Tag: Lisbon

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Essay

One Soul, Two Seas

By Charudutta Panigrahi

Goa
Odisha
From Public Domain

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

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

The Plate That Speaks First

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

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

Weavers of Light

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

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

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

Temples, Tides, and the Slow Pulse

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

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

Songs in Different Scales

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

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

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

The Literary Mirror

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

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

Stone, Laterite, and the Architecture of Belonging

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

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

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

The Sacred as Daily Bread

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

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

The Farmer and the Monsoon

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

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

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

The Playing Field

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

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

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

Rivers, Mangroves, and the Shared Ecology

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

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

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

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

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

[1] science of architecture in alignment with natural forces

[2] Local community games which involve teams

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

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

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

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Interview

How ‘The Red Silk Dress’ Invites Reflection and Reinvention

Keith Lyons in conversation with Natalie Turner, author of The Red Silk Dress

Natalie Turner in Lisbon

Tell us about your background and life. If you had to give a relatable elevator pitch to readers, what would you say?

I was born in 1968, a year of social upheaval, into a life shaped early by movement, belief, and questioning. My parents were Christian missionaries, so I grew up immersed in faith, travel, and a strong inner world. From a young age, I wanted to be a writer. I was also restless, resistant to fixed paths, and fiercely independent, which meant that desire took many shapes before it found its way home.

As a young adult, I travelled and worked across Asia and Latin America, experiences that expanded my worldview and quietly dismantled many of the belief systems I had inherited. I later studied politics, economics, and social psychology, worked in Parliament, and then moved into business and innovation, where I continue to help organisations navigate change. Writing stayed alive throughout, mostly through journals and ideas, even when it wasn’t centre stage.

The red thread running through my life has always been transformation. A willingness to question what no longer fits, and the courage to follow what is asking to emerge. Writing fiction felt like the most honest way to bring that thread home.

What first inspired The Red Silk Dress?

The inspiration came from living inside a world that looked complete from the outside but felt fractured beneath the surface. In Southeast Asia, I was surrounded by what’s often called the expat life, glamorous settings, elegant events, and success on display. Yet in quieter moments, especially in conversations with women, a very different story would surface.

Many were intelligent, capable, outwardly fulfilled, yet privately wrestling with a sense of loss. They had raised families and built impressive lives, yet somewhere along the way they felt they had misplaced themselves. The contrast between the polished exterior and the unspoken interior stayed with me.

At the same time, I recognised a parallel in myself. From the outside, my life also looked full and successful. Inside, I sensed something unfinished, something buried. The novel grew from that convergence. From the tension between what we show the world and what quietly asks for attention. Cambodia, and a writing retreat in Siem Reap, became the place where that question could no longer be ignored.

Why did you choose Claudette, a French woman living overseas, as the heart of this story?

I didn’t choose Claudette in a deliberate way. I wasn’t designing a character or thinking about nationality or backstory. She arrived. On the outskirts of Angkor Wat, during a writing retreat, surrounded by experienced writers and acutely aware of my own inexperience, this woman appeared fully formed in my imagination.

She was elegant and guarded, wearing a wide-brimmed white hat and dark glasses. She introduced herself as Claudette, from Paris, and asked me to write her story. When she removed her glasses, what struck me was the sadness in her eyes. That moment carried a quiet insistence. It wasn’t dramatic, but it was unmistakable.

I wrote the opening paragraph that day, and it remains the opening paragraph of the novel. Claudette wasn’t invented to make a point. She was the right vessel for the story that wanted to be told.

The novel explores longing, desire, and reinvention. What drew you to these themes?

Reinvention has always fascinated me because I’ve lived it. I’ve moved countries, changed careers, and rebuilt my life more than once. That capacity for agency, for choosing to become something new, has been a quiet through-line in my work and my thinking.

