She rode to the crest of the hillock and looked down. The other rider was a pale shadow on the trail below and in the moonlight his shadow was even paler than he was. That was because of the mica in the rocks which gleamed, glittered and shone and turned the landscape into something ethereal and strange. With a low snarl, she spurred her horse forwards.
She zigzagged down the slope and still the other rider didn’t hear her. Was he engrossed in his private thoughts? That must be the answer. Her Winchester was cradled in her arms and her low snarl turned into a stealthy laugh. Her prey seemed oddly incautious, but this was to her advantage. At the base of the slope, she spurred her mount to a fast canter.
The other rider finally became aware that something was behind him. As he turned in his saddle, she raised the rifle and aimed at his face. She slowed in order to be sure of hitting him square.
“Hey, what’s this?” he cried in astonishment.
His head, which was that of a giant rabbit, bobbed up and down, his nose twitched and his long ears undulated.
“Howdy, pard,” she said, and then she added, “I guess you think I’m just a bandit, some unwashed desperado who wants your money. But that’s not true at all. My name is Jalamity Kane and I’m hunting all the men who are part animal. I know what it means that you’re a man-rabbit, it means that you studied with a shaman, one of the Mojave wizards.”
“Well, yes I did,” answered the other rider.
“I make the same speech every time I find one of you people. When I was younger and full of hope and desire, I also sought out a shaman to study with. I found one. Seven years in a subterranean cavern, putting myself through horrid exercises, expanding my mind! But it didn’t work, I didn’t acquire the power. I failed and my soul became bitter. It’s not nice to be bitter and that’s especially true when I look upon your sweet little visage. Gonna blow a hole right through it. Say your final prayers, bunny boy!”
The other rider raised a paw to remonstrate with her but it was too late. Her finger squeezed the trigger and the canyon echoed with the shot. He slumped in the saddle and his horse bolted. He didn’t fall off but remained in place, his feet held by the stirrups. Jalamity watched him vanish into the crystalline darkness. She said to herself, “I’ll destroy all of you. I have no interest in money. I have no interest in anything, only in slaying every cat-man, owl-man, worm-man and cougar-man in the land. You’ll see!”
It was her mission in life. A cruel and futile mission, but a mission all the same, and a gal’s gotta have a mission.
2.
Jalamity was in position to ambush her next victim. She squatted in the shallow pit she had dug. The dry plain extended all around here, as flat as a tune played on a badly-maintained piano in a rotten old saloon somewhere in the worst kind of decayed ghost town where the railroad was supposed to come but didn’t. She had constructed her own cover because there was no natural cover available in the geography of the bland landscape.
The rider was a puff of dust at the limits of her vision. It was early evening and he was evidently trying to cover as many miles as possible before night fell and she chuckled at the malevolent thought that he was hurrying to his doom, a circumstance he would soon be aware of. The Winchester was firm in his grasp and she chewed a stick of licorice root.
This wasn’t European licorice or Glycyrrhiza glabra which also grew in a few places in a few states, having been brought over by settlers, but the harsher Glycyrrhiza lepidota that the Zuni people had liked to chomp as a medicine. Not that Jalamity needed a cure for anything. She just liked to chew on something at the end of a day and she hated tobacco.
She waited patiently as the cloud of beige dust that was the rider expanded in size and took on more of a familiar shape. His horse was tiring a little and his pace was slowing. As he approached, she saw that he wore a hood. All of these fools liked to cover their telltale faces!
She stood up straight, rising out of the pit like a snake about to strike, and strike she would, by which we mean attack and not cease working because of dissatisfaction with pay. She cared nothing for wealth. No ordinary bandit, this Jalamity, half woman and half man, the product of seven years’ meditation that hadn’t worked out the way she’d wanted.
“Hey, what’s this?” he cried in astonishment.
His head, which was that of a giant squirrel, bobbed up and down, his nose twitched and his jaws chattered.
“Howdy, pard,” she said, and then she added, “I guess you think I’m just a bandit, some unwashed desperado who wants your money. But that’s not true at all. My name is Jalamity Kane and I’m hunting all the men who are part animal. I know what it means that you’re a man-squirrel, it means that you studied with a shaman, one of the Mojave wizards.”
It was the same speech, or nearly the same speech as before. It was a short speech but one she had made dozens of times. Very few people ever got to hear it more than once, apart from herself.
An occasional victim escaped her, but it was such a rare event that in terms of statistics it counted for nothing at all.
Jalamity was now reaching the end of the speech. “Gonna blow a hole right through ya. Say goodbye, squirrel boy!”
The other rider raised a paw to remonstrate with her but it was too late. Her finger squeezed the trigger and the plains absorbed the sound of the shot. First he slumped in the saddle and then he fell off. His horse didn’t bolt but remained where it was, looking confused. One day, Jalamity knew, she would meet a man who was half horse. What would the horse he rode on do then? Would he regard Jamality as an enemy of all horses and try to kick her? She had no idea. It was a riddle that only the future could solve.
Most horses didn’t care about their riders but that one might be different. It was better to wait to find out the answer for sure. Speculation was a waste of her time. She climbed out of the pit, moved to the side, leaned over and reached out with her hands and jerked her wrists.
An unseen blanket came up in her fingers. Her horse was beneath it, lying on its side, and now it got clumsily to its hooves. She had covered it with a sheet and covered the sheet with sand and gravel and grit so that it resembled only the smallest of humps in the almost featureless plain. There had been nowhere else to hide it. She could have dug a pit, as she had for herself, but that would have been very hard work. Alternatively, she could have covered herself with a sheet too, but that would have restricted her visibility. Everything had worked out for the best. The squirrel-man was dead.
And now she had his horse as well. She could maybe use his horse as some part of a trap for her next victim. Killing these beasts was her mission in life. A cruel and futile mission, as we already have been told, but yes, a mission all the same, and a gal’s gotta have a mission.
About the Book
Bill Bones was a normal human being until he studied under a Mojave Shaman and was transformed into a man-dog called The Growl. Now, driven by a keen sense of justice, The Growl is on the hunt for the villains who killed his boss, newspaperman Ridley Smart … and he’ll stop at nothing!
Crossing the deserts and forests of the American continent, The Growl searches for the men he must kill. Along the way he meets more beast-men, more magicians, the avenger Jalamity Kane who is seeking to rid the world of the beast menace, and other dangerous characters, from the artificial to the wild, from the robotic to the demonic.
In the deft hands of Rhys Hughes, this inventive tale becomes a masterpiece of twists and turns … exploring and questioning our definitions of humanity, discovering the very meaning of what life and reality might be.
