced I’d sort it out somehow. Little did I know then that I’d have plenty of time to repack everything.

But, even as I was frantically shoving things into suitcases, my mind kept drifting to the match. This one felt different. Not because of the venue, though. The Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG) wasn’t some unfamiliar pilgrimage. I’d been there more times than I could count. In fact, it’s kind of a family tradition at this point to take the kids to watch WBBL (Women’s Big Bash League) matches and at least one day of the Pink Test every year. So, I knew this ground. I knew where the good coffee was, where the shade started creeping by the second session, and which section’s crowd always went too hard too early. But somehow, this didn’t feel routine. It felt big.

Part of it was the stakes. After four gripping Tests, Australia was on the cusp of winning the series, leading at 2–1. If India won, the series tied and the Border–Gavaskar Trophy stayed with them, as it had for the last eight years. But if Australia won, or even managed to draw? They’d take the cup back. That possibility had everyone on edge. And despite the chaos around me, I couldn’t help but feel the buzz of it too.

And then, of course, there was the familiar question I never quite knew how to answer: who was I even supporting? Born in India, citizen of Australia. Proud of my Indian heritage and equally proud of the Australian values. I’d cheered for Kohli’s centuries and Cummins’s yorkers with equal joy. So I did what I always do – I leaned into the game. I wasn’t there to take sides. I just wanted to see how it all played out.

The next day, I woke up early. Though I always wake up around the same time, this morning felt less like discipline and more like pre-match electricity. It was the kind of early where you don’t even need an alarm because your brain has already sprinted ahead, mentally packing sunscreen, triple-checking ticket PDFs, and wondering whether the security staff will let you bring in homemade sandwiches (they do).

Luckily, one part of the plan had been sorted well in advance: parking. Now, this is where I must pause and offer a public service announcement to all future Sydney cricket enthusiasts, especially the ones who think it’s a good idea to just find a spot on the day of the match or brave the 40-kilometre public transport haul from the outer suburbs.

Don’t do that. Book your parking at the QVB with Wilson Parking.

Book it early. Like, four days early. You’ll lock in a spot right in the middle of the city for what is basically loose change compared to sameday rates. Plus, you’re walking distance from an actual toilet and decent coffee. Then, hop on the light rail and enjoy the glorious fifteen-minute tram ride to Moore Park with no transfers, no platform guessing and no train-station drama. It’s the Test match equivalent of finding a hundred-dollar note in your old jeans. Thank me later.

By the time I’d parked, trammed and emerged into the growing pink tide outside the SCG, I felt oddly calm. Everything had worked. My bag was light, my timing was perfect and I still had sunscreen in my hand. I pumped my chest and walked like a man with a plan. And this plan was a little more than just watching the match, I was attending a breakfast hosted by the Primary Club of Australia.

Now, I hadn’t heard of the Primary Club of Australia until I got the invite, and discovering them felt like one of those serendipitous gifts this summer kept offering. Their mission is beautifully simple: every time a professional cricketer gets out for a duck, members donate to support athletes with disabilities. That’s it. It’s the kind of idea that slips under the radar, but once you hear it, you can’t stop thinking about how right it feels. Humble, purposeful, and very cricket.

The breakfast itself was held on the morning of Day 1 of the Sydney Test, and it’s a bit of a tradition at the SCG. Irfan Malik, who we met earlier, had been hearing about my cricket travels and kindly offered me an invite. AIBC was one of the partners for the event. It was a wonderful New Year’s gift and I was very excited to attend the breakfast event.

Inside, it was a mix of nostalgia and networking. There were white tablecloths, polite applause and a menu that could have been lifted straight from a five-star hotel buffet. But the heart of the morning was a panel discussion titled State of the Game, featuring Mark Taylor, Ed Cowan and Cricinfo editor Andrew McGlashan. It wasn’t just small talk or highlight reels, they offered frank insights on where the game stood, what was working, and what needed fixing. Taylor brought his statesman-like calm, Cowan was thoughtful and reflective, and McGlashan added the sharp edge of someone who watches the sport with both love and scrutiny. While there was a certain heft and seriousness to the conversation, it was also very refreshing and natural. You could see that everyone on the panel and in the room in general was engaged and excited about the game ahead.

 Somewhere between the eggs Benedict and the raffle for Pat Cummins’s signed bat, I found myself genuinely moved by what the Primary Club was doing. It was a reminder that cricket isn’t only about bat and ball. It’s about connection and causes that quietly build momentum in the background while the spotlight stays on the field. I signed up as a member right at the event thanks to the QR codes conveniently placed at every table. Who would’ve thought QR codes, a mechanism invented in Japan for labelling auto parts, would become such a ubiquitous part of our lives!

It turned out my neighbour at the table was Mohit Kumar, a local councillor I’d seen at other events. We had a brief chat about two things we had in common: cricket and Blacktown (our local council), and then I made my way to the book sales counter. There they were: signed copies of Pat Cummins’s autobiography. The book had been on my reading list for a while and these were of course signed copies! I asked how many they’d let one person buy because I didn’t want to be that guy sweeping the whole pile. They had a small limit per guest, which made sense. I picked up the maximum allowed. Some for me, some for a few people back in India who’d know exactly why this mattered. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that cricket books make excellent surprise gifts, especially when they’re signed. And even more so when you can hand one over with a casual, ‘Oh, it’s nothing. Just something I picked up at breakfast with Mark Taylor.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

From a village in North Karnataka in India to the bright lights of Sydney, Nikhil has lived and breathed the inevitable highs and lows that come with being a cricket fan.

