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.
Landscape of Change by Jill Pelto, Smithsonian. From Public Domain
Hope is the mantra for all human existence. We hope for a better future, for love, for peace, for good weather, for abundance. When that abundance is an abundance of harsh weather or violence wrought by wars, we hope for calm and peace.
This is the season for cyclones — Dana, Trami, Yixing, Hurricanes Milton and Helene — to name a few that left their imprint with the destruction of both property and human lives as did the floods in Spain while wars continue to annihilate more lives and constructs. That we need peace to work out how to adapt to climate change is an issue that warmongers seem to have overlooked. We have to figure out how we can work around losing landmasses and lives to intermittent floods caused by tidal waves, landslides like the one in Wayanad and rising temperatures due to the loss of ice cover. The loss of the white cover of ice leads to more absorption of heat as the melting water is deeper in colour. Such phenomena could affect the availability of potable water and food, impacted by the changes in flora and fauna as a result of altered temperatures and weather patterns. An influx of climate refugees too is likely in places that continue habitable. Do we need to find ways of accommodating these people? Do we need to redefine our constructs to face the crises?
Echoing concerns for action to adapt to climate change and hoping for peace, our current issue shimmers with vibrancy of shades while weaving in personal narratives of life, living and the process of changing to adapt.
An essay on Bhaskar Parichha’s recent book on climate change highlights the action that is needed in the area where Dana made landfall recently. In terms of preparedness things have improved, as Bijoy K Mishra contends in his essay. But more action is needed. Denying climate change or thinking of going back to pre-climate change era is not an option for humanity anymore. While politics often ignores the need to acknowledge this crises and divides destroying with wars, riots and angst, a narrative for peace is woven by some countries like Japan and Rwanda.
Suzanne Kamata recently visited Rwanda. She writes about how she found by educating people about the genocide of 1994, the locals have found a way to live in peace with people who they addressed as their enemies before… as have the future generations of Japan by remembering the atomic holocausts of 1945.
In translations, we have poetry from varied countries. Ihlwha Choi has self-translated his poem from Korean. Ivan Pozzoni has done the same from Italian. One of Tagore’s lesser-known verses, perhaps influenced by the findings of sensitivity in plants by his contemporary, Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937) to who he dedicated the collection which homed this poem, Phool Photano(making flowers bloom), has been translated from Bengali. Professor Alam has translated Nazrul’s popular song, Tumi Shundor Tai Cheye Thaki (Because you are so beautiful, I keep gazing at you).
Stories travel around the world with Paul Mirabile’s narrative giving a flavour of bohemian Paris in 1974. Anna Moon’s fiction set in Philippines gives a darker perspective of life. Lakshmi Kannan’s narrative hovers around the 2008 bombing in Mumbai, an event that evoked much anger, violence and created hatred in hearts. In contrast, Naramsetti Umamaheswararao brings a sense of warmth into our lives with a story about a child and his love for a dog. Sreelekha Chatterjee weaves a tale of change, showcasing adapting to climate crisis from a penguin’s perspective.
Trying something new, being out of the box is what helped humans move out from caves, invent wheels and create civilisations. Hopefully, this is what will help us move into the next phase of human development where wars and weapons will become redundant, and we will be able to adapt to changing climes and move towards a kinder, more compassionate existence.
Thank you all for pitching in with your fabulous pieces. There are ones that have not been covered here. Do pause by our content’s page to see all our content. Huge thanks to the fantastic Borderless team and to Sohana Manzoor, for her art too.
It’s again that time of the year when we have fun spooking each other with stories of ghosts and haunting. While festivals of light1 and darkness vie with each other for a spot on the same date, observances to pay our respects to our forefathers follow at their heels, some before and some after.
In this selection, we bring to you narratives that could be dark, strange or funny or all of these … a selection of poetry, fiction and non-fiction from around the world. Enjoy the reads!
The Ghosts of Hogshead: Paul Mirabile wanders into the realm of the supernatural dating back to the Potato Famine of Ireland in the 1800s. Clickhere to read.
Nagmati: Prafulla Roy’s long story based on strange folk beliefs has been translated from Bengali as Snake Maiden by Aruna Chakravarti. Click here to read.
