Seamus heaney – Borderless

By Mohul Bhowmick

The procession to mourn on Muharram (Bibi-ka-Alam) travels through the city of Hyderabad. From Public Domain

Hyderabad was not meant to be consumed only on Sundays. Especially when the Bibi-ka-Alam proceeded towards Masjid-e-Ilahi in Chaderghat, with mourners of all hues lamenting their inability to wage war alongside the pious. The elephant on which the howdah was placed murmured its assent before being offered cups of frothy Irani chai. The sidelong glances at the youth besmirched with the blood of a sacrifice heretofore unknown in their lives — and therefore easily bypassed — could not be missed.

She could not grasp, at first, why the chai had to be sweetened with such copious quantities of sugar. Nor could she understand why the students of the fine arts college in Masab Tank had to wrestle with their lives — and a passerby’s conscience — when getting off bus number 49M. She was told much later that they were forced to read The Fountainhead before they could even dream of touching their coursework. Their professor of drawing was no fan of Francisco D’Anconia, lesser still of Dagny Taggart — for reasons he credited to his deficient childhood in the treeless expanses of Rayalaseema — and, quite understandably, Atlas Shrugged was passed over.

She had bumped into an architect of renown, whose primary skill consisted of knowing someone who knew someone who had erected a brutalist coffee shop in west Hyderabad, and who had not heard either of Howard Roark or Ayn Rand. He called himself a modernist and displayed an unnatural interest in Balinese architecture. Spring had come late that year, and she had often found herself wondering what the brutalist coffee shop architect was called, and if she would be able to tell upon seeing it without being told. She seldom questioned her inability to see past charades those days.

But she had questioned her inability to separate facts from fiction, and one warm afternoon, upon finding herself in an auto-rickshaw on the national highway connecting Bowenpally to Suchitra, she had wondered at her own resilience. A fictional flyover, proposed to ease the misery of motorists, seemed comfortable in adding on more to it, and she had struggled to be a mere spectator in such a carnage of dust. Coughing seemed to be an act of participation, and she had denied herself the pleasure. Seamus Heaney often came to her those days — not least because of the parallels she could draw between the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland and those in her life — and she was reminded of the anguish of being an innocent bystander.

Turning south, her attention was taken up largely by the passion with which the Bibi-ka-Alam journeyed past Purani Haveli, and with a stab of recollection, she was reminded of why the city was home. Such brushes with epiphanies confined her to the immediate past, and whatever largesse Mir Mahbub Ali Khan or Mir Osman Ali Khan had bestowed upon the land, she could not look past the perverse stains of neglect on the walls of the Chowmahalla. The Khilwat Mubarak often wept these days, for want of heirs who truly knew the Deccan, and she had shied away from taking photographs of its compromised state.

She hardly ever turned east except to see Hyderabad play in the Ranji Trophy at the new stadium constructed at enormous expense to the taxpayer. She could not forget the Fateh Maidan as quickly as the newfound bourgeoisie that lived in Sainikpuri had, and it was also why, for sentiments she would not voice out of a fear she could not understand, the IPL[1] had passed her by. Her forebears spoke of ML Jaisimha and Abbas Ali Baig in the same breath (and deemed MAK Pataudi a mere passenger), and she had come to the Gymkhana expecting to see suave men in white. Cricket not played in its true colours had not appealed to her.

But one rainy evening, not long after the murderous summer had drifted away, a friend had spoken wistfully of the bric-a-brac one could conjure on the jumbling avenues of Dilsukh Nagar, and she had not known how to refuse. Soon afterwards, having been caressed by a sickly downpour, they found themselves in Kanchan Bagh (where a vision, as if from a previous life, had roused her to action) and a meal at Hotel Sohail in Malakpet — with the feasible attraction of Barkas and the debonair Chandrayan Gutta, warts and all, lurking close by — had seemed too cheery an enticement to pass up.

She had not truly known the city before journeying past the necropolis that was Golkonda. Her grandfather had often sung her lullabies about the ancient riverbed of the ferocious Musi. In moments of unguarded alacrity, she had found herself wishing to see it. Having lost everything but herself in the mêlée that the city had become, she had found enough strength in her lungs to bargain and hail an autorickshaw off the ranks at Basheer Bagh. Thankfully, it had not rained, but she could carefully envision the fresh petrichor wafting north from the exhibition grounds in Nampally.

