Tag: Somdatta Mandal

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Editorial

A Sprinkling of Happiness?

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.

Poetry brings in a sprinkling of good cheer not only with a photo poem by Hughes, but also with more in a lighter vein from Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Michael R Burch, Arshi Mortuza, Jason Ryberg and others. Sanjay C Kuttan has given a poem dipped in nostalgic happiness with colourful games that evolved in Malaysia. Koiko Tsuuda, an Estonian, rethinks happiness. George Freek, Stuart MacFarlane and Saranyan BV address mortality. Nilsa Mariano and G Javaid Rasool have given us powerful migrant poetry while John Grey, Craig Kirchner, Jane Hammons, Nia Joseph, Noopur Vedajna Das and Adeline Lyons refer to climate or changes wrought by climate disasters in their verses.

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 Pokemon and Nazes Afroz’s translation of Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Shabnam with both the extracts and Rabbani’s narratives reflecting the spunk of women, albeit in different timescapes…

Our book reviews feature Meenakshi Malhotra’s perspectives on Shuchi Kapila’s Learning to Remember: Postmemory and the Partition of India and Bhaskar Parichha’s thought provoking piece on Malvika Rajkotia’s autobiographical Unpartitioned Time: A Daughter’s Story. While both these look into narratives around the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent, Rakhi Dalal’s review captures the whimsical and yet thoughtful nuances of Namita Gokhale’s Never Never Land. Somdatta Mandal has written about Upamanyu Chatterjee’s latest novel, Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life, which is in a way a story about a migrant too.

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.

Good luck and best wishes!

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

Click here to access the content’s page for the August 2024 Issue.

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Review

Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life

Author: Upamanyu Chatterjee

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Several years ago, probably around the 1990s, the critic Nilanjana S Roy had defined the current crop of Indian Writing in English novelists as a ‘Doon School-St. Stephens’ conspiracy’. It was an interesting but true observation since the writers who were popular at that time were all products of these elite institutions and were quite adept at imitating western culture and simultaneously wrote in a style that was quite polished and urban. Upamanyu Chatterjee, belonging to this category, and at present a retired Indian civil servant, had shot into fame way back in 1988 by writing a definitive urban Indian coming-of-age story with his first novel, English August: An Indian Story. Several years later in 2000, he won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Mammaries of a Welfare State. His seventh novel Villany focused on a new class of post-liberalisation, westernised urban Indians who were hitherto ignored in the regional as well as the English fiction of India. This meticulously crafted literary thriller, a riveting story of crime and retribution, now stands at the other end of the spectrum when we read Chatterjee’s latest novel Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life (2024). Narrating the life-story of an Italian Benedictine monk Lorenzo Senesi, who is on a spiritual quest to find the meaning in life, this meticulously detailed story is based on the life of Italian Fabrizio Senesi, an acquaintance of Chatterjee in Sri Lanka for the last few years, who turned out to be “a good friend” of his and who is now a European bureaucrat and a Development expert residing in Phnom Penh leading a successful professional as well as a blissful family life. As Chatterjee states in his foreword, “It is a true story, that is to say, like many true stories, it is a work of fiction.”

Divided into nine chapters, the locale of his story moves from Italy to London and then to Bangladesh. This is how things begin. One summer morning in 1977, nineteen-year-old Lorenzo Senesi of Aquilina, Italy, drives his Vespa motor-scooter into a Fiat and breaks his forearm. It keeps him in bed for a month, and his boggled mind thinks of unfamiliar things: where he has come from, where he is going, and how to find out more about where he ought to go. When he recovers, he enrolls for a course in physiotherapy. He also joins a prayer group, and visits Praglia Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in the foothills outside Padua. Detailing this part of his life we are told how this monastery will become his home for ten years, its isolation and discipline the anchors of his life. The first three chapters are full of quotes from the teachings of Saint Benedictine, the different vocations that Lorenzo follows, and give us details of monastic life as led in different Catholic institutions spread throughout Italy.

In the fourth chapter titled ‘The Visitor at the Abbey’, Lorenzo listens to a talk by one Luca Rossini, a Benedictine monk native of Bergamo, who since 1976 has been staying a little over seven thousand kilometers to the east in a place called Phulbari Para near the town of Khulna in Bangladesh where he runs an ashram as a dependent of the Praglia monastery. So, after eight long years of the introspective silence of a monastery, Lorenzo decides to go to Khulna. But before that he must spend eight months in England attending English-to-Speakers of-Other-Languages courses at an Academy there, till Luca would come to pick him up and take him to Bangladesh.

Upon arriving in Dhaka, the cacophony and different aspects of an alien culture that Lorenzo faces is described very beautifully by Chatterjee in great details. He starts wearing a lungi, eating with the fingers of his right hand, washing his clothes in a public tank along with female strangers, studying Bengali in the library with Luca, and tries to acclimatise with the place, the weather, and the people as quickly as possible. Apart from praying seven times a day, he also spends a lot of time decorating the walls of the chapel with different tempura paintings.