About the Author
Rhys Hughes is a writer of Fantastika and Speculative Fiction.
His earliest surviving short story dates from 1989, and since that time he has embarked on an ambitious project of writing a story cycle consisting of exactly 1000 linked tales. Recently, he decided to give this cycle the overall name of PANDORA’S BLUFF. The reference is to the box of troubles in the old myth. Each tale is a trouble, but hope can be found within them all.
His favourite fiction writers are Italo Calvino, Stanislaw Lem, Boris Vian, Flann O’Brien, Alasdair Gray and Donald Barthelme, all of whom have a well-developed sense of irony and a powerful imagination. He particularly enjoys literature that combines humour with seriousness, and that fuses the emotional with the intellectual, the profound with the light-hearted, the spontaneous with the precise.
His first book was published in 1995 and sold slowly but it seemed to strike a chord with some people. His subsequent books sold more strongly as my reputation gradually increased. He is regarded as a “cult author” by some and though pleased with that description, he obviously wants to reach out to a wider audience!
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
A brief introduction to Rhys Hughes’ Sunset Suite, published by Gibbon Moon Books this year, and a discussion with the author on this ‘Weird Western’ and more…
Rhys Hughes
Perhaps — that’s the wrong way to start a review or any article— but given that this is a book that offers immeasurable possibilities, like sunsets or stars, one could still start with a ‘perhaps’… You might start with another word of course!
Perhaps, Rhys Hughes’ TheSunset Suite is a novel? Or, is it not? It seems to be a group of short, tall tales tied neatly into coffee lore, coming closest structurally to The Arabian Nights — stories told by the Scheherazade, originating around Middle Ages, much after coffee was discovered in Ethiopia by a goatherd in 800 CE. The book departs in various shades from the One Thousand and One Nights, even though magic creeps in every now and then.
Hughes also seems to have a fascination for coffee lores for he redid TheRubaiyatof Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), translated from Persian by Edward Fitzgerald, substituting the wine with coffee a year ago. And here you have two men in the Wild West, telling tall tales, inspired by 26 mugs of coffee.
In The Empire Podcast by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, there are a couple of episodes on coffee. Coffee houses sprouted around the fifteenth century in the Middle East and flourished during the Ottoman Empire, spreading over time to Europe, and even to America… if we are to believe Hughes! In those times, soldiers, among others, gathered in coffee houses, much to the dismay of kings. The warriors started turning to tall tales, philosophy and gossip instead of training all the time. The rulers were unhappy at the turn of events. Germany went so far as to ban coffee. An article on food history tells us: “One of the most curious of these events happened in Prussia, a precursor to modern-day Germany, where it’s leader Frederick the Great banned coffee by decree in 1777. And he did it for a reason that is almost baffling to modern notions of health and what’s good for society: He wanted people to drink more beer.” In the podcast, they do tell us Germany produced beer. In those days, coffee was seen as a suspicious drink, an aphrodisiac with magical qualities. It is these magical qualities that are invoked in TheSunset Suite.
Brand and Thorn are two coffee drinkers under the stars, sitting over a bubbling pot — and each cup from the pot has a tale in it, professes the author. That the tales are part of a dreamscape of darker hues verging on the absurd, bringing out the strangeness of the illusion we call life and its endless possibilities, comes as a surprise.
People turn into corn cobs, biscuits, musical notes, sombreros and are resurrected in paintings of nightmares at the end, tying the characters loosely into a frame. Phoenixes swim underwater and horses turn into boats and ‘a hill of beans’ becomes a ‘mountain of beans’. The transformations seem to be reminiscent of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) or Pinter’s The Room (1957) … but we are left wondering, are they?
The settings are often realistic at the start but head for the absurd as they end. Each story has a punch and leaves the reader open mouthed in amazement. They are imaginative, clever — sometimes playing on words — like the story of a genie who was told by a robber to make money ‘no object’ — a turn of a phrase which should mean that money is so plentiful that anything is affordable. But the genie, trapped in time and traveling over centuries, misunderstands the grave robber. He makes money into a literal ‘no object’— ‘abstractions, vague colours, mental scents and other intangible things’.
Hughes expands the literary world to a frog, a dog and even an armadillo who are yet to publish their books. This seems almost like an inversion of Luigi Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an author (1921), where the characters left incomplete by a deceased author are looking for a resolution. Hughes’ reader, who talks of these authors from the animal kingdom, waits patiently for the books to turn up. In another story, evocative of the same play by Pirandello, the characters from his earlier tales are trapped in a painting and talk to the artist, ‘the keeper of Lore’, who paints his own nightmares peopled by the creations of Hughes. One of the last narratives, this one ties the stories into a loosely structured unit.
“I am Grampsylvania. That wasn’t my original name, but it’s my name for the foreseeable future. He changed me, you see, from a man into a gigantic but sapient corncob pipe. I don’t mind.”
“And he changed me into a biscuit,” said another voice. “I was just George Lewis once but now I’m The Biscuit Kid.”
A third voice added, “Turned me into a hat, a sombrero. I was Max Grizzly originally. Not that I dislike being a hat.”
“Wonder what he’ll turn you into?” they said to Henry [the artist inside the painting].
“I don’t want to change.”
“Well, you don’t have a say in the matter.”
The idea of the writer as the ultimate creator stretches through tall tales to experimental forms. ‘The Biscuit Kid’ is a one-and-a-half-page story written in one sentence — is it an attempt at what is known as the stream of consciousness technique (as in James Joyce’s Ulysees, 1918) or just a quirky experiment? A strange tale about a man turning into a biscuit in a sulphurous pond with tea dunked into it with an allusion to the Boston Tea Party has the victim floating in infinite circles … is it a comment on history repeating itself? The narrative of ‘Reintarnation Smith’ maps the history of the world rather randomly through the many reincarnations of the protagonist, from a palaeolithic shaman (were there shamans in that time frame?) to a Napoleonic soldier and a First World War trooper to an intelligent tree in a world where humanity has become extinct! The alternatives offered and suggested are mind boggling…
Each story sees itself as a possibility expressed in a light gripping vein, characteristic of the author, who has ostensibly been seen as a cult writer… though I am not sure what that term means or how Hughes, who has authored more than fifty books and writes up storms of stories and poems, feels about it — Let’s ask him. We start with the most pressing question —
This is on something that has me perplexed after reading Sunset Suite. How do you think a frog, a dog or an armadillo would hold a pen? Can we read frog/ dog/ armadillo — or would one need to download a special app from Google to read their books? Or is it better to have a frogman/ dogman/ armadilloman translate these? Please enlighten us.