The driver had turned and twisted, driven on the wrong side of the road and gone past Moazzam Jahi market without paying obeisance, and she could feel the clock tower warning her to steer clear of exigencies to come. The courteous guide, with salt and pepper in his hair and dressed immaculately in a brown kurta at the Salar Jung Museum — where she had detoured after glimpsing the sickly Musi at Naya Pul — had spoken highly of his regard for women, and addressed her throughout as aapa. Of course, she had not gone close enough to smell the liquor under his breath, nor fathom his inexplicable urge to indulge in his favourite pastimes of beating his wife every night and collecting lithographs from the Asaf Jahi era.

Whatever was left of Hyderabad in her veins promised to wash away in the floods that had in the past reminded the Musi of its penurious state in 1908, or the spate it had reached in 1578, when Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah had worried endlessly about the well-being of Bhagmati. Such a Hyderabad did not exist for her anymore, and in her dreams, she recounted only the rapine and the arson and the pillage that Julius Caesar had expressly forbidden, and of which Raja Singh and Akbaruddin Owaisi were proud inheritors. Just like Rome, Hyderabad had been an idea, an idea worth fighting for, but she found herself disabused of any such notions on her midnight rambles to Gachibowli.

The thought of the Cyber Towers existing in a city where the Arts College proliferated disgusted her; where men such as those who had erected the Deloitte Towers (and Trump Avenue) existed, she could not. Her views on perfection were not mixed — she wanted the best or nothing at all — and to breathe in the same air where the dead architects of the Paigah Tombs and the Falaknuma shared space with real estate barons from Kokapet seemed sinful.

The government was involved too, hoping to pocket large parcels of Raidurg, and by then, she did not find it difficult to contemplate suicide on her way home. Only a hot cup of frothy Irani chai from Café Green Corner — going to Café Niloufer may have been the final straw — could calm her down before she mustered the courage to knock on her door, and open it to come face-to-face with herself. Did she need to protect Hyderabad from men, or did men need to be protected from Hyderabad? No. The answer was simple. She had to forget Hyderabad.

When she could afford the luxury of thinking about Hyderabad at all these days, she imagined herself turning west and staring at the last Hyderabadi across the Pacific, daring him to blink.

[1] Indian Premier league – cricket

Mohul Bhowmick is a national-level cricketer, sports journalist, poet, essayist and travel writer from Hyderabad, India. He has published five collections of poems and one travelogue so far. His latest book, The Past Is Another Country, came out in 2025. More of his work can be discovered on his website: www.mohulbhowmick.com.

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Heidi North in conversation with Keith Lyons

When New Zealand author Heidi North won an international Irish Poetry Prize in 2007, and was told by the Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney, to keep writing, it made her realise that not everyone wrote the way she did. Further recognition and confirmation of her own unique voice came just before Covid hit, when the band U2 used one of her poems in their Joshua Tree Tour on a gigantic screen before audiences of thousands. The writer of poems and fiction has been published in anthologies, journals and magazines around the world, but underlying her writing is a fascination with the human condition and how out of grief we make parcels of light.

When did you first start writing?

I’ve always been writing. I think I thought everyone just wrote poems and stories the way I did, when I was a kid. But as to when I started taking writing more seriously, that was when I won an Irish poetry prize in 2007 (The Feile Filiochta International Poetry), that’s when I realised that perhaps not everyone wrote quite the way I did.

What cultivated your love of words and storytelling?

My mother was a great storyteller and she often told me stories, especially family stories, growing up. In fact, a lot of those have made their way into an essay collection that I’m currently working on, a few decades later. My dad was an architect and artist, and my step mum is an artist, too so I grew up surrounded by creative people and books and a feeling that creativity was valued.

What do you enjoy about the process of writing?

It can be a frustrating one at times, there’s the gap between what you want things to be and where they are and finding the way to work from that point to another can be a challenge. But the great joy comes from the flow state, when you’re in that state, time and space are nothing, there is just you and the page and it’s joyful. You have to hold onto that as a writer, because a lot of the time is spent berating yourself for not actually writing, feeling deep despair about your work, and the process of editing, which can be joyful and painful too.

What differences are there between writing poetry and writing short stories/novels? Do you have to put a different ‘hat’ on to create?

For me, it’s sort of instinctual, I just know when what form things I want to explore will take. I was a poet first, so I did have to go through a process of really learning to write fiction. John Cranna from The Creative Hub (Auckland, New Zealand) really taught me how to bolt my fiction writing down. I feel like fiction adheres to the rules of gravity whereas poetry doesn’t have to. But writing both has made each form stronger, my poetry has become more narrative and my fiction benefits from the stripping back you do in poetry.

I wrote my second poetry collection, We are tiny beneath the light, as a sort of side project while I was working on my bigger project for my Masters. And it’s more a narrative than my first collection, Possibility of flight, which I published in 2015, for that reason.