After some time, he visits another ashram called Rishilpi run by Enzo and Laura, an Italian missionary couple in Satkhira, some sixty kilometers away. Seeing the multifarious social upliftment activities that are being undertaken at their place, Lorenzo is intrigued by the idea of worming one’s way into a community and working for its betterment from within. Though remaining a Benedictine at heart, he decides to quit the Order and continue his search for some purpose to his life.

At Rishilpi he joins as Deputy Director, Health Services, and opens a sorely needed physiotherapy clinic that would attempt to instill a little meaning in the lives of the disabled and would educate the rest in matters of hygiene, sanitation, medical care and physical well-being. After surviving quite comfortably without money for the past eleven years and living a strict, disciplined monastic life, Lorenzo gradually undergoes a change when he starts interacting with people from all strata of society. Concealing his religion within his heart, he goes on working with a missionary zeal and after some time realises that even working with women felt marvellous.

In due course, he even falls in love and proposes to Dipti, the Headmistress of the same institution, and thus an ex-priest goes on to marry an ex-nun, both remaining devout Catholics forever. They spend the six happiest years of their lives at Rishilpi, till Lorenzo realises it is also life that is holding him back. With children, his responsibilities increase, he cannot go his own way. He needs money to survive and is called upon more and more often to lecture trainees in Dhaka at the Centre for the Rehabilitation of the Paralysed. In this manner, he slowly broadens his acquaintance with the developing world, and becomes the ideal person to build a bridge between the first world donors and third world recipients.

In the brief concluding chapter of the book, Chatterjee tells us that if one ended Lorenzo’s story here, it is because, even though twenty-nine years have passed since his marriage and he and Dipti are alive and well in Phnom-Penh, he has not in essential changed and he is still in spirit, Benedictine. But what is most interesting is the fact that “he still continues, though, to live his life anti-clockwise, as it were, for (as we have seen) after passing his youth in search of direction for his spirit, he turned outward to the community – and to the joys and responsibilities of the domestic life – only in his mid-thirties; and it was not till his early forties that he properly set about addressing the matter of money. It is – broadly – the trajectory of the typical human life but lived in reverse.”

Chatterjee’s tour-de-force is his storytelling and imaginative prose combined with his trademark wit and attention to detail. In the acknowledgement section he thanks his friend Fabrizio Senesi for providing him innumerable clarifications about life in Italy and in Bangladesh. The long list of books that Chatterjee read and mentioned in the end provides ample proof that he undertook his research rather seriously and this is clearly reflected in the intricate details that he provides of places and people throughout the novel. The book is not a page-turner, and one must read it rather seriously to savour the meticulous effort that Chatterjee made to provide us a fascinating tale about an ordinary human being who finds that a life of service to God is enough, and that it is not enough.

Click here to read the excerpt from Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life

Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.

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Tribute

A Hundred Years from Today…

A hundred years from today…
  Who are you reading my poetry
     With eager curiosity? 

 -- One Hundred Years Later,Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore (May 7th 1861-August 7 1941). From Public Domain.

One of the greatest minds of centuries, Tagore wondered about life and death… about posterity. He lost his wife, some of his children and many more loved ones in his lifetime. He took a philosophical stance on death. On his death anniversary, we bring to you his ideas on death and life too…

As a salute to his pen, we start with his poems and stories, mostly in translation, and move on to tributes by Nazrul (translated by Professor Fakrul Alam), by Aruna Chakravarti , by the late Sunil Gangopadhyay and more…

Tagore’s Poetry   

The Child, a poem by Tagore originally written in English. Click here to read. 

Tagore in Translation  

Tagore’s Achhe Dukhu, Achhe Mrityu, (Sorrow Exists, Death Exists): These lyrics were composed by the poet when on the death of his wife. It has been translated by Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

Mrityu or Death, a poem by Tagore has been translated by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.

One Small Ancient Tale: Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Ekti Khudro Puraton Golpo (One Small Ancient Tale)’ from his collection Golpo Guchcho ( literally, a bunch of stories) has been translated by Nishat Atiya. Click here to read.  

Tributes

Nazrul’s Ghumaite Dao Shranto Robi Re(Let Robi Sleep in Peace) has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

The Myriad Hues of Tagore by Aruna Chakravarti : Aruna Chakravarti writes on times and the various facets of Tagore. Click here to read.

Rabindranath Tagore: A Universal Bard :This conversation between Aruna Chakravarti and Sunil Gangopadhyay that took place at a Tagore Conference organised by the Sahitya Akademi in Kochy in 2011. Click here to read.

A book review by Meenakshi Malhotra of Somdatta Mandal’s The Last Days of Rabindranath Tagore in Memoirs, a translation from a conglomeration of writings from all the Maestro’s caregivers. Click here to read.

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Contents

Borderless, July 2024

Art by Sohana Manzoor

Editorial

Seasons out of Time… Click here to read.