Armadillo: Image from Public Domain
I hadn’t really thought about it until you asked the question. They would have to use telekinesis to hold a pen. The power of their minds. Maybe they have bigger minds than we think. Having said that, I don’t know why we always assume that if you have a bigger mind, you will be able to move physical objects just by thinking. When I was young, I often tested my own telekinetic powers. They never worked, of course. Except for once, when I made a cardboard box cover a daisy during a storm. I was staring out the window and willing the box to fall on the daisy and protect it from the wind, and that is what actually happened! All of a sudden, the box rose in the air and came down over the flower. Certainly it was the wind that did the trick, rather than my mental powers, but at the time I wondered if perhaps I had found the secret of telekinesis. Frogs, dogs and armadillos would write books using telekinesis. The real question is how much we would understand of what they had written. I don’t suppose we have much in common with frogs or armadillos. The dog’s books might be more accessible. I guess most of the descriptive writing in a dog’s novel would be smell-based because that’s how dogs map the world. But while reading a dog’s novel, should we dog-ear the pages to keep our places? Or human-ear them?
That’s an astute observation… Maybe we can dino-ear them! Did all dinosaurs have ears…? Let’s leave that discussion for another time. Next, I need to know what is a cult writer? Are you one? Please explain.
I don’t really know, to be honest, and I’m not sure if I am one or not. Many years ago, I was told that I was one. I think it’s another way of saying, “Your books aren’t very popular,” but softening that blow by implying that, “At least some people read and enjoy them.” I embraced the definition for want of any better label. We do like labels, that’s the problem. When I write, I write just for myself. Not quite. I do try to write in a similar mode to the writers I most enjoy, and they have audiences. If they didn’t, I wouldn’t know about them. I adore the books of Italo Calvino [1923-1985], but I don’t know many other readers who read him. Does that make him a cult writer? I don’t think so. I think it’s just more likely that I am a little isolated and simply don’t know the readers who do read that kind of fiction. And yet I am in contact with some people on the internet who seem to share my taste in fiction. In fact, they give me recommendations of authors I’d never heard of, who turn out to be wonderfully in tune with my taste. Apparently, if you are a writer who is more loved by other writers than by readers who don’t write, you are a writer’s writer, and that’s a form of cult writer. Last year, I read the nine novels of the almost forgotten Henry Green [1905-1973], who was described as a writer’s writer’s writer, in other words a cult writer cubed. I suppose that to be a cult writer is simply a stage for some writers as they work their way up to greater popularity. It’s probably possible for writers who were once hugely popular but who are no longer appreciated by a sufficiently wide readership to turn into cult writers on the way down.
Why did you not write of a squonk in this book since it is your favourite fantasy animal? Will you be writing on a squonk soon?
A squonk: A mythical creature in American Folklore. Image from Public Domain.
There are no squonks in The Sunset Suite because I have written too much about them elsewhere. I don’t want to oversquonk myself. I first learned about squonks from Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings [1957] I think. And then I noticed references to the creature in all sorts of places. Years ago, I wrote a short story called ‘The Squonk Laughed’ because squonks are the saddest of all entities. I wanted to write about one that cheers up. And one of my longest ever poems is about a squonk ragtime pianist who works in a Wild West saloon, ‘Honky Tonk Squonk’. The very word is funny. It sounds round but also squelchy, rather like a cream-filled pastry. There is an excellent song by the band Genesis about squonks called simply ‘Squonk’ and it’s a song that will tell you absolutely everything you need to know about squonks if you listen carefully to the lyrics. In my book, it seemed to me that it was time to show some restraint when it came to squonks. You can have too much of a good, weepy thing.
How long did this book take to germinate into a full blown one and how did it come about?
Not long at all. Some of my projects proceed very slowly, they take years or even decades to be completed. But most of my projects are done fast. This is because if I take too much time over them, I worry that I will lose the thread or threads of the plot or plots, or that the mood and atmosphere of the work will change and be lost. That’s not always a disadvantage. I might begin work on a book thinking it is going in a certain direction. Then I put the project aside for a long time. When I return to it, I have often forgotten the direction I had intended to take the book. So I make it go in a different direction, and it seems to me that sometimes this other direction is a superior journey to the original intended direction. Who knows? But that has no relevance to The Sunset Suite because I wrote it in just a few weeks. I can’t recall exactly how long it took, but it wasn’t a drawn-out process. It happened to be one of those projects that flowed easily. Many do, and I am always grateful to them. It is almost as if I am not doing the work but simply acting as a channel for a set of stories that exist in some cosmic cloud. This is probably a fanciful delusion, but it is one that many writers have had over many centuries. We are conduits as well as creators. We are pipelines as well as pipers.
Have you actually been to the Wild West? Why have you set your book against this backdrop?
I have never been to the Wild West. I have never even been to the West. Even the most easterly part of the American continent is west to me. The furthest west I have been is Ireland. Yet I love Westerns, especially so-called ‘weird’ Westerns. Having said that, I have been to Almeria in Spain, the only desert in Europe, where many ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ were filmed. It looks the way I imagine Mexico or Arizona might look, but I can’t know that for sure because I haven’t been there. Maybe one day I will. I have written quite a few Westerns, all of them weird and unusual. The first was a novella called The Gargantuan Legion. I had the idea for that when I was very young. Much later I wrote a novel called The Honeymoon Gorillas [2018], and then a collection of stories, poems and short plays called Weirdly Out West [2021]. Shortly after finishing The Sunset Suite, I wrote a Western novel
called Growl at the Moon that has been accepted for publication. I am currently working on a novel titled The Boomerang Gang. I find writing weird Westerns to be great fun, relaxing too, yet they apply a strong stimulus to my imagination. Next year I hope to write a novel called Fists of Fleece, which will combine Welsh folklore with Wild West tall tales, creating an especially offbeat hybrid.
You have strange names given to characters peopling The Sunset Suite. Why? Please elaborate.
I enjoy giving my characters strange names. I also think it’s safer. Suppose I have a character in a story named Tim Jones and something absurdly odd happens to him. There might be a real Tim Jones out there in the world who will start thinking that I am referring to him and maybe even mocking him. It is better to give the character a name that surely no real person will ever have. Argosy Elbows, for example, or Crawly Custard. Readers can regard these as nicknames, if they wish. I often make lists of offbeat names for characters that I will use in future stories. Some of these names have been waiting decades to be used. Other names I invent on the spur of the moment while writing. Invention on the spur of the moment is an appropriate thing to do when writing a Western. But in fact the names in The Sunset Suite are still fairly conventional. Jake Bones, Shorty Potter, Killy the Bid, Grampsylvania, Max Grizzly, Cowboy Bunions, Dan Flyblown, Lanky Ranter. It’s not beyond the bounds of plausibility that real people out there do have such names.
