Munich – Borderless

Five poems by Pravasini Mahakuda have been translated to English from Odia by Snehaprava Das

YOUR POETRY 

You do not get liberated by arguments. 
Liberation isn’t on your mind,
Neither is it in your fortitude or your courage,
Nor in the tricky manoeuvring of your steps.
Liberation is in the challenges
Your soul ceaselessly confronts.
Salvation is in each line of the poem you write.
Do you know or do you not?
That even after you quit this beautiful earth,
Your poetry will live.
Readers of poetry will continue to be. 
Your poetry will live forever because
You hold a timeless lover inside you,
And because of your love,
Which is liberation itself.
Your poetry will thrive as a green permanence,
Even on a blazing summer noon.
You and your poetry are one,  
And have never existed apart.
 You yourself are poetry --  
Only poetry, and nothing else.
Because like you, Poetry, too, is a woman>
And you, like poetry itself
Are the eternal Truth.   

 THE REST OF THEM 

Let the rest of them 
Write about revolutions 
And resistances,
About rights and responsibilities.
I write about life.
I write about love,
And things that happen around me.
I write about the changing seasons,
About the prices of goods,     
Of the soreness hidden in the heart.
I write about the hopes and fears that
The heart incessantly wavers between,
Of an unseen wound that never stops to hurt.
I write about the eye that cannot see
The tears trickle down the other one,
Or the drenched pillow and the sari-end.
I write about a hand 
That does not care to share 
The ache in the other one.
I write about the song the dead river 
That flowed once between us had sung.
Let others write about 
What they won and lost.
I will write about the pain emanating from 
An aspired for void.
Let others write about spite and disdain, 
I will sing of life and love.
 
SHRAVANA* 

For which Shravana must the woman
Write a poem now?
What kind of a poem of Shravana  
Must she write to sprinkle life
Into the desert dying inside her
To cheer herself up?
Do you think it is easy to write poetry?
You do not know perhaps,
Only a drop of rain comes down
Against millions of palmfuls of tears.
In that lone drop of rain,
 Rings a primeval tune
That perhaps lay buried under
A century old rock.
You had never been in that song 
In any phase of life,
Not as friend, a husband or a neighbour
Neither as a reader, nor a critic.
The agony is because 
You were never a part of that song.
The Shravana is because 
You were never a part of that song.
And the rain is because of that,
And the poem too!  
It’s half-hour past eight. 
On this evening of a Shravana Sunday
The Shravana pours generously.
Do you believe a woman somewhere   
Still sits waiting for you on this evening,
Watching her own silent tears
Mingle in the Shravana rains outside?

*Month of July-August in the Indian calendar, normally monsoons in India.

GODDESS 

She is not a goddess --
The one you invoked while 
Immersing, 
Or immersed while
Invoking.
She is a woman.  
Perhaps you have not cared to see
The tears in the eyes of that goddess.
During those performances,
You have time and again played games
With her body and her tears.
Every night,
On the freshly made beds 
And in freshly written verses too.
You always know that the 
Finale of the game
Will be under your control 
And by your choice.
Because you have ensured the result
Would be in your favour,
You have taken the game for granted. 
    
        
SAREE 

The pain and pangs I have lived through 
Are as many 
As the threads woven 
In my saree. 
The end of the saree fails to hold
the profusion of 
All honour and dishonour,
All joys and sorrows,
Interest and indifference, 
The ache of losing things 
I had won,
The ecstasy of loving 
And the agony of no response.
As I set out on a journey,
The sorrow-flowers bloom in a row
Along the border of the saree,
Spring into life. 
As innocent symbols of that agony, 
A scene floats past my mind in a flash
Where I find the whole of my being
Standing by the loom.
I marvel at the intimate emotion
Of a beautiful loving mind
Employed at the act of weaving
Such a saree of choice.
The threads in this saree 
I am clad in are as many as 
The sorrows and sufferings, 
Joys and elations that roll
Inside me like the gentle undulations of 
The middle notes of a song.

Pravasini Mahakuda is a distinguished Odia poet and translator with 18 original books and 8 books in translation from Hindi to Odia. She has received the Odisha Sahitya Akademi award, Jhankar Award and Junior and Senior Fellowships from the Ministry of Culture, Govt. of India. Her international engagements include participation in poetry festivals in Germany presenting her work in Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Leipzig and Frankfurt. She regularly contributes poems in national magazines and attends seminars and poetry festivals across India.

Dr.Snehaprava Das, is a noted writer and a translator from Bhubaneswar, Odisha. She has five books of poems, three of stories and thirteen collections of translated texts (from Odia to English), to her credit.

