Chapter 2of Isa Kamari’s novel, The Throne,has been translated by the author from Malay. We will be running the whole novel as serial through the year. Click hereto read.
A Tiny Piece of Homeland, an autobiographical narrative by Kallol Lahiri in Bengali, has been translated by V. Ramaswamy. Click here to read.
Walking Together, a poem, has been written and translated from Korean by Ihlwha Choi. Click hereto read.
Swopno (Dream), a poem by Tagore, has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click hereto read.
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.
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.
Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed a rare book-centric memoir by Shanta Gokhale. He tells us, “Of Ancestors and Friends: A Life with Booksis 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.
One night in the dark, deep and black, you whispered ‘you and me’ and then I knew it would be me and you because you breathed those three words into me and my world became you and me, and even though the poet said one thing he knew for sure was ‘life goes on,’, I say one thing I know for sure is ‘you and me’, even though you are gone and I buried you by the seaside facing east and planted daisies on your grave and visit you every day, it is still you and me, and our photos sit high on the piano you used to play for me in the evenings when the sun was setting and the notes would float around us as I sipped my gin and gazed out across the fields of wheat and grain and you sang the song you wrote about me and you, ‘You and Me’.
SHELVING
I was always nagging you to clean your house, to tidy your mess, to hang your wet washing outside on the clothesline instead of on an old wooden rack in the middle of the lounge room. When I first started to visit you, it didn’t bother me much that your mantlepiece was still decorated with last year’s tinsel or that you had last century’s newspapers stacked on one end of the couch. But when I began to contemplate growing old with you (it was you who suggested it, after all) I realised I could never live with such cluttered disorder no matter how much I loved snuggling up to you in your warm bed on winter nights, or sitting with you in the sunshine on summer afternoons beside your weeping cherry tree. I lived in hope that you would change your messy ways so we could live together in harmony, spend our mornings in the garden, our evenings by a cosy fire in a beautiful house with everything shipshape. Come over, you said, one rainy Sunday. I’ve done a bit of cleaning up. Excited at the prospect of seeing all the work you’d done to impress and please me, I drove through the fog to your door. But everything looked the same, dusty as ever, except for the shelf with the framed photographs I had given you to remind you of me. The shelf was polished and clear. The photographs were gone. I dusted off the shelf, you said smiling from ear to ear. Have you dusted me off, too?
RELEASING
Difficult to sleep, she finally settles and dreams, an un-extraordinary dream. A small girl sits alone on a park bench waiting —just waiting—her tears spilling down into a pond at her feet. Just before dawn, she drifts ghostlike out of her dreamscape into her kitchen. Familiar cobwebs, crumbs on the bench. A cockroach races behind the stove. Making tea is her first line of defence. The water begins to bubble and just as the old tin kettle lets out a low screech, she feels a thick sob rising inside her, slow and deep, trapped in her throat, so hard it hurts. She lets out a long loud moan, a sound that circles and hovers for a moment, then floats through tattered lace curtains fretting in the cool morning breeze and finally escapes like steam, through the open sash window to meet a golden sunrise and rests at the foot of the new day.
Mary Pomfret is an award-nominated writer whose creative work has been published widely in literary journals and anthologies. Mary lives and works in regional Australia.
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