Why do you keep obsessing over coffee? Please explain.
I hope it’s not quite an obsession. I like coffee, that’s all. I guess it’s my favourite drink. No offence to water, tea or beer! I am in the process of cutting down on my coffee consumption. I have been reducing my intake for the past twenty years, but it’s still not at zero. I am reducing it very slowly indeed, that’s why. Mind you, the reason why there is so much coffee in The Sunset Suite is simply because cowboy films always show the characters drinking coffee around a campfire. They surely told stories to each other at night while drinking the coffee. It occurred to me that I could use this as a frame for my book. A sequence of strange stories set in the Wild West linked together by the fact that each tale was generated by a cup of coffee. At the end of the book, the two tale tellers have drunk too much coffee. The book is a warning that will be heeded too late. But we are all adults. We don’t really need to be warned about such perils as coffee consumption.
Since classification is an important aspect of human existence, how would you classify your book?
It’s a ‘Weird Western’. That’s what I have been calling it. This is a real sub-genre, and I think my book can be labelled as such without any objections. I might also call it a comedy, a picaresque or portmanteau farce, a speculative whimsy. But it remains a Western, that’s undeniable. It makes substantial use of parody, pastiche, paradox and probably other things beginning with the letter ‘p’. At the same time, I don’t mind if the book is classified just as a fantasy or even only as fiction.
What have been the influences on this book? On your writing?
The main influences on this particular book of mine were other weird Westerns by writers I admire, in particular The Hawkline Monster [1974] by Richard Brautigan, which was marketed as a Gothic Western. Brautigan was especially good at writing short but thoughtful passages that are often at tangents to each other but nonetheless do combine with each other satisfyingly. Another influence was probably a collection of stories I read when I was young, The Illustrated Man [1951] by Ray Bradbury, in which a sleeping man’s tattoos come alive one at a time and tell stories as they do so. But in my book, it is the cups of coffee that come alive in a fictional sense. I also think that the pulp Western author Max Brand was an influence on my book, especially his stranger works, such as The Untamed [1918], which seem to blend echoes of ancient mythology with the more conventional cowboy motifs and clichés.
Would you call these stories humorous? They do linger with absurdity and a certain cheekiness.
I like to think they are humorous. I like to think that The Sunset Suite is a comedy among other things. Most of my fiction has some comedic elements, even if the general tone of the story is serious. Real life is a mishmash of tragedy, comedy, indifference, absurdity, beauty, and who knows what else, so it’s only right and proper for fiction to be such a mishmash too. Obviously, in a short story there’s not much room in which to throw everything, so one has to be more careful when it comes to constructing the piece. The mode of the book, which features a framing device in which is found a set of individual tales that echo each other’s themes, is one I especially enjoy using. I am planning other books that follow this structure.
What books are you whipping up now?
I always work on several projects at the same time. I am currently working on two novels. One of them is a satirical thriller called Average Assassins, and the other is another weird Western called The Boomerang Gang, which is about an Australian immigrant to the Wild West in the late 19th Century and it features an experimental aeroplane with boomerangs for wings. I am also working on a large project called Dabbler in Drabbles, which consists of four volumes of drabbles. A drabble, as I’m sure you know, is a flash fiction exactly 100 words in length. There will be one thousand drabbles in total when the project is finished. The first three volumes have already been published and I am pushing ahead with the fourth. Yet another project I’m working on is a collection of short meditations called City Life. These meditations are supposedly written by the cities themselves and there will be sixty of them in total. I am working on other projects too, but I won’t mention those yet.
Thank you Rhys for your fantastic writing and your time.
(This interview has been conducted through emails and the review written by Mitali Chakravarty.)
Published in 1972, this novel by Italo Calvino explores Marco Polo’s journey to China and is in the form of a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.
Last year I began work on a project called City Life, which will consist of fifty short stories that are each exactly 500 words in length. I don’t know where the idea for this project came from, but I suppose it must have been influenced by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Perhaps my project is a modest tribute to that magnificent author, my favourite writer of fiction, but there are differences in approach. His cities are imaginary; mine are real. I tell the stories of my cities from the viewpoint of the cities themselves.
I feel a little uncomfortable trying to compare myself to Calvino. I stand in his shadow. City Life will never match Invisible Cities, yet I am pleased with my progress so far. I have written 32 instalments to date. I am at present unsure how I will go about finding a publisher for the book when it is completed, especially as my ideal format is for the book to be published in a box, with each individual city on a separate piece of paper, meaning that the tales can be easily read in any order. I will deal with that issue in good time.
Meanwhile, the following two extracts are told in the voices of Bangalore and Colombo.
City Life: Bangalore
Bangalore in 1890sModern day Bangalore
Once I was a garden city, full of lakes and trees, an environment with a climate very conducive to good health. But someone in another country discovered the transistor and then the computer chip. How did these technological innovations change me? I rapidly became a major centre for the new industries generated by those inventions. I expanded, lost my original definition, acquired a new one. A human being who expands too rapidly does so because of misapplied greed and a reckless disregard of bodily danger. I had no choice in the matter. I turned into an electronics hub, one devoted to the money that can be made from computers, those miraculous and alarming devices.
Yet my appearance matches no true vision of an imaginary future. Do not suppose that I am clean and beautiful, filled with crystal towers and monorails of gleaming glass. My roads are clogged with traffic, I am dusty, cracked, prone to flooding, polluted and overstressed. My air smells of smoke and chemicals. I am ashamed of my lakes, plastic-choked and foamy with effluent. I have grown huge and ugly, I tremble with the urgency of the commercial transactions taking place inside me, as if I have a nervous disorder, damage to my spinal cord. Yes, I generate enormous wealth, but who for? Not for the majority of the inhabitants who fight for the daily right to survive.
We think of deserts as empty wastelands and we suppose that the addition of a thousand lakes would transform them into paradisal realms. But deserts can be created by intense ambition as surely as by weather patterns and geography. Cut down trees, build roads, pound the ground flat in order to erect buildings, absorb villages on the edge of the sprawl. The process is too late to arrest. It will keep going until I am unable to recognise myself in my dreams. Not that I sleep enough these days for dreams to be common. I am a restless giant. The noise of the traffic is permanent. It reduces at night but never ceases. The coming and going of freight trains keeps me awake.
