No hard feelings for 400 yards but beyond that distance you can unleash all the fury in existence and even turn like a firm worm into an arrow of disaster shot from a bow by a vengeful archer.
Or if you prefer you can transform yourself into a doom-laden monster running faster than any athlete could and sniffing prey out when it hides in a wood with the assistance of a nose so persistent that nothing in existence can resist it.
No hard feelings means only soft thoughts are permissible in the same way that only easy tunes are whistleable to lips more familiar with quoting comfy quips than rugged ruminations.
Yes, whistleable is a real word, I checked it in a dictionary while I was cartwheeling up a garden path, something I tend to do just for the laugh it generally affords me later.
I once knew a waiter who jumped in alarm when I somersaulted across his restaurant floor after entering the front door on my way to my favourite table: he wasn’t able to control his nerves and the meal he was bearing ended up on the ceiling with people staring as it started to drip down.
No hard feelings! That’s the issue, the nose in the tissue, the reeling peeling squealing teasing of the kneeling devotee of long-gone Don Quixote, concealing his mirth to prove his ultimate worth while remaining appealing, freewheeling, even self-healing, and mercifully large of girth.
Now come and join me in the hard dance of softness and we will prance and caper like two wafers stuck in an ice-cream cone during a hurricane. At least we won’t be alone!
My acrobatic days are mostly over but every 400 yards or so I twist and turn as the hard feelings, hot from friction, burn my soul.
Meanwhile, Don Quixote’s dreamy head is spinning slowly like those festive windmill sails on sale at the end of the short Cervantes season.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Art by Sophia P, CypressArt by Hugo A, Quezon CityFrom Public Domain
In 1985, famous artistes, many of whom are no longer with us, collaborated on the song, We are the World, to raise funds to feed children during the Ethiopian famine (1983-85). The song was performed together by Michael Jackson, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Paul Simon, Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick, Lionel Richie, Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen. The producer, Julia Nottingham, said: “It’s a celebration of the power of creativity and the power of collective humanity.” The famine was attributed to ‘war and drought’.
Over the last few years, we have multiple wars creating hunger and drought caused by disruptions. Yet, the world watches and the atrocities continue to hurt common people, the majority who just want to live and let live, accept and act believing in the stories created by centuries of civilisation. As Yuval Noah Harari points out in a book written long before the current maladies set in, Homo Deus (2015), “…the stories are just tools. They should not become our goals or our yardsticks. When we forget that they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality. Then we begin entire wars ‘to make a lot of money for the corporation’ or ‘to protect the national interest’. Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; why do we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service?”
What Harari says had been said almost ninety years ago by a voice from another region, by a man who suffered but wrote beautiful poetry, Jibanananda Das… and here are his verses —
“The stories stored in my soul will eventually fade. New ones— New festivals—will replace the old — in life’s honey-tinged slight.”
We carry the poem in this issue translated by Professor Fakrul Alam, lines that makes one dream of a better future. These ideas resonate in modern Balochi poet Ali Jan Dad’s ‘Roll Up Not the Mat’ brought to us in English by Fazal Baloch. Korean poet Ihlwha Choi’s translation takes us to longing filled with nostalgic hope while Tagore’s ‘Probhat’ (Dawn) gives a glimpse of a younger multi-faceted visionary dwell on the wonders of a perfect morning imbibing a sense of harmony with nature.
“I feel blessed for this sky, so luminous. I feel blessed to be in love with the world.”
Starting a new year on notes of hope, of finding new dreams seems to be a way forward for humanity does need to evolve out of self-imposed boundaries and darknesses and move towards a new future with narratives and stories that should outlive the present, outlive the devastating impact of climate change and wars by swapping our old narratives for ones that will help us harmonise with the wonders we see around us… wonders created by non-human hands or nature.
We start this year with questions raised on the current world by many of our contributors. Professor Alam in his essay makes us wonder about the present as he cogitates during his morning walks. Niaz Zaman writes to us about a change maker who questioned and altered her part of the world almost a century ago, Begum Roquiah. Can we still make such changes in mindsets as did Roquiah? And yet again, Ratnottama Sengupta pays homage to a great artiste, filmmaker Shyam Benegal, who left us in December 2024 just after he touched 90. Other non-fictions include musings by Nusrat Jan Esa on human nature contextualising it with Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667); Farouk Gulsara’s account of a fire in Sri Lanka where he was visiting and Suzanne Kamata’s column from Japan on the latest Japanese Literary Festival in the Fukushimaya prefecture, the place where there was a nuclear blast in 2011. What is amazing is the way they have restored the prefecture in such a short time. Their capacity to bounce back is exemplary! Devraj Singh Kalsi shares a tongue-in-cheek musing about the compatibility of banks and writers.
