Chapter 4 of 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. Clickhereto read.
Ostrich, a story by Kizzy Tahnin, has been translated from Bengali by Rajib Mahmud. Click here to read.
Indifference, a poignant Korean poem has been written and translated by Ihlwha Choi. Clickhere to read.
Cholonto Kolikata(Calcutta on the Move), a poem by Tagore, has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click hereto read.
“…home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration…” – Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44)
Art by Sohana Manzoor
In Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped our World, the author, Anthony Sattin, professed that his narrative “traces the shifting relationships between people who move and those who were settled”. He showed how the ‘nomads’ — perhaps people we could now see as migrants or immigrants — shaped world history. With the advent of climate change, more frequent natural disasters and displacement due to political interference, other interventions and war, people have willingly moved or, at times, been forced to find new homes, even change countries. Have these seekers of refuge been accepted fully as part of the new community they called home? Often, when they are left without the option of returning to their birth land, they are referred to as refugees. Will such people ever find a home? Or even those who moved willingly? Our November issue has several narratives on migrants and exploring the idea of a home.
We have featured Suzanne Kamata, a modern-day migrant who shuttles between two very different cultures and her memoir, Owls in Ginzaand other Stories from Life in Japan. Perhaps, she can be called a global nomad. Though in the interview, she professes she wants to split her time in equal portions between her birth land and adopted country, she starts her book with an incident in her home in Japan (where she has lived for the last thirty seven years) that highlights a dilemma that is not unheard of among migrants:
“The other day, a door-to-door salesman rang my bell. When I opened the door, he peered around me and said, ‘Isn’t there anyone at home?’ As if I were invisible, or temporary. As if I didn’t belong.
“‘I’m here,’ I said. I might have added, ‘I am one of you, and I’m not going anywhere.’”
In our non-fiction section, we have Ian Smith recounting his family’s move from England to Australia post the Second World War. Snigdha Agrawal writes of a second-generation Polish immigrant who has opted to live in Canada. The question such moves throw up — is do they have a home in the country they adopt, especially the pioneering generation that initiates the move? Farouk Gulsara nostalgically glances at the home he left behind, though he just moved cities within Malaysia. Keith Lyons returned home after scouring some of the world and yet, he muses on the idea of a home, quoting Charles Dickens, that “home is a name, a word … stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration.”
Devraj Singh Kalsi takes us on a spin about words and their usages in a humorous vein while Quazi Johirul Islam discusses words, imagination, ornamentation and emotions performing a balancing act in prosody. Charudutta Panigrahi pays a tribute to a man who was known mainly as an actor, Nana Patekar, but he tells us when he met the famed artiste, “He [Patekar] spoke of programmes and people, of what works in a village and what only works on paper, of the farmer and the land. He spoke of ‘his work’ in agriculture, and there was not a grain of boast in the phrase.” So, here was a man who saw himself as of the farming community and the money from his awards often went to fund farming projects.
Patekar’s stance is reminiscent of Tagore’s own stance towards developmental work, as showcased by Uma Das Gupta in A History of Sriniketan: Rabindranath Tagore’s Pioneering work in Rural Reconstruction. He used his Nobel Prize money to fund Sriniketan, his rural reconstruction project. Tagore wrote in a letter sent to Elmhirst (who helped him set up Sriniketan) in 1939: “My path, as you know, lies in the domain of quiet integral action and thought, my units must be few and small, and I can but face human problems in relation to some basic village or cultural area. So, in the midst of worldwide anguish, and with the problems of over three hundred millions staring us in the face, I stick to my work in Santiniketan and Sriniketan hoping that my efforts will touch the heart of our village neighbours and help them in reasserting themselves in a new social order. If we can give a start to a few villages, they would perhaps be an inspiration to some others—and my life work will have been done.”
Our book excerpts host Ruslan Mavliashev’s The Political Unmanifest: Or How to Break Out of the Vicious Circle in which he looks for a change in our current polities. He tells us, “This is not a manifesto for the left or the right. It is an attempt to look beneath both—and ask what kind of human and institutional architecture a more mature politics would require.” The other is an extract from the late well-known Bengali humourist Shibram Chakraborty’s Those Boyhood Years, translated from Bengali by Niladri R. Chatterjee. Reading the translation, one realises how much a translator’s interpretation can impact the narrative. We have a review from Meenakshi Malhotra of Nayantara Roy’s debut novel, The Magnificent Ruins. And Bhaskar Parichha discusses Meena Arora Nayak’s The Blue Lotus: Myths and Folk Tales of India, dwelling on the commonality that exists despite the differences among the varied cultures of India. He writes: “There is something timeless about myths and folk tales. They survive generations, cross geographical boundaries and transcend religious affiliations, carrying within them the collective memory, imagination and wisdom of communities.”
