Wednesdays at the art gallery are free
and this muted street girl in rags files in
just after open, the old docent with veins like curdled milk
sees her there all the time, standing with a smile,
truly admiring the art, these sores all over her face,
not at all like the many oil models in the pictures,
but she seems happy, almost delighted!
The old docent starts bring coffee they can share,
then homemade sandwiches for the girl. She says
her name is Ashley and that the Italian Renaissance rooms
are her favourite. The old docent not wanting to spook her,
so she never tries to pry. Under that sprawling Diego Rivera
mural in the atrium with so many
busy bronzed men at work.
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.
Imagine a world without wars, without divisions, where art forms flow into each other and we live by the African concept of Ubuntu — I am because you are’ — sounds idyllic. But this is the month of March, of poetry, of getting in touch with the Dionysian elements in ourselves. And as we have said earlier in the introduction of Monalisa No Longer Smiles: An Anthology of Writings from across the World, what could be a better spot to let loose this insanity of utopian dreams than Borderless Journal!
Having completed three years of our Earthly existence on the 14th of March, we celebrate this month with poetry and writing that crosses boundaries — about films, literature and more. This month in the Festival of Letters or Sahityaotsav 2023, organised by the Sahitya Akademi, films were discussed in conjunction with literature. Ratnottama Sengupta, who attended and participated in a number of these sessions, has given us an essay to show how deep run the lyrics of Bollywood films, where her father, Nabendu Ghosh, scripted legends. It is Ghosh’s birth month too and we carry a translation from his Bengali autobiography which reflects how businessmen drew borders on what sells… After reading the excerpt from Nabendu’s narrative translated by Dipankar Ghosh and post-scripted by Sengupta, one wonders if such lines should ever have been drawn?
Questioning borders of a different kind, we have another piece of a real-life narrative on a Japanese Soldier, Uehara. Written by an Assamese writer called Kamaleswar Barua, it has been translated and introduced by Bikash K. Bhattacharya. The story focusses on a soldier’s narrative at his death bed in an alien land. We are left wondering how his need for love and a home is any different from that of any one of ours? Who are the enemies — the soldiers who die away from their homes? What are wars about? Can people live in peace? They seemed to do so in Kurigram, a land that has faded as suggests the poem by Masud Khan, brought to us in translation from Bangla by Professor Fakrul Alam, though in reality, the area exists. Perhaps, it has changed… as does wood exposed to a bonfire, which has been the subject of a self-translated Korean poem by Ihlwha Choi. Tagore’s poem, Borondalatranslated as ‘Basket of Offerings’, has the last say: “Just as the stars glimmer / With light in the dark night, / A spark awakens within/ My body. / This luminosity illuminates / All my work.” And perhaps, it is this luminosity that will also help us find our ideal world and move towards it, at least with words.
We have a book review by Aruna Chakravarti of Bornali Datta’sIn A Better Place: A Doctor’s Journey, a book that is set amidst immigrants and takes up certain social issues. Baba Padmanji’s Yamuna’s Journey, translated from Marathi by Deepra Dandekar, one of the oldest Indian novels has been discussed by Somdatta Mandal. Bhaskar Parichha has told us about S.Irfan Habib’s Maulana Azad – A Life. Basudhara Roy has brought out the simplicity and elegance of Robin Ngangom’sMy Invented Land: New and Selected Poems. He writes in the title poem that his home “has no boundaries. / At cockcrow one day it found itself/ inside a country to its west,/ (on rainy days it dreams looking east/ when its seditionists fight to liberate it from truth.)”. We also carry an excerpt from his book. Stories by Jessie Michael, Brindley Hallam Dennis, Sangeetha G and Shubhangi bring flavours of diversity in this issue.
Our journey has been a short one — three years is a short span. But, with goodwill from all our readers and contributors, we are starting to crawl towards adulthood. I thank you all as caregivers of Borderless Journal as I do my fabulous team and the artists who leave me astounded at their ability to paint and write — Sohana Manzoor, Gita Vishwanath and Pragya Bajpai.