Longing and desire entered the novel more subtly. At the time, I was living in Penang, Malaysia, immersed in colour, texture, heat, and beauty. I began to experience desire not as something reckless or romanticised, but as a form of intelligence. A way back into memory, creativity, and the parts of us that go dormant when life becomes crowded with too much to do.

Longing, for me, is a signal. If we ignore it, we stay as we are. If we listen, it draws us inward, into an interior journey that can quietly change the course of our lives.

Is The Red Silk Dress a love story, or is it really about something deeper?

It’s about something deeper than a conventional love story. The love affair in The Red Silk Dress isn’t a romance in the usual sense, and it isn’t about escape or transgression for its own sake. It functions as a catalyst. Love, in Claudette’s case, is what wakes her up to herself.

What interested me was eros in its older meaning. A sensual awakening of the body and the senses, of attention and aliveness. A pause that draws us back into ourselves and allows us to inhabit moments more fully.

In that sense, eros doesn’t just awaken desire. It awakens attention. And sustained attention inevitably sharpens conscience. When we feel more alive, more present, more attuned, we become more aware of misalignment. Of what we are complicit in. Of what no longer feels bearable. That awareness naturally turns outward into questions of responsibility.

Places feel very alive in the book. Why were Cambodia, Malaysia, and Paris important settings?

The places are alive in the novel, as much a character as the people who inhabit it. Geography isn’t a backdrop for Claudette’s journey; it actively shapes it.

Cambodia is where the story begins because it is where her inner life is first disturbed and opened. I was deeply affected by Cambodia’s layers of history, from the ancient Angkor civilisation to the energy of contemporary artists, designers, and entrepreneurs rebuilding culture with pride and imagination. There is a sensuality and generosity in the country that opens Claudette.

Malaysia is her lived world. It is where I spent many years, moving between lush, gated communities, international enclaves, and the daily crossings into Singapore. That environment, with its contrasts between order and improvisation, privilege, and dislocation, shaped how Claudette learned to belong and not belong at the same time.

Paris represents origin and memory. It carries sensuality, identity, and an earlier version of herself. It is where Claudette must reckon with who she has been and who she is becoming, not nostalgically, but honestly.

And then there is Portugal, which sits quietly behind the book rather than inside the story. It is where the novel was edited, refined, and completed. After the intensity of Asia, it offered a different rhythm. More space. More listening. It was here that what had been awakened elsewhere could be integrated and shaped with patience.

For me, the locale is never decorative. Each country asks something different of Claudette. Cambodia opens her. Malaysia tests her sense of belonging. Paris calls her to reckon with her past.

What’s your connection with Malaysia, Cambodia, and Singapore, and what was your experience living and working there?

I moved to Singapore in 2010, initially for work. It was still a time when the traditional expat package existed, and the city was dazzling, ordered, and highly curated. I was fascinated by it, not because it was my life, but because of what it revealed about status, success, and performance.

We moved to Malaysia largely for practical reasons. In Johor Bahru, we became part of a more entrepreneurial, improvised community, shaped by people building lives across borders. I crossed into Singapore several times a week, so the contrast between those two societies became part of my daily rhythm.

Penang was where something settled. It was slower, textured, steeped in history. It was also where I returned fully to writing and committed to the novel. After years of living between worlds, Penang became the place where the book could finally be written.

You’ve lived and worked across many countries. How has that shaped the way you write about identity and belonging?

Living across countries has made identity feel less fixed and more relational. Belonging isn’t something you arrive at once and for all. It shifts depending on place, people, and season of life.

Being immersed in different cultures sharpened my sensitivity to belief systems, values, and the ways we construct meaning. Living now in Portugal has added another layer. After years of movement, it has offered a sense of feeling grounded without confinement. A rhythm where I can listen differently.

I now find myself writing more reflective cultural pieces that explore place, memory, and creativity. Belonging, I’ve learned, is not about fitting in neatly. It’s about learning how to be changed by place while remaining true to yourself.

You often write about moments when life quietly asks us to change. Where does that fascination come from?