Conversation

A brief introduction to Suzanne Kamata’s Cinnamon Beach and a conversation with the author about her latest novel. Click here to read.

Translations

Tagore’s Achhe Dukhu, Achhe Mrityu, (Sorrow Exists, Death Exists) has been translated from Bengali by Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

Nazrul’s Ghumaite Dao Shranto Robi Re (Let Robi Sleep in Peace) has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

Amalkanti by Nirendranath Chakraborty has been translated from Bengali by Debali Mookerjea-Leonard. Click here to read.

Speech Matters, a story by Naramsetti Umamaheswararao, has been translated from Telugu by Johnny Takkedasila. Click here to read.

Every Day by Hafeez Rauf has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.

The Long Journey by Ihlwha Choi has been translated from Korean by the poet himself. Click here to read.

Mrityu or Death by Tagore has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.

Poetry

Click on the names to read the poems

Jared Carter, Michael Burch, Kirpal Singh, Rakhi Dalal, Stuart MacFarlane, Averi Saha, John Grey, Surbhi Sharma, David Francis, Pramod Rastogi, David Mellor, Saranyan BV, Jim Bellamy, Tasneem Hossain, Thompson Emate, George Freek, Mitra Samal, Lizzie Packer, Shamik Banerjee, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Rhys Hughes

Musings/ Slices from Life

Stop, Look, Think!

Farouk Gulsara muses with a slice irony at a traffic junction. Click here to read.

Norman Rockwell: Out of the Closet

Wayne F. Burke gives a vignette of the life of the legendary illustrator. Click here to read.

Unveiling the Magic of Mystical Mangroves

Sai Abhinay Penna travels to the second largest mangrove forest in the world. Click here to read.

Glimpses of an Indian Summer

Madhuri Bhattacharya nostalgically captures the nuances of a hot summer. Click here to read.

The Pearl of the Indian Ocean

Ravi Shankar travels to Colombo. Click here to read.

Essays

The Myriad Hues of Tagore by Aruna Chakravarti

Aruna Chakravarti writes on times and the various facets of Tagore. Click here to read.

Picked Clean

Snigdha Agrawal writes of the impact from the loss of green cover in Bangalore. Click here to read.

Fast Food for a Month

Keith Lyons gives an in memoriam about the late documentarian, Morgan Spurlock. Click here to read.

Stories

In the Shadows…

Paul Mirabile gives us a story steeped in art and mental health. Click here to read.

The Last Hyderabadi

Mohul Bhowmick talks of the passage of an era. Click here to read.

Alvin and the Curious Case of Spoilt Milk

Anagha Narasimha gives a light hearted piece about the impact of demonetisation. Click here to read.

Book Excerpts

An excerpt from The Poisoner of Bengal/The Prince and the Poisoner by Dan Morrison. Click here to read.

An excerpt from The Sunset Suite by Rhys Hughes. Click here to read.

Book Reviews

Somdatta Mandal reviews Knife:  Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie. Click here to read.

Basudhara Roy reviews Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry by Arundhathi Subramaniam. Click here to read.

Navleen Multani reviews Mapping the Mind, Minding the Map, edited by Basudhara Roy and Jaydeep Sarangi. Click here to read.

Bhaskar Parichha reviews Derek Waller’s The Pundits: British Exploration of Tibet and Central Asia. Click here to read.

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Categories
Editorial

Seasons Out of Time

Climate disasters. From Public Domain
...the horror of dark red sky – the gates of hell opened wide so they say that even atheists prayed to save the souls of the dead...

— Lizzie Packer, 'Hot Dry Summers'

The description in ‘Hot Dry Summers’ is not of hell but what is perceived as happening on certain parts of Earth due to global warming or climate change. Forest fires. Nearer the equator, the storms have become harsher with lightning strikes that seem to connect the Earth to the sky. Trees get uprooted as the soil is softened from excessive rain. Sometimes, they fall on passers-by killing or injuring them. There is no rain in some places, forest fires or flooding in others… The highest temperatures touched 55 degrees Celsius this year. Instead of worrying about losing our homes lodged on land masses to the oceans that continue to rise, becoming dark heat absorbers due to loss of white ice cover, we persistently fight wars, egged on by differences highlighting divisive constructs. It feels strange that we are witness to these changes which seem to be apocalyptic to doomsday sayers. Are they right? Our flora, fauna and food will also be impacted by global climate change. How will we survive these? Will we outlive these as a species?

Keeping the myriad nuances of living on this planet in mind, we have writings from more than a dozen countries showcased in this issue, with a few highlighting climate change and wars — especially in poetry. Michael Burch has given us poetry on weather. John Grey has celebrated nature. Other than Lizzie Packer, Mitra Samal has a subtle poem on climate change. Stuart McFarlane and David Mellor bring the disaster of war to our doorstep. Jared Carter, Kirpal Singh, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Averi Saha, Shamik Banerjee, David Francis, George Freek, Rakhi Dalal and more have reflected on the varied nuances of life. Rhys Hughes has brought in humour and a comment on our perspectives, with his poem ‘Devil’s Bridge to Istanbul’… Can a shortcut be found across continents with the magic of a signboard?