From listening to early morning radio commentaries to witnessing Sachin Tendulkar’s final match, Nikhil insists that every hour he was engrossed in watching, listening to and thinking about cricket was time well spent. This dedication culminated in the summer of 2024-25, when he undertook a personal pilgrimage to Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, attending every single match day of the ‘2024–25 India vs. Australia Border- Gavaskar Trophy’ test series. The book traces Kulkarni’s devotion to the sport over the last three decades where he meets fascinating people, explores new cities and forges new, unforgettable memories. To read My Summer of Cricket is to understand that cricket is more than a game – it’s a connection between the peoples of different countries, a vehicle for supporting meaningful causes, and a way to bridge generations.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nikhil Kulkarni is a Sydney-based tech leader, recognised community voice, and lifelong cricket tragic who has followed the game across India and Australia for more than three decades. An avid quizzer with a love for puns, he and his wife are raising two daughters in a home that celebrates both Indian heritage and Australian values.

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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

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

Categories
Review

My Shackled Life by Sushila Takbhaure: A Story of Reslience

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: My Shackled Life

Author: Sushila Takbhaure

Translators: Deeba Zafir and Preeti Dewan

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Ever since Dalit writing has caught the fancy of academics, researchers and social scientists in a big way, we are coming across several new titles almost every other day and are getting to read them in translation, often published by established and reputed publishing houses. The present volume under review falls exactly into this category.  First published in Hindi in 2011 as Shikanje ka Dard, this is an autobiography of a Dalit woman called Sushila Takbhaure who belongs to a poor Dalit Valmiki family in Seoni in Madhya Pradesh. Divided into three sections, it tells us the story of how the author rose through determination and her mother’s support to pursue higher education, teach in school and college, build a wide-ranging literary career and become part of the Babasaheb Ambedkar movement to bring social awareness and changes in the lives of the Dalits and the downtrodden in society.

Writing from childhood, she went on to publish poems, stories, novels, plays, criticism and her books are now even taught in university courses. In the pan-Indian surge of feminist consciousness and assertion of Dalit women in the 1990, Sushila Takbhaure is a name to reckon with.

Coming to this autobiography we find how the narrative chronicles the extremely protracted and tortuous process by which a timid and vulnerable Dalit girl fashions herself into an assertive and empowered woman by exercising her agency and single-minded pursuit of education. But the path was definitely not easy. The first section of the narrative entitled ‘Early Years’ gives us details of a society that is dominated by the savarnas or upper caste Hindus, and lays bare the truthful accounts of the disgraceful practices of this casteist order. Like many other Dalit families of the time, Sushila’s story is no different. Discrimination based on caste was widespread, and untouchability was deeply entrenched everywhere. The thatched mud huts of the untouchable Bhangi-Harijans stood outside the village, far from the landowner’s houses.

Raised like the child of any poor untouchable family with a life full of deprivation, Sushila was nurtured by her Ma (mother) and Nani (grandmother) and grew up eating, crying and playing. In spite of working as a scavenger and midwife, Nani protected her daughter from hardship and Ma too sheltered and nurtured her children by giving them an education. With society placing many restrictions on girls, however hard they worked, they enjoyed neither equal rights nor independence. Women lacked awareness and confidence, and the lack of education, knowledge, and foresight crushed the potential of many who had the ability to rise as all unethical behaviour was seen as natural and commonplace.

Sushila fought all odds and continued her studies till she managed to appear for her BA final exams. In a patriarchal society, women are always considered inferior to men though there were some women who through their talent, initiative, intelligence and courage managed to surpass men in every field. But society had conditioned them in such a manner that they could not come out of the shackles imposed by rigid casteist norms. The first section of the narrative ends with Sushila’s Ma continuing to look for a good match for her and she too often dreamt of a loving, caring husband meant just for her.

The second section of the autobiography ‘Marriage and After’ is the most distressing part of the entire narrative. Married to a man much older than her, Sushila finds that things are worse in all respects in her in-law’s place. As it is the atmosphere in the city of Nagpur was different from her village life, but her husband, who is always reverentially mentioned as ‘Takbhaureji’, acts as the typical patriarchal figure, often physically abusing her. The practice didn’t stop even after several children were born to her. He made his wife work at home and like all male chauvinists took away all the salary she earned as a teacher. One often wonders why Sushila went on enduring all the humiliation and never retaliated.  

Maybe if she had received love, care, and companionship instead of constant torment, she might have developed the strength to assert herself in public life, but that never happened. The atmosphere at home only deepened her sense of powerlessness and since she lived in constant fear, wrongs were committed against her without hesitation. It is amazing to learn that despite conflict and physical abuse becoming a regular part of her life and filling her with humiliation and pain, she managed to complete her PhD and start teaching in a college. Her married life, as she states, went with all its ups and downs.

