Tag: Pakistan

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Review

The Unseen Branches

Book Review by Mudassar Javed Baryar

Title: The First Jasmines

Author: Saima Begum

Publisher: Hajar Press

In the literary cartography of the Global South, fiction has often been pressed into the service of nation-narration. From Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, canonised as the novelistic metonym for India’s tumultuous post-independence history, to Tahmima Anam’s celebrated Bengal trilogy, received as a fictional appraisal of Bangladesh’s birth pangs, critics have persistently sought foundational texts that can emblematise emergent nation-states. Bangladesh, a nation forged in the crucible of a 1971 war that violently severed the geographic and ideological construct of Pakistan, occupies a distinctive position within this literary ecology. Its fiction emerges from a fractured genealogy of linguistic and political resistance, one that inherently unsettles monolithic, linear narratives of statehood.

Saima Begum’s The First Jasmines provides not as a supplement to a pre-existing history, but as an epistemological correction. It radicalises the project of narrating the nation by relocating the locus of meaning from the birth of a state to the structural, gendered violence its delivery both requires and represses. In doing so, the novel demands that we rethink the very relationship between fiction and national history, turning away from the monumental icon of the “tree” toward the unseen, divergent “branches” of women’s testimony.

The novel situates its inquiry not in the heroic theatre of the Mukti Bahini’s guerrilla campaigns, but in the circumscribed, carceral space of a military camp where women are held as spoils of a genocidal war. The protagonist, Lucky, is introduced as a figure of radical ordinariness, a mother and daughter-in-law whose husband works in London, whose life is violently unmoored during a journey to visit her ailing mother. Abducted alongside her sister Jamila, she is thrust into a temporal and spatial parenthesis where historical time collapses into the cyclical horror of daily violation.

Begum’s masterful narrative choice is to dwell in this atemporal zone, resisting the teleological pull of rescue and nationhood. The novel insists that the truth of national formation is to be found not in the climax of independence, but in this interstitial, nine-month duration of captivity—a dark, inverted gestation of the state. The narrative voice meticulously records a reality where agency is atomized into the smallest of sensory perceptions: “A lone window was squished between several patched-up panels, nothing visible from the outside but the thick black threads of hair of the women inside, shimmering liquid under moonlight.” The prose transforms the scene into a spectral image of beauty and abjection, a visual field where the women are reduced to a single organic mass, their subjectivity merging with the material textures of their prison.

Begum’s aesthetic project hinges on her refusal of graphic spectacle. The violence is rendered not through an unveiling of the wounded body, but through an immersive phenomenology of trauma and a choreography of survival. A dialogic exchange between the two sisters becomes a profound meditation on the ontology of endurance. Jamila’s counsel, “Close your eyes… The longer they stay open, the more you’ll remember when you leave…” and Lucky’s retort, “What I see with my eyes closed is worse than what I see with them open…” stage a dialectic of memory and presence, of protective dissociation and sensory assault. When Jamila counters Lucky’s terror with the sacred identity of “A praying mother,” Begum constructs what can be termed a fragile counterforce; an affective and spiritual armature that stands against the physical machinery of the camp.

These whispered philosophies, born from the collective precarity of womanhood, elevate conversation into a mode of existential resistance. The female prisoners emerge not as silent victims but as vernacular philosophers whose dialogue constitutes a parallel archive of wisdom, a repository of insight into the patriarchal logics that subtend the spectacular violence of war.

The novel’s metaphorical architecture is anchored by the recurring, titular motif of jasmine, “a flower that blooms at night, alluding to the possibility of survival and beauty in darkness.” This is not a simple consolatory figure. The jasmine operates as an olfactory and mnemonic counter-symbol to the visual regimes of state power and historiographic documentation. It is a scent that persists where light, the Enlightenment metaphor for knowledge and liberation, fails. In the novel’s most formally striking passage, the dehumanising violence is refracted through a complex simile of capture: the soldier grabs Zoleyka’s braid “like fishermen pulling a net full of bounty back from the sea.” The comparison is devastating in its precision, momentarily stripping the character of human subjecthood to figure her as catch, as non-human resource within a predatory political economy of bodies.

Yet, the meticulous catalogue of her braids, “Plait braid, single braid, lace braid, ladder braid, fishtail braid”, preceding this act of violation is a testament to a life of self-care and cultural practice. The text thus inscribes violence not as an isolated event but as a systemic logic that weaponises what women have tended with love. Begum’s narrative eye, however, is unremittingly dialectical, and in a chillingly audacious shift, she turns the omniscient gaze onto the hyper-sensory paranoia of the soldiers: “Tasted sugar when they bit into the flesh of bloodied girls.” This perspectival haunting refuses a Manichean simplicity, exposing the perpetrators’ psyche as a landscape corroded by superstition and a barbarity that recoils upon the self. It suggests a war that consumes both the captured and the captor, albeit along radically asymmetrical axes of consequence.

This bifocal vision culminates in the novel’s central epistemic maxim: “God must’ve given us different eyeballs, men and women, they only seem to see the tree and never the direction of its branches.” The folk aphorism articulates a gendered scopic regime. The masculinist, state-centric gaze sees the singular, monumental “tree”—the nation, the war, the linear narrative of liberation—while women’s perception traces the divergent, lateral, and unseen “branches”: the capillaries of care, the trajectories of trauma, the lived experiences that the grand narrative cannot integrate.

The novel’s own form embodies this branched perception. It intersperses harrowing depictions of suffering with moments of startling levity born from collective wit: “Never marry a man who needs to make a mistake to learn.” “Look at your mother-in-law’s hair.” This rhythmic oscillation between the visceral and the light is not a tonal inconsistency but a profound formal mimesis of the survival strategies of the captive women. Humour and gossip become technologies of selfhood, momentarily reassembling a world of intimate sociality within the zone of annihilation, proving that the unsayable can only be approached through a dance between testimony and the sustaining grace of the mundane.

The final act of the novel delivers a liberation that is no liberation at all, structurally executing a terminal critique of the nation-form. The Mukti Bahini liberates the camp; the state, in a gesture of political commemoration, confers the title of ‘birangona’ (war heroine) upon the violated women. Yet, as Begum’s paratextual note devastatingly clarifies, societal excommunication transmutes the honorific into its homophonic, pejorative other: ‘barangona’ (prostitute).

The state’s promised apparatus of care—rehabilitation, vocational training, social reintegration—evaporates, revealing a patriarchal compact that allows the nation to valorise the violated female body as a symbol of its own violated territory while violently disavowing that body’s living, breathing claim to dignity. This post-war abandonment constitutes a second, more insidious violence, a form of slow death by social prescription that exposes the nation-state’s liberation as a gendered event, incomplete by design. The women are granted a symbolic place in the national epic while being denied a livable place in the nation’s society, a schism that The First Jasmines identifies as the founding lie of the postcolonial settlement.

Published at a critical historical conjuncture, as Bangladesh navigates a new landscape of political turmoil following the 2024 mass uprising and the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government, The First Jasmines performs an urgent act of archival retrieval. It excavates the foundational, suppressed memory of gendered violence as the unspoken condition of the nation’s emergence, an inheritance that successive governments have refused to fully acknowledge or redress.

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.” To return to the novel’s governing metaphor, Begum abandons the vertical, central stem of the “tree”, the official history of the nation-state, to follow the rhizomatic directions of the “branches.” In doing so, she reframes the project of national literature not as the celebration of a fait accompli, but as a witness to its hidden costs. The novel ultimately insists that the nation cannot be received as an uncomplicated patrimony. True liberation, like the late-blooming jasmine, is a fragrance that unfolds only in the darkness, a promise whose truth is recognised only when we find the courage to sit with its scent long after the fanfares of dawn have faded.

Mudassar Javed Baryar is a scholar at the University of Faisalabad, Pakistan.

