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Editorial

Because We Are…

Melting Glaciers
Peat Fires
From Public Domain

We have started feeling the impact of climate change with a bevy of natural disasters this August. Glacial ice melts, peat fires, haze, rising seas, more storms, warmer climes and fires wiping out greenery are just a few that come to the mind. But, long ago, our ancestors — without the support of technology — survived climate events. Göbekli Tepe (Turkey), an ancient human settlement, more than 11,000 years ago was lush and green. People moved as it turned arid. Humankind was nomadic then. They moved with shifting riverbeds. In Europe, humans survived the last glacial age, about 20,000 years ago. Then, now when we are faced with the reality of climate change, why is it we tremble with trepidation? We even have technology in hand. Ideators and writers like Asimov found solutions. In Caves of Steel (1954), Isaac Asimov had humanity move underground to survive unfriendly surface conditions. He created a huge city underground for humanity while some moved into other planets. Perhaps, the time has come for us to think out of the box. And that is what we hope all of you will join to do in Borderless.

September has thrown up varied content. We have non-fiction which reflects on how changes are a part of human lore and how diverse cultures can co-exist to enrich each other. Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri dwells on this idea while talking of Nazrul’s approach to the Persian Ghazal. He writes, the poet through his adaptation of this form “showed how a culture can absorb another culture without losing itself, and how, in the process, both cultures can become something larger than they were before.” And perhaps from that largeness of thought will emerge a one-world community — that Yatish Kumar S espouses. Maybe from people who think beyond borders, we will find the solution to tackling and adapting to climate change. We have an essay from Charudutta Panigrahi where he attempts to arouse the survival instinct in humans. Young Shruti Keskar writes of how she finds a new lease to life by accepting and adapting to changes while Farouk Guslara philosophises on living and possessions. We have Meredith Stephens adding to the vivacity of non-fiction with a recount of her sailing adventures with wonderful photographs by Alan Noble. And Devraj Singh Kalsi brings in sardonic humour with his piece on art and artists.

Humour is woven into poetry with ‘Emily’s Ghost‘ by Rhys Hughes. We have poetry on rain and silences by Ananya S Guha and SR Inciardi. Ron Pickett explores nature as does T Manjunath. Diverse themes resonate in poems by Jim Bellamy, Veerashetty Aurad, George Freek, Hassan Ismail Adekunle, Mary Pomfret, Subramaniam Cheemalapati, John Zedolik, Shazia Khatoon, Richard D. Houff and Ryan Quinn Flanagan. We have a translation of a Korean poem by Ihlwha Choi that reflects how putting aside differences and walking together can make for a happier world, thus reflecting themes from our non-fiction section. Perhaps, the best illustration of this idea is in Nazrul’s Bengali lyrics translated by Professor Fakrul Alam.

A story-poem by Tagore, Swopno (Dream), has also been brought to us in English. An interesting memoir by Kallol Lahiri centring around his childhood in Bengal has been translated by V Ramaswamy. Translations offer fiction from Isa Kamari. He has transcribed in English the second chapter of his Malay novel, The Throne. The novel focussing on psychological torment is being serialised in Borderless.

Our stories trot around the world with a narrative about a wedding by Fiona Sinclair. While she talks of a world where the basics of life are taken for granted, Gowher Bhat brings to us an account about a young girl who has to work hard to have her daily needs met. Jonathon B Ferrini on the other hand shares a tale about a young child, using the epistolary technique. Naramsetti Umamaheswara Rao narrates a tale of two brothers.

In this issue, we seem to have gathered a number of reviews and excerpts based on memoirs. Teresa Rehman has shared women pilgrim’s narratives in Her Hajj Story: Travel Diaries of Women Pilgrims from Assam and in the excerpt we carry, we have her reflecting on how she gathered these gems. The other excerpt is from Shubha Apte’s memoir, When the Road Becomes the Teacher.

Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed a rare book-centric memoir by Shanta Gokhale. He tells us, “Of Ancestors and Friends: A Life with Books is an unusual kind of literary memoir. It is neither a conventional autobiography nor a conventional work of criticism. Instead, it occupies an intimate space between the two, tracing a life’s intellectual and emotional history through books.” Meenakshi Malhotra has discussed the renowned historian Romila Thapar’s memoir, Just Being, a book that reflects not only her own journey but the freedom and outreach that privilege and capability can bestow on women in South Asia. On the other hand, Mudassar Javed Baryar refers to the plight of birongonas, war time widows during the 1971 conflict that birthed Bangladesh, while discussing Saima Begum’s The First Jasmines. He reflects: “Begum’s profound innovation is to turn the narrative back not just to these women’s trauma but to their ‘humanity, resilience and heart’, depicting them as ‘architects of family and community’.” Somdatta Mandal has praised Omair Ahmad’s novel, Homecoming.

We have also featured Kanuprya Dhingra, who has written a book on a unique book bazaar. In a candid exchange, she tells us her non-fiction, The Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, “is for the reader in Singapore, or Mumbai, or London, or Lahore who has their own version of this informal, unruly, necessary space and sees it reflected here. It is a book about books, the people who read them, and the people who make that possible…the book is for everyone.” It’s an interesting read almost inviting you to stroll into the serendipitous democratic reading space full of local colour and stories.

We would like to thank not only Dhingra but all our contributors for their wonderful work. Huge thanks to the fabulous Borderless team for their input and to Sohana Manzoor for her artwork. Thank you all — without all of you and our wonderful readers, it would be difficult to have a journal. In the spirit of ubuntu, heartfelt thanks.

Do pause by our September content’s page. And let’s look forward to the hope for happier climes and times.

Best wishes,

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

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Categories
Interview Review

A Book about Books that Explores a Serendipitous Space for All Readers

An conversation with Kanupriya Dhingra with a brief introduction to her book, The Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, published by Speaking Tiger Books.

“Most Sundays, I found myself walking alongside hundreds of others for whom Daryaganj was, and continues to be, the primary site of book buying. It was democratic, messy, inclusive, sometimes illegal, often chaotic, but always alive.” 

-- Kanupriya Dhingra, Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public

Perhaps, Kanupriya Dhingra’s Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, could be seen as a democratisation of the process of reading. In an ethnographic study of a book bazaar that springs up every Sunday, Dhingra familiarises us with the historicity of the culture of a bazaar, of reading and even locates its roots in the Mughal Faiz Bazaar from the time of Shahjahan (1592-1666).

In an earlier article dated 2020, she had written about the bazaar: “Historian Sohail Hashmi says that Akbarabadi Begum, one of Shahjahan’s wives, built this market in its earliest form. Several historical maps of Delhi show the existence of ‘Faiz Bazaar’ in this area. The name, Daryaganj, itself means ‘a market across a river’, where ‘Darya’ refers to a river (here, the river Yamuna) and ‘Ganj’ refers to a site where trade is conducted. It was not always the same product that was traded here; Daryaganj only became synonymous with the sale of used, rare, pirated books in the 1960s. According to locals, Daryaganj started as a consumer goods market, set up adjacent to the walls between Subhash Park and Kasturba Gandhi Hospital. There were vinyl records and hand-mounted record players, radios, transistors, mechanical goods, medical goods and used clothes; books too found their place. After a few minor relocations not significantly far away from the lanes of Daryaganj, a few booksellers moved to the now absent ‘Lohe ka Pul‘ (Iron Bridge), near Golcha Cinema, from where the street market began to expand. Before its recent relocation to a nearby site by the name of Mahila Haat, the bazaar extended till Delite Cinema Hall. The structure of the market appeared like a long ‘L’, with books stacked on the sidewalks of Netaji Subhash Marg and Asaf Ali Road, and more than 250 vendors.”

Dhingra continued spellbound by the ‘magic’ of this bazaar when she visited it as a child and then, as a university student. Coming from a small town, where bookshops that stocked more than textbooks were a rarity, she supported the booksellers when they protested the ‘legalisation’ and the relocation of the bazaar to a newer site in 2019 and wrote of it in Himal Southasian in an article titled, ‘The death of a book bazaar’.

The book gives fascinating glimpses of booksellers and book buyers, of connoisseurs and of students striving for upward economic mobility in the job market. It houses parents, children, old people and young, book lovers, browsers, students, teachers and more. Dhingra asserts: “A republic, in its original sense, is a res publica—a public thing, a commons, something that belongs to everyone who participates in it. Not owned, not curated, not gatekept. The Patri Kitab Bazaar[1] is exactly this: a space where a rickshaw puller and an IAS officer, a first-generation student and a shauqeen[2] collector, a vendor from Uttar Pradesh and a buyer from Assam all have equal claim to the same pile of books.”