The final section ‘Writer Activist’ narrates her rise to become the voice of resistance for her people. Her fury started finding its voice in poetry. She wanted to write about being a Dalit and that became the central theme of her writing. Enduring social humiliation and fighting against the deprivations and oppression born of caste prejudice, she moved forward, slowly but steadily.

Once the various Dalit organizations in Maharashtra involved in the movement to address the problems faced by Dalit women in their homes and society came to know her, they began inviting her to travel with them to distance places to participate in their programmes. Even then her husband went on taking sadistic pleasure in hurting her. His real motive was clear: to prevent her from pursuing writing and publishing, and to keep her confined to the simple life of a working woman who managed both her job and household. But after living in Nagpur, Maharashtra gradually became an empowering experience for her. As a Dalit activist fighting for the ideals of Babasaheb Ambedkar across the country, she began travelling alone to far-off places within India and places abroad like Sri Lanka, Britain, and Dubai.

She could do all this because she had finally begun to feel confident of herself. At times, she received support from people within her community, while at other times, she faced opposition. Her goal was to carry Ambedkar’s ideology and knowledge of Dalit literature to others, and she succeeded in doing so. Although her travels abroad brought her immense joy, they unfortunately did not change her social condition. She remained what she had always been – an untouchable outcast.

This searing autobiography of Sushila Takbhaure, a Dalit woman whose life story reveals not only the brutal machinery of caste but also the intimate cruelty of patriarchy, is a must read for everyone irrespective of class and gender. Though the narrative drags a bit towards the end, one sees its importance too. Having embraced Phule-Ambedkarite ideology and taken part in the movement for social change, Sushila Takbhaure’s writing has gained a clear direction and is vital not only for herself but for her community too. As she states towards the end of her narrative, writing had given her the strength, and it was both a source of joy and a way to give back to society what it had meted out to her. After reading the autobiography, one must sincerely offer kudos to a deprived woman who succeeded in life in spite of all unsurmountable odds.

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

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

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

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

Categories
Memoir

The Man in 16C

By C. Christine Fair

More than twenty-five years have passed since we first met, and I still do not understand what drew me to Gurmit so tenaciously. Gurmit was wont to insist, “Chris. We were together in a past life, and something went tragically wrong. We are forced to get it right in our subsequent lives.” I used to rubbish his explanation for our inexplicable bond but I have no better explanation.

Our story in this life began at O’Hare airport in March 1994. For me, it was lust at first sight. There is no other way to describe my visceral reaction to the man I saw standing ahead of me at our San Francisco gate. I immediately fixated upon his dark black, soft, uncut beard tucked up under his chin. His pink, supple lips. A generous topknot was gathered up into his sloppily wrapped pale blue turban. He was several inches taller than me with his turban. I overheard him speaking in a luscious—but not posh—British accent. He was the most handsome man I had ever seen. And when confronted by his beauty, I felt my stomach seize up. The smell of the coffee wafting from the Starbucks nearby made me nauseous.  I was suddenly conscious about my unwashed waist-length hair, my unfashionably long shabby dress with knockoff Birkenstocks, the nails I bit down to the nub with chewed up cuticles and my face, which was speckled with red pimples unmasked by makeup.

I listened closely as he approached the staff at the gate.  I overheard her assign him seats 16C and D. Evidently, he wasn’t alone. I wondered if perhaps he had a wife. After he left the counter, I next approached the gate agent and requested 16B. She smiled knowingly and said in a distinctly flat Chicago accent, “Honey, that seat is taken but I’ll get you as close as I can.” She winked at me as she gave me 14A.

I followed him back to where he was seated in the lounge. He was with a portly, stygian, clean-shaven man. They were speaking in Punjabi, which was a language I was studying in my doctoral program in South Asian Languages and Civilisations at the University of Chicago. I discerned from their conversation that the man was his uncle. Gauging from his accent, I surmised he was born in India. I tried to make eye contact with the man in the turban, but he didn’t notice me notice me. Why would he? I was unremarkable and he was engrossed in the conversation with his overbearing uncle.

When it was time to board the plane, I was close behind him. I wanted to find a way to strike up some small talk, but the uncle was a formidable adversary. Daunted, I continued eavesdropping on their conversation. They were going to visit relatives in San Jose. I noticed that there was no wedding band on either of his meticulously clean hands. I felt queasy—in a good way. I was twenty-three and inexperienced, but I knew I wanted him.

Once the flight reached cruising altitude, I pulled out a notebook, tore out a piece of paper, and wrote to him in Punjabi, “If you’re not married, you can call me when you reach San Francisco. I’ll be at this number… Don’t be freaked out if a man answers. It’s my friend Gene. I’m staying with him.”

When the flight attendants were up and about, I folded the missive and turned on the call light. An officious flight attendant arrived. “Ma’am, can you hand this to the man in the light blue turban in 16C?” She smiled wryly as she took the note from my hand. Then I watched in agony as she made her way to 16C. Suddenly, I was struck by the horrifying thought that this British-born Sikh may not read Punjabi. But…his older uncle, with the Indian accent, likely did.