Poetry in our translations’ section travels to Balochistan, from where a Hafeez Rauf translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch, talks of burning tyres, again conflicts. It takes on a deeper hue as Ihlwha Choi translates his poignant poem from Korean, reflecting on the death of his mother. We have a translation of Tagore’s less popular poem, Mrityu[1], reflecting on the same theme. His reflections on his wife’s death too have been translated by Professor Fakrul Alam who has also shared a song of Nazrul, written and composed on the death of Tagore. Another lesser-known poet but brilliant nonetheless, Nirendranath Chakraborty, has been translated for us by Debali Mookerjea-Leonard. And what a tremendous poem it is when the person called Amalkanti wanted to be sunshine! We have a story too — ‘Speech Matters’ by Naramsetti Umamaheswararao translated by Johny Takkedasila.

Our stories as usual travel around the world — from Holland (by Paul Mirabile) to Hyderabad (by Mohul Bhowmick) and with a quick pause at Bangalore (by Anagha Narasimha). Travels in the real world are part of our non-fiction. Sai Abhinay Penna takes to a the second largest mangrove forest in the world and Ravi Shankar to Colombo. Madhuri Bhattachrya gives us a glimpse of an Indian summer and Snigdha Aggrawal explores the impact of climate change in her part of the world. Farouk Gulsara actually writes his reflections at a traffic junction. And it reads droll…

We have an in memoriam by Keith Lyons on Morgan Spurlock, the documentary maker who ate McDonald fare for a month and then made a film on it. We have two tributes to two legends across time. Wayne F Burke has given a brief piece on the iconic illustrator, Norman Rockwell. And Aruna Chakravarti, the queen of historic fiction who brought the Tagore family alive for us in her two very well researched novels, Jorasanko and Daughters of Jorasanko, has given us a fabulous tribute to Tagore on the not-so common aspects of him.

We have excerpts from another historical novel set in Bengal of Tagore’s time, Dan Morrison’s The Prince and the Poisoner: The Murder that Rocked the British Raj and Hughes’ The Sunset Suite, a set of absurd tall tales that make you smile, squirm or wonder…  Reviews of Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Somdatta Mandal and of Arundhathi Subramaniam’s Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry by Basudhara Roy bring two latest books to our readers. Navleen Multani reflects on Mapping the Mind, Minding the Map, edited by Basudhara Roy and Jaydeep Sarangi. And Bhaskar Parichha tells us about a group of men called Pundits during British Raj, “In the closed files of the government of British India, however, they were given their true designation as spies…” in his review of Derek Waller’s The Pundits: British Exploration of Tibet and Central Asia.

Suzanne Kamata, the novelist who does a column from Japan for us normally, has spoken to us about her new novel, Cinnamon Beach, which overrides multiple manmade constructs. It’s an interesting read from someone who lives her life across multiple cultures and transcends many boundaries.

This is a bumper issue, and it is difficult to convey the vibrant hues of words that colour this edition. Please do pause by our contents page for a more comprehensive look.

This issue would not have been possible without all our fabulous contributors and a wonderful, dedicated team. We are delighted that Rakhi Dalal — who has done many reviews and shares her poetry with us in this issue — has agreed to be a writer-in-residence with us. A huge thanks to all of you, and especially Sohana Manzoor for her artwork. I am truly grateful to our readers for popularising our efforts to put together an online space with free and vibrant reads.

I would like to end with a few lines that gives me hope despite climate change, wars and doomsday predictions.

There’s more to life,
he says to me,
than what you choose to see. 

— George Freek, 'The Imponderables'

Enjoy the reads.

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

[1] Death

Click here to access the content’s page for the July 2024 Issue.

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Categories
Review

Knife by Salman Rushdie

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

Author: Salman Rushdie

Publisher: Penguin Random House

More than thirty years ago, a fatwa had been declared by Ayatollah Khomeini on the famous writer Salman Rushdie. The charge of blasphemy was labelled after the publication of The Satanic Verses, and since then the author has been living in asylum at different places because he was not safe in his own country. When it was assumed that the incident had died its natural death, the simmering vendetta and violence upsurged suddenly on 12th of August 2022, when Rushdie had gone to participate in a week of events at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York titled “More Than Shelter: Redefining the American Home”, and an unidentified man attempted to murder him on stage with a knife.

This horrific act of violence shook the entire world. No one hoped that they would ever be able to read a single line written by the author once again. He was a totally lost case. Now, one-and-a-half years after the incident, and in unforgettable detail, Rushdie writes this first-person memoir Knife where he relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey towards physical recovery. His healing was made possible by the love and support of his present African American wife Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his readers worldwide.

