Ratnottama Sengupta muses on acts of terror and translates a Bengali poem by Tarik Sujat which had come as a reaction to an act of terror. Click here to read.
Renee Melchert Thorpe recounts her mother’s migration story, hopping multiple countries, starting with colonial Calcutta and Darjeeling. Click here to read.
Paul Mirabile wanders into the realm of the supernatural dating back to the Potato Famine of Ireland in the 1800s. Clickhere to read.
Conversations
In 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.
There was a time when humans walked the Earth crossing unnamed landmasses to find homes in newer terrains. They migrated without restrictions. Over a period of time, kingdoms evolved, and travellers like Marco Polo talked of needing permissions to cross borders in certain parts of the world. The need for a permit to travel was first mentioned in the Bible, around 450BCE. A safe conduct permit appeared in England in 1414CE. Around the twentieth century, passports and visas came into full force. And yet, humanity had existed hundreds of thousand years ago… Some put the date at 300,000!
While climate contingencies, wars and violence are geared to add to migrants called ‘refugees’, there is always that bit of humanity which regards them as a burden. They forget that at some point, their ancestors too would have migrated from where they evolved. In South Africa, close to Johannesburg is Maropeng with its ‘Cradle of Humanity’, an intense network of caves where our ancestors paved the way to our evolution. The guide welcomes visitors by saying — “Welcome home!” It fills one’s heart to see the acceptance that drips through the whole experience. Does this mean our ancestors all stepped out of Africa many eons ago and that we all belonged originally to the same land?
And yet there are many restrictions that have come upon us creating boxes which do not allow intermingling easily, even if we travel. Overriding these barriers is a discussion with Jessica Mudditt about Once Around the Sun: From Cambodia to Tibet, her book about her backpacking through Asia. Documenting a migration more than a hundred years ago from Jullundur to Malaya, when borders were different and more mobile, we have a conversation with eminent scholar and writer from Singapore, Kirpal Singh. Telling the story of another eminent migrant, a Persian who became a queen in the Mughal Court is a lyric by Nazrul, Nur Jahan, translated by Professor Fakrul Alam from Bangla. Ihlwha Choi has self-translated his own poem from Korean, a poem bridging divides with love. Fazal Baloch has brought to us some exquisite Balochi poems by Munir Momin. Tagore’s poem, Okale or Out of Sync, has been translated from Bengali to reflect the strange uniqueness of each human action which despite departing from the norm, continue to be part of the flow.
We have a tongue in cheek piece from Devraj Singh Kalsi on traveling in a train with a politician. Uday Deshwal writes with a soupçon of humour as he talks of applying for jobs. Snigdha Agrawal brings to us flavours of Bengal from her past while Ratnottama Sengupta muses on the ongoing wars and violence as acts of terror in the same region and looks back at such an incident in the past which resulted in a powerful Bengali poem by Tarik Sujat. Kiriti Sengupta has written of a well-known artist, Jatin Das, a strange encounter where the artist asks them to empty fully even a glass of water! Ravi Shankar weaves in his love for books into our non-fiction section. Recounting her mother’s migration story which leads us to perceive the whole world as home is a narrative by Renee Melchert Thorpe. Urmi Chakravorty takes us to the last Indian village on the borders of Tibet. Taking us to a Dinosaur Museum in Japan is our migrant columnist, Suzanne Kamata. Her latest multicultural novel, Cinnamon Beach, has found its way to our book excerpts as has Flanagan’s poetry collection, These Many Cold Winters of the Heart.
In reviews, Somdatta Mandal has written about an anthology, Maya Nagari: Bombay-Mumbai A City in Storiesedited by Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto. Rakhi Dalal has discussed a translation from Konkani by Jerry Pinto of award-winning writer Damodar Mauzo’sBoy, Unloved. Basudhara Roy has reviewed Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay’s Tales of Early Magic Realism in Bengali, translated by Sucheta Dasgupta. Bhaskar Parichha has introduced us toThe Dilemma of an Indian Liberal by Gurcharan Das, a book that is truly relevant in the current times in context of the whole world for what he states is a truth: “In the current polarised climate, the liberal perspective is often marginalised or dismissed as being indecisive or weak.” And it is the truth for the whole world now.