As soon as the seat-belt light went off, I practically ran down the aisle to reach the man struggling to read my note. “Hi. I’m Chris. I sent that note,” I said out of breath, pointing to the offending letter with my left and extending my right hand in a shake.

The man was befuddled but not displeased. “I’m Gurmit. Nice to meet you,” as he extended his own hand. Ignoring the curious uncle, I explained the content of my note as my face flushed deep red, and my hands trembled. My heart was leaping out of my chest. I pulled back my waist-long hair and blurted out quietly “I am in San Francisco for the week. I’d like to meet you if you are game. My number is in the note.”

I bolted in terror before he could respond. I had never been so impulsive before, and I was mortified by the thought of rejection after making such an ass of myself. But he was evidently intrigued if the curious grin on his face was any valid clue. Back in my seat, I was seized by thoughts of this Gurmit and what I should’ve said instead of running back to my seat.

The plane landed. He made eye contact with me and smiled as we disembarked. My friend Gene was waiting for me at the baggage claim. We continued to his apartment in the Haight. During the drive, I blubbered, “Gene, I did the craziest thing on the plane. I sent this note to some British Sikh dude who was totally hot. I told him to call me here if he wants to hook up.” I blurted it out in one breath hurriedly to preclude Gene from interrupting with his usual “You did what?” Gene’s stiff posture slackened, from which I concluded he was impressed and appalled at the same time. “How do you know you didn’t give my number to some psycho?”  Gene thought the

whole thing was a cockup and was dubious that the dude in the turban would call. Nonetheless, he offered suggestions on tourist sites.

Once at Gene’s home, I anxiously awaited a phone call that may or may not come.  Gene and I made small talk while I kept looking down at my watch. Gene would occasionally say with his familiar ‘I told you so’ voice, “He isn’t going to call you. What you did was insane.” Three hours later, the phone rang. Gene answered. “It’s for you, Chris. It’s that British guy you mentioned,” Gene belted out in complete surprise as he handed me the handset. My hands shook as I took the receiver, “Chris, it’s Gurmit. From the plane.” His voice stirred an unfamiliar feeling in my body. It was desire. “Do you want to see the sites with me tomorrow?” I excitedly exclaimed, “Absolutely! What about meeting at the Fisherman’s Warf, Pier 39, at 10 am?” He eagerly agreed.

After a restless night of fitful sleep, we met at the appointed place and hour. We spent the day seeing the tourist sites in San Francisco. Both of us preferred to see the city on foot. Sometimes we’d tuck into a cute restaurant for a bite to eat or to have a cup of coffee for me, tea for him. This gave us ample opportunities to speak with each other, cramming as much information gathering into the day as possible. Gurmit and I turned out to be the same age.  When I asked Gurmit why he came to Chicago, he explained “I am a doctor in London. I came to Chicago to learn how to treat gunshot wounds and other traumatic injuries.”

“But why did you have to come to Chicago to study this, Gurmit?”

“Because we don’t have enough gunshot injuries in London to study,” Gurmit said sheepishly. 

“Are you doing your residency to be a trauma surgeon?”

“No. I am just doing an externship in trauma work; my main medical profession is obstetrics and gynecology.”

I recoiled briefly. I had always disapproved of men being gynecologists, and I refused to avail of them. I preferred Gurmit as a trauma surgeon.

“What do you do, Chris, and how do you know so much about South Asia and Punjabi?” I explained that I’m doing my PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilisations, focusing on Sikh diasporas and the Punjabi language. Gurmit lit up. “I’m actually doing a PhD as well in reproductive medicine,” he enthused. We shared our stress of doing doctorates.

Apart from our academic interests, however divergent, perhaps the most important commonality was that both of us had recently lost our mothers to cancer. We bonded over our still-raw grief and our varied, complex relations with our living siblings. He had two sisters. I had two half-brothers. We also discussed our problematic fathers.

“Chris, I have to warn you. I come from a traditional Sikh family. My family cannot come to know of us meeting. My uncle is cool. But my father will sternly object.”

This was a chilling harbinger of things that would come hurtling our way in time. But we agreed to see where this went before agonising over his regressive father.

“Gurmit, I also have to tell you something. I don’t really know my father. He’s a deadbeat dad.”

If Gurmit was shocked by the nature of my paternity, his face didn’t reveal it.

With his family obligations in San Jose and my obligations to my friend Gene, we didn’t spend but one or two more days together that week. On the ferry from Alcatraz back to shore, our bodies grew close under the setting sun. Gurmit cupped my face and kissed me for the first time. I felt the softness of his moustache on my upper lip. My stomach fluttered as his tongue met mine and his hand moved to my lower back. We lingered in that kiss for minutes. It was not a hungry kiss. It was a tender kiss. It was a kiss that said I want you, but let’s take our time.

After we parted ways in San Francisco, we wrote letters weekly and we spoke on the phone when we could, which was very expensive in the early 1990s. We planned to meet in London a few months later, in June. I was on my way to India for the summer, where I would study Hindi and hopefully Punjabi in the idyllic—if very wet during the Monsoon—northern Indian hill station of Mussoorie. Throughout the duration of the flight, over numerous gins and tonic, I pondered what we would do and how we would do it when we met. Prior to leaving, I joked, with more seriousness than levity, with my saucy girlfriend Carmen, “The only parts of London I want to see are the walls and ceiling of Gurmit’s bedroom.” I imagined a romantic meeting at the airport.