From my own life. I’ve reinvented not just what I do, but how I think. What interests me most are the subtle moments when something no longer fits and begins to ask different questions.

Real change rarely arrives loudly. It comes as a discomfort, a quiet misalignment. Innovation, like personal change, requires the courage to step beyond conformity and tolerate uncertainty. I’ve always been drawn to that edge because it is where life becomes most alive.

Your professional work focuses on creativity and transformation. Did those ideas find their way into this story?

Yes, though not in a literal way. My work has always been about how change unfolds as lived experience. Claudette’s journey follows that inner arc. Awareness, awakening, investigation, and consequence.

Creativity also enters the novel through the senses. Fabric, silk, touch, style. I wanted creativity to live in the body, not just the mind. In that sense, the story becomes a meeting place between beauty and transformation.

Did writing The Red Silk Dress change how you see yourself or your work?

The act of writing, and the way the book moved me emotionally and sensorially, awakened a level of creative energy I hadn’t experienced before. When I finished the novel, I realised I had opened a door into a new phase of my life.

It also reoriented my work. I no longer separate creativity, leadership, and transformation into neat categories. They belong together. Writing the novel didn’t replace my previous work. It gave it a deeper centre.

In parallel, I continue my work with women in leadership, creating spaces where they can step back from performance and certainty and listen more deeply to themselves. In many ways, those spaces and the novel are in a subtle, mutually reinforcing conversation. Both are about reconnecting with agency, voice, and purpose, not as theory but as lived experience.

Who do you think this book is for?

It will likely resonate most strongly with women who are curious, reflective, and drawn to immersive stories. Readers who want to be transported into another world and enjoy discovering history, culture, and meaning through story.

That said, men have responded deeply too. Several have shared how meaningful it was to inhabit a woman’s inner world so intimately. While it is a woman’s journey, the relationships and portrayals of masculinity are layered and intentional.

At heart, it’s for readers standing at a threshold. Those who sense a quiet unease and are open to being moved by a story that stays with them.

If a reader recognises themselves in Claudette’s struggle, what would you want them to take from her story?

I would want them to pause first. To take a breath and turn inward. Claudette’s story isn’t a prescription or a manifesto. It’s an invitation to reflect.

If there is one thing I hope readers take from her journey, it’s the understanding that feeling trapped does not mean being powerless. Agency often begins quietly, with hope, courage, and a willingness to trust what is asking to emerge.

And that emergence isn’t just personal. It shapes how we show up in our families, our work, our communities. Change, in this story, is not about abandoning life, but about stepping back into it with greater responsibility for the world we are helping to shape.

What do you hope readers feel or reflect on after turning the final page?

Above all, I hope the book creates a pause. A moment of deeper listening. Not a rush to act or decide, but an invitation to sit with what is emerging.

What’s your advice to aspiring writers?

I think writing begins with attention. Being open to life, to what keeps circling at the edges of consciousness, to the story that wants to be told. Craft matters enormously, of course. Writing a novel asks for depth, endurance, and commitment well beyond beautiful prose. Technique only comes alive when it is in the service of something true, something rooted in vulnerability. Finding your story is about learning how to listen, and then having the courage and patience to give it form.

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Keith Lyons (keithlyons.net) is an award-winning writer and creative writing mentor originally from New Zealand who has spent a quarter of his existence living and working in Asia including southwest China, Myanmar and Bali. His Venn diagram of happiness features the aroma of freshly-roasted coffee, the negative ions of the natural world including moving water, and connecting with others in meaningful ways. A Contributing Editor on Borderless journal’s Editorial Board, his work has appeared in Borderless since its early days, and his writing featured in the anthology Monalisa No Longer Smiles.

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Click here to read an excerpt from the book.