But I am not yet ready for despair that resembles an infinite resignation. Every desert, even one manufactured for profit, should contain an oasis. Near my heart, at the centre of my flux, there is a certain street and halfway along it can be found the greatest bookshop in the world. Blossom Book House not only has a tremendous selection of titles, it also provides the burning desert traveller with pools of thoughtful quiet. I am a city that contains a bookshop. How can I enter and browse that store without turning myself inside-out? This is a mystery with a solution I intend to keep secret. Perhaps a city’s spirit can enter a human consciousness every once in a while?
I immerse myself in books full of pictures of the way I was. When I was the fairest one of all on my high plateau.
City Life: Colombo
Colombo
There is crime in all big cities, that’s a law of life, and a certain amount of crime occurs in me too. On the western shores of the island of Sri Lanka I recline, but it is difficult to relax for long. There are sirens, shouts, a scuffle. Someone is robbing pedestrians at knifepoint or breaking into a shop again. What is to be expected? There is even murder on occasion.
The police frequently arrest those responsible, but sometimes the best detectives are mystified by a cunning theft or abduction. They admit defeat. One day there is a spectacular homicide near the ocean. The perpetrator leaves no clues at all. The experts are baffled. At last, a forensics specialist comes up with the ingenious idea of turning the case over to me.
I am the city itself and must be fully aware of every incident that happens within me. If anyone can solve this case, it is I, the capital of my modest nation. When I am approached with the proposal, I agree immediately. There’s no need for me to examine evidence, which is non-existent anyway. The usual methods of the criminologist are suitable for human beings only.
I am a metropolis, not huge but significant enough, and the killing took place inside my body. I tightly shut my notional eyes and concentrate. Where do I feel a peculiar itch? In one of my southern suburbs, in a particular street. I narrow it down quickly enough, to a house and a room in that house. A man is sitting on a chair at a table. He is eating his dinner.
I speak to him. He is so surprised that he drops his spoon. But he is rather a resourceful person, able to recover his composure in a matter of moments, wide grin on his mouth, his eyes full of mockery. It is clear he feels safe from arrest, an assassin who carefully covered his tracks after the deed.
Securing his confession is the only way he can be prosecuted and he has no intention of admitting anything to a disembodied voice, a voice he assumes is his own guilty conscience toying with him in order to test the firmness of his resolve. I ask him questions about his movements on the night of the murder and he answers in an offhand manner.
He doesn’t even pause while eating his meal. He has an alibi, a plausible answer for everything. Half an hour of questioning and I am ready to give up. I tell him this and he smiles thinly and nods. I turn to leave. On the threshold of his consciousness, I suddenly stop and turn.
“Just one more thing,” I say, and I reveal that I am the city of Colombo, that he lives inside me and I’m aware of everything he has done. He is deeply shocked. His confession follows. How could it not? We might betray the people we love, but who willingly betrays their own home?
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
The famous old poem called The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is known to many through the translation Edward FitzGerald published in 1859. His first edition, a selection of 75 quatrains, is considered the best. He revised the quatrains several times, losing poetic force each time he did so.
His translations are regarded as highly inaccurate anyway, but they are musical, evocative and wistful, and I like them very much. They are among my favourite poems and I once resolved to learn them all by heart.
As it happens, I failed in that attempt, mainly through laziness, which is appropriate really, for FitzGerald himself was an especially lazy man, who wrote and did very little in his life.
The quatrains are all about the joys of wine. At any time of the day or night wine is good to drink. That is the essential message.
I have heard it said that Omar Khayyam’s wine is actually a metaphor, perhaps for God or enlightenment, but personally I find the idea unconvincing. Or rather, I lack the scholarly insight to feel the truth of that interpretation.
The verses seem to be about real wine, the kind that can get you drunk, though I am willing to entertain the notion that I am missing the point. At the very least they can be plausibly quoted in connection with real wine, and I have used them to justify drinking an extra glass, for yes, Omar is keen to insist that more is better than less, indulgence superior to restraint.
But although I am fond of wine, I am fonder of coffee by far. I can easily live without wine, but only with difficulty live without coffee.
Thus, I decided to write a Coffee Rubaiyat, matching FitzGerald’s first edition quatrain for quatrain but making mine all about coffee.
I daydream that copies of my slim collection will one day be found in the coffee shops of the world. If the cappuccino fits, wear it. So say I.
And now it is time for a coffee break and I shall say no more.
Rhys Hughes, June 2023
The Coffee Rubaiyat
I.
Awake! for the alarm clock next to the bed
Is ringing the bells that can wake the dead:
And Lo! The ruby rays of the rising sun
colour the espresso machine a pinkish red.
II.
Dreaming when Dawn’s Left Hand was in the Sky
I turned to Dawn with a very deep sigh,
“Crikey, dear, that’s a massive hand you’ve got.
Why not get out of bed and bring me coffee—a lot?”
III.
And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before
The coffee shop shouted—“Open then the door.
We all rather fancy a round of cappuccinos
Before grappling with our foes upon the floor.”
IV.
Now the New Year reviving caffeine desires,
The thoughtful soul to the kitchen retires,
Where the white froth on the large cappuccino
Flows out, and steam from the kettle perspires.
V.
Biscuits indeed are gone with all their crumbs,
And Sinbad is reduced to sucking his thumbs;
But still the coffee bush her lovely beans yields,
And still the waiter with our beverages comes.
VI.
And Dawn’s lips are coffee smeared; but in divine
Extra-strong roast, sighing, “The coffee’s all mine!
Cream but no sugar!”—the fox cries to the toad
But those dregs have gone cold and that’s not fine.
VII.
Come, fill the mug, and into the boiling kettle
Pour more pure water to cool the red-hot metal.
Strange folks prefer fashionable herbal teas
To sip—and Heck! They include leaves of nettle.
VIII.
And smells—a thousand aromas within one year
Wafted—and a thousand had no aroma to revere:
And this first breakfast time that brings burnt toast
Shall smear Sinbad’s ear on the sheer frontier.
IX.
Come with Coffee Khayyam and leave the lot
of juice bars and water bottles forgot:
Let gym instructors rant about overconsumption
Or doctors cry Enough—heed them not.
X.
With me at the quiet table of a terrace café
That divides the indolent from those gone astray,
Where one may slurp and dribble in peace
And pity the pedestrians who hurry on their way.
About the Book:
Settle into the enchanting rhythm of this coffee-themed adaptation of the classic Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, as each stanza awakens the senses with witty, humorous, and thought-provoking reflections on the joys and quirks of coffee culture.
The Coffee Rubaiyat embraces the essence of morning awakenings, midday pick-me-ups, and contemplative sips, all while exploring the comical and heart-warming encounters that revolve around this beloved brew.