The plane landed and disgorged its passengers. I passed through baggage claim, where I picked up my singular item: a large rucksack crammed haphazardly with Indian clothes for the summer, some notebooks, and Hindi and Punjabi grammars. I looked for Gurmit everywhere. He was nowhere to be seen. An hour passed. Then two. I felt the sour taste of panic rising in the back of my throat. Tears welled up and streamed hot down my cheeks. I was heartbroken and terrified. “What the hell have I done?” I wondered aloud.

To tame the panic, I flipped through the expanse of my 650-odd-page Lonely Planet India. Repeatedly. I tried to take naps, cuddled up to my ruck sack on the waiting area floor. After three hours, I wrote him off. He must have gotten cold feet, I presumed. Crestfallen, I began making my way to the ticket agent to change my flight. Then, at the last possible moment, I heard Gurmit call out “Chris! I’m over here! Where are you going, silly?” He had just arrived. He was sweaty, out of breath, and completely oblivious to the terror and disappointment I was experiencing despite my obviously tear-streaked face.  

Unable to sublimate my anger, I barked at him, “Where the flaming hell have you been? I was literally on my way to book myself on the next flight to Delhi! I was scared to death, goddamnit, Gurmit. Goddamnit!” Gurmit was sheepish. With downcast eyes, he tried to explain his inexplicable lateness.

“I’m really sorry, luv. I set off from dad’s place in Gravesend late and missed several commuter trains to London.” 

I pointed out the obvious, “If this were important, you would’ve left early, and you would have caught those trains.” I was still crying.

He offered one apology after the next, which I begrudgingly accepted. But it took several hours for me to shake off the anger and disappointment at him not being there when I arrived. There was no romantic reception.

While I was still stewing, we were making our way through a series of Tube and bus connections. “Here’s an A to Zed of London, which you’ll need while you’re here,” he said, foisting a massive tome into my hands.  I was utterly befuddled as he tried to explain this collection of endless maps and, with repeated reference to it, sought to explain to me where we were going and how.  “I know. It’s overwhelming, innit? But you’ll figure it out. You’re smart,” he said, beaming a wide, toothsome grin.

At long last, we arrived at the aging brownstone walkup in Golders Green he called home. This too failed to meet my expectations. I presumed that because he was a doctor, he had the means to have his own flat. It turns out that young doctors are not well-heeled in the United Kingdom.

 “So,” he paused with some embarrassment, “I’m renting a room from an elderly lady.” He could see the disappointment on my face. When we climbed the stairs and entered the flat, the octogenarian greeted us with tea. She was deeply chary of me from the first moment she laid eyes on me. She announced, while taking a sip of her tea, with precision in the Queen’s English, “The young lady shall not be allowed to spend the evenings in the flat.”

Without putting up a fuss, Gurmit explained to me, “You will stay with my younger sister, Saabjit. She’s only an hour away by bus. I’ll show you where she is in the A to Zed.” I shuddered at the thought of making my way here with that ominous and overwhelming volume.

Saying goodbye to the officious landlady reeking of rosewater and talc, we entered his room and closed the door.  The chemistry that overtook me at O’Hare airport engulfed me once we were alone. We kissed for what seemed like ages. Then, at long last and while looking into my eyes, he slipped my dress gingerly over my head. He undid my ponytail and scattered my hair about my naked shoulders and began to kiss my clavicle. Horribly ashamed, I said “Gurmit, I’m on my period.” To which he cheekily responded, “I’m a gynecologist. Do you think I care?”  His smile put me at ease.  He removed his turban and set it upon his desk, and untied his topknot. His long, black, thick hair tumbled below his waist, releasing a scent of coconut with which he plied his hair.

I was utterly mesmerised by the beauty of this man. I opened myself to him, forgetting my anger from several hours before. He kissed me tenderly on my lips as he entered me with his voluminous hair falling around my face. Our bodies intertwined. Our smells comingled. We made love until we were exhausted. Gurmit was the most sharing and attentive lover. He went to every length to pleasure me. After we made love, Gurmit braided our hair together in the low evening light. Then he smiled at me and said “Now I’ve got ya.” But in truth I wasn’t going anywhere…except to his sister’s house to spend the night.

During that week in London, we fell into a routine. During the day, he and I would stay together until late at night. Unable to control ourselves around each other, we made love in an offbeat section of Regent’s Park, in the unlit alcove of an apartment building in Golders Green, in a cemetery near his house, in the bathroom at a bar in Swiss Cottage. Then Gurmit would deposit me at his sister’s flat, where I would sleep until nine or so, have breakfast, then make my way over to Gurmit’s flat, where our shenanigans would begin anew.

At the end of the whirlwind week, I realised that I still didn’t know this man. I had not met any of his friends.  Our bond was largely physical. I enjoyed being in his presence, but our physical attraction to each other made it impossible to get to know him at a deeper level. All I knew by the end of the week was that I wanted more of Gurmit. I wanted more opportunities to go beyond our sexual attraction and intrepid encounters. Then, at the end of that week, I hopped on a plane and went to India for the summer.

