Poems of Longing by Jibananada Das homes two of his poems translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Clickhereto read.
Four cantos from Ramakanta Rath’sSri Radha, translated from Odiya by the late poet himself, have been excerpted from his full length translation. Clickhere to read.
Naramsetti Umamaheswararao takes us back to school. Click here to read.
Conversation
Ratnottama Sengupta talks to filmmaker and author Leslie Carvalhoabout his old film, The Outhouse, that will be screened this month and his new book, Smoke on the Backwaters. Clickhere to read.
On our third morning in the Lowveld, my travel companion and I woke up at 4:00 A.M. for our third game drive in Kruger National Park. We’d signed up for this over a year ago when we first booked ourselves on this group tour. We didn’t know then that it would be raining.
The other ten members of our group had chosen other options. Some were planning to hang out at the lodge, probably anticipating a day of lounging by the pool while kudu and impalas lingered nearby nibbling grass. Another cohort had signed up for a different sightseeing tour, involving waterfalls, with a later starting time. My friend and I were here, however, for the animals.
She and I had first met in Japan. We’d lived in the same town. Our kids had gone to the same schools, and we’d taught at the same universities. When she had moved back to Australia, we’d remained in touch. Both of us loved to travel, and both had dreamed of going on safari in Africa. Neither of us knew of anyone else who shared the same dream, so we vowed to go together. I had imagined that it would be years before I would be able to afford such a trip, but a little over a year ago, she’d come across a great deal. And now here we were, in South Africa.
Half-asleep, we quickly dressed, stuffed our sack-breakfasts into our backpacks, and stumbled out the heavy wooden door into the still dark morning. A light rain was falling. Although signs warned of roaming wild animals, and we’d seen plenty, it seemed safe to walk up to the office building to find our driver. His Toyota safari truck was already parked outside. After a few minutes, he appeared, and we climbed into the back middle seats of the open-sided truck, hoping to stay clear of the rain.
Our driver and guide, a local who drove 20-40 kilometers per hour over the speed limit and doled out one interesting animal fact per sighting, handed us lined ponchos to keep us warm on the forty-minute drive to the park. Then we zoomed off, passing pecan and macadamia groves, on the way to Numbi Gate. People were already waiting at bus stops along the way, probably on their way to work.
As the sky gradually lightened, we could make out the names of the shops along the road: Dragon Flame Car Wash, No Error Driving School, Drama’s Sneaker Wash, God is Able Beauty Salon, and an alarming number of small businesses offering funeral services.
When we finally reached the entrance to the game park, the guide parked and got out to register. Although the parking area had been crowded the previous two days, on this morning, we were the only ones there.
We had seen quite a few animals over the past two days, including elephants, giraffes, zebras, a rare white rhino, and a mama lion and cubs, albeit from a distance. We rattled off our wish list to the guide.
“A hippo out of the water,” my friend said. “And a male lion.”
I had been lucky enough to see both on a previous trip to Rwanda, but I had yet to see a leopard, one of the so-called “big five,” or a cheetah.
“When is the last time you saw a leopard or a cheetah?” I asked.
“I saw a leopard a week ago,” he said. “And a cheetah yesterday.”
He warned us, however, that because of the rain, we might not see anything at all. The animals might be seeking shelter. We understood and accepted that.
A few minutes into our drive, he braked the truck and pointed out a turtle making its way across the road. Understanding that this might be our biggest sighting of the day, I took a video of the creature with my smartphone. Soon after, we spotted some impalas. Although we’d seen so many the two days before that the guide no longer stopped for them, on this morning, we gave them our full attention.
And then we saw something unusual—a pack of African wild dogs alongside and in the middle of the road. I had never seen canines with such colouring. Their fur was brown and black, almost tortoiseshell. These dogs were featured on a signboard at the park entrance indicating the day’s sightings.
“There are only about 150 of these dogs in the park,” our guide told us. He mentioned that they were expert hunters, that they attacked in groups. Since Kruger National Park is vast, with an area of 19,485 square kilometers, much of the terrain being well away from the road, I realized how lucky we were to see these dogs. They trotted along, sniffing at the road, mindless of the truck slowly following them.
By this time, the rain had let up. Although we did not manage to see any hippos out of the water (they mostly come out at night to eat grass), we did see a herd of wildebeest, some vervet monkeys, an elephant, a water buffalo, baboons, and a Martial eagle perched on a high bare branch. And then our guide got a message on his phone and said, “From now, we’re not stopping for anything. Someone has spotted some cheetahs.”
As he sped ahead, we crossed our fingers and readied our cameras. I expected the cheetahs to be far off in the distance, where they wouldn’t be scared off by the sound of cars, as the lions were. Why else would they stay in one place long enough for us to reach them? As it turned out, however, five cheetah cubs were gathered together, sitting still, gazing intently into the bush. They were near the road, only about fifty meters away.
“They’re waiting for their mother,” the guide said. “Maybe she will come back while we are waiting.”
My friend and I took turns admiring them through binoculars. How patiently they watched the impalas nearby. How diligently they groomed themselves. They were gorgeous, leaving us breathless.
We waited awhile, but there were others eager to see them, so our guide suggested it was time to move on. “Are you happy?” he asked us.
“Yes, very,” we both said.
Later, as we returned to the lodge, we thought about how jealous the rest of the group would be when they heard about the cheetahs. The rain started to fall again.