Dedicating the book to the men and women who saved his life, the text is neatly divided into two parts, each containing four sections. The first half of the book titled “The Angel of Death” primarily revolves around ‘despair’, whereas the second part, “The Angel of Life,” narrates a vision of ‘hope’ and optimism and Rushdie’s attempt to return to normalcy once again with his indomitable spirit to fight on against all odds.

The opening chapter called ‘Knife’ begins with the description of a beautiful August morning in detail and how the apparent tranquility was shattered when suddenly violence appeared in the form of an unidentified man who rushed at him on the open stage and stabbed him indiscriminately. Totally flabbergasted, Rushdie obviously didn’t know what to do. So, he narrates the rest of the incidents in the form of a collage, with bits of memory pieced together with other eyewitness and news reports and tells us how that morning he “experienced both the worst and the best of human nature, almost simultaneously.” Though the incident of his attempted murder dragged “that” novel back into the narrative of scandal, Rushdie declares that till date he still felt proud of having written The Satanic Verses.

Apart from the day-by-day narration of how things shaped up after the stabbing incident, three things stand out very clearly in this memoir. First is of course the detailed description of his entire eighteen-day long stay initially at the extreme-trauma ward of the hospital and later at the rehab centre titled ‘Hamot’. Though in extreme pain we are told how doing a few simple everyday things for himself lifted his spirits greatly. So, apart from the rehab of the body, there was also the rehab of the mind and spirit. Spending more than six weeks in two hospitals, he could return to the world and so slowly he started feeling optimistic again.

The chapter called ‘Homecoming’ begins with his leaving the hospital at 3 A.M. as quietly as possible and going back home at that unearthly hour to evade any watching eyes.

Emotionally moved, even though he had lost one eye permanently, he felt “100 percent better and healthier immediately. I was home.”

The incident of homecoming is once again closely related to the second important issue during his convalescence –the love, care and bonding with his present wife Eliza. Dedicating a total chapter titled “Eliza”, Rushdie gives us details of how he met the African American poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths entirely unknown to him, through the eminent American writer, Norman Mailer, and how his friendship grew stronger day by day, leading to a secret marriage based on the realisation that it was a relationship not of competitiveness but of total mutual support. They showed that even in this attention-addicted time, it was still possible for two people to lead, pretty openly, a happily private life till the knife incident changed everything. He tells us how the poetical sensibilities of his wife lent extra support to him in such trying times.

The third most significant aspect of this memoir is the way Rushdie devotes an entire chapter addressed to his assassin –“The A”. And it is really at its imaginative best. In it he has recorded a detailed conversation that never actually occurred between himself and “a man I met for only twenty-seven seconds of my life”. After bringing in several intertextual references about other writers and situations, about other murders being committed in the lives of different personalities, in the fourth and final session of his imaginative conversation, Rushdie states, “You don’t know me. You’ll never know me.” After the imagined conversation is over, he no longer has the energy to imagine the assassin, just as he never had the ability to imagine him. He feels that the purgation is complete, and this chapter of his life is closed once and for all.

Interestingly after half a year of nothingness, Rushdie realises that his writing juices had indeed started to flow again. During his sleepless nights at the rehab, he often thought a lot about The Knife as an idea. Talking about different occasions and purposes when the knife is used, he realized that the knife is basically a tool and acquires meaning from the use we make of it. It is morally neutral, and it is the misuse of knives that is immoral. Then he states that language too was a knife for him, and he would use it to fight back. Here he made a resolution that instead of remaining as a mere victim, he would answer violence with art – “Hello, world, we were saying. We’re back, and after our encounter with hatred, we’re celebrating the survival of love. After the angel of death, the angel of life.” But it was hard for him to write about post-traumatic stress disorder at any time especially when his hand felt like it was “inside a glove” and “the eye… is an absence with an immensely powerful presence.” Returning to New York after a ten-day visit to London, he therefore decided to spend the second chance of his life on just love and work. Since several Muslim entities were still celebrating his pitiable condition, he thought to make it clear to his readers that his worldview about God had not changed a bit and so he declares — “My godlessness remains intact. That isn’t going to change in this second-chance life.”

In the final section ‘Closure?’ Rushdie writes that his own anger faded, and it felt trivial when set beside the anger of the planet. He understood that three things had happened that had helped him on his journey towards coming to terms with what had happened – namely — the passage of time, the therapy, and ultimately the writing of this book. Moving along with time, he felt he was no longer certain that he wanted, or needed, to confront and address his assassin in open court and that the “Samuel Beckett moment” no longer seemed significant at all. This is where art and love overcame all barriers. He has successfully moved on and there was no need to look backwards once again.