Despite being busy with my studies in Mussoorie, I was unable to stop thinking of Gurmit. Then, after a few weeks, my period was late.  I needed to speak with Gurmit. But in those days, making international calls from India was not straightforward or affordable. One had to find an agent who would book the extremely expensive call. I called Gurmit at his flat several times, but his landlady reported, “Sorry, dear. He’s still at work.”  After five or six increasingly stress-filled efforts, I finally reached him and blurted out, “Gurmit, my period is very late.” Without missing a beat, Gurmit said, “Chris, that is terrific news. I want to marry you. I hope you know that.” 

I was taken aback.

I was not ready to be a mom or a wife.  Up to that point, our relationship was physical rather than emotional. Being alone and pregnant in India was not something that I could countenance. I had no idea how to even begin finding an abortion facility.  After three panic-filled weeks, my period finally came. Perhaps my period was just irregular, as it sometimes was in those young years of womanhood, or perhaps I miscarried. When I began to bleed, I again called Gurmit. After several attempts, once more, I reached him. “Gurmit, we’re in luck! My period came!” I was ecstatic. I was practically crying from relief.  But Gurmit was devastated. “Oh Chris. I was really looking forward to being the father of your baby.” I felt discomfited by this claim, given the nature of our relationship.

During most Monsoon days in Mussoorie, it rained nonstop. I had to have my clothes dry-cleaned because it was impossible to dry them outside. Leeches were a common nuisance on the hour-long trek up the hill to class and down again. After class, I would return to the room I had rented in a guesthouse. The rain falling on my tin roof created a romantic atmosphere that made me miss Gurmit poignantly.

I wrote to him daily after lunch and made my way through the rain and leaches to the post-office in the next bazaar. He was an equally vigorous letter writer. We exchanged details of our days and our expectations for our next meeting on my return trip in early October. I told him about the monkeys who slipped through the bars of my room to eat my peanut butter, and he told me about interesting patients he had treated and their infertility challenges. He updated me on Saabjit’s various hijinks. Through those letters, I began to get to get a sense of who Gurmit was as a person, how he spent his days, what he dreamed about and what he wanted from this life.

October finally came. I made my way from the cool climbs of Mussoorie to the inferno that was Delhi for my flight home to Chicago via London. This time, when I landed in London, I did not expect Gurmit to be on time. I saddled up to a coffee shop with a book and waited for him. An hour or so later, Gurmit arrived with his perfunctory apologies. I didn’t even bother asking him why he was late. Our time in London was brief. Before returning to London, I informed Gurmit that I wanted to celebrate my birthday in Edinburgh. Dutifully, Gurmit booked our tickets on a comfortable bus, and we passed the eight-hour journey canoodling and generally discomfiting the other passengers with our altogether too public displays of affection.

At the hotel in Edinburgh, we settled in quickly, and our hands immediately began exploring and undressing each other’s bodies. I wish I could remember the details of the hotel room. But all I remember is how ravenous we were for each other. “Chris, luv, do you mind fetching the condoms from my coat pocket?”  However, when I went to his coat pocket, I found just two condoms. “Gurmit, condoms come in clusters of three. Where the hell is the third condom?” I demanded accusatorily.  Gurmit’s face was ashen.

“Chris, what are you talking about? What are you suggesting?”

“Gurmit, I think you know exactly what I’m suggesting. Who was—or maybe is—she? One of your goddamned nurses?”

Gurmit insisted that there was nothing awry.  But I didn’t believe him. I didn’t sleep with him that night. A seed of doubt had been planted, and I was beginning to feel like a fool for thinking this amazing man was all that he seemed.

A few days later, I was on a plane back to Chicago.

Back in Chicago, those seeds of doubt sprouted and took root. We were still together, but other problems quickly emerged. Gurmit, as he explained on the first day, was from a traditional Sikh family. Although his father, who lived with his older widowed sister, had been living in Gravesend for more than three decades, he still followed the lifestyle of India in the 1960s. His father expected Gurmit and his two sisters to have arranged marriages. Gurmit was the oldest. Any socially unacceptable behavior on his part would compromise the arranged marriage prospects for his two younger sisters.

However, neither wanted the arranged marriages being foisted upon them.  I had spent enough time with the youngest sister, Saabjit, in London to know that she would do most things to avoid an arranged marriage, and if those things comprised a ‘to do’ list, she was making her way through that list efficiently. Paramjit, the older of the two sisters, had escaped to Australia to avoid being gheraoed by her father’s plans for an arranged marriage in 1991. And to triumphantly hammer the final nail in that coffin, she hooked up with a white guy and had two children out of wedlock with him. Their father disowned her and her children.

Given Saabjit’s myriad misadventures, Gurmit asked that I let Saabjit live with me in Chicago. He thought my nerdy ways would have a salubrious effect upon her. I welcomed Saabjit to our couch, where she joined me and the Chinese husband-wife duo, who were my roommates. But Saabjit was incorrigible. She was shoplifting, picking up drug dealers at the laundromat, and disporting with miscreants that she found loafing about near McDonald’s on 53rd Street.