Thank you all.
Looking forward to the next year, I invite you to savourBorderless Journal, March 2023, where more than the treasures mentioned here lie concealed.
Hand of great age – what you find wrapped
around you in shawl-like cover, in humble endowment;
prayer beads, what may come,
this mustiness of basement galleries,
the art of Dutch colonials loading ships
no man can remember sailing
and the bell in the distance is for dinner
and never church; breaks in wrinkled skin, now weeping –
a pensioner’s sudden chill and you are laid up for days!
What is gallant is gone and it is these many long
silences that remain.
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.
“Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse -- and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness --
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.”
― Omar Khayyám (1048-1131); translation from Persian by Edward Fitzgerald (Rubaiyat, 1859)
I wonder why Khayyam wrote these lines — was it to redefine paradise or just to woo his beloved? I like to imagine it was a bit of both. The need not to look for a paradise after death but to create one on Earth might well make an impact on humankind. Maybe, they would stop warring over an invisible force that they call God or by some other given name, some ‘ism’. Other than tens of thousands dying in natural disasters like the recent earthquake at the border of Turkiye and Syria, many have been killed by wars that continue to perpetrate divides created by human constructs. This month houses the second anniversary of the military junta rule in Myanmar and the first anniversary of the Ukrainian-Russian war that continues to decimate people, towns, natural reserves, humanity, economics relentlessly, polluting the environment with weapons of mass destruction, be it bombs or missiles. The more weapons we use, the more we destroy the environment of our own home planet.
Sometimes, the world cries for a change. It asks to be upended.
We rethink, reinvent to move forward as a species or a single race. We relook at concepts like life and death and the way we run our lives. Redefining paradise or finding paradise on Earth, redefining ‘isms’ we have been living with for the past few hundred years — ‘isms’ that are being used to hurt others of our own species, to create exclusivity and divisions where none should exist — might well be a requisite for the continuance of our race.
Voices of change-pleaders rang out in the last century with visionaries like Tagore, Gandhi, Nazrul, Satyajit Ray urging for a more accepting and less war-bound world. This month, Ratnottama Sengupta has written on Ray’s legendary 1969 film, Goopy Gyne, Bagha Byne: “The message he sent out loud and with laughter: ‘When people have palatable food to fill their belly and music to fill their soul, the world will bid goodbye to wars.’” Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri has given an essay on one of the greatest pacifists, Gandhi, and his attitudes to films as well as his depiction in movies. What was amazing is Gandhi condemned films and never saw their worth as a mass media influencer! The other interesting thing is his repeated depiction as an ethereal spirit in recent movies which ask for changes in modern day perceptions and reforms. In fact, both these essays deal with ghosts who come back from the past to urge for changes towards a better future.
Delving deeper into the supernatural is our interviewee, Abhirup Dhar, an upcoming writer whose ghost stories are being adapted by Bollywood. While he does investigative stories linked to supernatural lore, our other interviewee, Andrew Quilty, a renowned journalist who has won encomiums for his coverage on Afghanistan where he spent eight years, shows in his book, August in Kabul:America’s Last Days in Afghanistan and the Return of the Taliban, what clinging to past lores can do to a people, especially women. Where does one strike the balance? We also have an excerpt from his book to give a flavour of his exclusive journalistic coverage on the plight of Afghans as an eyewitness who flew back to the country not only to report but to be with his friends — Afghans and foreigners — as others fled out of Kabul on August 14 th 2021. While culturally, Afghans should have been closer to Khayyam, does their repressive outlook really embrace the past, especially with the Taliban dating back to about only three decades?