Suzanne Kamatawas born and raised in Grand Haven, Michigan. She now lives in Japan with her husband and two children. Her short stories, essays, articles and book reviews have appeared in over 100 publications. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, and received a Special Mention in 2006. She is also a two-time winner of the All Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest, winner of the Paris Book Festival, and winner of a SCBWI Magazine Merit Award.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
There was a time when humans walked the Earth crossing unnamed landmasses to find homes in newer terrains. They migrated without restrictions. Over a period of time, kingdoms evolved, and travellers like Marco Polo talked of needing permissions to cross borders in certain parts of the world. The need for a permit to travel was first mentioned in the Bible, around 450BCE. A safe conduct permit appeared in England in 1414CE. Around the twentieth century, passports and visas came into full force. And yet, humanity had existed hundreds of thousand years ago… Some put the date at 300,000!
While climate contingencies, wars and violence are geared to add to migrants called ‘refugees’, there is always that bit of humanity which regards them as a burden. They forget that at some point, their ancestors too would have migrated from where they evolved. In South Africa, close to Johannesburg is Maropeng with its ‘Cradle of Humanity’, an intense network of caves where our ancestors paved the way to our evolution. The guide welcomes visitors by saying — “Welcome home!” It fills one’s heart to see the acceptance that drips through the whole experience. Does this mean our ancestors all stepped out of Africa many eons ago and that we all belonged originally to the same land?
And yet there are many restrictions that have come upon us creating boxes which do not allow intermingling easily, even if we travel. Overriding these barriers is a discussion with Jessica Mudditt about Once Around the Sun: From Cambodia to Tibet, her book about her backpacking through Asia. Documenting a migration more than a hundred years ago from Jullundur to Malaya, when borders were different and more mobile, we have a conversation with eminent scholar and writer from Singapore, Kirpal Singh. Telling the story of another eminent migrant, a Persian who became a queen in the Mughal Court is a lyric by Nazrul, Nur Jahan, translated by Professor Fakrul Alam from Bangla. Ihlwha Choi has self-translated his own poem from Korean, a poem bridging divides with love. Fazal Baloch has brought to us some exquisite Balochi poems by Munir Momin. Tagore’s poem, Okale or Out of Sync, has been translated from Bengali to reflect the strange uniqueness of each human action which despite departing from the norm, continue to be part of the flow.
We have a tongue in cheek piece from Devraj Singh Kalsi on traveling in a train with a politician. Uday Deshwal writes with a soupçon of humour as he talks of applying for jobs. Snigdha Agrawal brings to us flavours of Bengal from her past while Ratnottama Sengupta muses on the ongoing wars and violence as acts of terror in the same region and looks back at such an incident in the past which resulted in a powerful Bengali poem by Tarik Sujat. Kiriti Sengupta has written of a well-known artist, Jatin Das, a strange encounter where the artist asks them to empty fully even a glass of water! Ravi Shankar weaves in his love for books into our non-fiction section. Recounting her mother’s migration story which leads us to perceive the whole world as home is a narrative by Renee Melchert Thorpe. Urmi Chakravorty takes us to the last Indian village on the borders of Tibet. Taking us to a Dinosaur Museum in Japan is our migrant columnist, Suzanne Kamata. Her latest multicultural novel, Cinnamon Beach, has found its way to our book excerpts as has Flanagan’s poetry collection, These Many Cold Winters of the Heart.
In reviews, Somdatta Mandal has written about an anthology, Maya Nagari: Bombay-Mumbai A City in Storiesedited by Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto. Rakhi Dalal has discussed a translation from Konkani by Jerry Pinto of award-winning writer Damodar Mauzo’sBoy, Unloved. Basudhara Roy has reviewed Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay’s Tales of Early Magic Realism in Bengali, translated by Sucheta Dasgupta. Bhaskar Parichha has introduced us toThe Dilemma of an Indian Liberal by Gurcharan Das, a book that is truly relevant in the current times in context of the whole world for what he states is a truth: “In the current polarised climate, the liberal perspective is often marginalised or dismissed as being indecisive or weak.” And it is the truth for the whole world now.
Our short stories reflect the colours of the world. A fantasy set in America but crossing borders of time and place byRonald V. Micci, a story critiquing social norms that hurt by Swatee Miittal and Paul Mirabile’s ghost story shuttling from the Irish potato famine (1845-52) to the present day – all address different themes across borders, reflecting the vibrancy of thoughts and cultures. That we all exist in the same place and have the commonality of ideas and felt emotions is reflected in each of these narratives.
We have more which adds to the lustre of the content. So, do pause by our content’s page and enjoy the reads!
I would like to thank all our team without who this journal would be incomplete, especially, Sohana Manzoor, for her fabulous artwork. Huge thanks to all our contributors who bring vibrancy to our pages and our wonderful readers, without who the journal would remain just part of an electronic cloud… We welcome you all to enjoy our June issue.
G Venkatesh writes about a book from 1946. What is interesting is no women writers are featured in it despite their being a phrase which he quotes in his essay, ‘a stepdaughter of the Muses’…
Photo graph by G Venkatesh
There is this book published in 1946 in New York, that I picked up at a Red Cross charity shop in Karlstad (Sweden) of late. A compilation of micro-biographies (make that ‘nano’ if you will) of 20 novelists (fiction-writers in other words) from Italy, Spain, France, England, Scotland, the USA, Russia and Ireland, who graced the world of literature in flesh between the mid-14th and the mid-20th centuries, and will continue to do so, in spirit, forever.