Written a few years ago, Rushdie’s Joseph Anton: A Memoir narrated the story of how he was living a disturbed life under the pseudonym of Joseph Anton. But that memoir did not create much impact upon the readers, whereas Knife has brought back the powerful and erudite Rushdie as he has risen phoenix-like from the ashes and revealed his erudition without being parochial. Ordinary readers often shy away from his work as it is full of intertextuality and cross-references. But even those who find his writing to be too high-brow will have no problem in understanding the ‘free-associative way’ in which the mind of this writer works even today. The book is a page-turner no doubt and has brought back the popularity of Salman Rushdie once again. The simplistic yet very appealing cover of the book is an added attraction too.

Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a former Professor of English from Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India.

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

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Contents

Borderless, June 2024

Art by Sohana Manzoor

Editorial

Fly High…Like Birds in the Sky… Click here to read.

Translations

Nazrul’s Nur Jahan, the Mughal empress, has been translated from Bengali to English by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

Eight Short Poems by Munir Momin have been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.

An Age-old Struggle by Ihlwha Choi has been translated from Korean by the poet himself. Click here to read.

Okale or Out of Sync by Tagore has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.

Poetry

Click on the names to read the poems

Michael Burch, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Kumar Sawan, LaVern Spencer McCarthy, Shamik Banerjee, Prithvijeet Sinha, Gregg Norman, Rinku Dutta, Alex S. Johnson, Anushka Chaudhury, Wayne Russell, Nusrat Jahan Esa, Ahmad Rayees, Ivan Ling, Swetarani Tripathy, R.L.Peterson, Ayesha Binte Islam, Rhys Hughes

Musings/ Slices from Life

In the Grip of Violence

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.

Meeting the Artists

Kiriti Sengupta talks of his encounter with Jatin Das, a legendary artist from Bengal. Click here to read.

A Musical Soiree

Snigdha Agrawal recalls how their family celebrated Tagore’s birth anniversary. Click here to read.

A Cover Letter

Uday Deshwal muses on writing a cover letter for employment. Click here to read.

Musings of a Copywriter

In Berth of a Politician, Devraj Singh Kalsi muses on an encounter with a politician. Click here to read.

Notes from Japan

In A Day with Dinosaurs, Suzanne Kamata visits the ancient dino bones found in Fukui Prefecture. Click here to read.

Essays

From Place to Place

Renee Melchert Thorpe recounts her mother’s migration story, hopping multiple countries, starting with colonial Calcutta and Darjeeling. Click here to read.

My Love Affair with (Printed) Books

Ravi Shankar writes of his passion for print media. Click here to read.

A Story Carved in Wood, Snow and Stone  

Urmi Chakravorty travels with her camera and narrative to a scenic village in the Indo China border. Click here to read.

Stories

Spunky Dory and the Wheel of Fortune

Ronald V. Micci takes the readers on a fantastical adventure. Click here to read.

Rani Pink

Swatee Miittal sheds light on societal attitudes. Click here to read.

The Ghosts of Hogshead

Paul Mirabile wanders into the realm of the supernatural dating back to the Potato Famine of Ireland in the 1800s. Click here 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 here to read.

In conversation with Jessica Muddit, author of Once Around the Sun: From Cambodia to Tibet, and a review of her book. Click here to read.

Book Excerpts

An excerpt from Suzanne Kamata’s Cinnamon Beach. Click here to read.

An excerpt from Ryan Quinn Flanagann’s These Many Cold Winters of the Heart. Click here to read.

Book Reviews

Somdatta Mandal reviews Maya Nagari: Bombay-Mumbai A City in Stories, edited by Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto. Click here to read.

Basudhara Roy reviews Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay’s Tales of Early Magic Realism in Bengali, translated by Sucheta Dasgupta. Click here to read.

Rakhi Dalal reviews Damodar Mauzo’s Boy, Unloved, translated from Konkani by Jerry Pinto. Click here to read.

Bhaskar Parichha reviews The Dilemma of an Indian Liberal by Gurcharan Das. Click here to read.

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

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Editorial

Fly High… Like Birds in the Sky…

Great Wall of China
He sees a barrier where soldiers stand
with rifles drawn, encroachers kept at bay.
A migrant child who holds his mother's hand


— LaVern Spencer McCarthy, Are We There Yet?

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.

Among our untranslated poetry is housed LaVern Spencer McCarthy’s voice on the plight of migrants of the current times. Michael Burch gives us poems for Dylan Thomas. We have a plethora of issues covered in poetry ranging from love to women’s issues, even an affectionate description of his father by Shamik Banerjee. Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Kumar Sawan, Prithvijeet Sinha, Gregg Norman, Anushka Chaudhary, Wayne Russell, Ahmad Rayees, Ivan Ling, Ayesha Binte Islam and many more add verve with their varied themes. Rhys Hughes has shared a poem on a funny sign he photographed himself.

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 Stories edited by Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto. Rakhi Dalal has discussed a translation from Konkani by Jerry Pinto of award-winning writer Damodar Mauzo’s Boy, Unloved. Basudhara Roy has reviewed Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay’s Tales of Early Magic Realism in Bengali, translated by Sucheta Dasgupta. Bhaskar Parichha has introduced us to The 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 by Ronald 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.