One of the most fascinating stories that emerges is of the Om Bookstore — that can be found in major malls across Delhi and many major cities of India — and Om Books International. Dhingra met the founder Om Mago and this is what she wrote: “Om Mago told me that when he first came to Daryaganj, there was no bazaar to speak of—just a few men who had found this way of living. Books that did not belong anywhere, that had potential afterlives, had been discovered as a sellable commodity. ‘There was need in Delhi, and there were books.’ From that simple equation, he learnt the trade, built connections across Delhi and Mumbai, and gradually transformed a pavement enterprise into what Om Books International is today.”

Dhingra has gathered details from booksellers and connoisseurs. Connoisseurs like Sohail Hashmi and Abdul Sattar gave her historic antecedents while bloggers like, Mayank Austen Soofi, who runs the highly coveted The Delhi Walla blog, and claims to idolise Arundhati Roy and have met her in the bazaar, shared more recent perspectives. Soofi “has been passing in and out of the same neighbourhoods for more than a decade, documenting the minutest social and cultural changes” as the New Yorker noted, giving almost a ‘Proustian quality’ to his posts on Delhi. 

Dhingra has noticed that selling books is largely confined to men though women buyers are visible. She sees a difference in approach among the genders, which is an interesting observation, given the fact that Delhi is known for its discriminatory attitude towards women. 

What I found most fascinating about the book was the capture of local colours, though the focus was more centred on discussions around North Indian languages. It has interesting snippets like a man who operates pirated books out of the dickey of his car, lodging his ware near an ATM. Dhingra tells us: “At the Patri Kitab Bazaar, pirated books are called D ki kitab—where D refers to duplicate and/or digital.” She mentions too, a publisher that brings out ‘Guru Chela’ ( Master- Disciple) booklets.  “There were some 100 colourful booklets with miscellaneous titles of useful literature in Hindi, English, and Hinglish.” These were a mix of write- ups on ‘useful’ tips as well as popular jokes and light literature. Along with these, the vendor sold things like “pocketknives, razors, scissors, tiny notebooks, used fountain pens, old wristwatches and their band.” She also found stalls selling old film posters, lyrics and even ancient coins! A copy of the Lolita (1955, written by Vladimir Nabokov in English) translated to Hindi finds mention. “I found a copy of Lolita in the bazaar once—in Hindi. The title only mentioned Lolita in Hindi, and there was nothing else on the cover except a woman’s portrait. There were no copyright claims inside the paratextual pages—no author, no publisher. For a reader or buyer who is not familiar with Nabokov and his works, it is just another novel in Hindi.”

She makes one feel it’s a must to visit the bazaar, perhaps, with a copy of her book in hand! Her style is smooth, evocative and flows well. Dhingra has a passion which translated to a whole book reflecting a community that is unique in the very fact of its existence, tied loosely by the love of books – not necessarily reading. We interviewed her to discuss her journey and here’s how she responded:

Kanupriya Dhingra

“As an ethnographer of the city streets, I am constantly reminded of the transformative power of walking. It allows us to uncover hidden stories, forge unexpected connections, and shape the world around us.” Can you please elaborate on this “transformative power” and how the bazaar forms and unforms every Sunday?

Until 2019, since the 1970s, Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar was set up between two landmark cinema halls in Old Delhi — Golcha Cinema on Netaji Subhash Road and Delite Cinema on Asaf Ali Road. On any other day, this L-shaped part of the street carried the ordinary rhythms of a working city: government offices, shops and traders, food outlets, traffic on the road. On Sundays, those rhythms would change. Iron and cardboard boxes, tarpaulin sheets, and books spread across the footpath, using the closed shutters of offices as their display backdrop. The bazaar did not occupy the street so much as it temporarily rewrote it. What ethnography taught me to pay attention to is precisely this rewriting of the space that is overdetermined during the week, claimed by traffic and routine and competing uses, is briefly re-scripted by the arrival of booksellers and readers. And then, by evening, unscripted again. Books would go back in their boxes, the tarpaulins were folded, and the footpath was simply itself  — flat and indifferent. The street would forget entirely what stood on it. But the people remembered.

Can you tell our readers what is ethnography? Why did you feel the need to do an ethnographic study on the Sunday book bazaar? What would be the target readership of your very well researched book?

Ethnography, at its simplest, is the method of sustained and repeated presence in a place and trying to understand a world on its own terms. What it is not is a survey, an archive search, or a one-time interview. It is slow and embodied. It is, also, deeply dependent on the trust of the people who agree to let you into their working lives.

Because the bazaar exists outside the formal structures that usually produce archives, there are no official records of this market. The only way to know it is to go there, repeatedly, over years, and listen. The book is built from those years of fieldnotes, interviews, and observations. While the formal fieldwork for my doctoral thesis happened in 2019, I had been a regular for a while. I continued spending Sundays at the bazaar across seasons, displacements, and a pandemic. With the support of the booksellers, I documented the 2019 protests in urgent media reports as well, to produce an immediate archive of what happened to the bazaar, instead of waiting to revisit my notes only while writing my thesis.

As for who the book is for — I resisted writing a book that only scholars could read. The Sunday Book Bazaar is for the student who recognises Usha with her handwritten list of textbooks — one that has scope for a few other ‘finds’ because her pocket money allows for it, here, at the bazaar. It is for the shauqeen who recognises their own Sunday morning in these pages. It is for the Delhi reader who has been going to the bazaar for years without quite knowing why. It is for the reader in Singapore, or Mumbai, or London, or Lahore who has their own version of this informal, unruly, necessary space and sees it reflected here. It is a book about books, the people who read them, and the people who make that possible. The research is rigorous, I hope. But the book is for everyone.

You have mentioned the absence of women among the sellers. The few that are there do not even see themselves as sellers but as temporary fixtures in lieu of their husbands. Can you tell us why in the twenty-first century women are still being segregated in the bazaar? Is it justified?

The question of women at the bazaar is more nuanced than it first appears. Women vendors are not absent. Quite a few have been running stalls at Daryaganj for years, some for decades, even if it means supporting their brother or husband or son. What is more important, and what my fieldwork revealed, is that many of them do not claim the identity of bookseller. When I asked directly, the answers were careful, deflective, or simply negative. One vendor, who had been managing her late husband’s stall with evident expertise for decades, told me that this work belongs to men because women cannot “lift heavy books”. Another, who had joined the bazaar more recently, had also lost her husband. She was selling the stock he had gathered over the years, keeping the stall going until her son was old enough to take over. But it was more than that, she said, “He passed away on a Sunday, after selling books at the bazaar. That has to mean something.”

Cities give women this kind of ironic independence. The bazaar is one of its more interesting examples. Anonymity in the crowd, the freedom to occupy public space on their own terms, the economic agency that comes from handling money and stock and customers without anyone particularly watching. And yet the identity, the word bookseller, with its history and its community and its authority, remains something many women at the bazaar do not claim for themselves. The crowd hides them, and that hiding is simultaneously a form of freedom and a form of erasure.

You have also noticed that women buyers are different from men. How and why? Please elaborate. Is this a reflection of the culture/ accepted norm of the city/ the sellers and visitors?

Women’s time in public spaces, especially in Delhi, is measured differently. They negotiate with surveillance and scrutiny. Their purposefulness is driven by necessity. They arrive with clearer lists and are less likely to linger without a specific destination in mind. A woman spending two hours browsing a pavement book market on a Sunday morning is doing something that requires more social permission than the equivalent activity does for a man.

And yet the bazaar’s openness, its visibility from the street, and the absence of walls and thresholds made it more accessible to women than many other public spaces in the city. Even Mahila Haat[3] tends to offer an interior that might feel safer, allowing a new scope for purposeless wandering. Moreover, on a public footpath or inside a gated haat, among other people, that openness is precisely what makes the bazaar feel usable for many women readers. What they do with that openness reflects the social conditions they navigate to get there, not their relationship to books, which is as varied and as shauqeen as anyone else’s.

One of the things that your book makes me wonder is — is book piracy justified? What do you think?

I want to be clear first: I do not support piracy, and it is illegal. That is not a complicated position for me. What is complicated is the context in which piracy at Daryaganj exists and the questions that context raises.

After the March 2026 raid by the Crime Branch in Rohini, in which over twenty thousand books were seized — titles by Arundhati Roy, Yuval Noah Harari, Haruki Murakami, James Clear, among others — Penguin India posted about it on social media. The comments were quite instructive. Readers responded not with sympathy for the publisher but with a straightforward observation: books are not affordable. The original editions of the seized titles cost several hundred rupees each. The pirated edition costs a fraction of that.

