Tag: Joseph Pfister

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Contents

Borderless, August 2024

Art by Sohana Manzoor

Editorial

A Sprinkling of Happiness?… Click here to read.

Conversation

A review of and discussion with Rhys Hughes about his ‘Weird Western’, The Sunset Suite. Click here to read.

Translations

Two Songs of Parting by Nazrul have been translated by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

The Snakecharmer, Shapuray by Nazrul, has been translated from Bengali by Sohana Manzoor. Click here to read.

Leaving for Barren, Distant Lands by Allah Bashk Buzdar has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.

Loneliness has been translated from Korean by the poet, Ihlwha Choi. Click here to read.

Tagore’s Olosh Shomoy Dhara Beye (Time Flows at an Indolent Pace) has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.

Poetry

Click on the names to read the poems

Michael Burch, Arshi Mortuza, Jason Ryberg, Saranyan BV, Koiko Tsuuda, Jane Hammons, Noopur Vedajna Das, Adeline Lyons, George Freek, Naisha Chawla, John Grey, Lakshmi Chithra, Craig Kirchner, Nia Joseph, Stuart MacFarlane, Sanjay C Kuttan, Nilsa Mariano, G Javaid Rasool, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Rhys Hughes

Musings/ Slices from Life

Breaking Bread

Snigdha Agrawal has a bovine encounter in a restaurant. Click here to read.

That Box of Colour Pencils

G Venkatesh writes of a happy encounter with two young children. Click here to read.

The Chameleon’s Dance

Chinmayi Goyal muses on the duality of her cultural heritage. Click here to read.

Musings of a Copywriter

In Godman Ventures Pvt. Ltd., Devraj Singh Kalsi looks into a new business venture with a satirical glance. Click here to read.

Notes from Japan

In In Praise of Parasols, Suzanne Kamata takes a light look at this perennial favourite of women in Japan. Click here to read.

Essays

The Comet’s Trail: Remembering Kazi Nazrul Islam

Radha Chakravarty pays tribute to the rebel poet of Bengal. Click here to read.

From Srinagar to Ladakh: A Cyclist’s Diary

Farouk Gulsara travels from Malaysia for a cycling adventure in Kashmir. Click here to read.

Bottled Memories, Inherited Stories

Ranu Bhattacharyya takes us back to Dhaka of the 1930s… and a world where the two Bengals interacted as one with her migration story. Click here to read.

Landslide In Wayanad Is Only The Beginning

Binu Mathew discusses the recent climate disaster in Kerala and contextualises it. Click here to read.

Stories

The Orange Blimp

Joseph Pfister shares a vignette set in the Midwest. Click here to read.

A Queen is Crowned

Farhanaz Rabbani traces the awakening of self worth. Click here to read.

Roberto Mendoza’s Memoirs of Admiral Don Christopher Columbus

Paul Mirabile explores myths around Christopher Columbus in a fictitive setting. Click here to read.

Book Excerpts

An excerpt from Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Shabnam, translated from Bengali by Nazes Afroz. Click here to read.

An excerpt from Maaria Sayed’s From Pashas to Pokemon. Click here to read.

Book Reviews

Somdatta Mandal reviews Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life. Click here to read.

Meenakshi Malhotra reviews Shuchi Kapila’s Learning to Remember: Postmemory and the Partition of India. Click here to read.

Rakhi Dalal reviews Namita Gokhale’s Never Never Land. Click here to read.

Bhaskar Parichha reviews Malvika Rajkotia’s Unpartitioned Time: A Daughter’s Story. Click here to read.

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

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International

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Editorial

A Sprinkling of Happiness?

A Pop of Happiness by Jeanie Douglas. From Public Domain

Happiness is a many splendored word. For some it is the first ray of sunshine; for another, it could be a clean bill of health; and yet for another, it would be being with one’s loved ones… there is no clear-cut answer to what makes everyone happy. In Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (JK Rowling, 2005), a sunshine yellow elixir induces euphoria with the side effects of excessive singing and nose tweaking. This is of course fantasy but translate it to the real world and you will find that happiness does induce a lightness of being, a luminosity within us that makes it easier to tackle harder situations. Playing around with Rowling’s belief systems, even without the potion, an anticipation of happiness or just plain optimism does generate a sense of hope for better times.  Harry tackles his fears and dangers with goodwill, friends and innate optimism. When times are dark with raging wars or climate events that wreck our existence, can one look for a torch to light a sense of hope with the flame of inborn resilience borne of an inner calm, peace or happiness — call it what you will…?