Pillars of fertile imagination, seeded from the idea-realm Visual by G Venkatesh
I venture in this article to present some gleanings from this little gem of a book, to enlighten, motivate, inspire, educate and rekindle interest in the classics of yore. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that all writing happens by the grace of God. We witness that in the lives of the twenty writers profiled in the book. Some had an inborn urge to write, some developed the penchant to do so as if the idea floated in from the idea-realm beyond the astral, and some others were blessed by the Divine to transmute their pain and suffering to the written word that has stood the test of time, and will continue to do so, into the distant future. Condemnation paved the way to commendation for some, while rejections emboldened others to transcend the limits of human judgement and rejoice in the sunshine of hard-earned glory.
At its perigee, the ‘novel’, as observed by Henry and Dana Lee Thomas, is an epitome of philosophy as applied to life. The Thomases ask readers to consider the life of every novelist profiled to be a magnum opus in itself – each adorned with facts stranger than fiction.
Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes
This is an Italian-French-Spanish trio (encompassing the 14th to the early 17th century), and perhaps most of the readers may be familiar only with the third-named. Giovanni Boccaccio was a contemporary of Alighieri Dante (whose biography he wrote). A ‘friendly sinner’, he was a devotee of the here and now, while also being profoundly interested in the hereafter.’ Novelists, well and truly, leave behind accounts of their times, couched in fiction (and that, read alongwith factual history, helps us readers to visualise and understand better how things were in the past). The ‘poets’ in them, simultaneously dwell on and dream about how things can, must and will be in the future. Many of them refrain from including a semi-autobiographical element to their novels, and the Thomases have identified Francois Rabelais as being one such. To the Frenchman, all life was an anecdote with a bitter ending, a truth he based his limited fictional creations on.
Miguel de Cervantes, the Spaniard, is presented as a disappointed, shattered and disgusted man, who was chiefly motivated by his own trials, travails and tribulations to pen the famous Don Quixote. This knight who fought windmills, was perhaps what Cervantes thought himself to be – blessed with the good fortune to live in folly and die in wisdom.
Defoe, Swift, Sterne
From the simple Quixote and the clumsy Sancho Panza to the resourceful Robinson Crusoe and his helpful Man Friday, characters created by Daniel Defoe in a novel eponymous with the protagonist. Defoe was a paradox of moral integrity and material ambition (if you can visualise one such blend), who by virtue of the fact that he donned the mantles of businessman, pedlar, politician, pamphleteer and spy (not necessarily in that order) in his life, could interpret mankind expertly in his fiction. A kind of ‘been-there, seen-that, done-that, can-write-about-all-with-authority’. Jonathan Swift, of Gulliver’s Travels fame, was gifted with a supreme intellect and a spiritual-religious leaning, but encumbered by physical weakness. God gives but also deprives at the same time, a mystery which humankind has not been able to solve. Fatherless when barely half-a-year old, he was verily a titan (like the character Gulliver he created) among pygmies (like the Lilliputians). He abhorred injustice and thought and prayed forever for the felicity of humankind. He lived to be 78, but contended on the basis of his experiences that the gift of a long life is bought at a very high price.
Laurence Sterne, the preacher-poet Yorkshireman, left behind several nuggets of wisdom in his novels and a couple of them can be cited hereunder:
“I laugh till I cry, and I cry till I laugh” (reminding one of the Yin and the Yang which feed into each other)
“Give me all the blessings of wisdom and religion if you will, but above all, let me be a man.”
Scott, Balzac, Dumas
Sir Walter Scott, while being a prodigy like Swift, also had to contend with physical disabilities like him. He tided over them marvellously, prudently, gallantly and tirelessly, en route to a knighthood and immortality in the realm of English literature. Dreamy Honoré de Balzac, obdurate and uncompromising, believed that man’s destiny and purpose in life was to “rise from action through abstraction to sight” – a deed-word-thought ascent in other words. “Life lies within us (spiritual), and not without us (material)”, he averred. He never got the glory he deserved when he was alive, and his soul perhaps got the peace it richly merited when fame showed up posthumously.
Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D’Artagnan – characters from The Three Musketeers, a novel by Alexandre Dumas which presents the facts of 19th century France through the medium of fiction – were known to school-goers in the 1970s and 1980s, like yours sincerely. Dumas, as the Thomases have noted, met praise with a shrug and insults with a smile – stoically in other words. However, he had a penchant for sarcasm and trenchant wit which were unleashed whenever required. “I do not know how I produce my poems. Ask a plum tree how it produces plums,” is verily a testimony to his transatlantic contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “All writing happens by the grace of God.”
Hugo, Flaubert, Hawthorne
Two Frenchman and a New-Englander American comprise this trio. Viktor Marie Hugo, of Les Misérables fame, was born in the same year as Dumas, and was regarded widely as the ‘Head’ of the 19th century to Abraham Lincoln’s ‘Heart’. His crests of hard-won success coincided with the troughs of ill-deserved sorrow (he had to contend with the deaths of his wife and children). The Divine Will strengthened his mind, soul and fingers to move quill on paper, enabling the much-bereaved Frenchman to cope and conquer. “Sorrow,” he wrote, “is but a prelude to joy.” A stoic would however add, “and vice versa”. Quite like Sterne’s “I laugh till I cry, and I cry till I laugh”. Despite all that he had to endure; Hugo always believed in God and the purposes he lays out for human beings in their lives.
Hugo’s friend Gustave Flaubert considered the written word to be a living entity, with a voice, perfume, personality and soul. A concoction of realism and romanticism, if ever there was one, Flaubert was also a peculiar amalgamation of poet-cynic, artist-scientist and humankind’s comforter-despiser. He ardently believed that though the soul is trapped within a mortal corpus on the terrestrial realm, it (which is the actual identity of a human being) lives in the idea-realm, and finds its rewards therein.