I am not using this to justify piracy. I am using it to point to the structural failure that makes piracy legible to so many people as a reasonable response. The formal publishing market has not solved the affordability problem. The bazaar, in its informal and sometimes illegal way, tends to fill that gap, albeit partially. The more interesting question is not whether piracy is right or wrong but what its persistence tells us about the gaps the formal book economy has created and, at the moment, cannot fulfil. A reading public that cannot afford books is not served by enforcement alone.

You have written of “a densely competitive educational ecosystem shaped by chronic state underfunding, unequal infrastructure, and the relentless neoliberal promise of upward mobility through credentialism. In this context, the bazaar does more than sell books: it acts as an unofficial welfare infrastructure, absorbing and responding to gaps produced by shrinking public support and rising private costs.” Please elaborate how the bazaar supports aspirants of upward mobility. Does it help close the gaping gaps we notice among different socio-economic, ethnic groups that exist within the given polity?

The phrase unofficial welfare infrastructure came out of a specific observation: that the buyers I met at Daryaganj were not, in the main, casual browsers. They were people for whom the price of a book at a formal bookshop was a genuine obstacle. Students preparing for competitive examinations. First-generation readers with no family library to draw on. Aspirants using books as tools for a different life.

The state has not solved the problem of access to books. School libraries are underfunded. Public libraries are underused and often inaccessible. The formal book market serves readers who can afford it. The bazaar, entirely without subsidy or policy support, has for six decades been doing what the state has not: putting books within reach of people who need them.

Does it close socio-economic gaps? Partially, and imperfectly. It reduces the cost of access. It creates a space where the student with fifty rupees and the collector with five hundred rupees stand at the same stall. But it does not solve the structural problems that create those gaps — underfunding, unequal infrastructure, the credentialism that makes books feel like necessities rather than pleasures. What it does is something more modest and more important: it refuses to accept that books should only be available to those who can afford them at full price.

What has been your most interesting experience in this bazaar? Please share it with us.

There is one moment I return to often. It was 28 July 2019, a Sunday, a few weeks into my formal fieldwork. I was walking from Delhi Gate Metro Station toward the bazaar, headphones on, no music, mentally preparing for the day’s interviews. My phone rang. It was Qamar Saeed, the vendor I had come to know as the ‘King of Daryaganj’, “Madamji, bazaar uth gaya hai. Aap jaldi aaiye.” Madamji, the bazaar has been lifted. Come quickly.

I walked faster. My mind had gone quiet. No fieldwork instincts, no questions forming. Just the turn onto Netaji Subhash Marg, and then the footpath. It looked the same. That was the first thing I noticed: how completely the same it looked. The shutters were where they always were. The traffic moved. A guard sat outside the closed bank, reading his phone. And then I looked at the footpath, and it was just a footpath. No iron boxes. No tarpaulin sheets. No one crouching. No one haggling. Just concrete, flat and indifferent, as though six decades of a particular kind of Sunday morning had been lifted along with the stalls and taken somewhere I could not see.

I understood something that morning that I had known intellectually but not yet felt, that how fragile and contingent this world was. How much it depended on permissions and invisibilities, on the stubbornness and resilience of people who showed up every Sunday and arranged their books and waited. That day shaped this book more than any other.

Do you think this bazaar will continue to thrive/survive given the online market of books? Please elaborate.

The bazaar has already survived things more threatening than the online market. It has survived displacement orders, pandemic lockdowns, municipal raids, and sixty years of operating without official sanction. The online market is a pressure, but it is not a new kind of pressure.

What the online market cannot replicate is serendipity. You cannot search for a book you do not know exists. You cannot stumble upon a 1978 Penguin edition with someone else’s marginalia on an algorithm. You cannot haggle, or sit on the vendor’s side of the stall and hear a story that changes how you read. The shauqeen will keep coming for precisely these reasons. The students will keep coming because the price point remains unbeatable. The families will keep coming because it is still, on a Sunday morning in Old Delhi, one of the most alive places in the city.

The question is not whether the bazaar will survive but what form it will take. It has always been good at taking new forms — from the footpaths of Jama Masjid to the stretch between Golcha and Delite to Mahila Haat. Each relocation changes something and preserves something. That capacity for reinvention, for showing up in a new place with the same iron boxes and the same stubbornness, is what I mean when I call this a story of resilience. The bazaar has never needed the formal economy’s permission to exist. It is unlikely to start now.

Thank you for your fabulous book and wonderful answers.

[1] The Pavement Book Bazaar

[2] connoisseur

[3] Ironically, translates to ‘Women’s Bazaar’ in Hindi

 (This review and online interview by email is by Mitali Chakravarty)

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Click here to read an excerpt from Sunday Book Bazaar

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Categories
Review

Memoirs of Romila Thapar

Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra

Title: Just Being: A Memoir

Author: Romila Thapar

Publisher: Seagull Books

The title of Romila Thapar’s memoirs is deceptive and deceptively simple. It is not ‘just being’ but that being Romila Thapar is also a story of becoming, of mapping out borders and boundaries of what a woman from a liberal, progressive and well to do family could achieve in newly independent India. Her achievements are many and varied and her persona redoubtable. There is tremendous breadth of scholarship and Thapar’s is undoubtedly a remarkable journey which details the trajectory of her growing up  years-family, background, physical and social location.   

As a historian, Thapar is acutely aware and interested in the way memory works and it is this abiding interest which is perhaps reflected in her use of the following lines: “Times present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past”, lines from “Four Quartets” by TS Eliot.

This encapsulation of time reminds us of a common  feature of autobiography — memoirs and autobiographies measure the gap between two temporal loci — the time of a past event and the time of its narration. In this case, the beginning of the story goes back nine decades. Prof Thapar regales us with stories of growing up in pre-Independence India. Born in Lucknow, she grew up in the North Western Frontier Provinces, moving from place to place as her father was a doctor in the Army.

In a way, the seeds of autonomy and independent thinking were sown very early in her life in myriad ways. She was influenced by her maternal grandmother and her mother. The latter  was a graduate  in the India of the 1920s, creditable for a woman  since it was at a time when women’s education received mixed responses. She was competent in reading and writing three languages — Hindi, Urdu and English. Thapar narrates that “my maternal grandmother had insisted on two conditions before the marriage: that my mother never be asked to observe purdah– take the veil — when there were men around: and that she never be asked to cook meals for the family. These conditions were met.”

One finds it surprising even from the vantage point of the present time where entrenched patriarchal attitudes completely normalise the double burden carried by women and mythify cooking not only as part of women’s household duties and responsibilities, but as an act of maternal care and a labour of love. Many such instances stand out which provide a glimpse of a progressive, educated and liberal family, among whom are to be found many intellectuals who played their role in public life.

Underlying this memoir is a certain imagination of India. Thapar stands in the vanguard of  those invoking, protecting and saving the idea of an India which is secular, multilingual, diverse and heterogenous. Thapar’s narrative warns us time and again of the dangers of a single narrative , a single story. Thus, she calls out the crises of democracy both during the Emergency[1] and in the present time. Is the failure of democracy attributable to the pervasive atmosphere of fear where citizens were/are cowed into silence? Or is it the failure of the education system within capitalism which has oriented individuals to fulfilling privatised desires rather than their duties as citizens? Or is it a comment on our civilisational failure that we have been reduced to acting as echo chambers for ruling elites?   

In Just Being, historian par excellence Romila Thapar reflects on a rich, variegated, path-breaking life ― along with the people, relationships, ideas and journeys that made her who she is. In this compelling memoir, she invites us into her illustrious world ― a rich, testimony from a scholar who has profoundly shaped and moulded our understanding of India’s past and present. From her childhood growing up in British India, through her years of education in London, her extensive travels to archaeological sites across Asia and beyond, and her trailblazing role in shaping the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Thapar reflects on a life lived in the service of education and research. Written over the past few years, Just Being is ample proof of Thapar’s ability to view herself within the larger flow of history, and to give a splendid account of it with a scholar’s depth, a storyteller’s sensitivity and an artist’s luminosity. It reveals not only an extraordinary, boundary-defying life but courage, integrity and a profound conviction that understanding our past in the light of undeniable evidence is essential to understanding the present and shaping a more thoughtful future.

She completed her doctorate in 1958 and was offered a temporary job at School of Oriental and African Studies to teach a course in ancient history in London. Thapar’s father had set aside funds – it could be used for either marriage or education. She chose the latter and proceeded to educate herself in myriad ways. From attending the lectures of Eric Hobsbawm on European political thought, reading Ismat Chughtai, Simone de Beauvoir, enrolling herself in evening courses on Chinese art (she did Chinese landscape painting) and archaeology, learning italic calligraphy, playing table tennis with monks, holding the stepladder for friends in libraries while the other reached for books in upper shelves, her discovery of Africa, to making posters and going for marches at Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park, hers is a rich and variegated life.