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

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Excerpt

The Red Silk Dress

Title: The Red Silk Dress

Author: Natalie Turner

Publisher: Spines

The opening scene of The Red Silk Dress

Siem Reap, Cambodia—2015

Chapter One

She stepped out of the limousine. The brim of her white Panama hat brushed the car door, and dust from the spinning wheels of a departing silver Mercedes hung in the air like a shroud. She shot an irritated glance at the receding car. Why did everything have to feel so rushed? She exhaled slowly, a familiar weight pressing against her chest. She looked down at her Jimmy Choos, now dusted with sand—a small detail, yet enough to deepen her annoyance. Determined to regain a sense of control, she pulled a tissue from her bag and stooped to wipe them clean. Shielding her eyes with oversized black sunglasses, she lifted her gaze to the sun.

Surrounded by meticulously manicured gardens, the Grand Hotel d’Angkor, an elegant cream mansion with a red slate roof and white veranda, stood before her. Its old-world charm softened her irritation. Finally, a touch of class. Claudette hadn’t realised just how much she had missed it.

Beside the limousine stood Andrew, her husband, his tall frame casting a long shadow. Wiping sweat from his freckled forehead, the lines on his face betrayed stress and fatigue. She knew it was the toll of his work, and she couldn’t help but feel a pang of sadness.

“I’ll check in,” he said, frowning. Pulling a handful of US dollars from the pocket of his sun-bleached khaki shorts, Claudette watched as he paid the driver, a knot of emotion tightening in her chest. There had been a time when he was light-hearted—playful even—but those days were long gone. Now his frown served only as a reminder of how distant they had become. His efforts to avoid meaningful conversation only deepened her frustration, and their relationship rarely stretched beyond the children’s schedules and his business travel plans.

“Monique, Pierre, wait!” she called to their ten-year-old twins. Overcome with excitement, they ignored her and sprinted up the hotel steps. Waving to catch their attention, she dropped her mobile. “Mon Dieu. Can you tell the children to stop for a moment?” Andrew turned his back and waved dismissively. Why does the burden of responsibility always fall on me? It was a familiar pattern. She was tired of feeling unheard and unimportant. Picking up her phone, she tucked a strand of long dark hair behind her ear and lowered her hat to shield her face from the sun. Following the twins up the steps, she entered the hotel.

“Ma’am.” A butler bowed as he offered a cold-pressed towel. Grateful for his attentiveness, she thanked him and pressed it to her face. Its cardamom-infused aroma lingered on her lips, and her fingers tingled from its cool, damp texture. Wiping her hands, she smiled and placed the towel on a small bronze plate. Determined to shake off her discomfort, she followed him into the cool, air-conditioned lobby and stepped into the lounge. Notes of Duke Ellington’s ‘Sophisticated Lady’ drifted through the air, accompanying her inside. It was one of her favourite songs. A wave of nostalgia, stirred by Sarah Vaughan’s mellow voice, carried her back to her days as a fashion student in a Parisian jazz bar. How she missed those days—when everything felt simple, possibilities stretching ahead like an open road. Days before she met Andrew, when her dreams were bright and believable. For a moment, the memories wrapped around her like a warm embrace. For a moment, she forgot where she was. She wanted more than the façade of a glamorous life; she longed to feel alive again. She sat down on a muted gold velvet sofa, hoping this weekend she might rediscover the Claudette she once was.

ABOUT THE BOOK

From the mystical temples of Angkor Wat to the glittering expat communities of Malaysia and the elegance of Paris, the novel is a story of longing, courage and transformation. Claudette, a French expat trapped in a loveless marriage, is captivated by Som, a charismatic Cambodian whose passion for his homeland awakens desires she thought were lost. Torn between duty and an awakening that promises freedom, but at a cost, Claudette must choose or risk losing the life calling her name. An intimate journey through the beauty and ache of second chances, the risks we take for love, and the secrets we keep, even from ourselves. For everyone longing to reclaim identity, this story will linger long after the final page.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Natalie Turner is a British author based in Lisbon. Her debut novel, The Red Silk Dress, is an upmarket literary exploration of longing, courage, and awakening, set across Cambodia, Malaysia, and Paris. Alongside her fiction, she writes a reflective cultural column exploring creativity, imagination, and the human dimensions of change. She is also the author of the award-winning non-fiction book Yes, You Can Innovate. Drawing on years living across Southeast Asia and Europe, she writes about women at thresholds, the landscapes that shape us, and the quiet moments where life begins to change.