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

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Categories
Stories

The City that Refused to be Found

By Rabiya Rehman

From Public Domain

Rim and I decided that it was for the best that we pinned Thursday as the day we commemorated change. Rim said it carried value, that good deeds showed exponential impacts on Thursdays. I was always a sceptic, but I also loved to play along with her antics, believing that maybe her beliefs carried, if nothing, than at least unwavering faith. Like a wild moth that circumambulates light bulbs, I liked hovering around people with warmth in their convictions, even if I didn’t feel the heat myself.

That Thursday, with Lahore’s weather melting our bags and shoes, we took an Uber to the centre of the city. Sweating and stumbling under the weight of books, we had decided that the world needed our attention. Particularly the newer lot;  simple, untouched, sensitive kids, who were victims of a declining reading culture. Our project was simple. Revive the ancient literatures of our land and encourage youngsters to read Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Siraiki writings. It was a social action project, tinted strongly with the pressing need to fulfil our community service hours, get our undergrad degrees, and leave the country for good.

Our Uber halted on a wayward road and the Google Maps app on my cell phone pinged. Wiping my brows, I looked tiredly at the man sitting in the driving seat with cheap, tinted shades. Rim was already getting out, pulling out cartons. I followed, paying the man his due, and straightening my sweat-drained kurti[1]. The uber hurried by, leaving us alone on a deserted road, paralleled by a graveyard. A man spraying roses with ether sat outside. The graveyard looked empty. The dead was left to their accord in the unflinching heat, even mosquitos seemed suspended mid-air.

We looked around and couldn’t see the library we were looking for. Aside from an occasional car passing by, hardly any signs of life were visible, let alone a signboard. The man with the roses followed our movement, his eyes trailing us with an intent too steady to be casual.

Rim jogged to him. Stooping low to match his gaze, she inquired, “Baba jee[2], is there a library close by?”

The man stared back and with a disfigured thumb pointed to her back. A tomb-like structure, which we ignored for some kind of local monument, stood stall and decaying in the centre of a park. It had caricatures of half-fairies, half-children painted on it. Beneath it were some quotes from popular Urdu poems that the harsh heat of Lahore had eroded.

“Umm, that’s the library?”

“I think so.” Rim said with a quizzed expression. “Let’s walk closer to see the main entrance. I can hardly see anything from this side of the road.”

The tomb indeed had a heavy polished brass door which contrasted sharply with the rotting situation of its grey structure. I pulled at the door and we stumbled inside an elaborate, red-carpeted, and red-walled hall. The woman behind the desk peeked as soon as Rim entered.

The room was beautiful, with landscape paintings of old Lahore and the river Ravi. Air conditioner blasted at full speed, and the old hum of different electronics created a soothing and numbing atmosphere. I could feel my shirt drying as the woman crossed the hall towards us, her red dupatta[3] following her trail.

“My bachas[4], what brings you hear in this heat? It’s an old library, are you looking for some antique books?”

She wore red chipping nail paint which emphasized the thinness of her dark hands. Old but strangely young, the woman fixed her silky drape, staring at us with glassy eyes.

“We got your address… our university’s administration gave it to us. Umm… they said you work with students who are particularly interested in the development of local literatures?” I responded, still-focusing on her hands.

“Yes. We have a separate office for that. Bacha, you’re at the wrong place. We relocated our main office a few months ago. It’s not far from here.”

While the woman spoke, Rim had walked to the furthest end of the library. Only her hunched back remained visible, focused on something out of my sight.

“Alright, that sounds good. Can you please give me the address of the main office?”

“Sure, and call your friend back. Visitors are not allowed today.”

I turned a bit and whisper-shouted, “Rim, let’s go!”

Rim didn’t look back and as I walked closer to her, I made out a rugged looking pit in the middle of the library floor. I crossed the distance, careful not to disturb the silence that clung to every surface like a curse. Inside the pit were a few books, some miniatures paintings, plastic cars, and three children with pale, almost colourless hair, sleeping peacefully in the sunken space. Such was the hush that not even an inch of their hair moved. We stared at their faces quietly. An eeriness had quietly descended the hall. The silence was broken by a soft hand on my shoulder.

“I said no visitors today, bacha.”

The woman’s voice came from behind. My conscious jolted as I felt her hand melting on my shoulder. I turned around and hurried out the door, with Rim on my heels. Before the door was completely closed, we saw the woman bent down, staring at the pit, her silk dupatta quietly trailing down her side. The image was like a water-painting, old, blistered, and grotesque.

“That was strange.” I breathed the moment the sun blared at us again.

“I know, Biya, that woman is like a hundred years old. Who dresses up like that at a hundred years old?”

“I don’t know, she appeared… timeless.”

“Yeah, she made me uncomfortable.” Rim shuddered and rubbed her shoulders. “Anyways, it’s still mid-day. I think we better hurry to that office. I promised Ammi[5] that I’ll come home early today.”

“Let’s go. Let’s walk. I don’t see any rikshaw or Uber passing.”

We walked passed the graveyard. Soon, as our shadows began to lengthen, we embarked a highway. Recognising it immediately, we understood that now we were close to a boulevard.

I jogged and Rim followed pursuit. My sneakers were pinching at my toes, and the sun grew larger and larger. We walked with cartons pulling our shoulders down. In a few minutes we were at the entrance of a colony.

“Okay, so Google says five more minutes. You aren’t dehydrated, right?” I asked Rim, staring at her pale face with concern.

“Ah… I am fine, I think. Lets just keep moving.”

We moved further until my phone pinged again. The notification showed that we had arrived at our location. I looked around. The place seemed abandoned, except huge mansions lined each side of the street. It was staggering, coming from a less developed area of Lahore, it always took me by surprise that houses could be so extravagant. Lush, elaborate lawns, freshly-polished doors, razor wires that covered kilometres of walls, and shiny marble which covered every inch of the buildings. We walked around the silent place, looking for signs of life. Not a single person was in sight.

We walked slowly, looking at the mansions in awe. Most gates were open, with expensive cars lining porches. A particular mansion had a driveway as big as the distance we had walked from the library. The house only appeared like a glimmer in distance. It had a glass structure at the entrance, fifteen foot tall and thirty feet wide. From what we could see, it was filled to the mouth with paintings, statues, and old artifacts.

“I have never been here before, Biya, and I was born in this city!”

“Same, but why is it so abandoned?”

“That’s what I was wondering. People have their BMW’s and Bugatti’s parked with gates wide open. There isn’t a guard in sight.”

“But where’s the office?”

“Let me check.”

Google Maps pointed at a house on the right. It stood forlorn, the only one on the right of that particular block. The raven-coloured gate was only slightly ajar. I pointed towards it and Rim pushed the gate with a slight force. It swayed easily, uncovering a pathway lined with wild cactus and primroses.

We cautiously walked the path. The house loomed before us, exhaling and inhaling with our every step. Its windows were tainted, reminding me of someone who hadn’t slept in years. Like the rest of the colony, there was a sense of restlessness in the air that cut through our skin like knife. While the house appeared pristine at first glance, a deeper look revealed cracks that ran through like capillaries in sea-green coloured walls. Bougainvillea climbed the side pillars and bloomed furiously, as if trying to revive a place that had stopped expecting visitors. I felt uncomfortable and tugged at Rim’s sleeve anxiously.

Under my touch, Rim froze.

“Biya”, she whispered, clutching my arm.

I looked up.

There, on one of the walls, a barred window gleamed with peeling paint. A woman was standing there. She was waving; slowly, deliberately. Like a pendulum of an old grandfather clock. She swayed, one hand clutching the bars of the window. It was ominous. Her dark gown fluttered faintly with the breeze.

I slightly raised my arm, unsure how to respond. Was this a greeting?

Before we could understand, a loud metallic clatter filled the air suddenly. Dogs barked viciously in a fit of madness. We spun around, trying to look for the noise. The place was empty. From the main door, a man burst forth. His shirt stained, barefoot and eyes bloodshot, he ran towards us. As he came closer, time stood slow. The hollowness of his eyes appeared like sunken pits in a dried riverbed. His hair screamed past air the closer he moved.