Exploring more of life around us are stories by Sohana Manzoor set in an expat gathering; by Priyatham Swamy about a migrant woman from Nepal and by Naramsetti Umamaheswararao set against rural Andhra Pradesh. While Ahmad Rayees gives a poignant, touching story set in a Kashmiri orphanage, Paul Mirabile reflects on the resilience of a child in a distant Greek island. Mirabile’s stories are often a throwback to earlier times.
In this issue, our book excerpts explore a writer of yore too, one that lived almost a hundred years ago, S. Eardley-Wilmot (1852-1929), a conservationist and one who captures the majesty of nature, the awe and the wonder like Tagore or Jibanananda with his book, The Life of an Elephant. The other book takes us to contemporary Urdu writers but in Kolkata —Contemporary Urdu Stories from Kolkata, translated by Shams Afif Siddiqi and edited by Shams Afif Siddiqi and Fuzail Asar Siddiqi. A set of translated stories of the well-known Bengali writer, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay by Hiranmoy Lahiri, brought out in a book called Kaleidoscope of Life: Select Short Stories has been reviewed by Somdatta Mandal. Malashri Lal has discussed Basudhara Roy’s A Blur of a Woman. Roy herself has explored Afsar Mohammad’s Fasting Hymns. Bhaskar Parichha has taken us to Sri Lanka with a discussion on a book on Sri Lanka, Return to Sri Lanka: Travels in a Paradoxical Islandby an academic located in Singapore, Razeen Sally.
Bringing together varied voices from across the world and ages, one notices recurring themes raising concerns for human welfare and for the need to conserve our planet. To gain agency, it is necessary to have many voices rise in a paean to humanity and the natural world as they have in this start of the year issue.
I would like to thank all those who made this issue possible, our team and the contributors. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart. I cannot stop feeling grateful to Sohana Manzoor for her fabulous artwork too, art that blends in hope into the pages of Borderless Journal. As all our content has not been mentioned here, I invite you to pause by our content’s page to explore more of our exciting fare. Huge thanks to all readers for you make our journey worthwhile.
I would hope we can look forward to this year as being one that will have changes for the better for all humanity and the Earth… so that we still have our home a hundred years from now, even if it looks different.
Midnight tonight won’t be just any night. Midnight tonight will be just right for frights.
The shrivelled mummy lumbers his doom from the room in his tomb to the outer gloom, unwraps himself like god’s gift to ghouls.
Vampires and werewolves and men who are half bulls wander the maze of mythical days like fools stuck in a funhouse.
As for Faust, he summons the Devil in order to revel with beautiful girls, tumbling curls and long legs included.
Denuded of armour, the hasty knight swipes at the hungry dragon who finds him tasty after a lick but later the bones will make him sick. Heartburn!
Every day I learn something new about the terrors of specific midnights. Behind the funeral parlour curtain there is a monster certain to pull your head off if you draw back those drapes.
A witch doctor has arrived in town, a wizard in a gown made from toad skins: he is thin and radiates weird despair from the stare of his sorcerous spiral eyes.
Who among us dares ignore the wise words of scholarly mythographers who caution us to avoid minotaurs and men with paws and claws instead of normal hands?
There are ghosts who love to spread themselves thick on the toast of our sixth sense: we shudder inexplicably when, wickedly, they tickle us spookily right from the inside.
Now I want to talk about the cobwebbed bottles of black wine in the cellar where ape skeletons wear dresses decayed into tentacular nets, fibrous, phantasmagorical.
But let me pause for a moment to re-read what is written in these lines…
I think the knight and dragon in this poem are out of place among the entities of gothic nightmare elsewhere found here. On the face of things they bring down the eerie quotient, ground the horrors in whimsy.
The face of things? A hideous visage indeed connected to a grotesque head. And now I just need to repeat the first stanza and we can all go to bed.
Midnight tonight won’t be just any night. Midnight tonight will be just right for frights.
From Public Domain
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
An anonymous human once did a small, almost imperceptible, kindness to another anonymous human here. But it isn’t clear what that microscopic kindness was. All the details are missing and no amount of listening to the wind kissing my ears will give me any significant clues.
Maybe it was to make a dream come true? Some modest scheme such as a desire to swim in cream or perhaps the wish to read maps upside down without a frown?