Wish you happiness and good weather!

Thank you all.

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

Click here to access the content’s page for the June 2024 Issue.

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Review

Maya Nagari: Stories of Bombay-Mumbai

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

 Title: Maya Nagari: Bombay-Mumbai A City in Stories

Editors: Shanta Gokhale, Jerry Pinto

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

The very mention of the name Mumbai (or Bombay) brings to our minds a great city in India where the thriving metropolis grows at a rapid speed because people not only flock here from different parts of the country to make quick bucks and survive against all odds, but also because the film industry of Bollywood has also established it as a city of dreams, one that never sleeps and instead creates a mirage-of-sorts — an illusion, rightly labelled by the editors of this anthology as ‘Maya Nagari’. Edited by Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto, this book, comprising twenty-one short stories about Mumbai takes the road less taken to create a non-uniform image of the metropolis. In tune with its multicultural and multilingual nature, we have stories about the city that is a sea of people and speaks at least a dozen languages. There are stories translated from Marathi, Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, and stories written originally in English. Among the writers are legends and new voices—Baburao Bagul, Ismat Chughtai, Pu La Deshpande, Ambai,Urmila Pawar, Mohan Rakesh, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ambai, Jayant Kaikini, Bhupen Khakhar, Shripad Narayan Pendse, Manasi, Krishan Chander, Udayan Thakker, Cyrus Mistry, Vilas Sarang, Jayant Pawar, Tejaswini Apte-Rahm and Anuradha Kumar.

As Jerry Pinto clearly states in the introduction, the stories can be read as we like, we can begin with the first story or the last, or any story in between. The observant reader might notice that he and the other editor Shanta Gokhale have deliberately chosen not to organise the material according to chronology, or geography. This is partly because they believe that the city lives in several time zones and spaces at once, as does India, but also because there is something essentially chaotic about its nature. So, he says, “the stories echo and bounce off each other, they do not collide, but there is a Brownian motion to these patterns” and he hopes to let the readers find it. Here, Mumbai is stripped of its twinkle; it is deglamourised to reveal how it’s the quotidian that lends the city its character—warmth and hostility alike and as inhabitants of the city the editors call ‘home,’ they hope a narrative will emerge.

In the twenty-one stories of this collection, there is the city that labours in the mills and streets, and the city that sips and nibbles in five-star lounges, the city of Ganapati, Haji Malang and the Virgin Mary. What binds the stories together is ‘human muscle’ – the desperate attempts of men and women of all classes and castes to survive in this heartless city amid all odds.

The stories are of different lengths and written in different narrative styles. Of the five or six stories translated by Shanta Gokhale herself from Marathi, one is struck by the excessive length of the so called ‘short’ stories. The very first one “Oh! The Joy of Devotion” by Jayant Pawar, forty-five pages in length, narrates in detail about the Ganapati festival and how it is related to the fate of the local people. Pu La Deshpande’s story “A Cultural Moment is Born”, set in the 1940s, tells stories of people living in chawls [slums] and how they spend their cultural days. Another very long story translated by Gokhale called “The Ramsharan Story” tells us about the rise and fall of a bus conductor by the name of Ramsharan who turns out to become a union leader. Baburao Bagul’s “Woman of the Street”, written originally in Marathi and translated by Gokhale again, tells the story of Girija, a sex-worker trying to collect money to cure her son in the village. The story ends on a disturbing note, as it reaffirms the relativity of success.

Once again, Krishan Chander’s story “The Children of Dadar Bridge” translated from Hindustani by Jerry Pinto is so long that it qualifies to be called a sort of novella. In this powerful story God comes to earth to a chawl and offers food to the first-person narrator. Then, impersonating as a small and innocent child, and along with the child narrator, he moves around different places in the city to witness its activities firsthand — we get to know about behind the scene affairs that take place in the film studios, about satta[1] dens, about bribery, local dons who arm-twist every new hawker to carry on their business after receiving their weekly cut money and more. In “Civic Duty and Physics Practicals”, Malayalam writer Manasi reveals the different experiences one comes across living in a society defined by power equations. Issues of hooliganism, superstition, illegal colonies, corruption, intimidation and violence are explored in a single story where the narrator is struggling, for days, with blaring speakers at a wedding nearby, even as her son tries hard to prepare for his upcoming exams. The story soon takes a dark turn where power trumps over consideration for fellow human beings.