This intermingling of life and death and the past is brought to life in our fiction section by Sreelekha Chatterjee and Anjana Krishnan. Aditi Yadav creates a link between the past and our need to travel in her musing, which is reminiscent of Anthony Sattin’s description of asabiyya, a concept of brotherhood that thrived in medieval times. In consonance with wanderlust expressed in Yadav’s essay, we have a number of stories that explore travel highlighting various issues. Meredith Stephens travels to explore the need to have nature undisturbed by external interferences in pockets like Kangaroo Island in a semi-humorous undertone. While Ravi Shankar travels to the land’s end of India to voice candid concerns on conditions within Kerala, a place that both Keith Lyons and Rhys Hughes had written on with love and a sense of fun. It is interesting to see the contrasting perspectives on Southern India.
Professor Fakrul Alam has also translated poetry where a contemporary Bengali writer, Masud Khan, cogitates on history while Ihlwha Choi has translated his own poem from Korean. A translation of Tagore’s poem on the ocean tries to capture the vastness and the eternal restlessness that can be interpreted as whispers carried through eons of history. Fazal Baloch has also shared a poem by one of the most revered modern Balochi voices, that of Atta Shad. Our pièce de resistance is a translation of Premchand’s Balak or the Child by Anurag Sharma.
This vibrant edition would not have been possible without all the wonderful translators, writers, photographers and artists who trust us with their work. My heartfelt thanks to all of you, especially, Srijani Dutta for her beautiful painting, ‘Hope in Winter’, and Sohana for her amazing artwork. My heartfelt thanks to the team at Borderless Journal, to our loyal readers some of whom have evolved into fabulous contributors. Thank you.
Do write in telling us what you think of the journal. We look forward to feedback from all of you as we head for the completion of our third year this March.
The busiest airport on the continent –
air traffic control has never heard of John Denver,
I can hardly blame them, the job takes extreme focus;
did he lose his luggage? some caffeine-wired Pixie cut
tries to be helpful. He lost a lot more than that, I say.
YOU AGAIN? the shift supervisor walks in with his
three cream, four sugar Tasmanian Devil mug
and I tell him he would make a great sumo wrestler
with such a low center of gravity, but the Flat Earthers
aren’t having it so the muscle is called in, in a sudden fit of protein
to push me down those metal exterior stairs
that lead back to baggage claim and all those husky four-legged
drug sniffers that work their way up your leg while
the 10:45 out of Dulles disembarks.
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
We did it! … Announcing our first anthology … Monalisa No Longer Smiles… Click here to read.
Conversations
Suchen Christine Lim, an iconic writer from Singapore in conversation about her latest book, Dearest Intimate. Click here to read.
Blazing trails, as well as retracing the footsteps of great explorers, Christopher Winnan, a travel writer, delves into the past, and gazes into the future while conversing with Keith Lyons. Click hereto read.
Saturday Afternoon is a poem by Ihlwha Choi, translated from Korean by the poet himself. Click here to read.
Tagore’s poem, Tomar Shonkho Dhulay Porey (your conch lies in the dust), has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty as The Conch Calls. Click here to read.
Basudhara Roy has reviewed Afsar Mohammad’s Evening with a Sufi: Selected Poems, translated from Telugu by Afsar Mohammad and Shamala Gallagher. Click hereto read.
That good things happen despite darkness, despite prognostications of doom, that light glimmers hope if you strive to focus on your strength in hard times is borne true both in fiction and in life. Perhaps, we cannot get back the old ways (but is that what we want?) but new paths emerge. Old gives way to new. And while trying to gather pearls of human excellence — borne not of awards or degrees but of bringing out the best, the kindest, the most loving in human hearts — we managed to create with a team an outstanding anthology. Woven with the writings of old and new — we created a tapestry together that the editor in chief of our publishing house said was “classy, literary, engaging and international”. That one of the oldest and most reputed publishing houses in India with bookshops countrywide took it on was also an unusual event! We are truly grateful to Om Books International, Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri and Jyotsna Mehta along with all our writers and readers who made our anthology a reality, and to Radha Chakravarty and Fakrul Alam for the kind words they bestowed on our effort.