This collection celebrates the endless nuances and pleasures that coffee brings. Coffee lovers, literature enthusiasts, and anyone with a penchant for the art of the bean will relish in the fusion of two worlds – the timeless verses of Omar Khayyam and the contemporary charm of Rhys Hughes.
A delightful literary adventure that will leave you yearning for another sip.
About the Author
Rhys Hughes is a writer of Fantastika and Speculative Fiction.
His earliest surviving short story dates from 1989, and since that time he has embarked on an ambitious project of writing a story cycle consisting of exactly 1000 linked tales. Recently, he decided to give this cycle the overall name of PANDORA’S BLUFF. The reference is to the box of troubles in the old myth. Each tale is a trouble, but hope can be found within them all.
His favourite fiction writers are Italo Calvino, Stanislaw Lem, Boris Vian, Flann O’Brien, Alasdair Gray and Donald Barthelme, all of whom have a well-developed sense of irony and a powerful imagination. He particularly enjoys literature that combines humour with seriousness, and that fuses the emotional with the intellectual, the profound with the light-hearted, the spontaneous with the precise.
His first book was published in 1995 and sold slowly but it seemed to strike a chord with some people. His subsequent books sold more strongly as my reputation gradually increased. He is regarded as a “cult author” by some and though pleased with that description, he obviously wants to reach out to a wider audience!
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
I have always wanted to interview Ruskin Bond who lives in Landour, near the hill-station of Mussoorie in India. Bond, now 87, grew up in Dehradun, tried a stint in England and returned to the country that had nurtured him to write stories that make us laugh and yet bring out the flavours of love and kindness in the Himalayas. Sadly, no one seems to be able to get me an online interview with him. So, I did the next best thing…
I interviewed Rhys Hughes.
Rhys Hughes in Srilanka
You have to see it from my perspective, here was a humourist migrating from UK to India, just like Bond. Both their names begin with R — Ruskin wrote of monkeys conducting a fashion parade in colourful pyjamas borrowed from him, perhaps permanently and Rhys wants to interview a monkey who took a bottle of coconut oil from his current home. Only, Hughes’ monkey happens to be in Sri Lanka and Bond’s monkeys were in India. In fact, I told Hughes he could be the next Bond and could perhaps get into an apprenticeship. He has the basic compassion and humour in his writing that endears Bond to so many hearts. However, Hughes has not made it across to India as yet. He waits on the lush shores of Sri Lanka to make a landfall on the Coromandel Coast or … maybe the Himalayas… as the pandemic continues to upheave in tsunami-like waves. Maybe, Rhys Hughes will become the Ruskin Bond of Sri Lanka! Let us tread into the world of Hughes to check out what he thinks.
Tell us since when have you been writing? What gets your muse going?
I began writing when I was six years old or so. My earliest stories were inspired by films and comics I enjoyed and mostly were about monsters, adventures, space travel, robots, dinosaurs and ghosts. I doubt if any of them made much sense.
The first short story I wrote with a plot I remember was about a man who jumps off a cliff so that he will turn into a ghost and can create mischief in his village, which he does, but the twist is that he survives the fall and only thinks he is a ghost. The enraged villagers chase him back over the same cliff, and he isn’t frightened because he believes he can float on air, but he can’t and this time he doesn’t survive. I was about ten years old when I wrote that. But I didn’t begin writing short stories in earnest until I was fourteen. That was the real beginning of my writing career. I have been writing regularly ever since. I don’t require prompting to write these days. It has become a habit, a reflex, something I just do. I still write about the same old things as always, monsters, adventures, space travel, etc, but I have added a few more themes since I was a young child and my style has improved considerably. At least I hope it has!
That story you wrote as a ten-year-old definitely has potential! And we enjoy your writing as we read it now. Now tell us why do you write?
Ideas come unbidden into my mind and they won’t leave me alone unless I put them into stories. The moment I embody these ideas in a work of fiction they stop bothering me. I get ideas all the time, especially when I am walking or travelling somewhere, but also in the middle of the night. I try to make notes so I can use them later but sometimes I neglect to note them down and I forget them. Then the ideas go away temporarily but return days, weeks, months or years later and bother me again. Only when I pin them down into a narrative of some kind will they go away forever. So writing is a compulsion for me as well as a voluntary activity. It wasn’t always like this.
In the beginning I found it difficult to come up with original ideas. I had to work hard at it. I would say that most of my ideas back then were fairly ordinary ones and only occasionally truly original. But I persisted and exercised my mind, and just like muscles do, the parts of my mind responsible for the invention of original ideas got bigger and stronger, and now the ideas come without effort. As it happens, not all these ideas turn out to be as original as I like to think they are. Sometimes I get excited that I have come up with a totally new concept only to later discover that some other author beat me to it years ago. But I do believe that originality is possible.
The oft-repeated maxim that there are no new ideas simply isn’t true. If originality is impossible, how were any ideas generated in the first place? I don’t mean to say that originality is the ultimate objective of writing, of course not, there are a great many other reasons to write, but I am talking about it from my own particular point of view. And all I am really saying here is that practice is the most important thing, the only essential thing. I write a lot and the very act of writing regularly seems to make writing in the future easier and smoother.
What is your favourite genre for writing and for reading?
The genre question is a difficult one to answer but I am going to say that if I had to choose only one genre to describe my own writing I would answer “comedy”. This doesn’t mean that everything I write is comedic, but a large percentage of it certainly is. And I don’t necessarily mean laugh-out-loud comedy but other types of comedy too, whether subtle irony, philosophical farce, absurdist and surrealist works. There are many grades of comedy, from wit to parody, and I enjoy most of them. When it comes to reading, I still have a focus on comedy, I suppose, but I will read very sober and serious works too. If I made a list of my favourite works of fiction, comedic works would be at the top of the list.
Broadly speaking there are two types of humorous literature, one in which incidents are funny and one in which it is the telling that is comic. Writers who combine both types tend to win my deepest admiration. Yet quite a few of my favourite books have no comedy in them at all, neither in subject nor in style, for example The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqrollby Alvaro Mutis ( 1993, translated by Edith Grossman, 2002) which is a sequence of tropical and troubling narratives, often sombre in tone, that nonetheless remains an enthralling and uplifting read.
Which writers have influenced your work? Are you influenced by other art forms?
I wanted to become a professional writer because of Robert Louis Stevenson. It was Treasure Island (1883) that opened the gates into the entire world of literature for me. I still admire him hugely but I have had much bigger influences since then. Delving deeper into the novels and short stories that were available to me, I was lucky enough to find authors who resonated with some deep part of my being and made me not only want to continue trying to be a writer, but to be a writer who wrote as they did. Of course, it’s better to develop one’s own style, but I suspect that ‘distinctive’ styles are really the result of amalgams of influences, a blend of prior styles. Italo Calvino (1923-1985) has been my favourite writer for more than thirty years, with Donald Barthelme (193i-1989), Boris Vian (1920-1959), Flann O’Brien (1911-1966) and Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006) not far behind. At the moment I am a keen reader of the work of Mia Couto (1955-2013). Alasdair Gray (1934-2019) is another favourite.