“Who are you? Who sent you?” He exploded, spitting with rage.

 “This is a private property! Don’t you dare come here! Go back! Go back!”

I let out a startled yelp and felt blood leaving my feet. Rim grabbed my arm and turned, sprinting down the gravel path as the man’s shouting mixed with the ear-splitting barking. The cactus needles brushed our clothes as we half-ran, half-stumbled. The gate we had nudged open without a second thought now felt like an exit from a spider’s web. Before we left, my eyes saw a trembling cage covered with a moth covered cotton sheet.

Rim ran for a long time, dragging me along. Reaching the main road again, panting, books rustling inside the carton, she stopped. Her arms were shaking. She stopped and looked at me nervously. In what sounded like a hysterical laugh, she breathed, trying to regain her senses.

“Biya, that wasn’t the office.” Rim said, exhaling.

No brainer, I thought. The sun was now trying to spin westwards, bleeding into the smoggy, dry sky of Lahore. Rim and I dragged ourselves, noticing our shadows getting longer and longer. We walked back to the colony, stopping at a office which read “Samia Wellness and Fertility Centre”. We decided to flag down a rickshaw. Rim was now oddly quiet, and my throat felt like it was scratched with sandpaper.

“Some local rickshaw-wala might be familiar with the office. I don’t have the energy to walk and this place seems too cursed for random exploration.”

Rim silently nodded, too exhausted to share her thoughts. The rickshaw stopped in front of us.

“Where to, beti[6]?” the driver asked, as I again fumbled with my cell phone and gave him the address to the office. The Google Maps app kept acting up, rerouting like a compass held close to a magnet.

“Just take us to this stop,” I said, waving the screen in his face.

The rickshaw sputtered, coughing like a chain-smoker and off we went. We looked outside carefully, tracking the map with the roads that passed by. We passed the graveyard again. The man who ether-sprayed roses had gone. Five minutes later, the driver halted and pointed outside.

“Beti, this is it. Fertility Center. It will be 300 rupees.”

We blinked and looked outside. We were at the fertility centre again. Fresh paint covered the building and the sun was now casting orange hues. Rim and I exchanged a look.

“Bhai[7], are you playing tricks with us? You got us back to the same place!”

“This is the location you gave me,” the man shrugged with obvious irritation.

“That’s not where we want to go,” Rim cried in frusruration.

The man shrugged again, clearly uninterested in our predicament.

We decided to give it another try. Rebooted the app and entered the address. The same pin drop appeared.

“Let’s just do one more round,” Rim told the driver.

We took another round. Moving in circles, again passing the neighbourhood, the library, and the graveyard. We passed the same mansions. Same roads. The rickshaw stopped again.

It was the same fertility centre. The same man who sat outside the pharmacy holding a file looked at us with amused suspicion.

“This place is cursed”, Rim shouted.

We got off the rickshaw, paid and shooed the driver away, and decided to walk again.

“Google thinks our project is a lost cause.” I said quietly.

It was as if the old city of Ravi was itself draining us, trapping us in a loop of mythic punishment, reflecting its forgotten literatures, the very stories we aimed to revive.

This time we let instinct lead, trying to follow the directions our university’s management had told Rim verbally. Soon, the road of the fertility centre opened up into quitter rows of offices. One of them read in small plaque: “Pakistan’s Centre for Indigenous Literatures”.

Rim jumped and placed a hand over her mouth. “That’s it! This is the office!”

I knocked on the door carefully, half expecting another madman or a ghost to burst forth and envelope us.

However, this time, a middle-aged man with a plastic clipboard opened the gate and looked stratled at our sweaty and wild-eyed state.

“Umm, the volunteers, I presume?”

“Yes.” I replied with a pause and we both entered.

During our meeting, the lady in charge said something that stuck with me through many years. She shared the history of her organisation, which deeply intertwined with the history of Lahore. She remarked that Pakistan is a land of promise, but lands have a way of oozing decay. You can build highways, install fancy street lights, and create grand elaborate structures, but the degeneration, the last faltering breath of a city rampant with the destruction of ideology, of morality, and of faith, that cannot be swept under covers. It stares back from the layers of funds and aids thrown at it. So, you may close your eyes, put cotton in your ears, and even numb your hands, but the horrors of a city destroyed by its own people never really become silent.

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

[1] A short shirt cut like a kurta, but often short sleeved

[2] A polite term to address an older man

[3] A scarf or veil

[4] Children

[5] Mother

[6] Daughter

[7] Brother

Rabiya Rehman is a Staff Editor for Chartium, and the Poetry Feedback Assistant at ECHO Review. She is an English Literature grad student based in Pakistan, a place known for its centuries-old tradition of Sufi poetry and searching questions about the self. Her research and interests lie in speculative fiction and the ways stories shape both culture and selfhood.

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

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

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

Categories
Essay

Sam Dalrymple and the Shattered Lands

By Farouk Gulsara

From Public Domain

When the word ‘Partition’ is mentioned, it is always assumed to refer to the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. In fact, the Partition of the British Raj occurred five times.

Not so long ago, as recently as 1928, a vast expanse of land from Aden in the West to Rangoon in the east was united as the Indian Empire, all under British rule. It was the zenith of the British Empire, and it seemed the sun would never set on the Empire. A quarter of the world’s population lived here, from the Red Sea to Southeast Asia, and they all used the Indian rupee. One would travel across the span with an Indian passport. By 1971, in just 40 years, this Empire had been shattered five times, resulting in 12 nation-states.

We should learn to tell stories by listening to how housewives gossip. They narrate intimate personal stories about their neighbours, with vivid detail, as if they were there in the target’s bedroom. It becomes more believable when real characters are added. The same advice applies to telling history, his-story. Sam Dalrymple’s Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia does exactly that. A dry subject like history is turned into an unputdownable book by giving human faces to the people making difficult decisions at the administrative level and to those who have to bear the brunt of those decisions. Perhaps the author’s filmmaking background pushed him towards this style. That makes it very engaging.

The author, Samuel Hew Tantallon Darymple, is a scholar of Sanskrit and Persian, as well as a historian, author, activist, and social media influencer. He co-founded Project Dastaan[1],  a peace-building initiative that uses digital technology to reconnect people displaced by the 1947 Partition of India with their childhood communities and villages.

The five Partitions mentioned in this book are: the separation of Burma from India in 1937; the reclassification of Aden as a British protectorate; the formation of Pakistan; the dissolution of the 550-odd princely states; and, finally, a bloody civil war that led to the formation of Bangladesh.

The Indian idea of ‘Bharat’ is traditionally shaped by the ancient Hindu geography of Bharatvarsha, a triangular landmass stretching from the Himalayas in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south. Notably, Afghanistan, mentioned in the Mahabharata, and Burma, known as Brahmadesh (Land of Brahma), do not fall within this framework. The city of Kandahar in Afghanistan is apparently named after Gandhari, the blindfolded matriarch of the Kaurava clan.

After the 1905 Partition of Bengal and the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, calls for self-governance grew louder. To pacify the Indian public, the Crown sent a group of seven, known as the Simon Commission[2], in 1928 to implement constitutional reforms. It did nothing to advance Indian independence but demarcated Burma as a territory quite separate from British India, and its inclusion in India was an error.  

Coincidentally, this was the aftermath of the 1928 Depression. Before this, Burma was a melting pot of cultures. Its capital, Rangoon, one of the busiest commercial cities in Asia, was labelled the ‘Paris of the East’. It is said that in 1920, there were more traders in Burma than in New York. Rangoon port was an important harbour for the export of rice, teak and petroleum. Its banking services drew people from many regions. It was a multilingual and multicultural city, shaped by large-scale migration. People were heard speaking Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Marwari, Urdu, Chinese, English, and other languages. 