Click here to read the author interview

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Categories
Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes

Pessoa and Cavafy: What’s in a Name?

  • Pessoa
  • Cavafy
Courtesy: Creative Commons

Sometimes we know that something is untrue but we decide to believe it anyway. There may be several points in its favour, clues that seem to add up to a revelation. Then one shortcoming is noted and the speculation is ruined, revealed to be utterly implausible. Yet we keep hold of the notion because it remains aesthetically pleasing.

Such is the situation with my contention that the poet Pessoa (1888-1935) was the same man as the poet Cavafy (1863-1933) I discovered the work of both these special individuals in recent years. Pessoa I knew first, I have travelled to Lisbon often, I saw his statue sitting outside his favourite café, heard his praises sung by lovers of fine literature. Then I began reading him and I found a remarkable voice, a highly original talent.

Cavafy intruded later into my consciousness. His name was bandied about in Lawrence Durrell’s wonderful Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960) and I saw a copy of his collected poems in a very curious bookshop outside a peculiar village in a remote part of an obscure region of rural England. I felt a pull to that volume but I neglected to buy it on that occasion. Only when I saw a reprint of one of his poems called ‘The City’ standing alone did I realise that he had a supreme talent for pithiness.

And so I became a reader of these two luminaries, poets who excel in embossing their subliminally potent but often wistful visions onto modern reality. They are both among the best poets I have read. But I began to see an odd congruence between the pair. I started to link them together in my mind. There were so many points in their lives and working methods that seemed to correspond closely, too closely, that I finally wondered: Might they be the same man? Was this possible?

Yes, it is possible, even if not especially practical. There are cases in the history of literature that are no less extraordinary. Sometimes one man turns out to be several men. The author Luther Blissett is a case in point. He is an amalgam, or rather a conglomeration, of several individuals and as a result he barely exists in his own right. More frequently two or more men turn out to be one man. Kurban Said and Essad Bey are examples of this situation, for both are facets or sides or masks of one person, a true enigma by the name of Lev Nussimbaum (1905-1942).

Both types of deception are intended to create mystery and to baffle investigators, to allow those who indulge in the trickery to experience the displaced objectivity that comes with the transmigration of identity. On occasion identities multiply so prolifically that it is difficult to keep track of them all, and while we may wonder who exactly is who, the individual who is the original source of the identities acquires a status akin to that of the trunk of a venerable tree. The flowers and leaves on the branches are noted while the trunk is neglected or even forgotten about. This is clearly what some trees and some authors want.

Even a hasty examination of the respective lives of Fernando Pessoa and Constantine Cavafy will throw up some intriguing parallels and a few distorted symmetries. Pessoa was born in 1888 and died in 1935 at the age of 47, still a relatively young man. Cavafy was born in 1863 and died in 1933 at the age of 70. These dates show that they are absolutely not the same man. Pessoa lived in Lisbon, at the far western end of that longish body of water called the Mediterranean. Cavafy lived in Alexandria, at the far eastern end, and on the other shore.

So they lived far apart, almost as if they wished to throw people off the scent who might otherwise have remarked on the similarity of their appearance and eccentricities. If we draw a straight line between Lisbon and Alexandria and plot the halfway point, we end up in Tunisia. Were there any poets of great skill living in Tunisia at the time of Pessoa and Cavafy? There was Mahmoud Aslan, for one, and Aboul-Qacem Echebi, for another. What does this have to do with the subject in question? Not a great deal. But if a person had two identities and had to be in Lisbon at certain times and in Alexandria at others, then to base oneself right at the midway point of those two cities is wise.