It is hard to gauge the extreme circumstances with which many of us are faced in our current realities, especially when the events spin out of control. In this issue, along with the darker hues that ravage our lives, we have sprinklings of laughter to try to lighten our spirits. In the same vein, externalising our emotions to the point of absurdity that brings a smile to our lips is Rhys Hughes’ The Sunset Suite, a book that survives on tall tales generated by mugs of coffee. In one of the narratives, there is a man who is thrown into a bubbling hot spring, but he survives singing happily because his attacker has also thrown in packs of tea leaves. This man loves tea so much that he does not scald, drown or die but keeps swimming merrily singing a song. While Hughes’ stories are dark, like our times, there is an innate cheer that rings through the whole book… Dare we call it happiness or resilience? Hughes reveals much as he converses about this book, squonks and stranger facts that stretch beyond realism to a fantastical world that has full bearing on our very existence.

Poetry brings in a sprinkling of good cheer not only with a photo poem by Hughes, but also with more in a lighter vein from Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Michael R Burch, Arshi Mortuza, Jason Ryberg and others. Sanjay C Kuttan has given a poem dipped in nostalgic happiness with colourful games that evolved in Malaysia. Koiko Tsuuda, an Estonian, rethinks happiness. George Freek, Stuart MacFarlane and Saranyan BV address mortality. Nilsa Mariano and G Javaid Rasool have given us powerful migrant poetry while John Grey, Craig Kirchner, Jane Hammons, Nia Joseph, Noopur Vedajna Das and Adeline Lyons refer to climate or changes wrought by climate disasters in their verses.

A powerful essay by Binu Mathew on the climate disaster at Wayanad, a place that earlier had been written of as an idyllic getaway, tells us how the land in that region has become more prone to landslides. The one on July 30th this year washed away a whole village! Farouk Gulsara has given a narrative about his cycling adventure through the state of Kashmir with his Malaysian friends and finding support in the hearts of locals, people who would be the first to be hit by any disaster even if they have had no hand in creating the catastrophes that could wreck their lives, the flora and the fauna around them. In the wake of such destructions or in anticipation of such calamities, many migrate to other areas — like Ranu Bhattacharya’s ancestors did a bit before the 1947 Partition violence set in. A younger migrant, Chinmayi Goyal, muses under peaceful circumstances as she explores her own need to adapt to her surroundings. G Venkatesh from Sweden writes of his happy encounter with local children in the playground. And Snigdha Agrawal has written of partaking lunch with a bovine companion – it can be intimidating having a cow munching at the next table, I guess! Devraj Singh Kalsi has given a tongue-in-cheek musing on how he might find footing as a godman. Suzanne Kamata has given a lovely summery piece on parasols, which never went out of fashion in Japan!

Radha Chakravarty, known for her fabulous translations, has written about the writer she translated recently, Nazrul. Her essay includes a poem by Tagore for Nazrul. Professor Fakrul Alam has translated two of Nazrul’s songs of parting and Sohana Manzoor has rendered his stunning story Shapuray (Snake Charmer) into English. Fazal Baloch has brought to us poetry in English from the Sulaimani dialect of Balochi by Allah Bashk Buzdar, and a Korean poem has been self-translated by the poet, Ihlwha Choi. The translations wind up with a poem by Tagore, Olosh Shomoy Dhara Beye (Time Flows at an Indolent Pace), showcasing how the common man’s daily life is more rooted in permanence than evanescent regimes and empires.

Fiction brings us into the realm of the common man and uncommon situations, or funny ones. A tongue-in-cheek story set in the Midwest by Joseph Pfister makes us laugh. Farhanaz Rabbani has given us a beautiful narrative about a girl’s awakening. Paul Mirabile delves into the past using the epistolary technique highlighting darker vignettes from Christopher Columbus’s life. We have book excerpts from Maaria Sayed’s From Pashas to Pokemon and Nazes Afroz’s translation of Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Shabnam with both the extracts and Rabbani’s narratives reflecting the spunk of women, albeit in different timescapes…

Our book reviews feature Meenakshi Malhotra’s perspectives on Shuchi Kapila’s Learning to Remember: Postmemory and the Partition of India and Bhaskar Parichha’s thought provoking piece on Malvika Rajkotia’s autobiographical Unpartitioned Time: A Daughter’s Story. While both these look into narratives around the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent, Rakhi Dalal’s review captures the whimsical and yet thoughtful nuances of Namita Gokhale’s Never Never Land. Somdatta Mandal has written about Upamanyu Chatterjee’s latest novel, Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life, which is in a way a story about a migrant too.

When migrations are out of choice, with multiple options to explore, they take on happier hues. But when it is out of a compulsion created by manmade disasters — both wars and climate change are that — will the affected people remain unscarred, or like Potter, bear the scar only on their forehead and, with Adlerian calm, find happiness and carpe diem?

Do pause by our current issue which has more content than mentioned here as some of it falls outside the ambit of our discussion. This issue would not have been possible without an all-out effort by each of you… even readers. I would like to thank each and every contributor and our loyal readers. The wonderful team at Borderless deserve much appreciation and gratitude, especially Manzoor for her wonderful artwork. I invite you all to savour this August issue with a drizzle of not monsoon or April showers but laughter.