The turn of the economic tide and the disparity in economic status between the ethnic Burmese and the sojourners sparked a series of unrest. The Chettiars and Bengali houses and shops were targeted. Indians were systematically excluded from Burma, forcing rich traders to become refugees and make a beeline for India. This long march over the Patkai hills to India became a feature again as Japanese soldiers (and the Indian National Army under Bose) advanced during World War 2. The experiences of Mariappan, a Tamil shopkeeper who fled to Tamil Nadu to start anew in Burma because of his lowly caste, and had to run again because of Burmese nationalism, are heart-wrenching. Then there is Uttam Singh, who had to endure a treacherous long march home to Punjab across the hills. Losing everything, it was a miracle that he and his family made it in one piece. Little snippets like these are the real reasons this book grows on readers. 

Caught in the middle are the Naga people, whose land lies precariously between Burma and India. Although its leaders rallied for an independent Naga state, a fifth of the region fell under Burmese control. For decades to come, insurgency remained an issue. On April 1st 1937, Burma was carved out of British India, leaving many unanswered questions and triggering years of attempts to usurp power within Burma, followed by years of military rule and turmoil.

After its capture by the British East India Company, Aden was governed as part of the Bombay Presidency. It was an important coal station for ships. The administrators regarded Arabs as fundamentally different from Indians. To increase efficiency, the British decided in 1937 to rule the port of Aden as a British colony and its hinterland as a protectorate, much to the dismay of many in the Indian community there. The rise of Arab nationalism that followed, with the emergence of dynamic leaders such as Gamal Nasser of Egypt, who promoted Arab patriotism, meant the former Arabian Raj kingdom would no longer be associated with Indians. Indians, once regarded as cultured and civilised, were soon viewed as competitors. By the late 1950s, a reverse exodus began. Indians with deep roots in these Arab lands, including property, businesses, and connections, had to flee helter-skelter back to India and the UK. The Ambanis were one such family affected by this. 

Although Jinnah initially joined the Indian National Congress, his affiliation with the Muslim League grew stronger as he felt that Gandhi was leading the party and the nation towards a more Hindu-centric direction. The way the Congress conducted its meetings was as if they were at a religious ceremony, with chanting of mantras and singing of religious hymns. Muslims began to question how they would be treated in an independent India with Congress at the helm of power. Even though Jinnah appeared as an icon of Hindu-Muslim unity, later events propelled him and other Muslims to push for a two-state solution for post-independent India. 

In a way, as Gandhi promoted his Hindu agenda, the Burmese, with their Buddhist practice, also increasingly felt more detached from India, further fuelling Burmese nationalism.  

The post-WW2 era saw many changes in India. Britain was in debt, and the push for independence and a separate nation for Muslims was in full force. The third Partition was about to take place, but it was preceded by mindless killings and violence in the areas destined to be part of Pakistan. The Bengal region witnessed brutality on Direct Action Day, led by Suhrawardy and his acolyte, Mujibur Rahman, who would later be instrumental in the formation of Bangladesh. Things were no better in Punjab. The confusion created by Radcliffe’s arbitrary carving of the country left people unsure which country they belonged to, even one month after the ‘tryst with destiny’ speech.

There was then a scramble to recruit the 550-plus princely states to join Pakistan or India, or to stand alone. This was the 4th Partition. Recruitment reached feverish heights in states such as Junagadh, Kashmir, and Hyderabad. Junagadh housed two sacred Hindu sites, Dwarka and Somnath, but was ruled by a Muslim Nawab. Kashmir had a Hindu king, but his subjects were predominantly Muslims. The situation was reversed in Hyderabad.

The shattered subcontinent of India has been in constant flux even after attaining self-rule. It has to deal with internal squabbles and hostile neighbours. The situation becomes complicated as the world divides itself into the blue corner of capitalism and the red corner of communism. Marxism and Maoist ideology spread across its states, creating skirmishes here and there.

Pakistan, too, had its own problems. The insistence on using Urdu as the national language was not taken lightly by the Bengali-speaking East Pakistanis. The discord reached a tipping point in 1971, when the Bengali Awami League won the Pakistani elections. Civil war broke out when West Pakistani leaders refused to accept the election results. India sent in its troops to squash West Pakistan’s army and effectively completed the Fifth Partition, the creation of the country of Bangladesh.

The recurring theme throughout the book is that people continue to help one another, regardless of the day’s political climate. Despite ideological differences, people help people. The book highlights numerous heart-stirring accounts of the extraordinary resilience and compassion of everyday people. These ‘unity in diversity’ stories emerge from small acts of kindness that transcend religious, social, and economic boundaries.

It remains to be debated by future historians whether the colonial masters can be blamed for shattering the land that spanned the Arabian Gulf to Southeast Asia. Given the insatiable appetite of human greed for land, wealth and power, are these sequelae inevitable anyway? 

[1]  https://samdalrymple.com/project-dastaan

[2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Simon-Commission

Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.

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Categories
Review

The Tree Within: Octavio Paz in India

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: The Tree Within: The Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz’s Years in India

Author: Indranil Chakravarty

Publisher: Penguin Random House India

‘For me, India was an accident.’ – Octavio Paz

The Mexican Nobel laureate poet and essayist Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was a writer of lightening insights and electric intelligence. His impassioned poetry is meditative, with a precision of language that is imbued with a strangely sensuous quality. In fact, language and poetry per se were some of his key thematic concerns. The announcement on the cover of this book states that The Tree Within is the enchanting story of Octavio Paz’s passionate love-affair with India where he served as Mexico’s ambassador in the 1960s but reading through this very detailed 518 pages well-researched biography of the Nobel Laureate poet one realises that it is a lot more.

Immersing himself in India’s rich cultural life and contemplative traditions, Paz travelled widely, forged deep friendships with some of India’s finest minds, and produced several of his most inspired poetry and essays. It was here that he met the love of his life and until the day he died, he continued to refer to India as the place where he experienced what he called his ‘second birth’. It is difficult to find similar cases in our history when a major creative figure from abroad drew inspiration from India’s culture for one’s own works over such an extended period. His writings became a bridge between continents, blending Eastern and Western sensibilities in ways that enriched the literary landscapes of both. In India, where the erotic and the sacred blend in ecstatic union – unlike in the West, where the two are scrupulously kept apart – he saw the possibility of a new synthesis through the dissolution of dualities. Interestingly, Mexico belongs to the western hemisphere but is generally considered non-West, like India. Blending biography, cultural history, and literary criticism, The Tree Within is a luminous testament to the enduring alchemy between India and the world through one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

The book is divided into ten stand-alone chapters, and one can move to the topic of one’s choice. The first two chapters entitled ‘Family and Nation’ (1914-36) and ‘Paz Before India’ (1936-1951) serve as the background of Paz’s lineage, his growing up, and his passionate engagement with India can be understood in terms of the seeds planted early in his life through his family as well as the national cultural ambience where the idea of India was inscribed. All of them played a role in reinforcing his attraction towards the country. Unlike T.S.Eliot, Paz became politically active from an early age, with an initial inclination towards anarchism and Marxism and a subsequent rejection of Communism. He witnessed the Spanish Civil War firsthand, and he also had a close relationship with the surrealists in France.

It is only in the third chapter, ‘The First Sojourn’ (1951-52), that India is physically present when in 1951 Paz, then 37-years old, was assigned the task of opening a new embassy in New Delhi. It recounts his long sea-journey to India and his experiences and poetic output during that brief period of six months. To some extent, he externalised his inner unhappiness on India during his first trip. India of that time had little to offer him by way of intellectual excitement or fulfilling companionship. Things were in disarray when under Nehru as the new nation-state had just been born a few years ago. In New Delhi, Paz stayed at the Imperial Hotel, which became his residence during his entire stay. He also carried a lot of baggage in terms of Western cultural prejudices towards India. India not only smothered his senses; the grinding poverty and rigid mores of life left him disgusted.