From Public Domain
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Deepavali or festival of lights is on October 31st this year along with Kali Puja and Halloween. October 30th is Bhooth Chaturdashi, or Indian Festival of Ghosts while All Saints’ Day and all Souls’ Day are observed at the start of November. Early October hosted Pitri Paksha, observances for apeasing forefathers in India. ↩︎
Fakrul Alam writes nostalgically of his visits to Feni in Noakhali, a small town which now suffers from severe flooding due to climate change. Click here to read.
Rakhi Dalal reviews Swadesh Deepak’s A Bouquet of Dead Flowers translated from Hindi by Jerry Pinto, Pratik Kanjilal, Nirupama Dutt, Sukant Deepak. Click here to read.
Imagine the world envisioned by John Lennon. Imagine the world envisioned and partly materialised by Tagore in his pet twin projects of Santiniketan and Sriniketan, training institutes made with the intent of moving towards creating a work force that would dedicate their lives to human weal, to closing social gaps borne of human constructs and to uplifting the less privileged by educating them and giving them the means to earn a livelihood. You might well call these people visionaries and utopian dreamers, but were they? Tagore had hoped to inspire with his model institutions. In 1939, he wrote in a letter: “My path, as you know, lies in the domain of quiet integral action and thought, my units must be few and small, and I can but face human problems in relation to some basic village or cultural area. So, in the midst of worldwide anguish, and with the problems of over three hundred millions staring us in the face, I stick to my work in Santiniketan and Sriniketan hoping that my efforts will touch the heart of our village neighbours and help them in reasserting themselves in a new social order. If we can give a start to a few villages, they would perhaps be an inspiration to some others—and my life work will have been done.” But did we really have a new social order or try to emulate him?
If we had acted out of compassion and kindness towards redefining with a new social order, as Miriam Bassuk points out in her poem based on Lennon’s lyrics of Imagine, there would be no strangers. We’d all be friends living in harmony and creating a world with compassion, kindness, love and tolerance. We would not have wars or regional geopolitical tensions which act against human weal. Perhaps, we would not have had the issues of war of climate change take on the proportions that are wrecking our own constructs.
Natural disasters, floods, fires, landslides have affected many of our lives. Bringing us close to such a disaster is an essay by Salma A Shafi at ground level in Noakhali. More than 4.5 million were affected and 71 died in this disaster. Another 23 died in the same spate of floods in Tripura with 65,000 affected. We are looking at a single region here, but such disasters seem to be becoming more frequent. And yet. there had been a time when Noakhali was an idyllic vacation spot as reflected in Professor Fakrul Alam’s nostalgic essay, filled with memories of love, green outdoors and kindnesses. Such emotions reverberate in Ravi Shankar’s account of his medical adventures in the highlands of Kerala, a state that suffered a stupendous landslide last month. While Shafi shows how extreme rainfall can cause disasters, Keith Lyons writes of water, whose waves in oceanic form lap landmasses like bridges. He finds a microcosm of the whole world in a swimming pool as migrants find their way to New Zealand too. Farouk Gulsara muses on kindness and caregiving while Priyanka Panwar ponders about ordinary days. Saeed Ibrahim gives a literary twist to our musings. Tongue in cheek humour is woven into our nonfiction section by Suzanne Kamata’s notes from Japan, Devraj Singh Kalsi’s piece on premature greying and Uday Deshwal’s paean to his sunglasses!
In translations, we have Nazrul lyrics transcreated from Bengali by Professor Alam and poetry from Korean by Ihlwha Choi. We pay our respects to an eminent Balochi poet who passed on exactly a year ago, Mubarak Qazi, by carrying a translation by Fazal Baloch. Tagore’s Suprobhat (Good morning) has been rendered in English from Bengali. His descriptions of the morning are layered and amazing — with a hint of the need to reconstruct our world, very relevant even today. A powerful essay by Tagore called Raja O Praja(The King and His Subjects), has been translated by Himadri Lahiri.
Our fiction hosts two narratives that centre around childhood, one by Naramsetti Umamaheswararao and another by G Venkatesh, though with very different approaches. Mahila Iqbal relates a poignant tale about aging, mental health and neglect, the very antithesis of Gulsara’s musing. Paul Mirabile has given a strange story about a ‘useless idler’.