Hawthorne, on the other side of the ocean, was charmed by the sea and surf and sand in his childhood and youth, having spent a lot of time along the New England coast in north-western America. That led him to dwell on the mysteries of the human soul (which continue to be mysteries at the time of writing), while rebelling against the Puritanic influences that had engulfed the region. He was on an eternal quest, an intellectual and moral pathfinder in his own right, and a pioneering rebel with the pen and quill in his arsenal.
Thackeray, Dickens, Dostoyevsky
William Makepeace Thackeray, readers will be interested to know, was born in Calcutta (now, Kolkata). A sentimental cynic who glimpsed the stupidity of life through the fog of sorrow, he believed that foolishness of the past is a pre-requisite to wisdom in the present and the future – in other words, simply put, we learn from our errors as we move on. ‘Gifted with a bright wit and an attractive humour’, in the words of Charlotte Bronte, he contended that literature was more a misfortune and less a profession. His cynicism helped him to grasp reality, and feel empowered in the process –“How very weak the very wise; how very small the truly great are.” Kind and wise humans often lack the power to change things for the better, while the powerful ones lack the conscience, will and goodness to want to do so.
Thackeray rivalled with Charles Dickens for fame and glory. Dickens, similar to Scott and Swift, had to contend with physical discomfort in his childhood and adolescence, in addition to a father who was not responsible with the money he earned. These experiences would later feed into the stories he churned out prolifically; semi-autobiographical some of them, while informing readers at the same time about the times that prevailed – “the best of times and the worst of times” (A Tale of Two Cities). His humble beginnings made him burn the midnight oil later in life, fuelled by the ambition to succeed, which he sustained all along. Quite like it was Hugo across the Channel, the troughs of torment annulled the acmes of accomplishment. Yet, he remained grateful to God and fellow-humans for the life he lived, and bade one and all a ‘respectful and affectionate farewell’, before ascending to the astral realm.
Reclusive Feodor Dostoyevsky, like Hawthorne in America, struggled to shake off a Puritan upbringing and sought fodder for his literature among the common man – the suffering proletariat who visited liquor shops to drown their sorrows in alcohol. Man, he believed, was responsible for his own salvation…and not God. He however did believe at times that God saved those whom men punished. But then, he also contradicted himself or seemed to do so, when he said that man is saved only because the Devil exists. But perhaps that was not a contradiction after all – God saves man from what he has to be saved from! The meaning of life, according to Dostoyevsky, was the brute-to-angel and the sinner-to-saint transformation of man; quite on the lines of Balzac’s action-abstraction-sight prescription.
Novelist
Lifespan
Selected works
Giovanni Boccaccio
1313-1375
Filocolo, Filostrato, Teseide, Fiammetta, Amorosa Visione, Ameto, Decameron, Life of Dante
Francois Rabelais
1495 – 1553
Pantagruel, Gargantua
Miguel de Cervantes
1547 – 1616
Galatea, Don Quixote, Novelas Exemplares, Persiles y Sigismunda
Daniel Defoe
1661-1731
The True-Born Englishman, The Apparition of Mrs Veal, Robinson Crusoe, The Dumb Philosopher, Serious Reflections, Moll Flanders
Jonathan Swift
1667 – 1745
The Battle of the Books, The Tale of a Tub, Gulliver’s Travels Children of the Poor, Directions to Servants, Polite Conversation
Laurence Sterne
1713-1768
A political romance, Tristram Shandy, Sermons by Yorick, The Sentimental Journey
Sir Walter Scott
1771 – 1832
The Lady of the Last Minstrel, Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, The Lady of the Lake, Waverley, The Monastery
Honoré de Balzac
1799 – 1850
The Country Doctor, Eugenie Grandet, Jesus in Flanders, Droll Stories, Louis Lambert, Seraphita, A Daughter of Eve, The Peasants
Alexandre Dumas
1802 – 1870
The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Black Tulip, The Prussian Terror, The Forty-Five, Chicot the Jester, The Queen Margot
Victor Hugo
1802 – 1885
Les Misérables, The Toilers of the Sea, The History of a Crime, Legend of the Centuries, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Supreme Pity
Gustave Flaubert
1821 – 1880
Madame Bovary, The Sentimental Education, The Temptation of St Anthony, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Salambbô
Nathaniel Hawthorne
1804 – 1864
Twice Told Tales, The Blithedale Romance, The Scarlet Letter, Mosses from an Old Manse, The Marble Faun, Tanglewood Tales, The Snow Image
William Thackeray
1811 – 1863
The Great Hoggarty Diamond, Vanity Fair, The Book of Snobs, Henry Esmond, The Virginian, Lovel the Widower, The Newcomes
Charles Dickens
1812 – 1870
Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations
Feodor Dostoyevsky
1821 – 1881
Crime and Punishment, Poor Folk, The Double, The Landlady, The Family Friend, The House of Death, The Gambler, The Idiot,
Leo Tolstoy
1828 – 1910
War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Childhood, The Cossacks, Two Hussars, Three Deaths, A Confession, Master and Man, Resurrection, What is Art
Guy de Maupassant
1850 – 1893
Une Vie, The Ball of Fat, Mademoiselle Fifi, The Necklace, Yvette, Our Heart, Bel-Ami, Pierre and Jean, A Piece of String
Emile Zola
1840 – 1902
Doctor Pascal, Therese Raquin, The Dram Shop, Nana, Germinal, The Earth. The Dream, Rome, Paris, Fertility, Work, Truth, Justice
Mark Twain
1835 – 1910
Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Joan of Arc, A Connecticut Yankee, What is Man, The Prince and the Pauper
Thomas Hardy
1840 – 1928
A Pair of Blue Eyes, Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Trumpet-Major, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Table: The novelists profiled, and a list of their selected works
Tolstoy, Maupassant, Zola
Leo Tolstoy, also a Russian like Dostoyevsky, unlike Dickens, was not guided onward and forward by ambition. He believed in stooping to conquer and was motivated in his life’s journey by compassion. Orphaned when not yet a teenager, haunted by an inferiority complex pertaining to his ‘unprepossessing appearance’, and disgusted with organised religion (the Orthodoxy which prevailed in Russia), he discovered his purpose in Rousseau’s philosophy and in ridding the human heart of evil and helping it to live in peace, in communion with Nature. His dissent, rebellion and dissatisfaction with extravagance (of the nobility), bigotry (of the clergy) and tyranny (of the royalty), were the seeds, water and fertiliser for his contributions to Russian literature. Readers know that Mahatma Gandhi was inspired by the philosopher-prophet-penman Leo Tolstoy to set up the Tolstoy Farm in South Africa. Some nuggets which will serve as parts of vade mecums for readers:
“Death, blessed brother death, you are the final deliverance.”