In Chapter Four, ‘Paz and Satish Gujral: In Light of Mexico’ describes the personal friendship between Paz and Satish Gujral, one of India’s leading painters and how Paz shaped his development as an artist by inserting Gujral among the maestros of the Mexican mural movement. In fact, the influence of the Mexican mural movement on modern Indian art through Gujral would not have been possible without Octavio Paz’s decision to send him to Mexico. The meeting with Nehru and Indira Gandhi through Satish’s brother I.K. Gujral also offers interesting information. The following chapter, ‘Coming Home, Going Away’ (1953 -62) traces Paz’s life and creative evolution from the time he left India to the time he was sent to India as Mexico’s ambassador in 1962. This ten-year period between his first sojourn in India in 1952 and his return as the Mexican ambassador in 1962 involved many defining moments in his personal and professional life which shaped his creative evolution as a writer. The extent to which he had already immersed himself in Indian philosophy is evident from the ways he assimilated his experiences and insights of his first stay in the writings of the next decade even when their themes had little to do with India.

‘Making Poetry, Making Love’ (1962 -68) is an account of Paz’s travels through the Indian subcontinent (he was given additional charge of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Ceylon), his relationship with Bona Tibertelli with whom he spent an idyllic vacation across the Indian subcontinent, his unhappy marriage with Elena Garro, his meeting and eventual marriage with his second wife, Marie-Jose Tramini, and the poetry that grew out of that amorous experience – all find ample space in this chapter. The way in which their love affair unfolded is wrapped in secrecy. It is also said that he developed some unsavoury practices for a man of his position. Nevertheless, it was the most bountiful period of an unimaginably productive life.

Chapter Seven named, ‘The Poet as Diplomat (962-68), recounts his role as a diplomat and his pioneering bridge-building efforts. His life stands as a shining example of how the advantages of diplomatic life can be used for maximizing literary output. The title of the next chapter ‘Paz’s Indian Friends: Surrounded by Infinity’ is self-explanatory. It recounts Paz’s close personal friendships with major Indian painters, musicians, writers and thinkers. We are given details of the close relationship with Indira Gandhi, and Paz throws interesting light on Indira by contrasting her with Nehru: “Indira was concrete and sober. She never forgot the old maxim that politics was the art of the possible…”  

Among the literary figures, mention is made of Santha Rama Rau, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Satchidananda H. Vatsyayan, and many others. The story of Paz’s dramatic resignation in October 1968 over his own government’s massacre of students at the Plaza de Tlateloco is explained by the author through studying archival documents. The next chapter ‘Under Western Eyes: Visiting Writers and Artists’ tells the story of famous international writers, musicians and painters who met Paz  in India and forged lifelong bonds and collaborations based on their common love for India.

The final chapter ‘Paz After India’ (1968 -98), traces the continued presence of India-related themes in Paz’s body of work, particularly his prose, ever since his departure from the country. Leaving India was not easy for Paz and Marie-Jose. Over the next three years, he would drift around the world, accepting fellowships, residencies and lecture assignments. Though Indian themes gradually faded out of his poetry, in prose it continued to engage him till his last days, thirty years after leaving India.  Even in old age, Paz continued to maintain epistolary contact with his Indian friends and welcomed distinguished Indian visitors to Mexico with his characteristic Latin American warmth. ‘Cantata’ tells the knotty story of Paz’s legacy in Mexico and how India has periodically remembered him, one as late as February 2023, at a large international conference held in IIC[1], New Delhi, on the cultural links between India and Latin America. There was unanimity in the acknowledgement that the Mexican poet had created a permanent, direct bridge between India and Latin America that no state-led enterprise could have done.

Before concluding, a few words need to be said about the author of this book. An academic and a filmmaker by profession, Indranil Chakravarty’s interest in Hispanic literature and culture comes out clearly through the translations he made of Paz’s poems. His enormous labour to bring out this volume comes out in the manner he reconstructs the inner journey of the poet by delving into multilingual archives, declassified diplomatic files, personal letters, and intimate interviews. The labour that has gone into selecting the innumerable photographs that don almost every page of the book, many borrowed from the website zonaoctaviopaz.com (an ongoing repository of photographic and news material on Paz put together by a group of Mexican scholars) clearly exemplifies the author’s emphasis on visual imagery too. In Acknowledgements, he clearly mentions that he has merely tried to fill up the missing information on the poet’s India-years. He entirely agrees with Ramchandra Guha’s contention that an autobiography or memoir must be understood as a pre-emptive strike against a future biographer. The poet’s memoir of India elides most of the aspects that are interesting to us today.

[1] India International Centre

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

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Categories
Slices from Life

Technology War in the House

By Chetan Datta Poduri

From Public Domain

The other day I had a tough time explaining mobile telephony and its advancements to my dad who’s around 85 years old. Both of us are highly educated. Neither of us knew modern technology well. Nevertheless, me being a self-taught-geek-or-engineer-or-technologist-of-sorts keep explaining the advancements in technology at regular intervals to my father.

My father, 85, is still actively practicing in a nearby trust hospital. He retired from government service almost two decades ago. Ever since he has been actively consulting patients in local private hospitals. He always says that keeping oneself active (physically or professionally) is more than sufficient to keep ourselves healthy.

“No exercises needed”, he would say whenever someone asked him, and would add, “there isn’t any beach or a lake resort in the arid Hyderabad to sit back and relax. So, the patients give me some avocation to pass my time”.

I must also confess that my father has been using hearing aids in both the ears since he was 50 years old, and amnesia slowly started getting the better of him four years ago…

*

Six years ago, another problem cropped up…

In December 2019, as you all know this planet was plagued by the COVID-19 pandemic. Amidst this hullabaloo, China made a small significant technological advancement – China silently unrolled 5G mobile telephony[1] in Wuhan.

As March 2020 neared, Indian government announced harsh restrictions, prominent amongst them are the lockdowns. To complicate the matters, my dad’s patients desperately needed to consult him for whatever…

… So, literally imprisoned at home my father embarked on video consultations to patients through WhatsApp. That represented the flashpoint between my dad and me.

Dad started complaining that his video conferences were not working properly.

The self-taught engineer in me explained that for proper video streaming and conferencing the mobile handset needs to have certain amount of memory in its RAM and storage all of which must be compatible with the ‘xG’ mobile telephony the government or service provider is offering (where ‘x’ represents a whole number like 2, 3, 4 or 5 and in near future can be 6 also). Like a true technocrat, I explained all the technology I knew with appropriate diagrams and flow-charts.

“What’s this RAM and storage?” asked my dad

“Well, I think RAM means Random Access Memory…”, I quipped peering through the edge of my glasses.

“What’s with the storage?”

“Well, everything your mobile handset receives, be it SMS or any other notifications or photographs you click with your mobile camera, it needs to keep somewhere. It needs a filing cabinet. That is called storage. If your handset has something called an SD card, it is external storage while every handset is sold initially with some storage called ‘internal storage’…”

“So … how much area does this storage take”

I casually replied, “Usually it is measured in GBs (giga bytes) … Your handset, I guess is some 16 GB or so… Mine’s about 32 GB…”

It’s been six years since we have had this discussion. The then government complicated the situation in our house by announcing that in another six months it will roll out 5G services in India to compete with Chinese …

“Ok! That’s alright but why are my phone calls not up to the mark. What does it have to do with storage? I understand if it is missing SMS, photos, storing and retrieving videos, etc… But why is the voice of the caller invariably broken or videos not clear?”

“Well, you might be using a 3G handset. Presently, the service providers are offering 4G+ services. Maybe you need to change your handset”

“Do I look like a fool? On one hand you are saying my phone is 16 G and on the other hand you are saying that government is offering only 4G services. Are you trying to ridicule me?”