This is idle conjecture and nonsense and yet Pessoa and Cavafy both lived and breathed in the medium of enigma. Neither man submitted work for publication, preferring to share it only with a few friends, or with the darkness inside a large wooden trunk. Pessoa wrote under many different names, which he liked to call his ‘heteronyms’. A school friend described him later as “pale and thin and imperfectly developed. He had a narrow chest and was inclined to stoop. He had a peculiar walk and some defect in his eyesight gave to his eyes a peculiar appearance, the lids seemed to drop over the eyes.” He studied diplomacy but was a poor student. Then a sizeable inheritance from his grandmother allowed him to set up his own publishing house, which he named ‘Ibis’.

The Egyptian bird chosen for this business venture is perhaps a clue that I have seized on too eagerly. Alexandria is in Egypt, of course, and Cavafy worked his entire life in an office, as Pessoa had expected to do. Both men travelled when young because of family commitments, Pessoa to Africa and Cavafy to England, but after their return they preferred to remain exactly where they were and never travel again. Pessoa lived in a series of cheap rented flats, Cavafy lived in one cheap rented flat, each man pretending to be unaware of the other, partly because it would have been very difficult for Pessoa to have access to Cavafy’s poems, and vice versa, but also in order to preserve the illusion they were different men? I am clutching at straws, I know, but straws can thatch roofs, and roofs are what best protect us from the elements.

Pessoa enjoyed setting puzzles for his readers and swathing himself in clouds of obscurity while hiding in the passages of a labyrinth. Cavafy on the other hand appears less mischievous on the surface but certainly was also interested in transformations of identity, in particular the way that an individual in the present can absorb some of the sentience, attitudes, even wisdom of those who are long dead. Both poets are considered loners and yet their work yearns for connection. Was isolation necessary in order to continue with the elaborate deception?

No, of course not, and yet I wish that was the answer. If Cavafy was really one of the heteronyms of Pessoa, I would regard the trick as surely the greatest ever played in the history of literature. But Pessoa died first. So might Pessoa have been a reverse-heteronym of the older but longer-lived man? We tend to believe that a subset must exist inside the set it belongs to. Perhaps Cavafy was a heteronym that was so realistic it came alive and hopped off the page into the world. He might have been a tulpa, one of those mythical entities brought into life by an act of sheer thought. A wish made true.

None of this speculation has any place in serious poetic studies, but I am not here to be serious, I am here to scratch an intellectual itch. Habits can be shared by men, talent too, but if we look closely at photographs of Pessoa and Cavafy we see the same elusive quality in their eyes, sadness and strength mixed together, interiority without inferiority, a deep ironic wisdom. They are figures who exist outside the time that frames them, a pair of warped mirror images, somewhat neglected during their lives but always with the promise of greater recognition later. And that recognition came in a surge and lifted up their reputations to such a high point that we now acknowledge them both as obvious geniuses and find it very difficult to believe they were ever unappreciated.

Pessoa employed at least seventy-two heteronyms, identities not only with individual names but distinct signatures, temperaments, biographies, ambitions and destinies. And if Cavafy was the secret seventy-third of the heteronyms? Is there any evidence for this wild proposition? Consider the Cavafy poem entitled ‘Nero’s Deadline’ and the essential function in the text of that same number, seventy-three.

Nero wasn’t worried at all when he heard
the utterance of the Delphic Oracle:
“Beware the age of seventy-three.”
Plenty of time to enjoy himself still.
He’s thirty. The deadline
the god has given him is quite enough
to cope with future dangers.

Now, a little tired, he’ll return to Rome—
but wonderfully tired from that journey
devoted entirely to pleasure:
theatres, garden-parties, stadiums…
evenings in the cities of Achaia…
and, above all, the sensual delight of naked bodies.

So much for Nero. And in Spain Galba
secretly musters and drills his army—
Galba, the old man in his seventy-third year.