“There are millions of human beings on earth who are suffering. Why do you think only of me?”
Guy de Maupassant was one of those millions who suffered a lot. Reading about the tragic short life led by him, with constant physical and psychological afflictions which led to autoscopy in his 42nd year, and death in the 43rd, makes one sad. It also makes readers turn to his short stories – of which he is known to be a master – more eagerly. Flaubert and de Maupassant knew each other well, the former being a ‘guru’ guiding the latter on from time to time, along his literary journey.
Another Frenchman – Emile Zola – a contemporary of de Maupassant and Flaubert and a good friend of the painter Paul Cezanne, progressed through pitfalls and serendipitous godsends to profile the poor people of France, and ironically rise to richness thereby. A man who defended justice and spoke up against all forms of unfairness, Zola is known for standing up for the French army captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew who was wrongly (and knowingly so) accused of treason in 1894, and playing a key role in clearing the Jew’s name in 1906 (four years after Zola passed away). His last written words –“…to remake through truth a higher and happier humanity.”
Twain and Hardy
The man most readers know as Mark Twain, was born Samuel Clemens in America. Though it would not be right to compare and contrast the travails endured by the novelists profiled by Henry and Dana in this book, it can at least be said that a peep into Twain’s life tugs at your heartstrings and the vibrations linger on for a long time. Indeed, as a natural consequence, respect and admiration well up in the heart, for this novelist. He suffered an awful lot, but also learnt to laugh at his own agony as an ‘onlooker’ – the soul observing the pain of the body and the trauma of the mind it enlivens, from a distance, without being affected in any way. Like Hugo on the other side of the ocean, he endured what can be considered as possibly the greatest sorrow a man can face – burying/cremating his own children, one after another. Twain always supported the underdogs while voicing his disgust at the pompousness of the rich and powerful, in his own unique brand of sarcasm. The following words of his may sound cynical, but they are open to interpretation:
“Nothing exists but you. And you are but a homeless, vagrant, useless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty centuries.”
Without letting these words deter you, link them with the other sufferer Viktor Hugo’s “Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come”, and soldier on.
The last of the twenty, Thomas Hardy, is yours sincerely’s favourite (I happen to read all his important works in my twenties, if I remember right). Hardy like his fellow-Britons Swift and Scott was born with a “frail body, strong mind and compassionate soul”. He was compassionate towards and appreciative of the forces and elements of Mother Nature – winds, clouds, bees, butterflies, squirrels, sheep etc., as pointed out by the Thomases. The manner in which he moulded his protagonists in his novels was catalysed by this compassion. Most of them are compassionate themselves, and evoke compassion in the hearts of readers, quite easily. Hardy wanted to teach his fellow-humans how to “breast the misery they were born to”, by using his fictional protagonists as instruments. His life was an exercise in “subduing the hardest fate” and “persistence through repeated discomfitures”. As it often happens with true geniuses, he was much ahead of his times, and the glory that illumined his soul in heaven posthumously, more than compensated for the disappointments which had to be endured when it was encased in his mortal corpus.
Not the last word by any means
Serendipity, it must have been, which made me stride into the Red Cross charity shop in Karlstad in June, wherefrom I purchased this 280-page treasure. To quote Longfellow (who incidentally was a college-mate of Hawthorne’s),
“Lives of great men all remind us/We can make our lives sublime/And departing leave behind us/Footprints on the sands of time.”
The 20 authors profiled in this book represent a huge family of writers who converted fiction from ‘a stepdaughter of the Muses’ to an ‘epitome of the philosophy of life’, except that there were no ‘daughters or stepdaughters of men’ listed among the novelists in this volume.
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G Venkatesh (50) is a Chennai-born, Mumbai-bred ‘global citizen’ who currently serves as Associate Professor at Karlstad University in Sweden. He has published 4 volumes of poetry and 4 e-textbooks, inter alia.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Ujjal Dosanjh left his village in Punjab in quest of a better life. He had a bare smattering of English, very less money and some family overseas when he left his home at Dosanjh Kalan at the age of seventeen. That was in 1964. He spent the first three years in Britain and then, moved to Canada to become a prominent lawyer, activist and political figure.
When he started in the 1960s, to earn a livelihood in England, he shunted trains in the British Railways. He left for Canada in hope of a better future. He had to work initially in sawmills and factories to support himself. Eventually, he could get an education and satisfy his ambitions in British Columbia, which became his home. Coming from a family which contributed to the freedom struggle of India, it was but natural that he would turn towards a public life. His uprightness, courage, tolerance, openness and commitment had roots in his background, where his parents despite different political ideologies, lived together in harmony. His family, despite their diverse beliefs, stood by him as he tried to live by his values.