How do you go about your writing? With planning, spontaneous, inspiration or contemplation?

These days, between work and kids and the obligations of adulthood, the writing has to be planned and I have to give myself deadlines and hold myself accountable to them. But in terms of what I want to write, that still is fairly spontaneous. I have never felt like I choose what I write about, things just tug at me until I make something out of them.

Does being a writer make you more observant, mindful or aware, or does noticing details and recording them make you a writer?

What a chicken and egg! My dad always says I was fascinated by why people did things, so I think writing perhaps helps me make sense of the world.

What did you gain from studying creative writing at university?

Every time I’ve done any writing study, there have been two great gifts of it; one, it ringfences writing time and gives me deadlines, and a place to play with writing, to read and to really think hard about both. But the second, and perhaps the greater gift, is the cohort. I finished my Master of Creative Writing at Auckland University in 2017, and that cohort of writers, and our lecturer, Paula Morris, have been so valuable to me since. Plus, I still keep in contact with, and champion writers from other courses I’ve taken along the way. I’ve taken several short courses at the IIML at Victoria University of Wellington and those always gave me new inspiration and introduced me to new writers, many of whom have stayed friends.

What was your experience in China/Shanghai like?

Being in Shanghai for the International Writers Program in 2016 was just such a wonderful, stimulating creative time. I’d lived in China, in Huizhou, 12 years earlier for a year teaching English at a language school there, so I had a bit of an idea of what China was like, so while in some ways I was prepared, it was also so different. I loved spending two months there. I loved having the time dedicated to writing and to being in a different culture and to be being part of a group of 10 writers from around the world and to spend time with Chinese writers and particulate in many literary events. I feel so very lucky and thankful to the Michael King Centre in New Zealand for the exchange.

It was also hard and challenging and bizarre to be away from home. I had a small daughter at home and my marriage had recently broken up. So it was many things, all at once.

How do you go about getting published?

Just sending things out and keep sending things out. Hopefully, you send things out that people like and they get published. I’ve had a lot of rejection letters, and I’ve also learnt that some people will love your work and some people won’t. It’s true what they say that everything is subjective. I’ve had work rejected by someplace that ends up winning a prize somewhere else.

How do you think writing can address difficult subjects, such as your ‘We are tiny beneath the light’?

Your hope as a writer, when you write about difficult subjects, such as I did in, ‘We are tiny beneath the light’, which is about the breakdown of my marriage and the process of rebuilding myself after that, is that it illuminates something for someone else. Maybe someone else going through a hard time reads my poems and it gives them a foothold into their own life, or a way to express their grief, or offers a sliver of hope. I go to hard writing in hard times, and it gives me great comfort.

Does writing from your own experience mean being vulnerable on the page? If so, how do you live with that?

It would be easier to step back from your work and say it’s not you, and in ‘We are tiny beneath the light’, I could no longer do that. Was I scared of being vulnerable? Yes, I was terrified. My publisher and editor Mary McCallum was invaluable through that process and trusting in her careful guidance helped me get to the heart of the story I was telling.

The other thing is, that writing anything truthful always contains poetic license, and even if it’s not about you people will make assumptions anyway, so that’s freeing in a way. And you have to get past what you think people might think of you if you’re a writer, or you’ll never write anything.

Being vulnerable is something I find quite difficult, and yet, both of the projects I’m currently working on have memoir elements, so demand a level of vulnerability. In the end, I think all good writing is an act of vulnerability of some kind, and when I’m scaring myself that’s when I know I’m going in the right direction.

How do you make a bridge with the reader for them to get into your writing?

I think it’s vulnerability. You don’t have to agree with me or like me, but you have to know I’m telling some kind of truth – which is widely subjective, but that’s what the reader is here for, to see the writer tell the truth they have in the best way they can.

How useful are deadlines, goals, and writing groups to writing and improving your work?

They cannot be underestimated! It’s not an understatement that the process of getting to the desk is extraordinary hard. It would be such a relief not to want to write, because it’s so fraught just getting to the page. You have to really want to write to overcome that dread. It makes absolutely no sense that something you love is so intensely hard to do. This is where deadlines and writing groups, that come with deadlines come in. And it’s great to be able to talk about the craft with people who care about it as much as you do.

How rewarding does it feel seeing your work and name in print?

Holding the copy of your book in your hands for the first time is such a wonderful feeling. And when you get accepted for any kind of publication there is just this instant bubble of joy. And you have to hold onto that, because the slog is hard, and the rejections keep coming. It can be hard to savour the feeling of reward that comes with seeing your work published, but it is why we continue writing, so that someone will read it.