I don’t know but now I’m thinking about those times when I did a little kindness for someone too. Let me give you just one domestic example:
She asked me to do the washing up and I did. I don’t want her to think I take but never give. So, I did the plates, the cutlery, pots and pans, and every cooking utensil piled up in the sink, but my fingers got stuck in the holes of a sieve.
Not convinced of my nobility? Then I ought to choose some other incident that will prove my sincerity and ability when it comes to minor moral actions. Are you ready for my confession? It teaches a valuable lesson, yes it does.
After the fiasco with the sieve I bought her a pair of slippers made from a new type of fabric as black as a frogman’s flippers and when I enquired what she thought of them the following day, this is what she had to say:
“My slippers are equally good at both walking and wallowing, and so silky and smooth they glide like the valiant cheeks of a greased rump on a slide. A wider rump than mine by far, my rump is of a reasonable size and has no excess of friction. This is not a fiction. Hurrah!”
By which I surmise she liked the surprise even though I never saw her wear them, but it’s the thought that counts. Therefore I must have an abacus somewhere inside my skull, preventing me from being dull.
And at night I help her fall asleep by disguising myself as an intruder who isn’t a creep, a mythic figure from old fairytales, and she smiles as I try to croon a soothing refrain:
“Sandman, when it rains do your grains get sticky? It must be awfully tricky to sprinkle sticky grains into the eyes of sleepers? And have you seen my new bed? It’s in the shape of a hippopotamus head.”
Well, that’s all the evidence I possess to address the issue of whether I am the very best or even just a runner-up at doing small, almost imperceptible, kindnesses. Maybe you can outdo me, brewing coffee or tea for grizzly bears in the depths of a beverage-less forest, or climbing ladders to rescue adders stuck up trees, and by ‘adders’ I don’t mean snakes but men with abacuses instead of brains, or do you prefer to shovel snow to clear those lanes that seem to grow across the hillsides in spring like tendrils, a peculiar thing?
In the meantime I am bedridden and that is why I remain hidden from society, as if I’m anonymous and consequently synonymous with that kind human, the subject of this poem. Why do you say ho hum? Do you doubt my anecdotes?
Nobody knows how I managed to get thimbles stuck on my toes overnight. I rose one morning to sniff a rose with my long nose but found I could no longer walk.
How do I feel about this? Just sew-sew, I guess. I have no need to talk about it further. Be kind even if you don’t have an abacus for a mind. That’s all. Farewell.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Art by Sohana ManzoorCourtesy: Suzanne Kamata Some of our visuals in 2024
As we wait for the new year to unfold, we glance back at the year that just swept past us. Here, gathered together are glimpses of the writings we found on our pages in 2024 that herald a world of compassion and kindness…writings filled with hope and, dare I say, even goodwill…and sometimes filled with the tears of poetic souls who hope for a world in peace and harmony. Disasters caused by humans starting with the January 2024 in Japan, nature and climate change, essays that invite you to recall the past with a hope to learn from it, non-fiction that is just fun or a tribute to ideas, both past and present — it’s all there. Innovative genres started by writers to meet the needs of the times — be it solar punk or weird western — give a sense of movement towards the new. What we do see in these writings is resilience which healed us out of multiple issues and will continue to help us move towards a better future.
A hundred years ago, we did not have the technology to share our views and writings, to connect and make friends with the like-minded across continents. I wonder what surprises hundred years later will hold for us…Maybe, war will have been outlawed by then, as have been malpractices and violences against individuals in the current world. The laws that rule a single man will hopefully apply to larger groups too…
Courtesy: Ratnottama Sengupta Courtesy: Farouk GulsaraSome of our visuals in 2024
Amalkantiby Nirendranath Chakraborty has been translated from Bengali by Debali Mookerjea-Leonard. Click hereto read.
The Mirror by Mubarak Qazi has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click hereto read.
Homecoming, a poem by Ihlwha Choi on his return from Santiniketan, has been translated from Korean by the poet himself. Click here to read.
Pochishe Boisakh(25th of Baisakh) by Tagore (1922), has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.
Nazrul’sGhumaite Dao Shranto Robi Re(Let Robi Sleep in Peace) has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click hereto read.
Jibananada Das’sAndhar Dekhecche, Tobu Ache (I have seen the dark and yet there is another) has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.
Tagore’sShotabdir Surjo Aji( The Century’s Sun today) has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Clickhereto read.
A narrative by Rabindranath Tagore thatgives a glimpse of his first experience of snowfall in Brighton and published in the Tagore family journal, Balak (Children), has been translated from Bengali by Somdatta Mandal. Clickhere to read.
Suzanne Kamata discusses the peace initiatives following the terrors of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide while traveling within the country with her university colleague and students. Click here to read.