One is enthralled by her narratives of the people she met, the places she visited, illumined by the rays of her razor-sharp wit and comprehensive intelligence. What also dazzles is her knowledge of jazz, her cosmopolitanism and her capacity to engage with politics and culture, art and music. She narrates about  her experiences in both white and coloured jazz bars, among musicians across the racial divide, in the immediate aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination in January 1968. She writes about her meeting with the writer Nelson Algren, who had previously shared an intense relationship with Simone Beauvoir and featured in her  work, both fictional and non-fictional.  Undoubtedly and confidently cosmopolitan, she is able to make a place for herself and earn respect in widely varying contexts, including many international fora and platforms.

Professor Thapar’s feistiness is evident throughout this absorbing memoir. So is her impeccable scholarship. In the chapters on “History Rocks” and “Textbooks in the Fray,” she calls out the ideologically motivated peddlers of popular histories prevalent on Whatsapp groups and contrasts them with professional historians and historiographers. She is a stickler for honing the historian’s craft through the discipline of method and process and sharply critiques the ideologically motivated peddling of history at the cost of professionalism. Two points are made very clearly by her: first that history is and should be based on scientific evidence and there should be no mixing up or conflation of mythology and history. “Mythology is the other kind of literature that is often quoted in public discussion and confused with history.’’ Another distinction is made with equal precision: following a Weberian or Marxist methodology is not necessarily a sign of ideological persuasion as much as a methodological preference for a certain rational process of  historical analysis.

Thapar is one of the world’s foremost authorities on ancient Indian history, celebrated for transforming how ancient Indian history is studied. Rather than treating history as a sequence of kings and battles, her structural, sociological, and text-critical approach shifts focus on social formations, economic shifts, and the evolution of cultural identities. Her definitive research has fundamentally challenged both nineteenth-century colonial stereotypes and reductive nationalist narratives.

Her contribution to Indian history is immeasurable.She meticulously dismantled the Eurocentric colonial claim that ancient Indians lacked a “sense of history”. In works like The Past Before Us, she showed how early Indian society embedded its historical memory through distinct traditions — such as the Itihasa-Purana literature, Buddhist/Jain monastic chronicles, and royal biographies (charitas).

Her chapter “Textbooks in the Fray” traces the ideological warfare being waged over school textbooks, some of which she had written along with other well-known historians. Her interrogation and contestation of monolithic and singular identities pave the way for a  layered reading of history.

Thapar argues that modern conceptions of a singular, monolithic “Hindu” or “Muslim” community are modern constructs. Her study of the historical narratives surrounding the Somnath Temple in Dwarka illustrated how a single historical event was interpreted in profoundly different, multifaceted ways by varying social groups over centuries. Similarly, her study of Sakuntala’s contrasting depictions in the famous Indian epic  Mahabharata (around 4th century BC) and  Kalidas’s play “Abhijnanashakuntalam” (4th-5th century AD) point out different conceptualisations and representation of women from a chronological perspective. 

Prof Romila Thapar’s skills as a memoirist are perhaps comparable to her skill as a historian. Her endeavours have both decolonised history as well as given the discipline the status of a social science. The book gives an insight into her life, her beliefs and reflects on our times with an unbiased perspective of an adroit historian. It is a prized and rare read.

[1] 1975-77: Period of curtailment of civil liberties in India due to internal unrest.

Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition  to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory.  Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.

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Categories
Review

Homecoming

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: Homecoming

Author: Omair Ahmad

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

 From the title of this novella, Homecoming, one can guess that a particular place becomes the focal point in the unravelling of the story, and that place is none other than Lucknow, seeping in past history, a promise of grace that the city was famed for, and a unique brand of Nawabi culture. The novel opens with a ‘Prologue’ where we are told that Hassan’s wife Samina has decided to leave Lucknow after she discovered that a small monument with a grave had been destroyed and the calligraphy over it had been vandalised. From that vantage point, Omair Ahmad, an eminent novelist, tactfully gives us the entire history through rendition given by three characters – Hassan, Ahmed Sahib and Sam or Samina narrate the story in four independent segments.

 Hassan originally belonged to a Reddy family in Hyderabad and was of mixed parentage with a father steeped in communist ideology. His father married a Muslim lady from Patna. After several years, when they quarreled and fell apart, Hassan, a dentist by profession, left for Lucknow in search of a stable job. That became his home for almost twenty-five years. After years of trying to belong to Lucknow, once a city of poetry and grace where he had hoped to find something of the father he had lost, Hassan meets a kindred spirit—Ahmed sahib, an elderly man of quiet warmth and dignity, although diminished in circumstance. Unable to pay his professional fees, Ahmed sahib accepts Hassan’s proposal to show him around the city of Lucknow with the hope that it would become his home and gives him the gift of unspoken friendship. He believed that the city was too close to him. Sometimes, he thought, everything had changed, and sometimes he thought nothing had. In the company of this man, the city opened itself to him, parting ever so slightly, slowly making him its own in a way he had not felt in all the years he had lived there.

Ahmed sahib himself was an abandoned son, had no siblings, no wife or child, but was still connected to a wider family. It was through his connections with an extended family that the novelist depicts the lifestyle and stories of old Lucknow with its begums, kothas, tawaifs, courtesans, old havelis[1], music being practiced by so many great artists, intricacies of inheritance etc.  

The third and the most significant protagonist is Sam or Samina, who was born in Lucknow, though she didn’t know that, and as an orphan went to live and grow up in London with her aunt and uncle. In college she fell in love with Urdu calligraphy and the Lucknawi style, and she managed to receive a fellowship from the Royal Historical Society to go to Lucknow to study calligraphy on the tombs of the noblewomen there.

Her aunt used to receive a letter once every six months from Badinani in Lucknow, from a great aunt called Begum Waheed, who briefed regularly about the myriad people she still thought of as her family, even if she hadn’t met most of them. At first Sam was afraid because she felt she was entering a world where everybody was an aunt or uncle, or a great-aunt or great-uncle. But gradually she becomes slightly more stable.  

Hassan and Samina meet and gradually fall in love with the machinations of Ahmed sahib. When Ahmed sahib dies, the two of them felt orphaned once more. Hassan concludes his narrative by telling us that he was no longer the man he had been before he met Ahmed sahib, before he learned of all he was to so many people. It had taken a year after his death for him and Samina to discover each other, and when she offered him her name, he knew he could never let her go. The concluding lines of the novella are striking:

“I will let Samina rescue me from Lucknow, as her parents were once rescued by exile, and go haunt another land. I think Ahmed sahib would forgive me, I think he would even approve.”

Spare, nostalgic and moving, Omair Ahmad’s new novella is a meditation on love, lost and gained, dwelling on ideas of family, home and belonging. A wonderful read and the novelist should be congratulated for it.

[1] Kothas– brothels; Tawaifs– courtesans; Havelis– old palatial houses

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

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Categories
Excerpt

The Sunday Book Bazaar at Daryaganj

Title: The Sunday Book Bazaar: Daryaganj and the Making of a Reading Public in Delhi 

Author: Kanupriya Dhingra

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

PROLOGUE

“Faiz Nahar Jaari Hai”

It is six in the morning in Old Delhi. A footpath that bends into an L has already begun its weekly transformation. A bazaar assembles near Delhi Gate, out of almost nothing. Cardboard and iron boxes arrive—carried, wheeled, hauled from nearby godowns in auto-rickshaws—and are set down along the footpath with the precision of long habit. Tambu and tarred canvas sheets follow, spread across the designated six-by-four-foot patches of ground that each seller has claimed, in practice if not always in law, over years and sometimes decades of Sunday repetition. Books emerge: stacked, sorted, and arranged by some private logic visible only to those who have done this a thousand times before. By the time the first chai of the morning arrives at the stall, carried in a small paper cup from the nearby chai-wallah, the bazaar has already begun to announce itself. By nine, it is a different place entirely.

This is Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar: a bazaar of books, and only books. And this—this weekly conjuring, this seemingly serendipitous Sunday ritual—is what this book is about.

Every Sunday morning, the same stretch of pavement sheds its weekday skin. By mid-morning, the pavement fills entirely. Pedestrians who had no intention of stopping find themselves stopped by a spine, a title, a cover half-remembered from childhood. A student crouches over a pile of guidebooks, cross-checking prices on her phone. Two men argue cheerfully over a pulp fiction title. A child drags her father toward a stack of comics. The sellers watch patiently. They know that browsing is not wasting time. It is, in fact, the whole point.