Dumbstruck I tried to convince my dad. “Daddy, telephony G is different from storage GB … G of telephony means Generation and GB is giga bytes… 4G is different from 16 GB”.

“I know… I know… If government is offering only 4G and I have a 16 G handset, and there are two SIM cards in my handset 4G multiplied 4G is 16 G… then why is my handset not working properly?”, dad said angrily.

As an adolescent, I always felt that my father was very poor in mathematics and that’s perhaps why he asked me to opt for Biology stream in college. Had I known then that he knew how to square 4, I would’ve opted for mathematics stream giving many-a-CEOs a good run for their money…

“No!” I yelled, “the G in xG is different from GB”

“Now… Now… Now… My hearing aids are working properly… no need to shout… unnecessarily you’ll be disturbing the neighbours… Tell me, if my handset is 16 G why is it not working in 4G technology?”

I tried to pacify myself, “guess he has a hearing problem with letter ‘B’…”

“This G is not the same as that GB… Both are different…,” I said at the top of my voice

“Ok… But how to solve the problem?”

“Change your handset to something that can support 4G services…”

“But it is lockdown now… So… what’s the alternative?”

“The only alternative is to wait till they relax the lockdown and buy a new one until then endure the faulty video and audio calls… No other way out…”

*

Twenty years ago, in 2002, I bought my first mobile handset – a Nokia 3100 for about Rs3000. I was in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh then. There was a delayed roll-out of mobile telephony in North-western India and Kashmir regions of India for obvious reasons of them being very next to enemy nations, China and Pakistan. It was 2G technology then. Subsequently, a number of cheap Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese and Korean mobile handsets invaded India.

Back in 1991 CE, when India liberalised its economy, India was invaded by a number of international products in all spheres of life. Many Chinese and other Asian national companies also released their wares. This gave the average Indian at least four options.

The first option of buying highly priced superior quality original products from the Western Countries. The second option is that of the cheap lookalikes mostly from oriental countries like China, Taiwan, Vietnam and Korea. These were commonly referred to as duplicates. A third reasonable and genuine option was also offered by the liberalised Indian market – the Japanese products. These Japanese products, particularly the watches and calculators, were diametrically different from either the Western or the Oriental country products. They were priced somewhere in between and offered technology products with graceful designs. No matter what happens, these Japanese goods exceed your expectations. The fourth option was the local Indian products. These were rather crude in their design, usually low in quality and may or may not work testing your luck.

Chinese products, the duplicates, looked more American than the American products themselves but with Mandarin notations. From a distance it is difficult to say which is which. The most popular example in this direction was the copy of popular Batteries. Street vendors used to dispense American lookalike batteries for Rs5 while the original western would cost Rs95. Among the Indian products that stood the test of time were mostly food and dairy items and some watches/clocks.

This period of 90s in India paralleled the European Union’s efforts to revive the defunct industries that were bombed out in World War II. Also, around this time domestic airlines pampered the passengers by giving cheap watches as gifts and souvenirs. Net result: both my father and me developed a passion for collecting watches. My father’s patients would gift him cheap Chinese or so-called duplicates of the popular European watches. While he still collects these cheap watches, I, in due course, fizzled out. Of course, as of today, the pace at which the companies release newer designs outran our passion.

Mobile handsets, particularly the cheap ones that flooded the Indian market, fuelled our passion to collect handsets. So, now both of us have an additional avocation of changing mobile handsets as frequently as possible. Since in 2002 I was in Shimla and my dad was in Hyderabad, it became an unwritten rule between both of us that we appear with a different mobile handset every time we met. This passion continued for about a decade till 2012. By this time, I covered two cities – Shimla and Guwahati in Northeastern state of Assam. My father having retired from active government service lived (and continues to live in, touch wood) in Hyderabad which is in the south Indian state of Telangana.

A neighbourhood mobile vendor used to supply my father with cheap mobile handsets. For some unknown reason he used to call my father ‘Uncle’ and me as ‘Sir’. So, my mother and me used to pull my dad’s legs by calling the mobile vendor as his nephew.

As per our passion, we regularly changed our mobile phones. This continued till sometime… literally till 2018… when the 4G services were launched. Around this time the mobile ‘nephew’ of my father stopped supplying newer versions of handsets to my father.

But when he supplied mobile handsets to my father, he also used to do an additional service to my father: every time my father changed his handset, the mobile ‘nephew’ would somehow do a data transfer from the older handset to the new one. This I call an additional service because my father, as I mentioned earlier, uses hearing aids. So, the mobile handset must also be connected to the hearing aid through Bluetooth or other reliable technology. This is followed by a calibration of the hearing aid with the audiologist. All this took at least 2 – 3 days and multiple visits to both the mobile vendor and the audiologist. The mobile ‘nephew’ was very enthusiastic and never complained about any inconvenience. Other mobile shop owners would bluntly ask my father to get the calibration done elsewhere or with the service centre present at the other end of the city.

In one of the exchanges of mobiles, the data could not be properly transferred.

*

In June 2020, I guess, the government relaxed the lockdowns for the first time. Promptly, my father headed to a neighbourhood mobile phone shop and bought a 4G handset as per my recommendation. To my surprise, my father did not go to his mobile ‘nephew’. He went to a high-end mobile shop. My father this time bought an advanced model of a popular company’s handset.

After a day or two, and more video conferences later, my father expressed happiness and thanked me saying that for the first time in his life I gave a correct advice.

But now he needed something from the earlier unfinished data transfer. He wanted the data in the older mobile handset into the new handset. I took both the handsets to the new vendor and requested him to do the transfer. He gave a polished glib talk giving me the impression that the earlier handset is a cheap model from which it is better not to transfer the data. Crestfallen, I dragged myself to my-father’s-mobile-nephew and asked him to do the needful. The nephew told me that he failed to get permission for 4G and 5G so he’s at a loss as to help me.

“…that”, the nephew told me then, “is also the reason why your father no longer procures his mobiles from me”.

*

Two years of COVID restrictions rolled on somehow. For more than a year and a half every Indian was literally imprisoned in their respective homes due to the on-going pandemic.

The technology argument resurfaced between me and my father once again.

Dad said, “…again the problem of poor-quality video and audio…”

“Ah! Our service provider has now upgraded to 5G+ …Your handset is 4G… Change your handset…”

“Hmm… you mean there’s no problem with the handset?”

“Yeah! There’s no problem with the handset. It is just outdated. It is no longer compatible with the existing technology“, I quipped.

“What do you mean?“

I played the cards differently this time.

“We are three people in this house now. How comfortable will it be if suddenly there are 15 people in this house now?”

“If you talk like that, a greater number of people can be made to adjust in the house…”

“But what if everyday 15 people keep coming into the house without vacating?”

“Ah! Then that will be a problem…”

“Ditto for your handset… It is receiving more information from the network than it can handle…”

“The Apps are also freezing occasionally…”

“Same logic… they are receiving more information and upgrading themselves to the new technology… time to change your handset…”

“How much will a basic handset that works will cost me?”

“The one that is compatible will cost you around Rs15,000. The one that is also compatible with your hearing aids will be at the least Rs 20,000.”

Well, since my childhood, I always kept myself updated on the prices of the latest in market whether I need those items or not. Wishful thinking, I guess.

“If this is the case then, every year or two even if there is no malfunction, I am forced to change my handset. This is very bad…”

“That’s the flip side of the technological advancement… Whether you like it or not… Whether there’s a malfunction or not, we are forced to change our products leading to huge amounts of pollution…”

“Very bad state of affairs. Think about the laptops then. Unnecessarily we are shelling out truckloads of money just to keep us abreast of the technology…”

“Very bad state of affairs… the technology developers think everybody is a billionaire and everybody’s a computer geek…”

*

Thanks to our passions, every year, me and my dad each spend at least Rs8000 just for the batteries so that our watches are in working condition. The other day, I took an Indian watch of mine for servicing which I bought in 2001 with the first salary I received after my PhD. I bought it for Rs400 then.