Dosanjh voiced out against separatist forces that continue to demand an autonomous country for Sikhs to this day. In 1985, he was beaten almost to death by such Khalistani separatists as he boldly opposed the movement that had earlier led to the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi (1917-1984) and to the bombing of an aircraft where all 329 people aboard died. However, undaunted by such attacks, he continues to talk unity, welfare for the underprivileged and upholds Mahatma Gandhi as his ideal. He went into Canadian politics with unfractured belief in the Mahatma. Dosanjh was the Health Minister of Canada and earlier the Premier of British Columbia. He has been honoured by both the Indian and Canadian governments. In 2003, he received the highest award for diaspora living outside India, Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, and, in 2009, he was a recipient of the Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Award.
Now, sixty years from the time he left his country of birth, he shares his narratives with the world with his updated autobiography — the first edition had been published in 2016 — and also with fiction. As an immigrant with his life spread over different geographies, he tells us in his non-fiction, Journey After Midnight – A Punjabi Life: From India to Canada:“Canada has been my abode, providing me with physical comforts and the arena for being an active citizen. India has been my spiritual refuge and my sanctuary.”He writes of what he had hoped could be a better future for humankind based on the gleanings from his own experiences and contributions to the world: “If humanity isn’t going to drown in the chaos of its own creation, the leading nations of the world will have to create a new world order, which may involve fewer international boundaries.”
In this interview, he shares his journey and expands further his vision of a world with diminishing borders.
You travelled from a village in Punjab, through UK and ended up in the Canadian cabinet to make changes that impacted humanity in your various public roles as a politician. Would you have been able to make an impact in a similar public role if you had never left India? Was the journey you went through necessary to help you become who you are?
It’s almost next to impossible to imagine what actually would have happened to my life in India had I stayed there. The most complicating element would be the standards that I would apply in such reimagining, the standards I most certainly wouldn’t have known or applied to my Indian life’s journey. I do think though and I have said it often in conversations with friends that had I stayed in India I would have either turned into a saint or devil; nothing in between for one who in 1964, the year I left, already hated the beginnings of the corruption that has now almost completely enslaved the country’s polity and ensnared the society.
Even though what has guided me throughout my life were the lessons I learnt from my freedom fighter maternal grandfather, my activist father and Mahatma Gandhi’s life, I believe the ethics and mores of public life, first in Britain and then in Canada helped shape and sculpt who I became and how I conducted myself. Had I not been to Britain and not lived most of my life in Canada, it’s impossible even to imagine the ‘me’ that would now be walking upon our planet earth.
While within five years of landing in Canada, you were studying in University of British Columbia and driving an Austin, some other immigrants fifteen years down the line continued in abject poverty. What does it take to rise out of endemic poverty? Do you see that happening in the world around us today?
The way you phrased the question conceals the fact that before I resumed full time college in January 1970s and went on to complete my BA and then LL.B. in 1976, I had spent full six years of my life in UK and Canada working jobs including shunting trains with British Rail, making crayons in a factory, being a lab assistant in a secondary school and pulling lumber on the green chain in a saw mill in Canada while often attending night school.
And I must add that my extended family and my spouse were largely responsible for paying my way through my B.A. and LL.B.
While even then it wasn’t easy, I do recognise the union wage then available to students in summer employment enabled them to save enough for the school year; with most summer jobs that’s not the case now. The students now more often than not have to depend on loans or help from the parents.
A significant section of the immigrant diaspora has done reasonably well while for many it’s becoming harder and harder to just make ends meet.
And by the way the Austin, you refer to, was the used Austin 1100, Austin Mini’s sister, I had bought for the then princely sum of six hundred dollars; it took mere six dollars to fill its tank.
That’s truly interesting. At the beginning of your biography, you stated ‘politics is a noble calling’. Later you have written, “I had realized I needed to make a clean break from thepettiness of politics.” Which of these is true? And why the dichotomy — pettiness as opposed to nobleness? And what made you change your perspective?
No, I have not changed my view of politics. It is a noble calling but only if you do it for the right reasons. More and more I found that a significant number of people seeking public office did so for glory that they perceived the elected public office bestowed upon them. Shorn of any lofty ideals and the pursuit of public good politics often degenerates into petty squabbles rather than the giant battles of great and contrasting ideas.
The pettiness is the result of small minds pursuing the mirage of glory in phony battles that barely move the needle on the bar of public good. I often refer to the absence of great leaders in the political landscape of India and the world; Canada has not escaped the current curse of the dearth of great minds in the political arena. Hence my exasperation at the situation I found myself in.
The world over, politics seems to have become the refuge of intellectual dwarfs—no offence intended to our shorter brothers and sisters. The small minds tend not to see too far into the future; they are oblivious to the need to constantly challenge the world to be what it could be.
After a lifetime of activism and close to eighteen years of elected office it was only natural for me to tire of the myopia and pettiness in what otherwise remains a noble endeavour.
You met Indira Gandhi — the second woman to lead a country in a prime ministerial role — and had this to say of her “Indira Gandhi loved India immensely. One can be an imperfect leader and yet a patriot”. Do you think she was an effective leader for India?
