Tag: Kenya.

Categories
Poetry

Poetry by Nziku Ann

Nziku Ann
HOPE LINGERS 

I hear their stories—
and my heart drifts into their storms.
The air hums with sorrow,
an aura of misery
that speaks louder than words.

A tear escapes, unbidden.
How can life be so cruel?
So heavy with silence,
so unfair in its choosing?
Why must we surrender to such fate?

I see fragments of myself in them—
the same dreams,
the same quiet battles,
the same fire to rewrite the ending.

Then I hear them speak—
voices trembling yet strong,
breathing confidence,
power,
hope—
a convulsive awakening of the soul.

Another tear falls,
but this time it carries light.
Life may wound,
it may break,
but even in the wreckage—
hope lingers.

Nziku Ann is a literary enthusiast bases in Nairobi, Kenya. A beauty therapist by profession and an introvert who finds expression through poetry.

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

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

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Categories
Review

Weaving Strands of the Past to Create an Imagined Place

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: A Person Is a Prayer

Author: Ammar Kalia

Publisher: Penguin Books

“This novel became a way to collect the strands of the past, to pull these disparate lives together and to give me an imagined place to stand upon.”  Ammar Kalia

Debut novels have a unique quality – the author takes extra care to deliver his best, whether in the form of storyline, or setting or stylistic devices. And though either subconsciously or deliberately borrowing from family history, he always tries to justify that the novel is not autobiographical, but a piece of fiction. A similar thing takes place with Ammar Kalia, the author of this novel under review, who is a writer, musician and journalist living in London. Beginning and ending his narration in March 1955, he tells us the story of the Bedis, a Punjabi family who went through multiple migrations from India to Kenya and then to England. Like all diasporic Indians in search of their roots and still longing for somewhere they can call home, and find ‘something to belong to’, Kalia got the idea to develop this novel when he came to India in 2019, especially to Haridwar, to spread his grandmother’s ashes in the Ganges. As he stood in the dust near the river, several questions popped up in his mind – where did my grandparents grow up? How did they meet? Why did they move multiple continents in a lifetime (from Asia to Africa to Europe)? What were their dreams? Why did I never ask them anything important?

With all these questions lurking in his mind, Kalia opens Part I of the novel in March 1955 with a detailed description of how his grandfather Bedi’s marriage was arranged with a girl called Sushma through a middleman. Coming from far off Nairobi where he was the son of an engine driver and had seven other siblings, he came all the way to India, but Bedi was a tourist and not a prodigal son. We are given the details of the bride-viewing, the discussions of both parties on what they want and what to expect, and finally give the green signal to marry.

Part II of the book jumps straight ahead to February 1994, and it is located in London and Bournemouth where Bedi was spending his time trying to erase the past and not to be engaged in his three grown kids’ lives anymore, wanting to be left alone, to be respected from a distance, to ultimately be ignored. The story of his life in England is like all immigrants who had to make that a new home and go on living with the hope that maybe one day they would be able to go back. After mentioning the generation gap and how the children would not be stuck between continents, there is a sudden catastrophe in the family when Sushma goes out for a last-minute shopping trip for the family get-together and dies after meeting with a street accident. Everything goes haywire in their lives.

The story then moves ahead to September 2019 with three long sections comprising Part III of the novel and is narrated by the three siblings – Selena, Rohan and Tara – who come to India along with their family members on a ‘dreaded pilgrimage’ to scatter their father’s ashes in the Ganges at Haridwar. The heat knocked them out of their daze, and they could feel the looks of the surrounding men bearing down on them. They realsed they didn’t belong here but needed to be here as this was the only place they were meant to say goodbye. It was also a chance to reconnect with their ‘roots.’ By far the most powerful section in the entire novel, we are told how pilgrimage sites in India were dens of corrupt individuals, who tried to fleece the tourist or visitor at every step. After suffering from the heat and dust and a futile attempt to trace their father’s genealogical chart from the family records maintained by different pandits in the long family scrolls, they ultimately decide to scatter the ashes at the end of the day with the help of a new pandit and complete the ceremony for which they had travelled all the way from England.

Tara narrates:“We began to sprinkle him into the bubbling water and after each round we would watch as he dissolved like dropped candy floss in a puddle. … And now all of Dad is in the water and Sel and Rohan bow their heads for a moment of silence amid the strange harmonies of splashing, calling and praying. And I see myself, as if in a painting, unhook from their chain and step into the water, as if in my dreams, and I can feel its cold needles between my toes.”