To answer the second part of your question, I have definitely been influenced by art forms other than writing, in particular music and visual art. I might even say that the paradoxical imagery in the artwork of M.C. Escher (1898-1972) has been at least as big an influence on me as the prose of any author. I was astounded and captivated when I first saw his graphic designs and have loved them ever since.
You have travelled to many places. How many countries have you visited? Has travel impacted your writing? How?
I have lost count of the number of countries I have visited. I used to keep a map and colour in the countries that I had been to, but I lost the map years ago. The truth is that probably the total isn’t as high as I think it is. Most of my travelling has been done in Africa and Europe, and I have only really dipped my toes into the vastness of Asia, and I haven’t even been to the Americas at all. No one is so well-travelled that they really know the world.
Travel has certainly impacted my writing, though. I can state that with confidence. I am often inspired to write stories set in the places I have visited and I guess I probably wouldn’t do so if I hadn’t been there. Having said that, I do occasionally set a story in a location I have never visited. Such stories can work well but there is nearly always a vital element missing, some immediacy that a certain level of familiarity gives to a work of prose. It’s far easier to create a convincing atmosphere when you are writing from experience rather than from research. Little details will give some solidity to the evocation of scenes, details that can’t be easily imagined without first-hand experience. This doesn’t mean that I think travelling is necessary for the creation of good fiction. Good fiction can be centred in nowhere, almost in no space or time if the author is talented enough. And there’s a paradox in the nature of travel, which is that even though the particulars of your surroundings might change, the essentials remain the same. We can put a lot of effort into the act of travelling only to discover that people are people everywhere. And would we have it any other way?
Tell us a bit about the world you grew up in — we have an interesting piece by you called ‘Dinosaurs in France’ — which claims you grew up in a world of different value systems. Would you see those as better or the present as better?
The past is another country. That’s one of the pithiest and truest maxims anyone has devised. In only half a century I have seen many changes, but in fact most of these changes came so gradually I didn’t notice that things were changing at the time. Only now, looking back, do I see the vast gulf between the present and my past. I was youthful in a world where information was much more difficult to obtain. There were rumours and suppositions and often no way of confirming or refuting them. People believed strange things and adjusted their attitudes to match these odd beliefs. People still do the same now, of course, but it somehow feels different. One can more easily check assertions now than before and learn much more quickly if they are true or false. The world I grew up in was one in which you had no choice but to take another person’s word at face value. So if a supposedly responsible adult, like the postman, told you with a straight face that he lived in a house made entirely from marshmallows, there was no easy way of disproving the claim. You had to take his word for it. I can’t say it was a better world and I don’t want to suggest it was a worse one. It was simply different, a world lacking ready access to information.
You have written a lot of humour. Not too many people do that nowadays. Could you tell us why your funny bone is tickled to create humour as it does? Do you think humour is a good way to address major issues?
Humorous writing has gone out of fashion to a certain extent in the anglophone world, yes, but it’s still there, in the background. There was a great tradition of British humorous writing that lasted about a century or so, and I was fortunate enough to grow up at the end of that phase. I am talking about a particular type of humour, dryly ironic but also theatrical, a sort of blend of surrealism and the old musical hall routines. J.B. Morton (1873-1979) was one of the masters of the form, and he was an influence on many of my favourite comedic writers, such as Spike Milligan (1918-2002), Maurice Richardson (1907-1978) and W.E. Bowman (1911-1985). These humorists also took the language and played with it a little, transforming it into something new, though I feel ultimately that such comedy derives more from the rhythms than the melodies of wordplay.
The entire range of comedic devices might be used but new ones invented as well. There can be over reaction to minor incidents and under reaction to major ones, constant misunderstandings, amplification of repetition, parody of existing forms. W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle is my favourite humorous novel, and its sequel, The Cruise of the Talking Fish, is also high on my list of best comedic literature. Bowman apparently wrote a third volume in the series that remains unpublished and is in the safe keeping of his son. If this is true, I hope it will appear one day.
Are you influenced by any specific humourist? If so, who?
Flann O’Brien is probably my biggest influence in terms of comedic prose. His work is quirky, inventive, curiously erudite, absurdist and often metafictional. I am staggered by the wealth of invention in his novels, the supremely silly but also highly ingenious conceits and concepts, and the bone-dry irony contrasted with farcical exuberance, the light touch and the dark tone. W.E. Bowman and Maurice Richardson are another two favourites. That is prose but when it comes to poetry I love Don Marquis (1878-1937), Ogden Nash (1902-1971) and Ivor Cutler (1923-2006) best, all of them with radically different approaches to comedy. Marquis in particular pushed humour in his free verse to a point where it often became profound, serious and socially critical. You asked if humour can be used to address major issues. Yes, sometimes it can, even with great force, but it doesn’t have to.
Tell us the extent of your work. How many books have you written?
I have published many books. The question is how do I count them. I tend not to count the self-published books. It seems to me that self-publishing is too easy. On the other hand, traditional publishing is maybe too difficult. I have forty or so traditionally published books and twenty self-published books out there, so I am going to give forty as my answer. Most of my books are collections of short stories. I have only written a few novels. My poetry collections so far have been self-published with the exception of one single volume called Bunny Queue.
It is one of my goals to have all the short stories I have ever written appear in my books. At the moment there are many of my short stories that exist in magazines and anthologies that have never been collected. And there are many unpublished short stories in my files too. My plan is to write exactly a thousand short stories and consider them as part of one big story-cycle. This project is almost done. In a few more months, with luck, I will finish writing my thousandth story. Thirty years in total it has taken. When that last story is finished I will devote myself entirely to novels, plays, poetry and articles. No more short stories! So, in reply to your question, I can say that I have written a great deal of work, maybe too much, but as I said earlier, writing has been something of a compulsion for me.
What are your future plans?
I plan to finish my big story-cycle of one thousand stories. Then I will write a few novels that I have been planning for a long time. One of these novels will be called The Hippy Quixote and will be about a young, deluded fellow who in his mind is living in the 1960s. He takes a guidebook written in that decade and follows the old hippy trail to India, blissfully unaware that so many things have changed in terms of societal attitudes and geopolitics. This idea seems to me to be a fruitful one for the creation of comic scenes.