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

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

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

By Nitya Amalean

It was the year 2020. When most of the world was lacking connection and normalcy, I had the privilege of being in Sri Lanka, an island that I had referred to as ‘home’ but hadn’t truly been my home since I left at the age of eighteen. Being here gave me connection with a sugary coat of ‘normalcy’. I had my affectionate family, who made lockdowns entertaining with the purchase of a ping pong table, the nightly binge of true crime documentaries and the occasional games night, including a terrible decision to play ‘Cards Against Humanity’. I had a relationship with my boyfriend in all the physical sense of the word after two years of long-distance phone calls. I had my friends who were all a 15-minute drive away. I had a flexible job where I could interact with smart and passionate coworkers, something I ignorantly thought I wouldn’t find in Sri Lanka. Add to that, countless long weekends and public holidays, mostly spent in the beach towns down south, a region brimming with excellent food options, tasty cocktail bars and magnificent sea swims – truly this was an island that brought comfort, safety and security.

But I wanted more.

This romanticised version of the pandemic years spent in Sri Lanka, while all true, evoked such strong feelings of being lost, purposeless, and devoid of self-worth. This most comfortable of comfort zones made me feel completely out of sorts and yearning for something different. Long, sleepless nights of overthinking, questioning and wondering, “What on earth am I doing here?” Did I spend four years in an exceedingly difficult academic environment and four years working in the most ambitious, individualistic, enlightening city to land up here? Did my parents really spend thousands of dollars on American college tuition for me to end up back home feeling like a failure?

The initial move back home in May 2020 was going to be temporary. I was placed on furlough from my job in London and I believed it was best to wait it out back home. I thought that once the pandemic was all well and done, which would obviously be in a few months, I’d return to London, like nothing had changed.

As I fell in deeper with the aesthetically pleasing confines of beautiful beaches in Trincomalee, the delicious home-cooked meals, the hugs from my parents, the kisses from my boyfriend, the cuddles with my little nieces and nephews, and the long weekend trips with friends, it would be an outright lie to say I wasn’t relieved when the furlough continued and ultimately, ended with the expiration of my work visa. That seemed to seal the decision. I had no way back to the United Kingdom. Sri Lanka was to be my home now.

Looking back at that time, it was like being given this Trojan horse of a cozy, tender, warm embrace, disguising claws that pierced slowly, leaking poison and disillusionment. The surrounding Indian Ocean was as confining as it was endless, as isolating as it was welcoming, as suffocating as it was refreshing.

Scrolling through social media, I compared myself to others. And no, it wasn’t the mindless glazing-of-the-eyes watching Tik Tok or Reels but the reading-every-post-with-anxiety on LinkedIn. I compared myself to my friends in New York City, progressively moving up the ladder with impressive promotions and new six figure salaries. I compared myself to my best friends, living their lives independently, powering through their work passionately. I compared myself to peers in my graduating class who seemed to be smashing it in whatever life path they were on. And I felt thoroughly sorry for myself.

While pleased to be working with smart individuals at my WFH startup job in Sri Lanka, the lack of growth and opportunity for professional development made me itch. There were too many moments in the middle of workdays, where I laid sprawled across my bed, staring up at the fan and berating myself down a black hole. I switched between two toxic mindsets, one telling myself that I was no longer worthy of doing exciting, cutting-edge, fulfilling work and the other questioning why I couldn’t be content with all the positives that I had around me? Why did I always want more? Why did I always have this “grass will be greener” frame of mind? Why couldn’t I just ‘be’? This second mindset would set in when I heard my mum’s call to come for her home-cooked lunch of rice and curry. Wasn’t I begging for all these luxuries when I was living abroad?

While work was a huge factor contributing to my discontent, lifestyle was a secondary, significant reason. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer that everyone has different priorities and are in different stages of life and I spent a lot of time (over)thinking about my priorities. I wanted new experiences. I wanted to be pushed outside my comfort zone to do things that terrified my introverted self. I wanted to work remotely from a Greek island. I wanted to pick up Spanish again and stay in Barcelona for the summer. I wanted to take a creative writing course in Paris. I wanted to hop on a flight and visit my best friend in Munich, where she was living on a farm. I wanted the luxury of having a multiple-year multiple-entry Schengen visa which would be stamped every few months. I wanted a different passport. I wanted to go for an innumerable amount of plays, whether they were in small, 30-seater spaces with no set design or in beautiful, historic theatres where the lead actor is naked almost the entire run time (for artistic purposes apparently). I wanted to watch Jodie Comer in Prima Facie. I wanted to laugh hysterically at a live interview with the legendary Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I wanted to listen to the beautiful minds of Konkona Sen Sharma, Nandita Das and Aparna Sen discussing the perils of censorship in their films in India; watch a match at Wimbledon; find a way to go to the Berlinnale Film Festival. Enjoy the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

I wanted to do so many things.