Divided into several sub-sections and narrated in the first person, we get the detailed background and fill-up of the personal lives and family relationships of each of the three narrators. Kalia does a remarkable job here. We are told how each sibling follows a different profession, gets embroiled in different relationships, and how they ultimately behave with their own children. Incidentally, one is reminded of William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying (1930), which narrates the story of the death of a matriarch in a family and keeping to her last wish, the family members carry her coffin for forty miles to the town of Jefferson to bury her next to her own kith and kin. While they are travelling, Faulkner devotes each chapter to a different family member who narrates the same incident in the first person and from a different point of view. Thus, it gives us his or her background along with the reason for travelling to Jefferson.

In the ‘Author’s Note’ at the end of the novel, Kalia categorically states: “I like to call it an act of remembrance, but it’s all fiction. It’s bringing people back to life – with those we can no longer reach. This is a story of a family like mine, but that isn’t mine; it is a novel about people hoping for a better future, longing for an idealized past and striving to survive in the present. It is about so many families.”

This personalisation and universalisation of the narration at the same time is what makes this novel a unique reading experience. Kalia’s narrative style is appreciable, and one can go through these 284 pages without feeling bored or mired into unnecessary details for long. The observant eye of a foreigner blends subjectivity and objectivity in balanced proportion and so the book is recommended for all classes of readers – serious and casual alike.

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

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

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

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International

Categories
Excerpt

The Wistful Wanderings of Perceval Pitthelm

Title: The Wistful Wanderings of Perceval Pitthelm

Author: Rhys Hughes

Publisher: Telos Publishing

There is a shop somewhere in this town that sells bittersweet longing and I decided to seek it out and buy enough for the afternoon and perhaps the evening too. I wandered the streets of Figueira da Foz and if I happened to meet a stranger I asked them for directions, but no one knew where it was, though most had heard of it.

My yearning to find and enter that shop grew steadily more intense, and it now occurred to me that I already had what I wanted, a bittersweet longing for the building and the product sold by its keeper to his clients. But this simply wasn’t sufficient.

Perceval Pitthelm is my name and I’m sure you already knew this and I am English and a writer of adventure novels. I came to Portugal because I had been told it was a more tranquil land than my own in which to write a new book. This turned out not to be quite true. Nonetheless I was fairly satisfied with my circumstances.

I was a little lonely, indeed, but my health had improved. Originally, I planned to stay three months, but I now felt I would be here until the day of my death. Of course, that day might come with any particular sunrise. It could even be today. Fate likes to take us by surprise and teach us useless lessons. Who can say why this is?

At last, purely by chance, I found the shop at the far end of a dark and narrow alley that went nowhere else. The low doorway was covered by a curtain that I realised was a ragged flag and it tickled the nape of my neck as I stooped to pass under. I emerged in shadows and it required a minute for my eyes to adjust to the gloom.

Then I saw I wasn’t alone and that a man was sitting on a chair behind a long counter on which stood rows of oddly shaped jars and bottles. His teeth shone faintly behind a wide but unjustified smile. Most illumination came from the vessels in front of him, an eerie phosphorescence of many shifting colours. I took a step closer.

‘There is bittersweet longing in the glass containers?’

He nodded slowly. ‘Correct.’

‘I didn’t realise it came in liquid form.’

‘You can freeze it if you wish, then it will turn solid. You may heat it over a flame and inhale the vapour. But at room temperature it is a liquid that emits the glow of its own sad craving.’

‘Shall I drink it neat?’

‘Not if you are unaccustomed to it.’

‘I am English, you see.’

‘Of course you are. Drink it mixed with tea. ‘Saudade’ in its raw form is too potent for you. The effects are dramatic. All day and night you will stand on the shore waiting for something you may not even recognise if it arrives. Your hair will grow long in hours and float in the wind, whipping your face and urging it to gallop off your head, even if there is no wind at the time. So many tears will stream from your eyes that your cheeks must go mad from the excess of salt.’

‘I’ve never had mad cheeks! My features are sane.’

‘Keep it that way, Senhor.’

‘Yet I wish to taste bittersweet longing …’

He sighed deeply and said:

‘I understand and I won’t try to discourage you, but imbibe it slowly, a few drops only. This stuff is lethal. Mad cheeks have been responsible for much mischief in the past.’