What makes this bazaar remarkable is not only what it sells but what it refuses to be. It has no fixed address in the way a bookshop does, no permanent threshold, no air-conditioning, no MRP sticker that goes unchallenged. Every week, it must be built from scratch, for the crowd that somehow always finds its way back. There is nothing accidental about this. Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar has survived municipal raids, court orders, evictions, relocations, and sixty years of official indifference. It has outlasted the shops behind it, the cinema halls that frame it, and every prediction of its disappearance. It keeps returning, as things in Delhi tend to do, in a slightly different form but with the same insistence.

In the mid-fourteenth century, sixteen years before he became the Sultan of Delhi, Firoz Shah Tughlaq undertook a grand endeavour: the construction of the Faiz Nahar, a seventy-five-mile canal created with the noble intention of bringing welfare to the people. Over time, the canal evolved under the watchful eye of Shah Jahan, stretching further and transforming the landscape around it. Its banks were adorned with lush neem and peepul trees; its waters flowed through the heart of Chandni Chowk, with one branch entering the majestic Red Fort as part of the Nahar-e-Bahisht. The other arm, known as Nahar Saadat Khan, meandered through the bustling streets of Daryaganj before merging with Jamuna, the river Yamuna. Along this vibrant waterway, a lively array of shops flourished, from jewellers and fruit sellers to sweet makers and fabric merchants, creating a corridor of commerce and conversation.

With time, however, the canal fell into disrepair. Hope was rekindled in 1820, when Sir David Ochterlony initiated its restoration. Poet Shah Nasir immortalised the event in verse, celebrating Ochterlony—affectionately referred to as ‘Looni Akhtar’—and the canal’s revival. For the people of Delhi, the return of the Faiz Nahar was more than an engineering triumph; it restored an old rhythm, reaffirming the city’s enduring bond with its waterways.

In the enchanting tales of Sangin Beg’s Sair-ul-Manazil, we encounter vivid scenes of Shahjahanabad and its many moods. His walks lead him to the joyous sight of the Faiz Nahar, inspiring the delightful refrain, ‘Faiz nahar jaari hai’. Faiz canal persists.

Centuries later, in modern Delhi, the spirit of the Faiz Nahar continues—not through water, but through the steady, determined passage of books that animates the streets of Daryaganj every Sunday.

Delhi endures by outgrowing versions of itself. What disappears returns in altered form, what is uprooted finds another ground, and what seems final rarely is. Here, destruction is never quite the end, and reconstruction never a clean beginning. In this ongoing conversation between erasure and perseverance, Old Delhi’s Sunday Book Bazaar has carved out its own fragile space. Its history is folded into the city’s larger habit of rebuilding what has been displaced. Daryaganj Sunday Book Market is not an exception to Delhi’s rhythms but a continuation of them—a marketplace that survives by starting over every Sunday.

My own journey into this parallel world began out of necessity and slowly transformed into something else entirely. I arrived as a researcher and became an accidental shauqeen buyer, lingering over pavement piles, returning week after week, slowly forming bonds with sellers who had long mastered the art of reading their readers. Through these chaotic streets and animated exchanges, I discovered the heart of Delhi’s readership. In their company, I began to understand how this city continues to breathe through its stories, how the joy of encountering books persists, even in the most uncertain times.

Faiz Nahar is gone. But every Sunday in Daryaganj, something of it still persists.

Extracted from The Sunday Book Bazaar: Daryaganj and the Making of a Reading Public in Delhi by Kanupriya Dhingra. Published by Speaking Tiger Books.

About the Book

Every Sunday, in the heart of Old Delhi, a footpath became a bookshop.

For decades, the Daryaganj Sunday Book Bazaar drew students, collectors, families, tourists and lifelong shauqeen to its pavement piles: textbooks, comics, rare editions, pirated bestsellers, forgotten magazines, discarded libraries, and books that seemed to find their readers by accident. Built by migrant booksellers, sustained by bargain-hunters and bibliophiles, and shaped by the rhythms of the street, the bazaar became one of Delhi’s most beloved cultural institutions.

In The Sunday Book Bazaar, Kanupriya Dhingra traces the life of this remarkable market—from its roots in the book cultures of Shahjahanabad and Daryaganj to its rise as a second-hand book paradise, and from its legal battles and evictions to its relocation in Mahila Haat.

Combining urban history, fieldwork, memoir and literary affection, she follows the books, booksellers and readers who made the bazaar a parallel world of print: informal, unpredictable, deeply democratic, and impossible to replace.

At once urban history, ethnography, memoir, and a love letter to second-hand books, The Sunday Book Bazaar asks what makes a market more than a place of commerce. Who gets to read? Who gets to sell? Who gets to occupy public space? And what does a city lose when it tidies away the unruly, democratic spaces where its readers first learn to browse, bargain, linger and belong?

About the Author

Dr Kanupriya Dhingra researches book history, print cultures, oral history, and urban studies, with a special focus on Delhi’s parallel book markets. Her doctoral work at SOAS, University of London, supported by the Felix Scholarship and the SOAS Fieldwork Grant, examined Daryaganj’s book culture through extensive interviews with booksellers and readers. She has written for Comparative Critical Studies, The Caravan, Seminar, Scroll, and Himal SouthAsian, and has spoken at institutions including Oxford, the British Library, Jadavpur University, Jamia Millia Islamia, and the University of Delhi. She also writes and translates poetry and fiction from Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu.

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Categories
Musings

Downpour

By Ian C Smith

Persistent rain soaks my senses, the lively past’s good fortune knocking on memory’s door, or is that just the beating of my heart?  Does being surrounded all night by an alluvial tattoo promote this hearkening back?  Beckoned as if by a distant porch light when lost in a storm, I embraced rites from times swept by in the long steady dying since Gloucestershire when, open-eyed, I took it all in.  An exhilarating melancholy floods me recalling standing inside a Norman chapel in the Cotswolds’ slanting light.  I breathed ancient mortar’s microbial odour, imagining a careful congregation in the Middle Ages, rough-sculpted, their murmuring voices long gone into the cold earth, willowherb and meadowsweet dormant.  That winter of my naïve yearning, fields of frost under a murderous owl’s moon, I shucked the duvet to fill pages rearranging words.  Trying to make sense of life’s stampede instead of slouching off early to work as I had in Australia since I was thirteen, was life changing?

If possible before final darkness, I still want to picture our quaint haven with the snugly warm smoky pub where I bumped my head in the low doorway, and we won a Christmas raffle.  I yearn for embedded images of that ilk to which I cling.  Yet to discover Edward Thomas’s poem about Adlestrop station written after his friendship with Robert Frost began — I didn’t know that — bereft of trains and poems, it slept nearby.  The poem was published days after his death in action.  With an adventurous partner, wind and rain rattling our sanctuary, ruffling rooks perched high above the tennis courts, horses sheltering in Larkin’s ‘cold shade’, my blood quickened.  Our first bus trip for shopping, the route wending through golden villages of stone between hedgerows hemming narrow roads, was studded with stops.  Women wearing hats, carrying baskets, and elderly couples sticking together, filled the bus with their soft, cidery accent.  Spotting travellers’ colourful caravans before reaching Moreton-in-Marsh, we messaged with our eyes to attract each other’s discreet attention.

Part-time servants, our Upstairs, Downstairs situation inverted, we hauled backpacks up flights of stairs.  In our bower we scrubbed greasy gunk from the stove and bathed in several inches of costly hot water in an antiquated iron bathtub.  I blue-tacked maps of our travels to damp walls under the roof where, on hushed evenings, dark so early, we read by lamplight.  Borrowing a gas heater on castors, I decorated it with an Olympic pattern of coffee mug rings, starting my blind attempts at a writing apprenticeship.  Each lunchtime, my bedmate, younger than me, living her antipodean dream, glowing after exercising hunters across frosted terrain listening to Ted Hughes’ ‘quake of hooves’, listened to me read what I, laughing at my own jokes, had written.  She astonished her workmates once, choosing not to hang around after work to see a future king of England ride one of their horses, coming home to my self-congratulatory words instead.  At other times she crossed her fingers for Reynard whenever we heard the hunting horn.

Born in England, an early boyhood memory was the story of my missing aunt.  My father’s last sighting of his runaway sister was from the bus he was driving.  For years I pictured this as a cinematic scene in monochrome with a grainy film-noir quality.  A brave woman pushing a pram flees along a street, wet, like the beginning of this piece.  Dim lighting casts shadows as she glances over her shoulder (a close-up).  She has no-one to defend her, to help.  Saddled with this unfinished business of finding her, Births, Marriages, and Deaths became my gripping reading.  We bought a cheap, used car with a good heater.  London’s records led to Liverpool, a city recently battered by riots.  By simply driving there from the Cotswolds we transitioned from poor to posh.  Absorbed, I accrued and sorted all this marvellous new material.  Gold.