Spain is not Portugal but it is an adjacent country. Cavafy was not an ancient Roman, but he was an adjacent sort of fellow, a modern Greek. It is very unlikely that he was a heteronym but would he have been willing to admit it if he was? None of Pessoa’s other heteronyms were especially keen to reveal themselves as fictional. Nero thought that the oracle was a reference to himself and his own age whereas in fact it alluded to the age of the man who soon succeeded him.

And why is seventy-three a magical number? It is a prime number and Pessoa died in the prime of his life. In binary it is written as 1001001, the neat symmetry of a line with one end in Lisbon, one in Alexandria and a middle in Tunisia. In octal it is written 111, three men or the same man in different positions? It is a star number, a centred figurate number that can form a regular hexagram, and both Pessoa and Cavafy were stars. It is an emirp number, meaning that written in reverse it is also a prime. It is used by radio operators as a substitute for “best regards” because when written in Morse Code it is also a palindrome and sounds the same forwards as it does backwards, another mirror image.

Shall I continue in this fashion? It is unnecessary.

I will finish by pointing out that 73 is the atomic number of tantalum and that both poets remain tantalising. At no point do I really believe that Pessoa and Cavafy were the same man.

Yet there is something satisfying about the idea.

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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

Categories
Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes

Dinosaurs in France

Eiffel Tower Paris. Courtesy: Creative Commons

I am still confused as to how many continents there are. Is Oceania the same as Australasia? Do North and South America count as two or just one? Is Antarctica a proper continent and not just a frozen phoney? What about the subcontinent of India? Does that count as half, quarter, or some other fraction? What continent does Greenland belong to? And the islands of the mid Atlantic, what about them?

When I was younger the issue was simpler. There were six continents, Africa, America, Asia, Australasia, Europe and Great Britain. There was absolutely no doubt that Britain was separate from Europe geographically and spiritually. In fact, the mainland of Europe was the continent and things that came from it were ‘continental’ and mostly malodorous, quilts and kisses on the hand being exceptions.

In Europe people did peculiar things; they spread chocolate on bread for breakfast and melted cheese in communal pots in the evenings. Or so it was said. Europe was a place of mystery, a patchwork of suspense, and crossing its multifarious internal borders wasn’t likely to be easy. If you had to travel there, a large vulcanite suitcase that could be plastered with triangular destination labels was the minimum requirement. Better not to go at all! The greasy food, cooked in nasty olive oil, was certain to upset your stomach. And there were yodellers.

My great childish dream back then was to build a raft and paddle it to France. There were enough fallen trees in the forest near my home to provide wood for the construction. France seemed an incredibly exotic destination and my enthusiasm was increased rather than diminished when I was told that dinosaurs existed there. They had become extinct everywhere else but still flourished in France. Thus, I couldn’t wait to drag my raft ashore and encounter my first stegosaurus. Other lies that adults told me about France included the assertion that the Eiffel Tower was something that horses jumped over in the Grand National. Having no idea what a ‘Grand National’ was I felt only a vague sense of awe. It was many years before I learned that it is a horse race famous for being dangerous to horses and for the ludicrous hats worn by upper class drunken women who watch it and chortle.

Adults in those days told outrageous untruths as a matter of course. It was an accepted part of life. I grew up in an environment where no one said anything sensible but instead would make the most absurd statements with a straight face. It was an uncle who claimed that France was jammed with dinosaurs. He also informed me that we were living in Australia, not Britain, but that everyone else would try to trick me into thinking it was Britain and that they were all in the joke together and I shouldn’t believe them. The truth of the matter, he added, was that Britain was a fiction, it didn’t exist, or it had sunk beneath the sea, it was a joke or a memory and nothing more. This was Australia and when he was my age, he had made a raft, from twigs, and sailed it around the world and started a successful property business with a gorilla in a jungle.