Please greet our first anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles, with love and friendship. It could be the perfect Christmas gift in the spirit of the season! And as the blurb says, “it will definitely bring a smile to your face because it is a celebration of the human spirit.”
The anthology is different from our journal in as much as it has a sample of an eclectic collection that has been honed with further editing and has some new features. Most of the writing is from our first year and showcases our ethos, except for Lesya’s poetry and interview. Lesya Bakun from Ukraine is still on the run, looking for a refuge — she cannot return home like you or I can. Her family is scattered across number of countries. Her cousin, who was guarding the factory at Azovstal, was taken prisoner. We included her story in the anthology hoping to create global empathy for refugees as the numbers will increase not only due to war but also due to climate change.
The reason we felt a hardcopy anthology was a good idea was because nothing beats the joy of having a bunch of interesting reads in the warmth of your hands (especially where internet cannot reach or is unavailable). In any case, books with the feel of paper, the rustling whispers which carry voices of leaves can never be replaced as Goutam Ghose had also said in his interview which is now part of our anthology.
And that is why we celebrate more books… this time we feature Singaporean prima donna of literature, Suchen Christine Lim, with her new book Dearest Intimate, a novel that spans more than hundred years including the harrowing Japanese invasion during World War II. She shared sound advice with writers: “Suffering is good for the writer. It will deepen lived experience and expand the heart’s empathy.” And perhaps that is what is echoed through the experiences of the other writer interviewed on our pages by Keith Lyons. This is a writer who not only brought out his own books but was a regular contributor of travel pieces for Frommer’s and National Geographic traveling to unexplored destinations — Christopher Winnan. Another writer Lyon had interviewed recently, Steve Carr, has passed on. We would like to convey our heartfelt condolences to his family and friends.
More translations from Bengali, Balochi and Korean enrich our November edition. Fazal Baloch has translated a story by Haneef Shareef and Rituparna Mukherjee by Shankhadeep Bhattacharya. We have the translation of an inspirational Tagore poem helping us find courage (Shonkho Dhulaye Pore or ‘the conch lies in the dust’). Another such poem by Nazrul has been rendered in English from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. He has also shared an autobiographical musing on how he started translating Tagore’s Gitabitan, which also happens to be his favourite book. More discussion on the literary persona of TS Eliot and the relevance of his hundred year old poem — ‘The Waste Land’ by Dan Meloche adds variety to our essay section.
Evoking the genius of another outstanding artiste, Kishore Kumar, who happened to pen thought provoking dialogues in some films, is Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri’s essay, review of a recent book on the legendary actor-singer and an interview with the authors. Infringing the boundaries of literary with popular culture and art and integrating all forms into a wholistic bundle has been part of our ethos. In that spirit we have a musing by Prithvijeet Sinha on Edvard Munch’s famous painting called Scream. We have non-fiction from Australia spanning Meredith Stephens’s recent brush with Covid, Mike Smith visits a Scottish beach in the footsteps of a novelist, Ravi Shankar has given us a poignant piece for a late friend and Candice Lousia Daquin talks of the existence of bi-racial biases. In contrast, Suzanne Kamata sent a narrative that bridges divides showcasing a German wife of a Japanese scientist that draws us to conclude that biases erode over time to create an acceptance of bi-racial people. Devraj Singh Kalsi brings in humour with his funny narrative about a guitarist. Rhys Hughes writes in a lighter vein on Indian cuisine in his column and spouts more funny poetry bordering on the absurd.
Gathering all of your thoughts in strings of words from all corners of the world, we present to you the bumper November issue of Borderless Journal . Thank you all for sharing your thoughts with us. Thanks to Sohana Manzoor for her fantastic painting and more thanks to the whole Borderless team for seeing this issue through. We would not have been able to do the anthology or these issues without each one of you — writers and readers.
MANNEQUIN
All those weekends with my mother.
Driving out to that K-Mart in the mall
along Bayfield Road.
Leaving me in the toy section
back when such things were okay.