A story by Sharaf Shad, has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.
Conversations
Ratnottama Sengupta talks to Ruchira Gupta, activist for global fight against human trafficking, about her work and introduces her novel, I Kick and I Fly. Click here to read.
A conversation with eminent Singaporean poet and academic, Kirpal Singh, about how his family migrated to Malaya and subsequently Singapore more than 120 years ago. Click hereto read.
Jibananada Das’sAndhar Dekhecche, Tobu Ache (I have seen the dark and yet there is another) has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.
Manish Ghatak’sAagun taader Praan (Fire is their Life) has been translated from Bengali by Indrayudh Sinha. Click hereto read.
Manzur Bismil’s poem,Stories, has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.
Homecoming, a poem by Ihlwha Choi on his return from Santiniketan, has been translated from Korean by the poet himself. Click here to read.
Tagore’sShotabdir Surjo Aji( The Century’s Sun today) has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Clickhereto read.
Paul Mirabile wraps his telling like a psychological thriller. Clickhere to read.
Conversations
Ratnottama Sengupta converses with Divya Dutta, an award-winning actress, who has authored two books recently, Stars in my SkyandMe and Ma. Clickhere to read.
Painting by Claud Monet (1840-1926). From Public Domain
Acknowledging our past achievements sends a message of hope and responsibility, encouraging us to make even greater efforts in the future. Given our twentieth-century accomplishments, if people continue to suffer from famine, plague and war, we cannot blame it on nature or on God.
–Homo Deus (2015),Yuval Noah Harari
Another year drumrolls its way to a war-torn end. Yes, we have found a way to deal with Covid by the looks of it, but famine, hunger… have these drawn to a close? In another world, in 2019, Abhijit Banerjee had won a Nobel Prize for “a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty”. Even before that in 2015, Yuval Noah Harari had discussed a world beyond conflicts where Homo Sapien would evolve to become Homo Deus, that is man would evolve to deus or god. As Harari contends at the start of Homo Deus, some of the world at least hoped to move towards immortality and eternal happiness. But, given the current events, is that even a remote possibility for the common man?
Harari points out in the sentence quoted above, acknowledging our past achievements gives hope… a hope born of the long journey humankind has made from caves to skyscrapers. If wars destroy those skyscrapers, what happens then? Our December issue highlights not only the world as we knew it but also the world as we know it.
In our essay section, Farouk Gulsara contextualises and discusses William Dalrymple’s latest book, The Golden Road with a focus on past glories while Professor Fakrul Alam dwells on a road in Dhaka , a road rife with history of the past and of toppling the hegemony and pointless atrocities against citizens. Yet, common people continue to weep for the citizens who have lost their homes, happiness and lives in Gaza and Ukraine, innocent victims of political machinations leading to war.
Just as politics divides and destroys, arts build bridges across the world. Ratnottama Sengupta has written of how artists over time have tried their hands at different mediums to bring to us vignettes of common people’s lives, like legendary artist M F Husain went on to make films, with his first black and white film screened in Berlin Film Festival in 1967 winning the coveted Golden Bear, he captured vignettes of Rajasthan and the local people through images and music. And there are many more instances like his…
It's always the common people who pay first. They don’t write the speeches or sign the orders. But when the dust rises, they’re the ones buried under...
Echoing the theme of the state of the common people is a powerful poem by Manish Ghatak translated from Bengali by Indrayudh Sinha, a poem that echoes how some flirt with danger on a daily basis for ‘Fire is their life’. Professor Alam has brought to us a Bengali poem by Jibanananda Das that reflects the issues we are all facing in today’s world, a poem that remains relevant even in the next century, Andhar Dekhecche, Tobu Ache (I have seen the dark and yet there is another). Fazal Baloch has translated contemporary poet Manzur Bismil’s poem from Balochi on the suffering caused by decisions made by those in power. Ihlwha Choi on the other hand has shared his own lines in English from his Korean poem about his journey back from Santiniketan, in which he claims to pack “all my lingering regrets carefully into my backpack”. And yet from the founder of Santiniketan, we have a translated poem that is not only relevant but also disturbing in its description of the current reality: “…Conflicts are born of self-interest./ Wars are fought to satiate greed…”. Tagore’s Shotabdir Surjo (The Century’s Sun, 1901) recounts the horrors of history…The poem brings to mind Edvard Munch’s disturbing painting of “The Scream” (1893). Does what was true more than hundred years ago, still hold?