I also have to finish a novel I began a long time ago, The Clown of the New Eternities, sections of which have already been published. It’s long overdue for completion. This novel is about a highwayman who has accidentally outlived his own age and is forced to adjust to the modern world. Another variant of Quixote, I suppose. I think that many or most of my longer narratives are a blend of the Quixote and Candide models with a bit of Gulliver thrown in. We can talk about our future plans all day, of course, but whether we are lucky enough to have a chance to make them real is another question altogether. I intend to do my best, as I have always done, but nothing is certain in this world of ours.
Thanks Rhys Hughes for your time and lovely answers.
After almost fifteen days of this ‘lockdown’, I drew a long breath and took up my laptop to scribble away my thoughts. Know not why! Just a way of keeping myself busy, just a mode of whiling away the ‘time’ which otherwise might lie heavy on my heart, cannot say exactly why. Or maybe, being inspired by the ‘lockdown diaries’ penned and shared on Face Book by my friends! Cannot tell you the reason exactly!
Last night, I sat up till late. Sleep eluded me. Dreams kept streaming in, whenever I was trying to catch forty winks! I gave up my futile attempts to fall asleep and went on reading! A metallic noise vibrated my cellphone. The noise usually cuts through the stillness of my room, in vacant hours when messages, especially ones on WhatsApp, pour in. I felt lethargic. Did not check the messages, went on going through Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium instead. A beautiful book. It opened up casements on many unknown terrains, quite interestingly. I read and was being informed subsequently.
However, before dozing off finally for the night, I went to check my incoming messages. There was a video-clip sent by a friend, who used to burn midnight oil during school days. I am sure, the habit of staying up late into the night, talking to the moon and stars, is still very much with her. I ignored it and checked the other messages, navigating off. But somehow, some inadvertent press on some button began playing the clip. I did not stop it. Went on watching instead. It was a short film with not more than three small scenes. But believe me, I found myself in a pool of tears when it ended.
You are wondering… I know. For that, I have to share the story, I am afraid, there’s no well-formed story at all, but just a simple narration. Naturally, how can you expect a story to be told in such a narrow compass of say, some 7 minutes or so? Well, let me tell you what happens there actually…
A little boy rushes to school to attend his classes. Every day, he finds to his utter dismay, that the teacher has already entered the class before him. As he raps on the closed door of the classroom, the teacher asks him to get in. And each day, he feels irked to find himself late for the class. The teacher daily drubs him loudly with a measure-scale on his right palm and the boy never whimpers nor groans in pain. With pain writ large on his face, he takes his seat instead. Tears glisten at the corner of his eyes, but they do not spurt out or course down his cheeks.
He sits at his desk, driving his pain down his gullet. One afternoon, as the teacher cycled through his neighbourhood, he spotted the boy behind a wheelchair. The young boy was pushing the wheelchair with a man with deformed limbs seated on it. The man looked sad.
The teacher felt sad, cast a glance at his watch and paddled off. He could feel the boy’s pain, it seemed. He sighed aloud. Next day, the boy was late to the school as usual. He found the teacher standing with the scale, calmly. He was just looking at him. The teacher had forgotten to utter the curses with which he used to snub him before. He stuck out his hand to his teacher. The teacher put the scale on the boy’s palm, lightly, knelt before him and took him in an affectionate embrace.
The boy was puzzled. He did not comprehend the reason.
The film ended here. A soft piano went on playing in the background. It was soft, but so evocative of many untold emotions!
I shared this clip on my Facebook page with a note saying, “Cannot say why I loved it so much! This language is Latin and Greek to me. I do not teach little kids. But somewhere, somehow, the inner chord felt a tug. A plaintive note issued. A drop or two coursed down my cheeks, unawares!”
Many comments poured in. Many likes and loves followed. I answered only one from among them, delving into my feelings, rather I tried to justify my emotions, “Pain has its own language, expression of love too has. No langue and parole divide can stand in its way! The message rings loud and clear through it all.”
After downing a few cups of green tea and coffee down my oesophagus, I sat with Italo Calvino. Read a few pages. Was being charmed by his take on poetry. I was really carried away by his notion ‘lightness in poetry’.
I remembered Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being and was trying to imbibe the thought as propagated by Calvino. On the 6th June 1984, Italo Calvino was welcomed officially by Harvard University to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures. He divided his lectures into six talks of which I was going through ‘Lightness’ first. While talking about ‘lightness’ he named Cavalcanti and went to talk in length about his poems, at the first place, ‘lightening of language by which meanings are carried by a verbal fabric that seems weightless, until they take on that same rarefied consistency’, secondly, ‘the narration of a train of thought,’ and ‘a visual image of lightness that takes on symbolic value’. I was trying to fathom deep into these notions of ‘lightness’.
Suddenly, I looked out through my open window and the world was getting ready to usher in evening in myriad hues. I was lost somewhere.
Cutting through the silence of my room, the phone rang. I received and at the other end a voice commanded, “So, when are you going to send your essay on Lawrence?” Oh yes, by this evening… I hate to renege on a promise. Hence, after a frugal supper, I sat with the paper on Women in Love by Lawrence and sent it by 1.40 a.m.
Dog-tired, on a lockdown night, I lay straight on my bed to get transported to the much-desired realm of dreams…surrendering slowly to the inviting arms of the eiderdown…losing myself…drifting into dreams…
Ketaki Datta is an Associate Professor of English at Bidhannagar Government College, Kolkata, India. She did her Ph.D. on Tennessee Williams’s late plays and later it was published, titled, “ Black and Non-Black Shades of Tennessee Williams”. She has quite a few academic publications along with two novels, two books of poems and quite a few translations. She had been interviewed by Prof. Elisabetta Marino, University of Rome, archived by Flinders University, Australia. She won grants for working at American Studies Research Centre[1993,1995], Hyderabad, India. She presented academic papers at IFTR Conference[Lisbon], University of Oxford and University of California, Santa Barbara. Her debut collection of poems, Across the Blue Horizon, had been published from U.K. with the aid of Arts Council, England. Her latest poetry-book, Urban Reflections: A Dialogue Between Photography and Poetry has been published by KIPU, University of Bielefeld, Germany, with Professor/Photographer Wilfried Raussert [photographs of Street Art of Americas]. She has interviewed American novelist, Prof. Sybil Baker, recently for Compulsive Reader. She is a regular reviewer of poetry volumes with Compulsive Reader, USA. She interviewed poet Lucha Corpi of San Francisco, in 2018. She is the Regional Editor, India, of thetheatertimes.com, headed by Prof. Magda Romanska, Emerson College, Boston, U.S.A.
Borderless 