May we all find our paths towards building a resilient world with a bright future.

Good luck and best wishes!

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

Click here to access the content’s page for the August 2024 Issue.

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READ THE LATEST UPDATES ON THE FIRST BORDERLESS ANTHOLOGY, MONALISA NO LONGER SMILES, BY CLICKING ON THIS LINK.

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Stories

The Orange Blimp

By Joseph Pfister

Two days after learning her husband is sleeping with another woman, Elena crashes her son’s moped. Later, she will remark it was fortunate the only vehicle in the garage at the time was the moped, and not something that could’ve gone a great deal faster.

It’s a Tuesday. Afternoon. All the husbands are at their offices downtown, taking two-hour lunches with clients and customers; their wives hiding indoors from the heat, impatiently awaiting September, the start of school and the cooler temperatures that accompany autumn in the Midwest. When Elena frees the moped from its tarpaulin and stomps the kickstart, she isn’t sure whether it’s her or the bike that’s vibrating like a plane about to sprint down the runway. All she has to do is release it.

She leaves the helmet she insisted Nathan wear on the sawhorse. She squeezes the throttle down as far as it will go and the moped responds in earnest, shooting out from under her so fast, she almost falls off the back like a cowboy from his reluctant mount. Never mind that Nathan’s friends christened it “The Orange Blimp”, after Elena and her husband told him he couldn’t have a motorcycle, that they were a death wish. Within a block, she is traveling fast enough that the wind lifts her hair off her shoulders, her green house dress flapping against the rear spokes. The whrrrrrr of the bike—somewhere between the throaty growl of a motorcycle and high whine of a lawn mower—erases all thought. She ignores the stop sign and pushes the bike faster, giving it all the gas the little bike has.

The odometer wobbles around 40 m.p.h. on the little glass dial. It’s hard to tell because everything is bouncing and rattling like San Francisco during a quake. The thought occurs to her like lightning out of a clear blue sky: She doesn’t know where the brakes are. No one ever showed her and she didn’t think to ask. Panic races down her arms, into her fingertips. Her mind goes blank as a classroom with the lights off. She releases the throttle, but the bike seems to have a mind of its own. Thirty-eight…thirty-five… She isn’t losing speed nearly fast enough.

The cul-de-sac at the end of Pine Street rises to greet her. In a split second, she decides to bail rather than crash headlong into the Georgesons’ above-ground swimming pool. Her shoulder smacks the pavement first, and she rolls four or five times before coming to a stop. The Orange Blimp hits the curb like a missile, careening into the Georgesons’ metal trash cans with a terrific bang that shatters the afternoon, momentarily interrupting the pressure-cooker hiss of the cicadas.

It takes Elena a long, stunned moment to recover herself and appreciate that she is, more or less, all right—minus the continuous scrape down the left side of her body and the throbbing bruise where her stubborn heart continues to beat. At least she didn’t hit her head, thank God.

The Georgesons’ youngest boy gallops from the house, his freckled, nine-year-old face caught somewhere between terror and excitement. The bike’s rear wheel is still spinning.

“Mrs. Jaeger!” the boy shouts. “Gosh! Are you all right?” He is wearing a cowboy hat, the string cinched beneath his chin, a pair of twin holsters riding on his hips.

Perhaps, it is the result of the tremendous spill she has just suffered, or maybe the fact that her quiet, comfortable life has just been pulled from beneath her unsuspecting feet. Either way, the first thing she thinks to ask is:

“Did anyone else see?”

“No, I don’t think so. Just me. But that was cool!”

The Gottliebs’ blinds twitch, she’s sure of it, and she thinks she sees a shadow in the MacKenzies’ front room.

Christopher and James used to play with the MacKenzies’ oldest, she remembers. Baseball in the spring; football in August. Patrick was it? Or Paul? She hasn’t seen Loretta since the news. It hits her somewhere in the middle of her chest: She will have to sell the house, of course. She knows this, has known it all along, though she hasn’t admitted it to herself until now. Already Loretta and the others are treating her like a deceased relative, the cold corpse of their friendship whisked from its bed before dawn, delivered to the undertaker’s back door.

“Nobody else’s mom would have done that!” The Georgesons’ boy is still there, still watching her. Perhaps he’s worried about her. She would be.

The clamor of the cicadas has returned, the air vibrating with their insect whine.

“Yes, well,” she says, teetering to her feet, “none of the other moms’ husbands are leaving them.”

Elena corrals The Orange Blimp and, with a defiant jut of her chin, marches it past her neighbours’ darkened windows, back to her silent, waiting house.

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Joseph Pfister’s fiction has appeared in Oyster River Pages, PANK, Juked, and X-R-A-Y, among others. He is a graduate of the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and teaches fiction at Brooklyn Brainery.

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

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International