I was intrigued and asked him to cite examples.

‘Well,’ he continued, ‘there was once a man named Dom Daniel and he drank against my advice half a bottle of distilled saudade and went off to stand on the beach, to weep, wait and gaze at sea, and his cheeks went mad and began swelling with delusions of grandeur and they became too big for his face and gravity tore them off. The tide dragged them far out and he assumed they were lost forever. Back home he walked, ashamed to own a face without cheeks and dreading the anger of his wife when she found out, but those lost cheeks of his didn’t drown or sink to the bottom. They kept riding the currents.’

‘And were washed up on a remote island?’

‘Indeed, Senhor! How did you guess? On an island off the coast of far distant Brazil they reached a new shore and they took root in the sand and grew into cheek trees, extremely tall and festooned with cheeks for leaves and those cheeks blushed deeply like overripe fruits and they were visible to the crews of passing caravels.’

‘Do they still sail caravels in Brazil?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Why not?’

‘We are living in the modern era, that’s why.’

‘Oh no, Senhor! Oh no!’

‘What did I say wrong? What is my blunder?’

‘Saudade doesn’t permit one to remain in the present. It takes us back, my friend, to a time that perhaps never was real but has been lodged in our hearts since we were children, to a time and to places from that time. The magical lands that filled our daydreams, those visions of wonder and marvels, those gentle golden easy places, when we knew that travel was a miracle that would take us there one day, always one day, one day, yes, but never now, never soon. We just had to wait to grow up and the power would be ours. But we did grow up and nothing was as simple or fine as it should have been. The lands were gone, we couldn’t locate them on any map, for we had forgotten to look into our hearts, where they really were, slumbering and fading all the while.’

‘But what happened to those giant cheek trees?’

‘Nothing at all, Senhor.’

‘Didn’t anyone climb them?’

‘To pluck unripe cheeks, you mean? No! The cheeks blushed and the blushes were visible for many leagues across the ocean. Burning blushes that pulsed in the night like lighthouse beams. How do you think it made sailors feel? Sure, they could navigate using the blushes, but cheeks will respond to other cheeks like brothers.’

‘And also like lovers?’

‘Exactly that way! You are no fool, my friend. I knew it before and I know it again. The cheeks of the cheek trees blushed and the cheeks of the sailors blushed in sympathy. How embarrassing for grown men! How humiliating that must be in front of their comrades, all together with their scarlet cheeks pulsing and burning!’

‘And they began to avoid that island, to sail far around it, to take long detours out on the open ocean?’

‘You are perceptive. And saudade was to blame.’

‘The tale is intriguing.’

‘This really happened,’ he told me, and he sighed again, ‘so take care if you sip saudade, even if you dilute it with tea. This isn’t fake stuff, the bittersweet longing of actors in films.’

‘I listen. I have no desire to lose my cheeks.’

‘Oh Senhor! This stuff is intoxicating and throbs your soul as well as your heart. It must be swallowed only in drops. As for cheeks, they are perilous and weird, but let me tell you something. Knees are worse, much worse. Knees! Bear this in mind.’

I said farewell to Old Rogerio, for I already knew his name and in fact had spoken to him at length before. But saudade cares not for precision. It prefers the vagueness that frames a longing. One must never be quite sure what exactly one is yearning for…

About the Book:

Writer, explorer, inventor, fantastist … join Perceval Pitthelm as he takes you on a journey in the township of Kionga, self-propelled on a pair of massive, mechanical kangaroo legs. His stories may be wild, but his adventures are even wilder. In a riot of imagination and literary sleight of hand, Rhys Hughes presents an old-style adventure set in East Africa, Brazil and the Sahara Desert in this novel. We’re talking Philip José Farmer crossed with H Bedford-Jones meeting James Hilton by way of Karel Čapek (in his War with the Newts phase). And with hefty chunks of Flann O’Brien and Boris Vian thrown in for good measure!

About the Author

Rhys Hughes has been writing fiction from an early age. His first book was published in 1995 and since that time he has published fifty other books, nine hundred short stories and many articles and poems, and his work has been translated into ten languages. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Having lived in Britain, Spain and Kenya, he is now planning to move to India. His poetry tends to be humorous light verse and offbeat lyrical fantasy, influenced mainly by Don Marquis, Ogden Nash, Edward Lear, Richard Brautigan, Ivor Cutler and Spike Milligan.

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

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

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