“Saabjit, aim higher than drug dealers, for fuck’s sake! You’re just putting yourself and me at great risk.”

 “Chris, just because you’re fucking my brother, doesn’t mean you get to tell me what to do.”

After the dustup I called Gurmit. “Gurmit, you need to come out here. She’s going to get herself into big trouble. Hell, she’s going to get me in trouble.”

By the end of the week, Gurmit was in Chicago.  “Saabjit. Chris is right. Find a professional man. Stop chasing the hooligans.”

Saabjit was clear in her response to him too, “Gurmit. Fuck off.”  As if by plan, she got pregnant. She returned to London to have the baby. She was twenty-one.

When her father learned that she had given birth to a half-Black daughter through the Punjabi rumour network, he was predictably enraged. He gave her an ultimatum: put the child up for adoption and accept an arranged marriage to whomever he found for her at once, or else. She went underground.

As Gurmit and I were becoming more serious and as I spent more time in London, the responsibility reposed in Gurmit began eroding our relationship because the prospects for our future were increasingly dim.   If we were walking down the street together in London and Gurmit saw another Punjabi in the distance, he would let go of my hand and speed up or even cross the street to get away from me. He was terrified of the Punjabi rumour mill and its devastating efficiency. 

“Gurmit, it really hurts my feelings when you do that.”

“Sorry, luv. If my dad finds out, I’m in big trouble.”

We increasingly fought about Gurmit’s endgame or lack thereof. He kept insisting that we could get married once his sisters were “settled” even though they were never going to be settled in the preferred sense intended by the Sikhs of Gravesend.

There had been a window of opportunity for our relationship to progress meaningfully in spite of these constraints. Before the third year of my doctoral program, I could have switched to a comparable program in London, provided I could get admitted. However, Gurmit was still scared to death of getting caught. And when I perceived the window to be closed because I was now committed to Chicago, I told Gurmit I couldn’t live like this anymore. He had to be willing to break from his father’s expectations if he wanted to be with me. I needed to know that there was a future rather than an endless string of presents. And Gurmit simply could not do that. I broke up with him.

I concentrated upon my doctoral work and tried to put him out of my mind. That worked for a few years. In 1998, I moved to Los Angeles to work for the RAND Corporation. Alone in a new, overwhelming, and sprawling city, I thought about him often. I read and re-read his letters, and I fell in love with him all over again. Unable to resist the urge,  I called him at his father’s home in Gravesend.

“Gurmit, it’s Chris. I’m calling from Los Angeles.”

Gurmit was excited to hear my voice. “Why are you calling?”

“Well, remember when you braided our hair together?  I’ve been thinking about that a lot.”

“Me too, Chris. Me too.”

“Is there any chance you can come to LA? I’d like to try again?”

Within ten days, Gurmit was in Los Angeles. Our physical attraction was as strong as ever. But our lovemaking was tainted with sadness. After all, what had changed? I was afraid to ask Gurmit if he could tell his dad about us because deep down, I knew the answer.

Once, when I curled up against his body in bed, I cautiously asked: “Gurmit, how can we be together if you won’t tell your dad or at least marry me anyway?” He continued to harp on the necessary but insufficient condition of his sisters’ arranged marriages. I was livid.

“Gurmit, your sisters are mothers now.”

Gurmit’s position hadn’t evolved at all. Left with no choice, I explained, “Gurmit, I want you. I want us. But if you still can’t take on your dad, nothing is possible. I need you to leave on the next flight.”

Begrudgingly but without complaint, Gurmit was gone the next day. Years passed. We made a few furtive efforts to get back together. Each time was bedeviled by the same problem.

In April of 2004, I moved to Washington, D.C. for a job with the United States Institute of Peace. A month later, I met Jeff, the man I would marry.  Later in December, we learned that I was pregnant, and so in March 2005, I married Jeff. We lost our baby the week before we married. Jeff was with me from the beginning to the bitter end of that tragic pregnancy. Then we lost again a few months later. For the second miscarriage, Jeff was distant and disengaged. This was a poisonous weed that took root early in our marriage.

While the losses created a distance in our new marriage, his parents pried those distances further.  My mother-in-law, Mary, would say “Chris. You’re white trash. You come from the wrong side of the tracks, and you will always be from the wrong side of the tracks.”

When his parents were cruel like this, my husband did nothing. He was unable to confront his parents.  I sunk into a deep depression. If I am unworthy of being protected by my own husband, what am I worthy of? We kept drifting apart, and Jeff refused to go to counseling.

“Jeff, I need you to go to counselling with me to save our marriage. It’s crumbling about us.”

“Chris, I can’t. What if the counsellor tells me I’m doing something wrong.”

“Jeff honey, we are both doing something wrong.”

But he was adamant in his refusal. The space between us became a chasm. And in that chasm, thoughts of Gurmit began to grow.