Our short stories reflect the colours of the world. A fantasy set in America but crossing borders of time and place byRonald V. Micci, a story critiquing social norms that hurt by Swatee Miittal and Paul Mirabile’s ghost story shuttling from the Irish potato famine (1845-52) to the present day – all address different themes across borders, reflecting the vibrancy of thoughts and cultures. That we all exist in the same place and have the commonality of ideas and felt emotions is reflected in each of these narratives.
We have more which adds to the lustre of the content. So, do pause by our content’s page and enjoy the reads!
I would like to thank all our team without who this journal would be incomplete, especially, Sohana Manzoor, for her fabulous artwork. Huge thanks to all our contributors who bring vibrancy to our pages and our wonderful readers, without who the journal would remain just part of an electronic cloud… We welcome you all to enjoy our June issue.
“Keep off my emotional lawn,” young Dorothy Carmody snapped, fourteen years young. “You’re trampling on my rhododendrons.”
“Geez, Dory.”
“Adventure. Need some ASAP, you know how it is.”
“Sure.”
And then a new girl, a transfer, came sashaying along the school corridor, her skirt whipping up a storm of self-assurance — Constance Harrington, known to the hoi polloi simply as Connie. And the moment Dory laid eyes on her, she knew. Here was a partner in crime. Here was a throw caution to the wind cohort, someone who wouldn’t back down from the prospect of adventure.
It was the very same week she had met Connie that she discovered a pack of cards buried in a pile of leaves beside her verandah. In the smoky autumn air, choked with swirling leaves, on her way up the walk she caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of her eye. She thought it was a discarded pack of cigarettes, but the colour of it seemed odd. It was a deck of cards, and hardly your run of the mill playing cards. These cards were mini works of medieval art, in vivid colours.
“What’s that?” her mother asked. “My guess, tarot cards.”
She thumbed through the cards and found herself in a strange world populated by cups and knights, pages, swords, pentacles, and collapsing towers. What in the world, she wondered, or perhaps out of it. Here were unusual cards that seemed culled from the mists of time. Runes from the leaf piles of autumn.
As she fingered each card, it seemed to speak of faraway places. The meanings, she felt, would instinctively reveal themselves to her. She would look them up on her laptop, but she knew no amount of research was a substitute for what she might intuit and how she might construe the meanings for herself. Spunky was funky that way.
Now young mistress Carmody needed to share her newfound treasure, even before absorbing the meanings of these odd cards. She retreated to her room and called Connie. “You know anything about the tarot?” she asked.
“Oh! billy clubs and chopsticks,” Connie retorted.
“Come on, Connie, don’t give me the stonewall treatment. I’m staring right here at a pack of tarot cards — they’re shaking in my hands, as though they want to speak.”
“I’m tone deaf, Dory, tired and tone deaf. Too many idiots got on my nerves today,” Connie said.
“Connie, I’m serious. These are hot, and there’s adventure here. Emergency confab — third period study hall. Tomorrow. In the stacks.”
“If you insist,” Connie sighed.
The study hall was sprinkled largely with numbskulls or brainy types toiling quietly in their heads. But there were tall metal racks of books, a modest library. And you could enjoy a bit of secrecy there. Dory slyly slipped the pack of tarot cards into Connie’s hands.
“Rider deck,” Connie said, to inquisitive eyes. “Yup.” “Well?”
Connie plucked a card at random from the deck. Wheel of Fortune.
Suspicious looks were exchanged and shoulders shrugged. “So?” Dory said.
And suddenly the room began to spin, and her eyes were tiny pinwheels. She felt a whirlwind coming on, a sweeping blur. “Con — ?”
“Grab my hand,” Connie said, and they were both caught up, heads spinning in a kind of wild vertigo.
When they regained their composure and the seeming gale had subsided, they were no longer in the school library. They were on some deserted beach in the tropics, complete with palm trees, and water as pale green, clear and pristine as all of creation. Waves rolled and crested, lapping the sands, and they were shoeless, and the heat stung their toes. They looked left, they looked right. The beach was deserted. Sure enough, they were alone.
“Our own private Idaho,” Connie joked. “Spunky Dory, what have you done?”
“No,” Dory said. “We’re dreaming. Snap your fingers, come on.”
Thumb and fingers snapped, but the portrait of paradise did not morph one iota.
“Now, Miss Thirst-For-Adventure, how do you propose we get back?”
“Who needs back? We’ve hit it, Con. Paradise. Park ourselves down in the palm shade and chill, Con, chill. Unless you’d prefer our private limousine.”