So she could shop on her own.
And how I quickly bored of the toys.
Heading over to the clothing section
to pretend to be a mannequin.
Standing perched up on that display still as I could.
Posed like the family of mannequins
around me.
A few women smiling at my pretend
as they wheeled by.
Even a wink or two.
A moment of shared knowing.
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
Anthony Sattin, an award winning journalist and travel writer in conversation about Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped our World, his recent book published by Hachette, India. Click hereto read.
VR Devika talks of the dynamic Muthulakshmi Reddy, the first woman in the world to preside over a Legislative Assembly who sought justice for Devadsis and prostitutes and discusses her book, Muthulakshmi Reddy: A Trailblazer in Surgery and Women’s Rights published by Niyogi Books. Click hereto read.
Translations
Daridro or Poverty by Nazrul has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.
The Browless Dolls by S.Ramakrishnan, has been translated from Tamil by B Chandramouli. Click hereto read.
Two poems from Italy by Rosy Gallace have been translated from Italian by Irma Kurti. Click hereto read.
Aalo Amar Aalo (Light, My Light) a song by Tagore, has been translated by Mitali Chakravarty from Bengali. Click hereto read.
Pandies Corner
Songs of Freedom: Moh-Reenis an autobiographical story by Amreen, translated from Hindustani by Janees. These stories highlight the ongoing struggle against debilitating rigid boundaries drawn by societal norms, with the support from organisations like Shaktishalini and Pandies. Click hereto read.
Ravi Shankar recommends walking as a panacea to multiple issues, health and climate change and takes us on a tour of walks around the world. Click here to read.
Ali Jan Maqsood introduces us to a strong matriarch from a Balochi village. Click here to read.
Musings of a Copywriter
In Drill, Fill, Just Chill, Devraj Singh Kalsi gives us humour while under a dentist’s drill. Click here to read.
Notes from Japan
Suzanne Kamata writes of herA Ramble on Bizan, focussing on a writer, also by the surname of Moraes, who lived on Mount Bizan more than century ago, moving to Japan from Portugal having fallen violently in love. Click hereto read.
1.
There is this dummy quality about it all.
A sprawling suspension bridge vastness about
the ambition if not the foresight.
I sit, surrounded by numerous bird-hatched plans.
Drinking down all the man’s beer,
and none of his ideas.
2.
You are predictable as a subway train.
Eat, sleep, drink, talk the same so that
the sum of your habits make you an easy target.
Just two days ago, you were under surveillance.
From some tired hock shop camera
with a faulty aperture that has seen
better days.
3.
Time casts doubt, that is true,
so that anyone who waits on anything
becomes less the suspect and more
the patient opportunist all the time.
4.
I don’t care what you did or didn’t do.
This is Fowler’s revenge.
I hear you’re teaching his own children to hate him
which is utterly deplorable.
Keeping him from seeing them,
but such revelations come second hand.
I am friends with both of you
which makes this all the more difficult.
5.
Distance is another consideration.
No one could have invaded Russia
from the pleasure-seeking funhouses
of Coney Island.
6.
I hear you have taken up with your legal counsel now,
please tell me it is not true.
The rumour mill never stops spinning.
I hear it is still on the sly.
He is in it for the favours as much as you are
for the money. And he is married,
please tell me this is not true.
Perhaps you have already made
your calculations.
7.
Fowler made good on his threats tonight.
Not against you, but himself.
The one he always hated most
according to the letter.
I walked in and had to cut him down.
So blue in the face he looked like some dangling
pathetic Picasso which angered me.
And the smell, let me tell you!
All alone in that sorry basement apartment.
After everyone had left.
8.
I guess you get full custody.
I hope you are happy.
A phone call would be nice.
We used to be friends.
9.
Tell Jimmy happy birthday.
I believe this would be his ninth.
I hope you got the gift I sent.
The mail is sporadic these days.
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 The Oklahoma Review.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Borderless 