A short story collection has been reviewed by Rakhi Dalal, Swadesh Deepak’s A Bouquet of Dead Flowers, translated from Hindi by Jerry Pinto, Pratik Kanjilal, Nirupama Dutt, Sukant Deepak. Somdatta Mandal has written about a book by a Kashmiri immigrant which is part based on lived experiences and part fictive, Karan Mujoo’s This Our Paradise: A Novel. Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed Ayurveda, Nation and Society: United Provinces, c. 1890–1950by Saurav Kumar Rai, a book which shows how healthcare was even a hundred years ago, politicised. Meenakshi Malhotra has reviewed Anuradha Marwah’s novel, Aunties of Vasant Kunj, of which we also have an excerpt. The other excerpt is from Mineke Schipper’s Widows: A Global History. Ratnottama Sengupta converses with Reba Som, author of Hop, Skip and Jump; Peregrinations of a Diplomat’s Wife.
We have more content that adds to the vibrancy of the issue. Do pause by this issue and take a look. This issue would not have been possible without all your writings. Thank you for that. Huge thanks to our readers and our team, without whose support we could not have come this far. I would especially like to thank Sohana Manzoor for her continued supply of her fabulous and distinctive artwork and Gulsara for his fabulous photographs.
Let us look forward to a festive season which awakens each autumn and stretches to winter. May we in this season find love, compassion and kindness in our hearts towards our whole human family.
John, Augustus Edwin; Dylan Thomas (1914-1953); Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales; From Public Domain
I Can See Pink And White Mice (for Dylan Thomas)
The milkman’s habit of leaving his bottles behind was worrisome, reminded some of Starkweather; the weather’s stark, the distrait wind. All manner of throttled spectres splintering off to catch the light. And the visions of the magi had all become household names: bruised apple, poster wall, salt shaker…I can see pink and white mice sure as creeping mountains, blubberous fantasia of silty sea bed’s quilt, careening gulls in apocryphal death-mount: show me the tension that builds in each sinew, dance the structure of things away from gleeful horns, so that the words come upon you like a stranger in dark alleys: it is how things go together, sliding, reeling, unconstrained as a busy wood shop. Warring crabs in twisted pincer, the general’s best men sent to the front to dig through the dirt of slugs. Turning the soil into a belly of nervousness, of rolling thunder.
Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Borderless Journal, GloMag, Red Fez, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Ranu Bhattacharyya takes us back to Dhaka of the 1930s… and a world where the two Bengals interacted as one with her migration story. Click here to read.
A Pop of Happiness by Jeanie Douglas. From Public Domain
Happiness is a many splendored word. For some it is the first ray of sunshine; for another, it could be a clean bill of health; and yet for another, it would be being with one’s loved ones… there is no clear-cut answer to what makes everyone happy. In Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (JK Rowling, 2005), a sunshine yellow elixir induces euphoria with the side effects of excessive singing and nose tweaking. This is of course fantasy but translate it to the real world and you will find that happiness does induce a lightness of being, a luminosity within us that makes it easier to tackle harder situations. Playing around with Rowling’s belief systems, even without the potion, an anticipation of happiness or just plain optimism does generate a sense of hope for better times. Harry tackles his fears and dangers with goodwill, friends and innate optimism. When times are dark with raging wars or climate events that wreck our existence, can one look for a torch to light a sense of hope with the flame of inborn resilience borne of an inner calm, peace or happiness — call it what you will…?
It is hard to gauge the extreme circumstances with which many of us are faced in our current realities, especially when the events spin out of control. In this issue, along with the darker hues that ravage our lives, we have sprinklings of laughter to try to lighten our spirits. In the same vein, externalising our emotions to the point of absurdity that brings a smile to our lips is Rhys Hughes’ The Sunset Suite, a book that survives on tall tales generated by mugs of coffee. In one of the narratives, there is a man who is thrown into a bubbling hot spring, but he survives singing happily because his attacker has also thrown in packs of tea leaves. This man loves tea so much that he does not scald, drown or die but keeps swimming merrily singing a song. While Hughes’ stories are dark, like our times, there is an innate cheer that rings through the whole book… Dare we call it happiness or resilience? Hughes reveals much as he converses about this book, squonks and stranger facts that stretch beyond realism to a fantastical world that has full bearing on our very existence.