Dory pointed. There was a leaky old wooden rowboat at water’s edge tethered by a long rope that extended around the trunk of one of the palm trees.
“No,” Connie said. “We’re in Never Never Land, and that old boat is going to take us where?”
“Over the rainbow, beyond the blue horizon, take your pick.”
“And here they come,” Connie said, as out of the trees poured what appeared to be natives of some sort, and their cries shattered the bliss, not to mention the spears they were jostling in their hands. Had Connie’s imagination done a back flip?
“The cards, the cards,” she said, and she rubbed the Wheel of Fortune card, frantically rubbed and rubbed.
“Dor– ?” she said, terrified, and just as grass skirts, spears and painted warrior faces were all but upon them, angry ones at that, they felt their heads begin to spin dizzily again, and trees and sand and ocean swirl madly around them and they clung to each other and in what seemed like hours but was only an instant, they were back among the library stacks.
“No,” Connie shook her head. “No way.”
“Yeah,” Dory said. “Oh yeah. And we chickened out.”
“We sure as suds did, and not a moment too soon. What did we have for lunch today anyway, was it spiked? I mean, did we just — “
“Yeah, we just…”
“And you wanted us to, well, indulge our just, is that the just of it?”
“Where is your sense of adventure?”
“I think I left it in algebra class. Assuming we weren’t having one big hallucination, what just happened?”
“That’s what we’re gonna to find out.”
“Look, we are gonna be late for fourth period.”
“Saturday, Connie. My basement. Word of honour?”
“Dory, you’re crazy. No way.”
“Come on — besties?”
Reluctantly, Connie nodded: “Okay, besties. As in, it was the bestie of times, it was the worstie of times. You’re gonna get us in a mess, Dory, I just know it.”
Had they imagined this? Had the cards transported them to a temporary Shangri-la, an island paradise, or had too much cramming for school fried their innocent, developing, and surely hyperactive brains?
Those cards had some very strange pictures, and paradise island may or may not have been a figment of their imaginations run wild. But what if they dared investigate the rest of those cards, because Connie suspected that was the plan. She shuddered to think.
Saturday came, as it always does, with its wonderful sense of liberation and kick around freedom, and after lunch in the kitchen of Dory’s home, with the two girls munching on sandwiches, Dory gave the nod.
Connie was apprehensive, but down into the darkened depths of the cellar they went. The air was cool and a bit stale, and small windows didn’t admit much outside light. There was an old workbench there, and a cold room where her father stored paints and tools. They sat side by side on the workbench, and Dory fanned out the pack of tarot cards in front of them.
“Here’s the deal,” Dory told her friend. “There are twenty-two major arcana and fifty-six minor arcana cards. Fifty added to six reduces to eleven. That led me to eleven minor cards and twenty-two major.”
“I think you’re confusing me with key signatures.”
“Well, those are supposedly special numbers. You’ll have to do your own research there. Eleven and twenty-two. Back to the main game. The major arcana — that’s the twenty-two — are sort of major changes in your life, and the minor ones are day to day activity. Still with me?”
Connie was growing impatient.
“The cards with pictures of cups — well, the cups represent feelings. The swords represent actions. The pentacles, those gold coins, the five- figured ones, represent the material aspects of life — like work and business. And finally, there are wands, and those express action, passion and energy. Get the picture?”
“Pictures, Dory dearest. A passel of confusion. And what about that wheel card?”
“The Wheel of Fortune, the destiny card. There are also court cards — king, queen, knight and page.”
“Couldn’t we try something less precarious, like say gin rummy or hearts or something? Dory, lead us not into temptation.”
“I’ll shuffle, you get to make the pick.”
How lucky could a girl get, Connie thought to herself. Oh boy, here we go again.
Dory worked the deck, the cards crunching as she shuffled and cut, shuffled and cut. She was waiting perhaps for one of the cards to spring unbidden from the pack, for fate to play its hand. And wouldn’t you know, a card flopped out.
“Kismet, Connie.”
“Yep, that’s what my friends call me, good old ‘Kismet Connie.’ Never met a kiss I didn’t like. Or was that kiss, bat my eyes.”
The card that had flopped out was in fact the eight of pentacles, depicting a relatively young fellow in Renaissance squire’s costume seated at a workbench, wearing what appeared to be a doublet and red tights. He was intently using a mallet and chisel to hammer gold coins. There were five-pointed pentacles stamped on the coins, eight in all. He seemed amiable enough.