And he told me that he once pulled the plug out of the bath while he was still in it and got sucked down the hole and ended up at the bottom of the sea where he lived in a gigantic air bubble with a dolphin who taught him dolphin language and how to make crêpes. None of this was said in a joking manner but in a tone of utter seriousness. Everyone was like this. The postman once told me that he lived in a marshmallow house and was terrified of lightning strikes because the heat would alter the flavour of his roof and that people were taxed on the flavours of their roofs, so for him it was a major concern that his tiles weren’t toasted.

One of my favourite absurdities concerned the International Date Line. Because Australia was so many hours in the future, people who lived there (like ourselves) could phone relatives in Europe with the results of football matches, horse races and boxing competitions that hadn’t yet happened, enabling those relatives to make a big profit at the betting shop. These European relatives could then phone America to pass on the same information, enabling friends over there to also make money through betting. However, because of the Date Line it wasn’t possible for America to do any such favours for any countries west of them. In other words, America took but didn’t give, and as a consequence, was building up a large debt to the rest of the world.

One day all the other nations of the world, all those living in a future time relative to America, would form an alliance and invade America and loot all its treasures in retaliation. I am fairly sure it was one of my schoolteachers who told me all this. Even supposedly ‘responsible’ adults liked to be ridiculous in a blasé manner and play jokes on children. I remember one outing to a pond in a park as part of a nature class. We were required to sketch any animals that we might encounter, and, in my mind, I can still see the teacher crouching over a child’s sketch pad and pointing to a duck that was paddling slowly on the water.

“What it that, boy?”

“A duck, sir.”

“No, boy, it’s a fish.”

“But it has a beak and wings, sir!”

“Yes, but it has a tail too. Can’t you see the tail? Fish have tails, don’t they? That means it’s a fish. Draw it exactly as you see it and write the word ‘fish’ under the drawing and tomorrow I will hand your work to the headmaster so he can form a judgment of your educational progress and I am sure the result will interest him.”

That’s how life was in Britain when I was younger. Practical jokes and getting other people into trouble for the purposes of comedy was standard behaviour. If you didn’t tell amusing fabrications then you were regarded as rather odd, dubious even, a spoilsport and also, perhaps, a saboteur or foreigner. I would look at adults in the street and wonder if any of them were French and on familiar terms with dinosaurs.

Then everything changed and the countries and cultures of Europe became much more accessible. Going to Paris, Madrid or Lisbon for a weekend took no more effort than visiting Weymouth, Blackpool or Margate. In fact, it usually took less effort. I began to genuinely feel like a European citizen, something generally considered not feasible for a British fellow, but I am Welsh, not English, and the Welsh, who are the original Britons, are hardly British. To feel European required only my desire and acquiescence, and I had that desire and yes, I was willing to acquiesce. Feeling European wasn’t an option denied to me at that time and I never thought it would be, at least not until plate tectonics reformed the continents and Europe ceased to physically exist.

It sounds ludicrously obvious, but it still apparently needs to be said. Britain isn’t a continent by itself. That was just a childhood myth, similar to the story that if you swallow an apple pip a tree will grow inside you, and in fact I once deliberately swallowed many pips in order to have an orchard in my stomach and never grow hungry. I would only have to jump up and down at mealtimes for the fruit to fall from the branches. Because the fruit was already in my stomach, actually eating it would be unnecessary. It seemed such a wonderful solution that I couldn’t work out why everyone didn’t do it. I supposed that maybe adults didn’t really like convenience. But no, we can’t have trees growing inside us. And sadly, dolphins don’t know how to make crêpes.

Politely we call such things myths. They are deceits, of course. But the world seems to have gone back in time. Travelling abroad is truly difficult again, impossible in many instances. I spend my days bewailing the reversal. I have started wondering if my old plan of building a raft might be my best option of leaving these shores and visiting other lands. There might be dangerous dinosaurs off the coast of France, those long-necked plesiosaurs, but I will take a big detour around them. I will steer by the light of the stars and satisfy my hunger by eating the walls of my marshmallow cabin. Everything will work out fine.

Courtesy: Creative Commons

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