Neither of us adequately masked our scorn of protocol’s scripture, smirking at our employers’ gross snobbery undercut by their practical helplessness.  Exacerbating this was my partner’s rising popularity among the local casual workforce, and our now interesting missing person sleuthing.  Irked by supercilious nonsense early, ad-libbing po-faced about the difficulty of finding decent racing saddles for kangaroos, my ludicrous irony had been taken as authentic.  I believed my Aussie bullshit humour leading the snobs from attempted humiliation to pathos was forever unforgiven.  Perhaps it was my multiple errant triggering of their burglar alarms.  That magical Christmas Eve, my birthday, befriended villagers invited us for carol-singing by flickering lantern lights from mansion to mansion for charity.  The ethereal beginning of We Three Kings was a goosebumps highlight, my missing aunt never far from my thoughts.  We also attended a pantomime at Chipping Norton, Jack and the Beanstalk, where I wondered what the Hooray Henrys might have made of this bewitchment.

For a joke when she who still dogs my dreams visits, I squeeze into my naval pea-jacket worn everywhere those years ago.  Finger-fiddling a never used spare button in its silken pocket solicits past voices.  I could display other memorabilia from then though she sternly advises just sticking to writing in the past tense.  My lightweight phone speedily locates those places we slowly discovered, their wonderful names – Bourton-on-the-Water – biro-circled in a bottom drawer heavy with old maps I sometimes sniff to transport me.  From there we journeyed all the way across another ocean, and prairies, the sky storybook-sized, hitchhiking to Alaska, sometimes at the edge of danger.  And there was more, much more, but it is to that soft privileged borough, despite the more dramatic, risk-laden zones of our sojourns, that my mind constantly returns.

My phone can also conjure up the television programme episode we researched, resulting in a moving family reunion watched from the Green Room.  It can’t locate the snappy words my partner exchanged with the famous ex-pop star presenter who complained about people fuddled with age after the show when she entered our descending lift in the studio.  I want to grasp the smells, sights, and sounds of where this all began that lure me like a secret love.  Time-travelling, from our attic window, transposed unscathed by age’s scourge – that raw cold would fell me now – breath fogging like the future we cannot see, I would gaze lingeringly once more on what shall be lost, therefore precious.

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 Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, North of Oxford, Rundelania, The Spadina Literary Review, Stand, & Westerly. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.       

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

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Categories
Poetry

A Kingdom of Sunflowers

By Ryan Quinn Flanagan

A KINGDOM OF SUNFLOWERS 

Let it be June, the 6th month in the calendar,
or perhaps one of the "embers" on the back end,
like a late surger at the track.  
You follow the betting lines, so you should know better.
That sudden swing in action just before post.
May as well linger in slotter's row, feeding the beast.
Sitting around waiting on the Super Jackpot.
The drink girl has three large hoops dangling from one ear.
She seems off-center, four smaller hoops through her eyebrow
on the same side.  She probably jingles when she's not making change.
Pulls this purple rescue inhaler from her pocket when she thinks
no one is looking.  Not the eye in the sky, or her boss with a voice
like a streaking dive bomber.  Let it be May, her grandmother's name.
All those hours of soda bread and Euchre. The wall of commemorative plates.
No simple diary pledge ever held so much weight!
Let it be August, a kingdom of sunflowers.
Sunflowers, National Gallery, London, (Painted in August 1888) by Vincent van Gogh, who did a series of paintings that month of yellow sunflowers. From Public Domain

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage.  His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Borderless Journal, GloMag, Red Fez and Lothlorien Poetry Journal.  

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Categories
Essay

Ozymandias Syndrome and the Illusion of Permanence

By Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan

Ozymandias or Ramses II (Died 1213 BCE)

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

By Percy Shelley, 'Ozymandias', 1819 edition

The real world spark for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” wasn’t purely poetic imagination but it was archaeological gossip with excellent comedic timing. In 1816, news reached England that a colossal granite bust of Ramesses II, often referred to as the Younger Memnon, (aka Ozymandias by the Greeks) had been unearthed in Egypt and was on its way to London. The statue was enormous, ancient, and very much not intact. Broken, battered, and missing key pieces, it arrived less like a triumphant relic and more like history’s version of a “before” photo gone permanently unanswered. Shelley, never one to miss an opportunity for philosophical irony, saw exactly where this was going.

Ramesses II, after all, was not a man known for moderation. His titles alone read like a LinkedIn profile written without character limits. One of them, “King of Kings”, was inscribed on the pedestal of the very statue now showing up in London looking like it had lost an argument with time itself. Shelley translated that title straight into the poem, ensuring that Ozymandias’s voice would echo loudly, right before being undercut completely.

At its core, “Ozymandias” is what happens when an ancient ruler commissions the Bronze Age equivalent of a massive Instagram flex, and time responds by absolutely ratioing it.

The poem opens with a traveller recounting what sounds suspiciously like the least glamorous vacation slideshow imaginable. Instead of sunsets or souvenirs, we’re given ruins in a desert. Not even dignified ruins, either, just two giant legs standing awkwardly in the sand and a shattered face lying nearby. This is not the kind of monument that inspires awe so much as mild concern. If this were a modern tourist site, it would come with a plaque reading: “Formerly Impressive. Please Use Imagination.”

And then comes the inscription, which is where the satire really starts to stretch its legs. Ozymandias doesn’t simply claim power, but he declares himself the King of Kings and commands all who pass to look upon his works and despair. It’s bold. It’s confident. It is, as history clearly demonstrates, wildly optimistic.

Because immediately after this declaration of unmatched greatness, the poem delivers its deadpan punchline, “Nothing beside remains.” That’s it. No empire. No cities. No loyal subjects live tweeting his victories. Just sand. Vast, flat, indifferent sand. It’s as if time paused, reread the inscription, raised an eyebrow, and quietly erased everything else.

The statue’s physical condition doesn’t help his case. The face, half buried, cracked, and broken, still carries what Shelley calls a “sneer of cold command.” This suggests that even in ruin, Ozymandias managed to retain the personality of someone who would have been exhausting to follow online. You can practically imagine him posting daily declarations of greatness with comments disabled. His empire didn’t last, but his bad attitude, preserved in granite, somehow did. It’s the archaeological equivalent of a fossilized ego.

What makes the whole thing even more amazing is the sheer effort that went into creating this monument. This wasn’t a casual side project. Designers planned it. Sculptors carved it. Workers hauled it across landscapes to place it somewhere appropriately dramatic. Years of labour went into capturing Ozymandias in his full “behold my glory” aesthetic. And now, centuries later, it’s a broken art installation in the world’s largest sandbox. If monuments received annual evaluations, this one would read, “Strong initial impact. Failed long-term objectives.”

Shelley’s point isn’t just that power fades, it’s that Ozymandias genuinely believed he’d outsmarted mortality. Death might come, sure, but his legacy would remain forever, intimidating future generations into awe. Instead, his message survives only because it’s so spectacularly wrong. Readers don’t despair when they see his works, they experience second hand embarrassment on his behalf. His warning to rivals has become a warning to himself.

The setting seals the joke. The “lone and level sands” contain nothing else, no ruins of cities, no remnants of civilisation. Nature has gone full minimalist, stripping the scene down to its most brutal contrast. Against that emptiness, Ozymandias’s claims look less commanding and more delusional. The silence delivers the verdict more effectively than any narrator could.

Of course, Shelley isn’t just mocking one long dead Pharaoh. Ozymandias stands in for every leader who confused dominance with permanence. History is full of people who built monuments, declared themselves irreplaceable, and assumed the future would be impressed. The future, as it turns out, is rarely in the mood.

Even Ramesses II himself, arguably one of Egypt’s most powerful and accomplished Pharaohs, could not escape this irony. His statues were propaganda tools, meant to scream greatness across centuries. When one finally arrived in London, broken and incomplete, it did exactly that but not in the way he intended.

 ‘Ozymandias’ in that sense, isn’t just a warning about fading power, it’s a satire about how absurd unchecked confidence looks once time has had a say. The king who demanded despair now inspires reflection, humour, and a gentle reminder that the louder the boast, the quieter its echo tends to be.

Time doesn’t argue. It waits. And then it lets the ruins speak.

In the 19th century, Benito Mussolini fancied himself less a man and more a monument, preferably one carved in marble, chest thrust forward, chin angled eternally toward destiny (or at least a flattering light source). In his own imagination, he was the sequel to Rome, not a mere politician, but a reboot of empire, complete with dramatic speeches, synchronised salutes, and an alarming number of uniforms for someone who never quite won a war.