And perhaps, the fables by Naramsetti Umamaheswararao do exactly that — rely on the wisdom of communities to highlight the resilience of humanity in a world of doddering values. In fiction, we have such a story based in Southern India by Umamaheswararao and a narrative set in Kashmir by Gowher Bhatt showcasing a woman who finds resilience. Jay Samanta plays with migration, home and resilience as he dwells on a nightmare while Umair Khan writes a poignant tale about an old rickshaw driver in Karachi, highlighting the need for compassion.
Do pause by our contents page to savour the whole issue.
Huge thanks to all our fabulous contributors and our readers. That the journal would not exist except for the love shown by all of you is a reality which we truly appreciate. Huge thanks to our wonderful team for their input.
Enjoy the reads and hope you look forward to our early bird edition this December.
Nana Patekar (1951-2026) was an actor and philanthropist. From Public Domain
Some people you meet for an hour and carry for a lifetime. Nana Patekar was that for me.
It was at IFFI1 in Goa, a few years ago. The formalities of the official function were over, and the dignitaries were being ushered to their seats. A chair had been kept for him, as chairs always are for men of his stature. A senior lady stood nearby with nowhere to sit. He saw her before anyone else did, and he gave her his place. The people around him protested and insisted, as people around the famous always do. He ignored them, quietly and completely, the way one ignores a noise. There was no flourish in it, no glance to see who was watching. He simply would not sit while she stood.
I did not know then that I had already seen the whole man.
That evening there was a get-together, and a common friend introduced us. He, of course, needed no introduction. We exchanged a couple of lines of courtesy, and then, almost without my noticing how, we were talking, engrossed about social development. Rather, he was talking, and I was looking at him, unable to do much else.
He spoke of programmes and people, of what works in a village and what only works on paper, of the farmer and the land. He spoke of “his work” in agriculture, and there was not a grain of boast in the phrase. He spoke as a worker speaks of the day’s labour, not as a benefactor speaks of his gift. Listening to him, you would never have guessed that he was the giver behind the effort. He had placed himself among the hands, not above them.
I remember the face more than the words. The eyes glowed. The nostrils flared as the conviction rose in him. My mother used to say that people with those two features are meant to be extraordinary, that they carry a rare individual presence and that their word comes to matter in society. I thought of her that evening. She was right, as mothers are.
What struck me most was his forthrightness. He belonged to an industry that thrives on compliance and malleability, where agreeing is a career and bending is a skill. To stand on your own there takes temerity, and his eyes shone with it. His voice was emphatic, the voice of a man who had never learnt to say what he did not mean. The plain speech, the straight speech, the easy way he lived, the humility that came naturally and was never an act put on for the room, the oratory, the articulation, the command he held over himself: all of it showed in those few minutes. Nothing was held in reserve for a better audience.
Our conversation was not long. Its impact has lasted me forever.
The world will remember the actor, and it should. It will remember the coiled fury, the silences that said more than pages of dialogue, the voice that could turn a line into a verdict. Others who knew him across decades will write of the craft, and they will write it better than I can. I knew him for one evening. But I saw him give away a chair, and I heard him speak of the poor without once placing himself above them, and I believe an evening can be enough.
Hermann Hesse, I am told, saw in such lives the triumph of creativity over mortality: a human footprint that refuses to die. Nana’s footprint is of that kind. It is pressed into the soil he cared about, into the screen he set alight, and into people like me, who met him briefly and were never quite the same.
“To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die,” wrote Thomas Campbell. By that measure, he has gone nowhere. He lives in the farmer who found a hand on his shoulder in a bad season, in the audience that still holds its breath when he appears, and in a stranger at a festival in Goa who went home with something he could not name.
The chair he gave away that evening stays with me. He never needed one. Men like him do not occupy seats. They occupy memory.
Glowing eyes, flared nostrils, an emphatic voice, a presence that is, and will remain, indelible — go well, Nana. You stood so that others could sit.