In 2014, nearly nine years into my challenging marriage, I went to London to give a book talk. After the talk, I was alone in my hotel. Memories of Gurmit and me were littered across London. I decided to call the home of Gurmit’s father and ask for Gurmit. Gurmit had always spent the weekends in Gravesend, and I assessed that he was likely there. I no longer had a functional number for him in London.  Gurmit’s father answered in a thick Punjabi accent. I told him in Punjabi, “My name is Christine. I’m the woman who wrote all of those letters to Gurmit from India many years ago. I’d like to speak with Gurmit.”

Gurmit’s father responded briskly in Punjabi, “I know who you are. Gurmit’s not home.”

“Can you give him my number?” His dad agreed to do so. Then I went home to Virginia to wait.

Within two days, I saw the +44 number come up on my phone. It was Gurmit. I was on a train to New York for another book talk. We spoke for the duration of the train ride. I asked him if he was married. “Chris, I’m divorced, and I have a daughter. You?”

“Yes. But I’m miserable in my marriage.”

We began messaging and connecting on Skype. It was as if time had collapsed on itself. We were as we always were. But this time, Gurmit resolved that he would tell his father and marry me, irrespective of his father’s opinions on the matter. I told my husband that I was leaving him and that I was getting back together with Gurmit. Jeff was devastated, but he still refused to go to marriage counselling.  Gurmit and I met thereafter in New York in December.  Once we were together, our bodies found each other as they always had but Gurmit was lost. His marriage had changed his life. In New York he told me the whole story, or so he said.

“Chris, I have to tell you a lot of things. I am not the man you fell in love with. My marriage destroyed me.”

Gurmit began to explain the sordid truth of his recent past and present. He agreed to have an arranged marriage. His father found him a barely literate woman from his family’s village outside of Jullundur. I was appalled by Gurmit’s willingness to marry a woman who was so beneath him intellectually, and felt a strange pity for this woman. He had not even met her. Their engagement took place between the woman and his photo. His father picked a much younger woman he believed would be an amiable housewife, willing to take care of Gurmit, him and his sister while giving birth to children she would raise.  It turns out that she wasn’t the simpleton they presumed her to be. While awaiting to come to England, she was studying U.K. immigration law, and she imagined a very different life for herself in the U.K. that didn’t necessarily include being married. At least this was Gurmit’s account.

Once in Gravesend, she began calling the police to report abuse at the hands of the residents of the home. She began staging suicide events, evidently telling the medical personnel that her family was abusing her. She filed a criminal complaint. Gurmit’s elderly aunt was taken into custody. Gurmit and his father also spent time in jail. Ultimately, those charges were dismissed. Along the way, she became pregnant but aborted the fetus without telling Gurmit until after the fact. But despite all of this drama and legal jeopardy, he took her back when she came crawling back to the marriage.

But she was undeterred: she wanted to remain in the U.K., but she didn’t want to be married if she didn’t have to.  She continued the old patterns of trying to establish a collage of evidence of abuse. Even while trying to ruin her married life, she clung to it as a contingency plan. She became pregnant in hopes of keeping Gurmit until she no longer needed him. She filed a police complaint again. The household members were taken into custody again. This time, the judge found him guilty. He went to jail. He had to perform community service. He could no longer practice medicine.

“Gurmit, so how do you earn a living?”

“I work in a shop close to our home in Gravesend.”

I was floored. But this explains why I was unable to find anything on my extensive Google searches for him over the years. He was no longer an active, publishing scientist.

I asked him about his daughter. The story grew darker. “I don’t have a relationship with my daughter. I refused to visit her under visitation.” I was sickened.

“Gurmit, that’s what my father did to me. How the hell could you abandon your daughter?” I was simmering in rage. Gurmit offered the palliative that at least paid child support. It wasn’t enough. He had no defense for his actions.

Rightly or wrongly, at no point did I doubt his innocence. But his failures as a father were all too similar to my own father. I felt for his daughter. I imagined the crises of identity she will have to maneuver over the course of her life as a fatherless daughter. But I could feel in my bones that this great reveal wasn’t the entire truth. He was holding something back.

Back in Virginia, we continued to talk nearly every day. But I told him, “You’re still hiding something from me. I need to know what you’re hiding.”  After a lot of persuasion, Gurmit conceded. “Chris, you’re right. I’m still married.” I felt a wave of nausea wash over me.

“What the fuck do you mean, you’re still married? You told me you were divorced.” 

“I am divorced. But I had second arranged marriage.”

I could not believe the idiocy of this man. After the fiasco of his first arranged marriage, he had another marriage.  As before, his father scouted his village for a simpleton. Once again, the engagement happened between the woman and a photo of Gurmit. Again, Gurmit had never met her prior to the wedding night, which he consummated.  Something snapped inside of me. I was repulsed by him. I couldn’t stand the thought or sight of him. I told him that I couldn’t see him anymore.

And with that final grotesque revelation, a thirty-year saga ended abruptly as I confronted the damage I did to my marriage and what it would take to fix it.

.

C Christine Fair is a Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University. She completed her PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilisation at the University of Chicago. Her creative pieces have appeared in Fictive Dream, Hypertext, Lunch Ticket, Bangalore Review, Glassworks, and Existere Journal of Arts, among others, in addition to her scholarly work and literary translations from Urdu, Punjabi and Hindi.

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

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