A powerful essay by Binu Mathew on the climate disaster at Wayanad, a place that earlier had been written of as an idyllic getaway, tells us how the land in that region has become more prone to landslides. The one on July 30th this year washed away a whole village! Farouk Gulsara has given a narrative about his cycling adventure through the state of Kashmir with his Malaysian friends and finding support in the hearts of locals, people who would be the first to be hit by any disaster even if they have had no hand in creating the catastrophes that could wreck their lives, the flora and the fauna around them. In the wake of such destructions or in anticipation of such calamities, many migrate to other areas — like Ranu Bhattacharya’s ancestors did a bit before the 1947 Partition violence set in. A younger migrant, Chinmayi Goyal, muses under peaceful circumstances as she explores her own need to adapt to her surroundings. G Venkatesh from Sweden writes of his happy encounter with local children in the playground. And Snigdha Agrawal has written of partaking lunch with a bovine companion – it can be intimidating having a cow munching at the next table, I guess! Devraj Singh Kalsi has given a tongue-in-cheek musing on how he might find footing as a godman. Suzanne Kamata has given a lovely summery piece on parasols, which never went out of fashion in Japan!
Radha Chakravarty, known for her fabulous translations, has written about the writer she translated recently, Nazrul. Her essay includes a poem by Tagore for Nazrul. Professor Fakrul Alam has translated two of Nazrul’s songs of parting and Sohana Manzoor has rendered his stunning story Shapuray (Snake Charmer) into English. Fazal Baloch has brought to us poetry in English from the Sulaimani dialect of Balochi by Allah Bashk Buzdar, and a Korean poem has been self-translated by the poet, Ihlwha Choi. The translations wind up with a poem by Tagore, Olosh Shomoy Dhara Beye (Time Flows at an Indolent Pace), showcasing how the common man’s daily life is more rooted in permanence than evanescent regimes and empires.
Fiction brings us into the realm of the common man and uncommon situations, or funny ones. A tongue-in-cheek story set in the Midwest by Joseph Pfister makes us laugh. Farhanaz Rabbani has given us a beautiful narrative about a girl’s awakening. Paul Mirabile delves into the past using the epistolary technique highlighting darker vignettes from Christopher Columbus’s life. We have book excerpts from Maaria Sayed’s From Pashas to Pokemonand Nazes Afroz’s translation of Syed Mujtaba Ali’sShabnamwith both the extracts and Rabbani’s narratives reflecting the spunk of women, albeit in different timescapes…
When migrations are out of choice, with multiple options to explore, they take on happier hues. But when it is out of a compulsion created by manmade disasters — both wars and climate change are that — will the affected people remain unscarred, or like Potter, bear the scar only on their forehead and, with Adlerian calm, find happiness and carpe diem?
Do pause by our current issue which has more content than mentioned here as some of it falls outside the ambit of our discussion. This issue would not have been possible without an all-out effort by each of you… even readers. I would like to thank each and every contributor and our loyal readers. The wonderful team at Borderless deserve much appreciation and gratitude, especially Manzoor for her wonderful artwork. I invite you all to savour this August issue with a drizzle of not monsoon or April showers but laughter.
May we all find our paths towards building a resilient world with a bright future.
Lady With a Blue Veil (Sally Fairchild) by John Sargent(1856-1925). Sourced by Ryan Quinn Flanagan
GHOSTING SALLY FAIRCHILD
What a ghost of a woman! That Sally Fairchild, with hand raised to chest as if poignantly aghast at the very sight of her own faded rendering, a noticeable accompaniment on the ring finger, so there is that limited certainly, but the thickets already seem to be gripping at apparitional days, a loosening auburn bun swallowed up in blushing blues, rimmed day hat, much the same: perhaps, it is that maniacal jungle of colour all around her, swirling spiked monsters jumping out from a forgotten child’s scary closet – what was John Singer Sargeant thinking? No woman wants to be painted like that. As if she is disappearing right out of existence. Vanishing before everyone, even herself.
Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Borderless Journal, GloMag, Red Fez, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
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