Could I find these things while living in Sri Lanka? I convinced myself that I couldn’t.

Recently, at my one-year work anniversary in my current job, my manager thoughtfully said, “Thank you for always striving for excellence.” While very kind words, they made me understand something I perhaps always knew about myself, without ever being explicitly told. Always striving for excellence even as a type-A young person, pushing for excellent grades, in order to go to an excellent college in the United States, and ultimately, secure an excellent job. (I’m exhausted just typing out this sentence.) And after being extremely fortunate to work with intelligent and supportive people and have challenging, exciting projects, my own benchmark for excellence kept rising.

I wanted to really enjoy my work but also be challenged by it. I wanted to learn from diverse, brilliant colleagues. I wanted to learn new technical skills. I wanted to have workshops with Product teams on developing new AI functionalities and how best to position them in the marketplace. I wanted to brainstorm with the Content team on how to best partner with a certain Tamil British-Indian actress and not feel like the token voice of diversity. I wanted the promotion and the salary bump and the senior title and the recognition and the reputation. And if not now, then it was in the five-year plan. I can say that this is what New York City does to you, but that would be a lie. It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.

All this ambition drove me straight into a brick wall, dissolving my confidence in my own capabilities. I blamed Sri Lanka. I blamed a whole country for making me feel like this.

Soon, the island was facing its worst economic crisis since independence and to watch the destruction of possibility, willpower and any minute form of political stability in real time was heartbreaking. I won’t even attempt to put into words the plight of Sri Lankans who lost almost everything, unable to access the most basic essentials of fuel, electricity, cooking oil, milk powder and medicines. By early 2022, ‘home’, an island that had nurtured me, that gave me the most special roots, that offered me safety and security, was broken. In my siloed social bubble of international school kids, foreign-educated graduates and Colombo’s upper-middle class families, I desperately wanted to get out. And so did thousands of others who did not want to waste their potential in a nation that was falling apart at the seams.

After years of only regarding Sri Lanka with fondness, I found that bitterness, resentment, and animosity towards my island nation magnified to a point where I couldn’t even hold a conversation with friends who could leave but were choosing to stay. Give me a work permit, give me a Western passport, give me a student visa, give me anything that will allow me to leave this place.

A family meeting was called when my black mood permeated through the home, along with wine, cheese, and a whiteboard to discuss my future plans — the pleasures of coming from a business family — efficient but with alcohol. My family, the ever-loving, supportive, encouraging guiding lights in my life, told me point-black, “You need to leave.” In an atypical South Asian, fashion, they said, “Do what makes you happy. Get a job or do your Masters. Travel everywhere.” My sweet parents, knowing that they would once again be empty nesters with my brother and me elsewhere, knowing that they fully enjoyed having the house full again, also recognised that their kids would be their happiest selves outside of Sri Lanka.

To have diametrically opposing emotions about the right path forward is confusing to say the very least. If I chose to remain in Sri Lanka, it would have been because three people lived there. My parents were not getting any younger and more substantially, we treasured each other. My partner and I were finally living in the same city after years of distance and savouring every moment of togetherness. And to have all three people only having words of encouragement further deepened the guilt.

But I wanted to be selfish. I didn’t want to stay because I’m a patriotic citizen contributing to the brain drain. I didn’t want to stay because I’m a good daughter or girlfriend. I wanted to leverage my resources, my experiences and most importantly, my LinkedIn, to do the impossible. A broken island meant I had to put together the pieces. For myself.

To leave or not to leave? And to which part of the world? To return back to the country where I have the privilege of residency but do I want to live in the land of mass shootings and a work-till-you-die mentality? Or to pursue an entry into the U.K. through a student visa by doing an unwanted MBA? Or to strive for the most idealistic, unrealistic scenario — a job in London?

But in that snug, tightly wrapped, a-little-too-hot Anokhi[1] blanket of a comfort zone, the decision was always clear. Maybe one day, I’ll make my peace with my ‘home’. Maybe one day, my blood won’t boil with frustration when I’m on Sri Lankan soil for more than a fortnight. Maybe one day, I will feel the affection again. Maybe one day.

Fast forward two years to the present day, sitting in my cozy flat in London, having just spent a few electrifying weeks in Greece, riding on a high from a successful partnership with a certain tech juggernaut, and preparing for next week’s launch of a new AI product, I appreciate my new ‘home’. It might not be the island I once thought I would spend the rest of my life in, and it’s a little colder and gloomier than the tropics. But the possibilities are endless once again, my dreams are daring once again, and life is feeling full once again

[1] Anokhi Quilt

Nitya Amalean is an emerging writer and storyteller. She was born and nurtured in Sri Lanka, college-educated in the United States and currently, lives in London where she works for an audio media company.

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

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

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