He spoke often of glory, of legions, of history bending obligingly in his direction. If Julius Caesar had crossed the Rubicon River, Mussolini would cross the street, provided there were cameras. His Italy would be disciplined, resplendent, and feared. Trains would run on time, crowds would roar on cue, and maps would gradually recolour themselves in reassuring shades of “Italian ambition.”

But there is something endearingly fragile about men who compare themselves to eternity. They tend to forget that eternity has a long memory and a sharp sense of irony.

Like the boastful Ozymandias in the poem with the shattered statue in the desert, Mussolini constructed not just a regime, but a self-image meant to outlast sand, wind, and inconvenient facts. He posed, proclaimed, and postured his way into history, convinced that future generations would gaze upon his legacy and tremble appropriately.

Instead, history did what it does best, it waited.

The Round Colosseum originally built in 80CE
Square Colosseum built by Mussolini in 1942
From Public Domain

Because while Mussolini was busy reenacting Rome, the world had moved on to more modern catastrophes. His empire turned out to be less of a Colosseum, more cardboard set, impressive from a distance, but distressingly flimsy up close. Military campaigns faltered, alliances shifted, and the grand narrative began to fray like a cheap banner left out in the rain.

And then came the collapse, swift, humiliating, and utterly indifferent to his carefully rehearsed grandeur. The man who styled himself as Il Duce (The Leader), the infallible leader, found that infallibility has a very short shelf life when reality intervenes. Statues, literal and metaphorical, do not crumble all at once. First, a crack. Then another. Then, suddenly, the whole thing looks less like a monument and more like debris.

In the end, Mussolini’s legacy resembles that broken colossus in the sand, a once imposing figure reduced to fragments, surrounded not by awe, but by a kind of puzzled silence. The grand declarations echo faintly, like lines from a play no one remembers attending. “Look on my works,” he might have said, but history, squinting into the distance, struggles to find anything intact enough to admire.

What remains is not the empire he promised, but the cautionary tale he became. A reminder that self-mythology is a risky business, especially when you start believing your own press releases. The louder the proclamation of greatness, the more satisfying the eventual deflation.

And so, Mussolini endures, not as the architect of a new Rome, but as a rather theatrical footnote to its long shadow. A man who aimed for immortality and achieved, instead, a kind of poetic symmetry, the bigger the statue, the more dramatic the ruin.

Then in 21st century, Trump arrived, as not so much as a politician but as a brand, capital letters implied, gilded edges included. His name was already stamped across towers, steaks, ties, and the general concept of self-confidence. When he entered politics, it seemed less like a campaign and more like a licensing deal with history.

Here, at last, was a figure who understood that power, in the modern age, is as much about spectacle as substance. Why simply govern when you can perform governance? Why speak when you can proclaim? Why build policy when you can build a persona so large it requires its own skyline?

Like the monarch in that well-worn desert poem, he projected an image of immovability. His words carried that same tone of “cold command”, a conviction that reality itself ought to rearrange in response to his declarations. Critics were dismissed, facts negotiated with, and complexities flattened into slogans sturdy enough to fit on a hat.

He cultivated loyalty not just as support, but as devotion. Crowds gathered, slogans echoed, and the line between leader and legend blurred in the heat of repetition. There were rallies that felt less like civic exercises and more like episodes in an ongoing series, complete with catchphrases and recurring villains. The message was clear, this was not merely a presidency, it was an era, a brand extension into the realm of destiny.

And then there were the monuments. Not carved in desert stone, perhaps, but etched into skylines, social media feeds, and the collective consciousness. Towers bearing his almost spoken name stood as vertical declarations of success. Each structure seemed to say, “Look on these works,” though one suspects the subtext was “preferably from a flattering angle.”

But the thing about monuments, whether sandstone colossi or glass and steel high rises, is that they depend heavily on perspective. From up close, they can appear overwhelming, permanent, inevitable. From a distance, or with time, they shrink into context. The desert, metaphorical or otherwise, has a way of reclaiming narrative.

History, as always, proved to be an uncooperative audience. The seemingly untouchable aura began to flicker, then waver, then, most inconveniently, invite scrutiny. The voice that once filled arenas began to echo differently, as though the acoustics had changed. What once sounded like certainty started to resemble insistence.

And here the comparison to that shattered statue becomes irresistible. Not because everything vanishes, far from it, but because what remains is oddly disjointed. Fragments endure, phrases, images, impressions. A pedestal without its full figure. A face remembered more for its expression than its achievements.

The lesson, if there is one (and satire insists there must be), is that power built on projection is particularly susceptible to erosion. The louder the declaration of permanence, the more history seems to take it as a challenge. “Observe my greatness,” says the ruler. “Give it a moment,” replies time.

In the end, the figure who once seemed larger than the system becomes part of it, filed, debated, reinterpreted. The monuments still stand, of course, but their meaning shifts. What was once awe inspiring becomes, with enough distance, a curiosity. A relic of a moment when personality tried to outpace permanence, and, like that ancient king in the sand, discovered that time is the harsher critic. Perhaps his current antic in the Middle East could be his “Waterloo”.

If Ozymandias had taken a brief detour eastward say, a spiritual exchange programme before commissioning that ill-fated statue, he might have found in the Mahabharata a rather comprehensive warning label, “Caution, ego may appear permanent but is, in fact, highly perishable”.

Because if there is one text that understands the fine art of watching powerful men dramatically overestimate their shelf life, it is this sprawling epic of dynasties, destinies, and deeply committed bad decisions.

Take Duryodhana, for instance. Here was a man who didn’t just believe the kingdom was his, he believed the universe had personally notarized the claim. If Ozymandias carved “King of Kings” into stone, Duryodhana essentially carved “Mine” into an entire map and dared anyone to bring an eraser.

Like our desert bound statue enthusiast (and certain more modern figures with a fondness for branding), Duryodhana cultivated loyalty that blurred into devotion. Courts were filled with nodding allies, affirming uncles, and the occasional voice of reason that was quickly ignored for disrupting the aesthetic. After all, nothing ruins a good narrative of invincibility like someone pointing out reality.

Enter Krishna, who might best be described as the epic’s version of a calm, cosmic fact-checker. While others delivered speeches, Krishna delivered perspective, the kind that gently suggests, “Perhaps don’t build your identity entirely on winning at all costs.” This advice, naturally, was received with all the enthusiasm of a terms and conditions agreement.

And so, like a man commissioning a statue taller than his own foresight, Duryodhana doubled down. The result? The Kurukshetra War, an event so catastrophic it makes Ozymandias’s lonely desert look like a minimalist art choice rather than the aftermath of total collapse.

What’s particularly Ozymandian about the whole affair is not just the fall, but the confidence before the fall. Duryodhana walked into the war convinced of his permanence. His power was vast, his allies numerous, his rhetoric polished to a fine sheen of inevitability. If he had a pedestal, it would absolutely have read, “Look on my armies, ye Mighty, and reconsider.”

History (or epic poetry, which is history with better dialogue) responded in its usual way, by waiting.

Because just as the sands eventually reclaim the boastful statue, the battlefield of Kurukshetra quietly dismantled every assumption of permanence. One by one, the pillars of Duryodhana’s certainty collapsed. Not all at once, never all at once but enough to turn confidence into something far less photogenic.

By the end, what remains is strikingly familiar, not the empire he imagined, but the lesson he unintentionally authored. Much like Ozymandias, Duryodhana’s greatest legacy is not his power, but the spectacular mismatch between his expectations and reality.

Meanwhile, characters like Yudhishthira, hardly perfect, occasionally indecisive, and significantly less interested in self-branding, endure in a different way. Not as towering monuments, but as complicated, human figures who understood (sometimes too late) that power without humility is just a very elaborate countdown.

The Mahabharata, then, reads like a long form satire of the Ozymandias Syndrome, the irresistible urge to declare oneself permanent in a universe that specialises in editing such claims down to footnotes.

So, if there is a lesson worth carrying forward, it is not about avoiding ambition, monuments, or even great struggles. It is about perspective. Before we carve our names into stone, raise towers toward the sky, or wager everything on a certainty, it is worth pausing to ask, how will this endure when seen from far away, at a distance measured not in kilometres, but in time?

Because time does not rush to correct us. Like Krishna, it does not need to raise its voice. It allows events to unfold, lets pride exhaust itself, and waits patiently for meaning to reveal itself. When the noise has faded and the dust has settled, what remains is not the spectacle of victory, but the quiet truth of what was built with wisdom, humility, and awareness. And that, more than triumph, is what lasts.