The servicing personnel cooed, “Is this watch still working?”

Nostalgically, I asked, “What’s the price of this model now?”

“This model is no longer produced Sir…”

If this episode makes me misty-eyed, my Japanese watch always gives me goosepimples.

In 2010, I found a display board in a watch shop in the Fancy Bazaar of Guwahati that read, “Japanese – EcoFriendly watches”. I walked into the shop and bought the watch for about two thousand bucks. The manual said, “10-year Battery Life”. Believe it or not, it lasted 15 years and this is the only watch which did not give me an opportunity to change its battery.

Good and Honest things in life must be appreciated at the first opportunity.

[1] Telephony is the technology involving telephones for communication (audio or video), and data exchange between distant parties

Categories
Poetry

The Sun by Mahnoor Shaheen

Mahnoor Shaheen
He cradled the Sun on his back,
ripe with lost songs, nestled to attack.
It was an old tune he kept harkening, 
an old anthem he kept murmuring. 

It was a poem burning him inside,
yet it was the one thing keeping him alive.

“Why must you carry this weight, this burden, this light?” they asked.
It’s the only thing binding me, he said.
Was it a song, a boulder, a passion or a tune he had to keep dragging upright?
Was it a pen bleeding out his insides?

Wasn’t he the only one who could hear, sing about the Sun’s symphony?
Wasn’t he the only one who could speak her name
and yet, he could never see the red blisters on his hands, knuckles and ribs?

He would tell you the Sun gives him light 
when all he could feel was burning.

Mahnoor Shaheen is a poet and academic based in Lahore, Pakistan. Her work explores the artist’s relationship with poetry, mythology and memory.

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Categories
Poetry

Poetry by Malaika Rai

Malaika Rai 
BHERA STOP 

My winters are steeped in grey, 
My streets are silent, with nothing to say. 
My arms, as they wander and restlessly twine, 
Wait constantly for yours to be tangled with mine.

Every branch in my neighbourhood asks of you.
You’re my Sun in the morning, my evening star. 
My blossoms, my roses, they thirst for your grace, 
Seeking the light of your Spring face.

Even in wings that are severed and shorn, 
The echo of your name is the cry that is born. 
This city I walk in, this life I call mine, 
Is nothing but a shroud wrapped around me, a funeral sign.

If you ever return, I would have you know: 
Our cities aren't distant, the maps do not show. 
The tragedy is, in the lives we have spun, 
People share the same house, but meet with no one.


Malaika Rai is a poet and Clinical Psychologist from Lahore, Pakistan. Her visceral work explores themes of anatomy and resistance, and has been featured in multiple magazines. 

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Categories
Poetry

Innocence by Manahil Tahir

INNOCENCE 

Torn clothes, rough hair, a burn scar—
I wonder where she is.

Maybe adopted by a safe land,
still afraid of the dark, the smoke,
and a voice too high.

Lying with hollow eyes,
staring at the starry sky—
I wonder where she is.

Maybe in a refugee haven,
still starving to feed one younger than her.

Alongside a graveyard of dreams and desires…
I wonder where she is.

In a wrecked shelter once called home—
not warm enough to battle the cold inside.

You may wonder why I am so optimistic.

Because—

I was her doll, and she was mine.
There is no mortality in Doll Land
From Public Domain

Manahil Tahir  is an MBBS student from Pakistan whose writing explores memory, conflict, and quiet resilience at the intersection of humanity and psychology.

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Categories
Review

The Lost Pendant

Book Review by Udita Banerjee

Title: The Lost Pendant

Editor: Angshuman Kar

Publisher: Hawakal Publishers

The Lost Pendant brings together poems translated from Bengali by translators such as Himalaya Jana, Mandakranta Sen, Rajorshi Patronobish, Sanjukta Dasgupta, Angshuman Kar, and Souva Chattopadhyay. Through these compelling translations, the volume makes a significant intervention in Partition literature, arriving at a moment when revisiting the lingering spectres of the event has become especially urgent. The Partition of India in 1947, which divided the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, resulted in one of the largest mass migrations in history and left enduring scars of displacement, violence, and fractured identities. As the editor, writer and academic, Angshuman Kar, notes in the book’s introduction how Partition remains a 78-year-old wound that continues to bleed.

The anthology showcases poetry from the eastern parts of the subcontinent, chiefly Bengal, Assam, and Bangladesh, featuring works by 41 poets from India and Bangladesh. Kar does not simply compile these poems but thoughtfully curates them to reveal several critical nuances. He invokes the concept of “buoyant memory,” introduced in his earlier work, Divided: Partition Memoirs from Two Bengals, to depict how “forgetting the past is impossible for the direct victims of Partition.” He also draws attention to the disproportionate representation of upper-caste Hindu Bengali poets, in contrast to the relative invisibility of Muslims and those from marginalised communities. This imbalance extends to gender as well, with a noticeable disparity between male and female poets in the collection.

The book is structured in two parts, respectively featuring poets from India and Bangladesh. The Indian section is notably larger and presents a wide range of emotions, reflecting both the immediate trauma of Partition and its long-lasting reverberations over the years. Many of the poems in this section express a deep nostalgia for a lost homeland. For instance, Alokeranjan Dasgupta’s ‘Exile’ evokes memories of abandoned spaces. Similarly, Ananda Sankar Rai’s ‘The Far Side’ laments the estrangement from what was once familiar. He writes, “Once it was a province, now an alien land / where you must enter passport in hand.” Basudeb Deb’s ‘Picture of My Father’ constructs a powerful portrait of the nation through the figure of the father: “Swadeshi movement war sirens famine flood / Riot and partition written in the wrinkles on his forehead.” After the father’s death, only a walking stick remains. The poem draws a powerful parallel between the futility of the father’s dismissive words, “This country is not a pumpkin that you can cut it in one blow”, and the uselessness of the walking stick after his passing. This object comes to embody the spirit of the deceased father, “just another old toy”, offering a stark commentary on how individuals became pawns in the hands of the state.

Several poets in the anthology focus intensely on the experiences of refugees, capturing both their suffering and the complexities of their identities. In ‘The Refugee Mystery’, Binoy Majumdar laments the loss of linguistic roots, noting how “the Bangals now speak the dialect of Kolkata all the time, having forgotten the dialects of Barishal and Faridpur / The Moslems of Dhaka are heard singing and speaking in the radio with the lilt of Uluberia.” His reflections emphasise the deep connection between language and social identity. This theme finds a resonance in Sunil Gangopadhyay’s poem ‘That Day’, where he writes, “On one side they named the waters Pani / on the other side–Jol.” Through this simple yet evocative contrast, Gangopadhyay underscores how a shared concept can be articulated through divergent linguistic expressions in India and Bangladesh, which become subtle yet potent markers of socio-linguistic divisions. Such poems provoke profound questions: Can the adoption of a new dialect truly redefine one’s identity? How does one navigate the tension between past and present linguistic selves, and is reconciliation even possible?

Viewed through the intertwined lenses of faith and suffering, poetry often functions as a repository of collective memory and a means of resilience. In this regard, Devdas Acharya’s three poems present a poignant exploration of the lived experiences of refugees in post-Partition India. A recurring and haunting image emerges in his work: a grieving father, who has recently lost a child to hunger, standing before a deity symbolically embodied by a swadeshi leader. This image encapsulates both the profound deprivation endured by displaced communities and their simultaneous reliance on unshaken faith. Despite the magnitude of loss, what sustained many refugees was a deeply rooted belief system that imbued their suffering with meaning.