My wife and I spent an hour speaking with Indira Gandhi on the afternoon of January 13, 1984. We spent the first few minutes comparing notes about our grandparents and parents as freedom fighters and activists before discussing the issues related to the agitation in Punjab, its growing militancy and increasing violence in and outside the Golden Temple. From what she said it was clear she was extremely troubled about the dangerous situation of the militants holed up in the Temple and the toll it was taking on the peace, politics and the economy of the state. I sensed a certain helplessness in this otherwise quite brave woman when describing the unsuccessful efforts she and her office had made to reach a peaceful settlement of the issues raised by the Sikh agitation. Because I had met both the militant Bhindranwale and the peace loving leader of the agitation, Longowal, and understood the tension between the two men and their followers, I knew she was grappling with a political minefield. All of this and much more that we discussed left me in no doubt about her love for the country and all its people.
But I do believe she allowed the situation at the Golden Temple to linger too long and deteriorate before trying to bring it under control; thus, it and the Operation Bluestar, her ultimate response to the armed militants holed up in the Temple, remains one of her great misjudgements—perhaps as grave as the declaration of the National Emergency in 1975.
Imperfection being part of the human condition, one isn’t surprised that Indira Gandhi who saw all Indians as equally Indian, too, was imperfect; a strong but imperfect leader.
“Sikri was the capital for the new world of unity that Akbar had wanted to create. Ashoka took a similarly bold leap toward peace after a bloody war. Two millennia after Ashoka and four centuries after Akbar, Mahatma Gandhi shared with India a similar vision and a path out of colonialism. India killed him.” Please explain why you feel India killed Gandhi.
One can’t and mustn’t blame an entire country for the actions of one or two persons and yet what I said of Gandhi’s assassination, at least figuratively if not literally, can be said with ample justification; not one but several attempts were made to end Gandhi the mortal. If many Indian hearts and minds—and there were many in his lifetime, perhaps not as many as there are in Modi’s India—wanted Gandhi and his philosophy of nonviolence and love for all dead, then I must say, even without resorting to the writers’ licence, India stands accused and guilty of his January 30th, 1948 assassination; India killed Gandhi.
Even before the advent of Modi on the national scene India’s politicians had substantially diminished and damaged Gandhi’s legacy of Truth, Love and Non-violence. Considering the so few prominent voices in the public domain criticising the Modi regime’s single-minded undermining of Gandhi’s legacy, almost to the point of extinction, it can be said that if it already hasn’t done so, India is close to annihilating Gandhi’s Truth, Love and Non-violence.
“To India’s shame, the rich and ruling classes of today mimic the sahibs of yore. Some of them still head to the hills with their servants, the Indian equivalent of the slaves of the United States.” As Gandhi is seen as one of the architects of modern India, what would have Gandhi’s stand been on this?
When Gandhi lived in England and South Africa, he was part of the diaspora of his time and learnt new things as such. Today with social and digital media one hopes even living in India he would have been aware of the yearning of humanity for equality and economic and social justice. The way most rich and powerful treat the poor and the weak in India is absolutely antithetical to what an egalitarian India would demand of them.
I’m aware of how Gandhi didn’t support the abolition of caste and of his position or lack thereof on the question of equality for the blacks of South Africa at the time. But different times throw up leaders with different and perhaps better approaches to the fundamental issues. Were he alive today, he would have argued for the abolition of caste, equality for all and he wouldn’t have accepted or ignored how India treats its workers, poor and the powerless.
You have told us “India leads the world in the curse of child slavery and labour. Millions of India’s children are trapped in bonded labour, sex trafficking and domestic ‘help’ servitude.” Most people plead poverty and survival when they talk of children working. Do you see a way out? Is there a solution?
Yes, like all problems, this, too, has a solution:
Legislate, legislate and legislate.
Enforce, enforce and enforce the legislation.
I know some laws do exist but we need legislation with more teeth. The laws regarding minimum wage, hours of work, overtime and holiday pay and health regulations must be strengthened and more vigorously enforced, in particular, in the so-called domestic help sector. Better wages and working conditions rigorously enforced would attract adult workers who would be able to send their children to proper schools rather than thrust them in to slavery in exploitative homes, factories and workplaces.
Not much will improve on this front though unless Indians end the endemic corruption in law enforcement. You see corruption confronts and stares us in almost all, if not all, issues Indian; it is the elephant almost in each and every room.
“Violence can never be a tool for change in a modern, democratic nation.” You tried to use Gandhian principles through your life — even in Canada. Do you think non-violence can be a way of life given the current world scenario with wars and dissensions? How do you view Gandhi sanctioning the participation of soldiers in the first and second world wars? Can wars ever be erased or made non-violent?
First let’s deal with Gandhi’s sanction of the soldiers in the two world wars. Whether or not he had sanctioned their participation, the soldiers would have gone to war; most of them fought for wages, not for the love of war or the country except those for whom the Second World War was a war against fascism and hence justified.
I don’t believe Gandhi ever stated that in fighting a violent enemy or a perceived enemy one was not allowed to use violence. All I ever remember him saying was that you throw your unarmed body wrapped in soul force in front of the enemy but if you are too chicken to do so or can’t do so for some other reason but fight an aggressor you must, violence is better than doing nothing.
As for countries fighting each other I don’t believe he ever said that, in an uncertain world where the military of another country could invade at any moment, a country must forego a military of its own.
As for nonviolence being a way of life, it can and must be for a country in its internal life. On the borders however one always has to deal with what one is presented with; you can’t ask Ukraine to not fight; in the face of a suddenly expansionist China or a belligerent Pakistan, Gandhi wouldn’t have urged the Buddha’s meditational pose for India; he didn’t do so in late 1947 when Pakistani fighters invaded Kashmir.
As for wars being non-violent, they can never be if the likes of Russia continue to invade others.
You opposed the Khalistani separatists and stood for a united India. What is your stand on Khalistan, given the recent flare up? Did you do anything this time to allay the situation in Canada?