Ravi Varmman explores leadership, culture, and self-inquiry through a philosophical lens, weaving management insight with human experience to illuminate resilience, ethical living, and reflective growth in an ever shifting world today.

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Bibliography:

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Ozymandias.”
The Poetry Foundation, Online, accessed 2026.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature
Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. D: The Romantic Period.
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Ramesses II
Tyldesley, Joyce. Ramesses: Egypt’s Greatest Pharaoh.
London: Penguin Books, 2001.

Wilkinson, Richard H. The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt.
London: Thames & Hudson, 2000.

Younger Memnon
British Museum. “Colossal Bust of Ramesses II (Younger Memnon).”
London: British Museum Collection Online, accessed 2026.

Benito Mussolini
Bosworth, R. J. B. Mussolini.
London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2002.

Farrell, Nicholas. Mussolini: A New Life.
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism.
New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1951.

Donald Trump
Setoodeh, Ramin. Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass.
New York: HarperCollins, 2024.

Mahabharata
Debroy, Bibek, trans. The Mahabharata (10 vols.).
New Delhi: Penguin Random House India, 2010–2014.

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

Categories
Memoir

The Man in 16C

By C. Christine Fair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was taken aback.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Me too, Chris. Me too.”

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

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

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

“Gurmit, your sisters are mothers now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Essay

Memories: Where Culture Meets Biology

By Amir Zadnemat

The scent of ozone and damp earth, the particular weight of afternoon light filtering through old venetian blinds—these small phenomena often announce memory long before language does. A man sits in a borrowed room, tracing with his thumb the grain of a worn wooden desk. He is not summoning a triumphant episode from his past; he is grasping at a faint, persistent echo: his grandfather’s rough hands, smelling of linseed oil, guiding him to adjust the focus on a heavy, obsolete microscope. This tactile ghost, a pressure without a narrative, is memory in its most primordial register—somatic, unspoken, resistant to articulation. Yet across the same room sits a framed, slightly faded photograph of a military regiment from a war the man never witnessed. If the desk grain belongs to the biology of remembrance, the photograph belongs to its cultural architecture. The former is of the body; the latter is of the nation.

Between these two points—molecular trace and cultural inscription—memory unfolds as a dual phenomenon. One register writes itself into the nervous system or even into the regulatory architecture of DNA; the other composes itself through stories, monuments, rituals, and shared forms of collective identity. Human remembering, therefore, is never a single mechanism. It is a negotiation between biological predisposition and symbolic world‑making. While Maurice Halbwachs argued that memory exists only within social frameworks—familial, religious, national—the new sciences of epigenetics complicate this picture by suggesting that experience may inscribe itself directly onto the genome, altering stress responses and emotional baselines (Halbwachs 1994). Jan Assmann placed cultural memory within the realm of external media—texts, rituals, archives—through which civilizations secure continuity. But what if continuity also occurs beneath culture, silently, in the biological preconditions of feeling, reactivity, and vulnerability?

The humanities have traditionally claimed memory as their domain. For scholars of culture, memory is built, curated, stabilized, even dramatised. The frameworks of collective identity depend on ritual performances, anniversaries, museums, and the symbolic politics of commemoration. Pierre Nora’s notion of lieux de mémoire—sites of memory—emphasises the necessity of external anchors when living memory fades (Nora 1989, 18). Paul Connerton underscores how societies remember through bodily habits: the manner of sitting, mourning, greeting, celebrating (Connerton 1989). Paul Ricoeur goes even further, proposing that identity itself is narrative; one becomes a self through the stories one tells and those narrated about the person (Ricoeur 2004). In this tradition, memory is a fundamentally symbolic undertaking. It requires a community, a language, a form.

Yet parallel to this symbolic tradition runs a different kind of memory science—one that refuses narrative and instead concerns itself with molecular inscription. Michael Meaney’s research on maternal care in rats revolutionised the field by showing how early‑life nurturing modulates the expression of genes associated with stress regulation (Meaney 2001). In Meaney’s experiments, pups that received high levels of licking and grooming developed healthier stress responses as adults due to reduced DNA methylation at specific sites in the hippocampus. This was not metaphorical memory but biological history. Szyf (2007) argues that the epigenome serves as an interface between the dynamic environment and the inherited static genome, responsive to chemicals and social behaviors like maternal care, shaping phenotypic diversity and disease susceptibility. Under certain extreme conditions—famine, war, prolonged deprivation—some studies even suggest intergenerational effects, whereby descendants inherit altered physiological responses shaped by ancestral trauma (Zhang and Meaney 2010).

Here arises a philosophical friction: cultural memory is fluid, socially negotiated, and open to reinterpretation; biological memory is involuntary, material, and often silent. If one is authored by discourse, the other is authored by experience itself. If one requires narration, the other bypasses language entirely. And yet, human memory—actual lived memory—always seems to emerge in the space between these two registers.

Bruno Latour would likely say this duality is not a conflict but an illusion. Modernity, he argues, falsely separated nature and culture into distinct domains (Latour 1993). Epigenetic memory and cultural memory demonstrate that the separation was never real to begin with. Biological predispositions shape how cultural narratives are received, processed, and embodied. Cultural narratives, in turn, modulate biological baselines—stress responses, temperament, even the perceived meaning of vulnerability. The subject is always hybrid: part symbolic construct, part molecular history.

Tim Ingold’s idea that human beings do not “store” memory but rather live along unfolding lines—lines of descent, perception, and movement—allows a different perspective (Ingold 2007). In this view, memory is neither an archive nor a code but an ongoing negotiation between the environment and the self. Early experiences lay down tendencies, grooves, or vulnerabilities, while cultural forms offer scripts, languages, and interpretive structures. The resulting life is neither determined biologically nor invented culturally; it is braided, entwined, perpetually unfolding.

Consider inherited trauma—a conceptual laboratory for observing this entanglement. A child of survivors may inherit an altered cortisol response, a nervous system calibrated toward vigilance. That same child is simultaneously raised within a narrative tradition of survival, persecution, resilience, or victimhood. The cultural story does not cause the biological predisposition, and the biological predisposition does not dictate the cultural story. Rather, each shapes how the other is lived. The narrative frames the physiological feeling; the physiology lends weight and urgency to the narrative. Memory occurs where the body trembles at the threshold of meaning.

Even the politics of memory shifts when viewed through this dual lens. Nikolas Rose’s “politics of life itself” points to how biological knowledge—molecular, epigenetic, neurochemical—reshapes governance and identity (Rose 2007). Cultural memory stabilises collective meaning, while biological memory renders life legible in new ways: as risk profiles, predispositions, susceptibilities. One is mobilised for identity, the other for prediction.

What emerges from these entanglements is a model of memory as dual‑register: one symbolic, one material. The symbolic register is flexible, contextual, and discursive. It legitimises, interprets, and projects meaning. The material register affects moods, is pre-linguistic, and enduring. It inscribes, tunes, and predisposes. The two registers do not mirror each other; they modulate each other. Without the symbolic, the material remains mute. Without the material, the symbolic remains disembodied.

Human memory exists in the shimmer between the registers. It is neither pure biology nor pure discourse; it is the embodied narrative of a life being lived in time. The man at the desk, staring at the old regiment photograph, is not merely recalling. His body, shaped by ancestral stress and nurtured by familial narratives, meets an artifact shaped by national history. His interpretation of the photograph is guided by cultural frameworks, but the emotional charge with which he confronts it may come from deeper, older inscriptions—those written, silently, in the folds of his biology.

To remember, then, is to stand at the crossroads of matter and meaning. It is to inherit stories and methylation patterns, monuments and cortisol rhythms, photographs and tremors. It is to live as a site where culture meets biology, where the past becomes present through both symbol and cell. Memory is not a story we tell, nor a gene we carry, but the meeting point where the body’s predispositions encounter the world’s demands for meaning. In that meeting—fleeting, trembling, always becoming—the human appears.

Amir Zadnemat is an Iranian writer and essayist with a master’s degree in literature from the University of Guilan. His work focuses on modern literature, cinema, and cultural criticism.

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Bibliography

Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Halbwachs, Maurice. 1994. On Collective Memory. Edited and translated by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge.

Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Meaney, Michael J. 2001. “Maternal Care, Gene Expression, and the Transmission of Individual Differences in Stress Reactivity across Generations.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 24 (1): 1161–92.

Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (Spring): 7–24.

Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rose, Nikolas. 2007. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty‑First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Szyf, Moshe. 2007. The dynamic epigenome and its implications in toxicology. Toxicological Sciences 100, 7–23.

Zhang, Tie-Yuan, and Michael J. Meaney. 2010. “Epigenetics and the Environmental Regulation of the Genome and Its Function.” Annual Review of Psychology 61: 439–66.

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