By foregrounding the gendered dimensions of violence, Partition poetry exposes how women’s bodies became contested sites of power and trauma. In “She, on the Platform of a Station”, Krishna Dhar powerfully captures the plight of women during Partition. She writes, “Chased from the other side of the border, escaping fire and the fangs and tongues of wolves, one day she arrived,” evoking the image of a refugee woman doubly marginalised– “devastated by Partition” and simultaneously “dodging the eyes of the hyenas.” Here, the metaphorical wolves and hyenas represent predatory men who treated women’s bodies as extensions of territorial conquest. Kar points out in the introduction that very few women wrote poetry about their Partition experiences, largely because they were already engaged in the broader struggle for gender equality. While women’s memoirs on Partition exist, poetry by women addressing these themes, particularly from the 1970s, is strikingly limited. This absence is significant, as women’s experiences are crucial to understanding how deeply gendered the space of the subcontinent was during and after Partition.

Following independence, conflicts often emerged within the nation, revolving around issues of region, language, religion, and ethnicity. In ‘The Diary of a Refugee’, Shaktipada Brahmachari reflects on his sense of belonging across borders, juxtaposing his memories of a past home in Bengal with his present life in Assam. He writes, “The world is my home now, in Bangla my love I spell–Prafulla and Vrigu are the cousins of my heart,” referencing two leaders of the Asom Gana Parishad. While refugees in Assam experienced a more complex form of marginalisation due to ethno-linguistic differences, Brahmachari portrays a gradual process of acceptance, where both the homeland he left and the land he adopted come to hold emotional significance.

Across the border in Bangladesh, the theme of displacement persists. In “Leaving Home”, Jasimuddin asserts, “this land is for Hindus and Muslims,” calling on educators to return and “build the broken schools once more…we will find out our beloved brother, whom I lost,” a poignant appeal for reconciliation and return of Hindu families displaced by Partition. The motifs of memory and loss recur throughout most of these poems, a trope common between both the nations. This sense of finality is further echoed in Binod Bera’s lament: “Our nation is now three, all three are independent, and love lives an alien existence.” The emotional chasm created by Partition, and the subsequent loss of mutual affection, renders any notion of return futile.

The collection deserves commendation for its ambitious effort to recover voices from Bengali literature and render them accessible to a global readership beyond linguistic boundaries, through gripping translations. It is the first-ever translated collection of Bengali Partition poetry that captures the angst of the original poems with perfect nuance. The very title, The Lost Pendant, merits particular attention, for it resonates with themes of liminality and the fractured sense of identity experienced by the refugee poet Nirmalyo Bhushan Bhattacharya, better known by his pseudonym, Majnu Mostafa. Born in Khulna, Bangladesh, yet spending much of his life in Krishnanagar, India, Bhattacharya embodies the dislocation and dual belonging of Partition’s afterlives. As Kar insightfully observes, the choice of pseudonym can be read as a deliberate act of defiance, “a strategy to cross the boundaries set up by religious politics and fundamentalism–a move much needed in the subcontinent of our times.” In this sense, The Lost Pendant is not merely an anthology but a work of cultural recuperation as it attempts to resurrect poets whose voices risked erasure, while simultaneously protecting their oeuvres from the twin threats of historical amnesia and linguistic inaccessibility.

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Udita Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of English at VIT-AP University. Her work has previously been published in platforms such as Outlook Weekender, Borderless Journal, Indian Review, and Poems India.

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Categories
Stories

A Lump Stuck in the Throat

Nasir Rahim Sohrabi

A Balochi short story by Nasir Rahim Sohrabi translated by Fazal Baloch

The bus had stopped in front of the roadside hotel, but the dust from the road still hung around it. The passengers, before getting off completely, were busy brushing the dust off the from their travel. The fatigue caused by the delipidated road was visible on their faces and in the creases of their clothes. I had been following the bus and was now sitting under the thatched shelter, drinking tea from a small boy’s cup. The sun was at its peak, glaring down like an angry man. The grime from the boy’s hands on the hot teacup had not yet dried when a red ambulance pulled up in front of the hotel. The dirt and dust stuck to it showed clearly that it had travelled a long way. Two men got out, dusted their clothes, and walked straight toward the water to wash their faces and hands.

The hotel waiter watched them closely. Then the back door of the ambulance opened and their third companion stepped out. His shoulders seemed burdened with many years, and he walked forward with heavy steps until he reached the shade of the shelter. He greeted everyone, and sat down leaning against a wooden pillar. A glass of water was placed before him, but he didn’t touch it. His eyes remained fixed on the ambulance, from which dust continued to rise as though it were still on the road.

After a while, the other two men joined him. Their faces were clean now, but the dust still clung to their ears, eyes, and nostrils. They ordered food. To their third companion they said only, “Come, let’s eat.” But he kept looking at the ambulance fixedly. They didn’t ask him again.

The young boy who had been watching him from a distance placed my tea before me and went toward the man. He touched his shoulder and asked,
“Why aren’t you eating?”

The man was startled as if waking from a deep sleep. His gaze shifted from the ambulance to the boy’s face. He looked at him the way someone, seeing the world for the first time after eye surgery.

“I can never eat alone,” he said. “Food never sits well with me unless someone eats with me. Will you sit here with me?”

The boy nodded.

Offering him the first bite, the man said, “I’ve always fed him the first bite. Until I fed him, he wouldn’t eat at all.”

“Who was he?” the boy asked.

The question seemed to trouble him. His teeth tried to chew the morsel while his eyes stayed fixed on the boy’s face. I saw clouds of dust gather in his eyes, and their darkness spread over his face. Pain began to pour like rain. Lakes of grief rose within him. His breath grew heavy. At last, composing himself, he said: “He was my son. But he had taken my father’s place in my life. When he was a child, I fed him. But over time, I became used to eating the bites he offered me. His mother left him and me long ago. She went away with those who were demanding water and electricity along with the young, the old, and the children. I pleaded with her not to go, but she didn’t listen. She left and never returned. At first, people wrote poems about her. But now, people have too much water in their eyes and too much brightness from electricity in their homes. Now they’re concerned only with their own reflection. She once lived in people’s memories, but the world has forgotten her now.”

After a pause, his eyes drifted again toward the ambulance, though the rain inside him didn’t stop.

“He was in a hurry too, just like his mother. He was always in a rush for everything. He would run to school and never delay returning home. He grew up before my eyes. One day he said to me, ‘Now you sit and rest. It’s my turn to look after you. I’ll feed you now.’ I insisted that my turn wasn’t over yet, but he was in a hurry and won the argument. Then he joined Captian Qasim’s boat as helmsman. But he didn’t stay there long. A year later he became a sailor on Ibrahim’s boat. He never hid anything from me, but after joining Ibrahim, I seldom knew when he left for the sea or when he came home. Whenever I asked, he only said, ‘Whenever the boss orders, we’re ready to go.’

This time too he was in a rush. The moment he came home, he said, ‘We’re leaving for the deep sea. We’ll be back in a few days.’ I wanted to stand up and hug him goodbye, but before I could rise, he had already stepped out the door. Then news came that their boat had caught fire. It didn’t sink, but it was badly burnt. Thanks to the boss, they sent us to Karachi by air. But maybe this time it was the order of the Great Boss. Or maybe the son was in a hurry to go to his mother. He didn’t stay in Karachi even for a day.”

The bus horn blared and the passengers hurried toward it. The boy got up too and began to put on his sandals.

“I haven’t even eaten yet,” the man said. “Where are you going?”

“Look, the bus is leaving. I have to hurry,” the boy replied.

The sun had now slipped behind the western mountains. The shelter had emptied. The red ambulance was gone too. But the old man still sat leaning against the wooden pillar, his eyes fixed on the road. The bus sped off, trailing dust behind it.

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Nasir Rahim Sohrabi lives in Gwadar, Balochistan. He occasionally writes short stories. This story originally appeared in Monthly Balochi, Quetta in year 2000 and translated and published with  permission from the author.

Fazal Baloch is a Balochi writer and translator. He has translated many Balochi poems and short stories into English. His translations have been featured in Pakistani Literature published by Pakistan Academy of Letters and in the form of books and anthologies. 

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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