Reflecting on eternal human foibles, Naramsetti Umamaheswararao creates a contemporary fable in fiction while Snigdha Agrawal reflects on attitudes towards aging. Paul Mirabile weaves an interesting story around guilt and crime. Sengupta takes us back to her theme of artistes moving away from the genre, when she interviews award winning actress, Divya Dutta, for not her acting but her literary endeavours — two memoirs — Me and Ma and Stars in the Sky. The other interviewee Lara Gelya from Ukraine, also discusses her memoir, Camels from Kyzylkum, a book that traces her journey from the desert of Kyzylkum to USA through various countries. In our book excerpts, we have one that resonates with immigrant lores as writer VS Naipual’s sister, Savi Naipaul Akal, discusses how their family emigrated to Trinidad in The Naipauls of Nepaul Street. The other excerpt from Thomas Bell’s Human Nature: A Walking History of the Himalayan Landscape seeks “to understand the relationship between communities and their environment.” He moves through the landscapes of Nepal to connect readers to people in Himalayan villages.
The reviews in this issue travel through cultures and time with Somdatta Mandal’s discussion of Kusum Khemani’s Lavanyadevi, translated from Hindi by Banibrata Mahanta. Aditi Yadav travels to Japan with Nanako Hanada’s The Bookshop Woman, translated from Japanese by Cat Anderson. Jagari Mukherjee writes on the poems of Kiriti Sengupta in Onenessand Bhaskar Parichha reviews a book steeped in history and the life of a brave and daring woman, a memoir by Noor Jahan Bose, Daughter of The Agunmukha: A Bangla Life, translated from Bengali by Rebecca Whittington.
We have more content than mentioned here. Please do pause by our content’s page to savour our December Issue. We are eternally grateful to you, dear readers, for making our journey worthwhile.
Huge thanks to all our contributors for making this issue come alive with their vibrant work. Huge thanks to the team at Borderless for their unflinching support and to Sohana Manzoor for sharing her iconic paintings that give our journal a distinctive flavour.
With the hope of healing with love and compassion, let us dream of a world in peace.
Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes — including you!
I passed that sign on the outside wall of the ‘Relaxation Centre’ this morning and I had to take a photo to serve me as a future warning.
The message it conveys has disturbed me in so many ways, especially logically. You see, it seems to claim that if you unplug yourself (in other words stop working) you will work again. So if you stop working, you will start working!
But I stop working when I want to stop working, not when I want to start working. The ultimate result of this message, if it is true, is that we will be stuck in an eternal loop of work.
What a nightmare! The very notion hurts my brain. I don’t want to work forever. I don’t think it’s clever to avoid holidays. One of the perks of life is that we have opportunities to shirk stress and strife by staying away from the office and offering a kiss goodbye to chores and labour.
In fact, I believe holidays to be vastly superior to toil and drudgery. Even a budgerigar knows this to be true. Who doesn’t? Only the person who made that sign.
Maybe they were drunk on the wine of self-satisfaction or thought they could get a certain reaction that would be useful to them from intrigued passersby but I question why they forgot the simple equation: we have earned the right to do absolutely nothing without expecting rejuvenation.
And now I am sitting in a canoe next to you. We are drifting down a stream and when the stream joins the river, and when the river reaches the sea, together we will paddle, you and me, to a new land where work is avoided as a matter of course. Call it utopia if you like or any other name. I only hope that when it is our turn to call it something, it will respond with the smile of a comfy paradise, humming a lazy tune in our honour.
I don’t want to bother with work: it irks me to think of the trouble it perpetuates, the ruthless facile way it decimates sensitive minds. Our canoe and every dream afloat in the flimsy boat are more true than management strategies and meeting room agendas.
Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes — including you? No thanks. I don’t intend to put it to the test. My plan is to rest for lifetimes, not minutes, on my own serene terms.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Nazrul’s Tumi Shundor Tai Cheye Thaki(Because you are so beautiful, I keep looking at you) has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.
Hotel Acapulco, has been composed and translated from Italian by Ivan Pozzoni. Click hereto read.
Farouk Gulsara pays a tribute to a doctor and a friend. Click hereto read.
Musings of a Copywriter
InBecoming a ‘Plain’ Writer, Devraj Singh Kalsi explores the world of writer’s retreats on hills with a touch of irony. Clickhere to read.
Notes from Japan
In Educating for Peace in Rwanda, Suzanne Kamata discusses the peace initiatives following the terrors of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide while traveling within the country with her university colleague and students. Click here to read.
Bijoy K Mishra writes of cyclones in Odisha, while discussing Bhaskar Parichha’s Cyclones in Odisha – Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience. Clickhereto read.
Borderless 