How has your writing ended up being shared to the wider world? Is it true that U2 used your poem ‘Piha Beach, two years on’ in its New Zealand concert screen images?

Yes! Isn’t that just wild? Having my poem picked up and used by U2 is one of the most unexpected and wonderful things that being a writer has led to. I wrote about it — the surreal joy of having my poem selected to play on the largest screen I’ve ever seen – may ever see – in my life, to a crowd of thousands here: When one of the biggest bands in the world bought my tiny poem

If you can’t make a living from writing poetry, what other benefits are there from publishing poetry?

You don’t write poetry or short stories in New Zealand for the money, but being a writer has lead me to some extraordinary experiences, like an all-expenses-paid trip to Bali when I won the Asia New Zealand Foundation Short Story Competition, going to the Shanghai Writers Programme and all the wonderful experiences I had there, meeting Seamus Heaney and having him tell 26-year-old me sternly to keep writing when I picked up the Feile Filiochta poetry award in Ireland, and spending the evening in the Friends and Family lounge before the U2 concert in Auckland.

So, it’s not bought me great monetary riches, but it’s bought me great dinner party stories.

How important is winning awards, and getting feedback from readers in keeping your writing?

Really, really important. I’d like to say I don’t care what people think, but I do. I don’t mean in the way it stops me from writing hard things, but in the way that if I’d never had any positive feedback at all the doubt would have gotten the better of me and I would have stopped writing long ago.

How do you use your writing skills in your day job?

I work in strategic communications and engagement, which is all about how to communicate the bigger story and connect with people. It’s fulfilling to tell stories in different capacities.

How do you juggle your life and other responsibilities with making time to write?

I’ve learnt to write in snatches, when kids are playing noisily around me, when I don’t want to, when I’m too tired, when I’m feeling flat. There’s always something writing or writing-adjacent you can do, even when you may not be at your best and that way you keep a toe in the water. I do everything I can just to keep a toe in the water, and then sometimes that leads to full body immersion, but with kids and a job and a house there isn’t much glorious uninterrupted time these days.

What are you currently working on?

I always have multiple things on the go at the same time, so one project I’m working on is a personal essay collection about childhood, family politics, parenting and love. And the other is my Shanghai project, a hybrid novel memoir about a runaway bride who finds herself hiding in Shanghai – the last place she remembers being happy, and it’s also about me, on the Shanghai writers programme grappling with where I was in my life post-separation.

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Read, read, read. Do interesting things. Find your own voice. Allow yourself to write things without expectations or limits. Write into the things that make you scared. Then go deeper. Keep going.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

Don’t agonise so much, and just keep going.

How does writing make you a global citizen better connected to the world?

Participating in literary events and publications and exchanges creates so much connection and empathy with different cultures and ideas. It’s so important.

New Zealand writer Heidi North has won awards for both her poems and short stories, including an international Irish Poetry Prize, and has been published in anthologies and magazines around the world. Heidi was the New Zealand fellow in the Shanghai International Writers Programme in 2016. The same year she was awarded the Hachette/ NZSA mentorship to work on her first novel. Heidi has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Auckland and lives in Auckland with her family. Her first poetry collection, Possibility of flight was published by Makaro Press in 2015. Her second collection, We are Tiny Beneath the light (The Cuba Press 2019), was launched by U2 when they used one of her poems from the collection in their 2019 Joshua Tree Tour.

‘Piha Beach, two years on’ by Heidi North

My feet punch bruises in the black sand
and I am back in the burn of childhood summers
 
the circle of sentinel gulls
their grey wings tipped to catch the light
 
warn me back
but I go down to the white foam edge
 
bluebottles bloated with their pretty poison
yield to the sharp edge of my stick
 
I go down to the place
where the wind kicks holes through my heart
 
and there is a child down there
too close to the ribbony horizon line
 
holding his blue kite
towards the updraft
 
still smiling as it lurches
against the wide white blaze of sky –

and I smile and laugh and I run with him because how can I tell him
all the brutal things are yet to come

(‘We are tiny beneath the light’ has been published with permission from The Cuba Press)

Keith Lyons (keithlyons.net) is an award-winning writer, author and creative writing mentor, who gave up learning to play bagpipes in a Scottish pipe band to focus on after-dark tabs of dark chocolate, early morning slow-lane swimming, and the perfect cup of masala chai tea. Find him@KeithLyonsNZ or blogging at Wandering in the World (http://wanderingintheworld.com).

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

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