“Everything up to date in Kansas City?” Connie kidded. “Watcha got there, pentacle fellow?”
Just as quickly, the card seemed to respond, and Connie and Dory felt the whirlwind coming, the dizziness, and the wild spinning sensation. The room was going round and round, and where it’d stop nobody knew — like some kind roulette wheel spun by the hand of fate.
“Me and my big mouth,” Connie said, as the girls sought refuge by clinging to each other. “And to think, instead of this I could have been out there shopping for basics.”
Fate seemed to murmur: Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars. . . Their heads spun and spun, the girls clung and clung, you really had to be there, and the scene around them was changing, and as they became lucid again, the spinning sensation had stopped. Lucid, in point of fact, now in a medieval workshop, just like the one depicted in the tarot card, as before them a lad was busy with hammer, chiselling away at his coins.
Connie leaned to her friend — “Thanks, pal. Thanks a ham sandwich.”
“Look at this, we’re in a medieval workroom or something. Come on, tell me you’re not digging this.”
“You want the long version or the short? Dory, you’ve done it again, and dragged me in a windstorm with you. When oh when will I ever learn?”
Dory gestured her friend in the direction of the busily hammering boy.
“You first,” Connie said. “Con?”
“I get it. I get the dirty assignments. Okay, little miss wizardry, I shall be so bold. As always, you are pushing the envelope. I won’t even ask where we are, but I’m guessing we made a wrong turn somewhere at Camelot.”
The young man seemed oblivious to their presence, as though they weren’t even there.
“Uh, excuse us, medieval person,” Connie said, “I believe we took a wrong turn at a traffic stop in the village. Yes, we are obviously from another time warp and out of our depth, so to speak. Think fish out of water. Twenty-first century hussies. Whatever you want but get us back to where we once belonged. You get the gist, even if gist wasn’t even a word that had been invented during the Middle Ages, Renaissance, what have you.”
“I like that,” Dory said. “Middle Ages!”
“Hey, I’m cutting edge,” came the sarcastic tone of Connie’s voice.
“Are you here for the coins?” he asked. Yes, the ‘he’ at the workbench who was pounding away at just such coins.
“No, we’re here to pick up the laundry,” Connie joked. “Actually, we’re sort of not here at all, imagine us as shadows, will-o’-the-wisps, ghosts. What we really could use is a lift somewhere, preferably back to the twenty-first century. I hear the distinct sound of reality calling. You got a spare oxcart or something?”
“One,” he said. “I will part with but one.”
“Oxcart or coin?” Connie couldn’t resist.
“Here, take it.” He handed them a gold coin.
“For good fortune.”
“Good fortune we could use,” Connie said. “And a couple of airline tickets outta here fast.”
Let’s face it, who could look a gift coin in the mouth, even if it was a medieval mouth?
Dory appropriated the coin, and the moment she touched it — uh-oh, spinning heads and flying saucers, whipping winds and wildebeests, and in what seemed two shakes of a lamb’s tail, they found themselves back in Le Present Age, also known as the here and now — yes, down in Dory’s dank basement.
It was still there in the palm of her hand, the gold coin, albeit it had somehow dwindled in size. It was now the regular size coin rather than the giant medieval family variety. But it did glitter and come to tell it was actually made of gold, as Dory found out later when she consulted a local precious metals dealer.
“And now,” Connie said, “can we do some clothes shopping and give that pack of cards a big hearty heave-ho where it belongs?”
“Aw Con.”
“Aw nothing. Ditch them. Dory, forgive me, but time machines are sooo yesterday.”
“Connie, Connie, Connie,” Dory muttered, shaking her head. She knew she could pretend to accede to Connie’s wishes, but she also knew she was going to hide that magical little deck of cards somewhere in her bureau drawer, for another day. If you couldn’t look a gift coin in the mouth, you sure couldn’t look a gift adventure, not with life being as humdrum as it was.
“Loosen up, Con,” she winked. “Yeah, yeah. Don’t say it.”
Dory smiled ear to ear. “Girls just wanna have fun.”
Ronald V. Micci, a native New Yorker, is a prolific author of plays, screenplays, novels, and short stories, both comedic and serious, many available for perusal on the Booksie, Simply Scripts and Amazon websites. A published playwright (Brooklyn/Heuer Publishers), former magazine editor and advertising proof reader, his one-act plays have been staged in Manhattan and throughout the country.
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