A very powerful story written by Ambai in Tamil called “Kala Ghora Chowk” deals with issues of Marxist ideology, trade unions and the fate of a raped woman called Rosa. Anuradha Kumar’s “Neera Joshi’s Unfinished Book” tells us the life story of one woman who “made the city” and the perennial problems of displaced mill workers when the closed mills give way to high-rise buildings. Some of the stories are of course written in a lighter vein, though they also depict different problems related to city life. As the title of Vilas Sarang’s story “An Afternoon Among the Rocks” suggests, it narrates the plight of a couple trying to make love in the deserted seashore and how they get hijacked by a smuggler! In “The Flat on the Fifth Floor”, Mohan Rakesh writes about two sisters who meet the narrator after one failed love affair. A moving picture of the closing down of cinema halls in Mumbai comes out very beautifully in the Kannada story “Opera House” by Jayant Kaikini, especially narrating the plight of one of the sweepers working there when the declaration of permanent closure is pasted everywhere. Tejaswini Apte-Rahm’s “Mili” tells the story of a man who meets his ex-girlfriend after five years.

Though it is not possible to give the details of each and every story included in this anthology in this review, one must mention some of the stories that were originally written in English. Cyrus Mistry’s “Percy” about a young and lonely Parsi boy is so compelling that it was even made into a Gujarati motion-picture. “House Cleaning” by Jerry Pinto tells the story of a woman cleaner and his son, who talks about the reality of street dwellers. Eunice de Souza’s “Rina of Queen’s Diamonds” is not a straightforward narration at all but offers a collage of different vignettes of life in Bombay.

Though most of the stories portray the seamier side of life and in some ways de-glamourise Mumbai, at the same time they also portray how human resilience can combat all sorts of odds, and the city can be revealed only through shared experiences. Thus, each of the twenty-one stories in this collection tells a different tale of Mumbai, Bombay, Momoi, Bambai, Manbai and many others. As the editors have rightly pointed out at the beginning of their introduction, “You cannot catch a city in words. You cannot catch a city at all.”  They felt that “it is not meant to be caught…this city resists even more because it was not designed at all; it just happened and it keeps on happening.” Thus, the four-hundred plus pages of this anthology Maya-Nagari remains a book to be treasured and read now at leisure and also at any time in the future.

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[1] Betting or gambling dens

Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.

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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

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Celebration

Welcome to Nazrul’s World

I’m a cyclone, a whirlwind,
	I pommel all that lie in my path,
	I am a dance-driven swing,
I dance to my own beat, I’m a free spirit, high on life...

-- Kazi Nazrul Islam, Rebel or Bidrohi, translated by Prof Fakrul Alam.
Young Nazrul

Nazrul’s writing has the power of whirlwind or a tornado — it can break with its force and make with love. His songs are a law unto themselves and called Nazrul geeti. And all this remains popular and still relevant more than a century after he was born.

Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) was born in Burdwan, a part of the Bengal Presidency that stretched from Bengal to Singapore during colonial times. Nazrul lived through the colonial rule, the independence of the subcontinent, the Partition and the creation of Bangladesh. He was multifaceted — he had tried his hand at soldiering and then settled for being a poet, writer, journalist, and musician. He is now regarded as the national poet of Bangladesh, the Bidrohi Kobi or the rebel poet. 

Nazrul teaching Nazrul Geeti

Here, we have tried to gather flavours of his writing and life. We start with the translation of his lyrics (a Nazrul geeti) on butterflies, translated by Fakrul Alam performed by the legendary Feroza Begum, move on to his response to Tagore’s poetry — they had a vibrant relationship as Somdatta Mandal has reflected in her discussion on Radha Chakravarty’s recent translation of his Selected Essays. It’s followed by more translations of three of his poems by Niaz Zaman, who has also written about Nazrul’s support for women. A searing essay on religious divides and socio economic gaps, translated by Sohana Manzoor, also brings to focus the plight of a beggar woman torn by poverty. A short story , showcasing him as a fiction writer, is borne of his experiences as a soldier. Last but not the least, we have a fiery speech by Nazrul from Chakravarty’s translation.

On Nazrul’s 125th birth anniversary, we welcome you to muse on him and his world…

Poetry

Projapoti (Butterfly) by Nazrul has been translated by Fakrul Alam from Bengali. Click here to read.

Nazrul’s rejoinder to Tagore’s 1400 Saal has been translated by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

Three poems by Nazrul have been translated by Niaz Zaman. Click here to read.

Prose

 Deposition of a Political Prisoner: A Speech by Nazrul

A fiery speech by Nazrul from the Selected Essays: Kazi Nazrul Islam, translated by Radha Chakravarty from Bengali. Click here to read.

Temples and Mosques

Kazi Nazrul Islam’s fiery essay translated by Sohana Manzoor. Click here to read.

Hena

A story that grew out of Nazrul’s experiences as a soldier translated by Sohana Manzoor. Click here to read. 

Discussions

Nazrul and His World View

Somdatta Mandal writes about Radha Chakravarty’s translation of Selected Essays: Kazi Nazrul Islam and in the process explores his life and times. Click here to read.

When the Feminist and the Revolutionary Met

Niaz Zaman writes of the feminist leanings of Nazrul’s poetry in context of Madam Roquiah, a contemporary of the poet. Click here to read.