I have always been opposed to countries being carved out on ethnic, linguistic or religious basis; I am a firm believer in multilingual, multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-racial populations living together in peace within the boundaries of peaceful countries; for that to happen, secularism remains a sine qua non[1]. That is why I so passionately continue to support a secular and inclusive India.
As for me doing something in the face of what is happening in Canada today vis a vis the Khalistanis, I didn’t say anything because I don’t believe it would have added to the debate; everyone already knows what I think and believe.
What does concern me though is the weak-kneed response and reaction of the public leaders of Canada; they have not unconditionally condemned the glorification of terrorists, known murderers or those who on the streets of Canada glorify and revere the killers of Air India passengers or of Mrs. Indira Gandhi. For me, someone who immigrated to Canada in 1968 when the elder Trudeau became the Prime Minister of the country, the near silence of our politicians on Khalistani violence and its glorification has been a low point; the older Trudeau knew how to deal with the terrorists; he didn’t and wouldn’t have pussy footed around terrorism or its glorification.
When your autobiography was published the first time in 2016, your column in Indian Express was cancelled. As many of us grew up in India of the past, we believed in secularism and democracy with freedom of expression. How has it changed over a period of time?
After I left India and particularly when I was introduced to the Hyde Park, I reflected on India and it seemed to be one of the freest places in the world; any intersection of a city road or a corner of the village served as a mini Hyde Park; from the millions of speeches made in such Hyde Parks all over India, millions of ideas tumbled forth from the lips of ordinary but engaged Indians.
Of course, I do realise that in the lives of the poor and the powerless, the freedom hadn’t shone as bright. The imprisoning of the Naxalites without charges and Indira Gandhi’s Emergency were the first real jolts of un-democracy and unfreedom I felt India as a whole had suffered. From there it went downhill; that sporadic communal riots continued; that Godhra was done to the Muslims as was done the post Indira assassination violence to the Sikhs; lynchings of Muslims and Dalits continue today.
India’s response to the first major unfreedom, Indira’s Emergency censorship, was encapsulated in the blank front pages of the censored Indian Express, that symbol of the Journalism of Courage. That symbol may still burn today but it is smouldering and clearly less bright enveloped as it and others are in the atmosphere of fear of the likes of ED[2] and CBI[3]; almost none amongst the traditional media homes shines much or at all; the digital media has thrown up some brave examples like The Wire. But the overall scene is dismal. India needs many revolutions; one of them is the reawakening of some semblance of fortitude in India’s Godi[4] media outlets.
Over repeated trips to India, you observed that people did not want to talk of major issues like availability of potable water but wanted to discuss issues like the eroding culture among the diaspora. Why do you think this has happened? Is there a way to change this mindset?
Human mind is an amazing thing; it seeks engagement but when the immediate is painful to observe and feel, it finds solace in contemplating the scenes afar; for sheer survival in its troubled and troubling milieu it develops numbness; such numbness shields it from the immediate while thinking about the distant problems, imagined or real, offer it a sense of engagement. Such is what I thought happened to many in Punjab.
Another troubling thing was that much beyond the essential human pride a sense of chauvinism and superiority, at least among its rich and powerful, has plagued Punjab for a long time which has blinded it to the need for change and progress—one didn’t need to improve what one believed to be perfect and hence superior.
Punjab has significantly slipped in the Human Development Index. That this humbling fact is now quite widely acknowledged in intellectual and political circles gives me some hope that things may improve.
“There are massive water shortages across the country. There’s a crisis in health care…Under the weight of crippling debts and droughts, small and marginal farmers are killing themselves. There aren’t enough jobs being created for the millions of youth joining the job market every year. The human-rights record of the Indian State inKashmir, the Northeast and other parts in the grip of insurgency is horrific and shameful. Dalits and Muslims are lynched with impunity by Hindutva-inspired mobs for skinning dead cows, or being in the vicinity of meat that may or may not be beef.” Do you see a way out? What can India do to step out of the condition you have described so accurately?
I have argued for some time that what India needs is a new freedom struggle, a Values’ Revolution, to rid itself of corruption—rishwat[5], unethicality, religious and cultural fanaticism that impinges on many Indians’ right to life, dignity and liberty. In arguing this I am aided by Gandhi’s dictum—that I have always alluded to in my own writings—that he was engaged in not creating a new India but a new Indian; my reading of what he said has led me to conclude he meant a caring, humane, compassionate, egalitarian and an ethical Indian. To create an India with 1.4 billion ethical and progressive Indians requires a mammoth revolutionary change in our values; hence a Values’ Revolution.
At the moment I see the country’s civil society under constant attack by the forces of social division whereas in fact social solidarity and cohesion are sorely needed. A Values’ Revolution will require giant leaders; I see none on the scene today but I’m not disheartened because once begun the Revolution itself may, as do all revolutions, throw up the necessary giants.
You are an immigrant who has lived out of India for almost half a century. Do you think as part of the diaspora living outside India, we could all act together to heal a region broken by its own inability to live up to the vision created by those who wrote the constitution of the country? What would be your vision of India?
The diaspora coming together to even slightly nudge India forward is an emotionally compelling and noble thought; many of us constantly dream of doing something for the country we have left behind. Some of us do so while others revel in its imaginings only.
A major stumbling block to the diasporic unity on this question has been the ideological divisions amongst the Indians abroad which usually mirror India’s domestic political fault lines and unfortunately those difference have been only rendered sharper by the way elements of the diaspora have recently been employed in aid of India’s domestic political machinations. The old diasporic divisions now seem and feel more rabid; it is as if the political battles of India now rage equally actively in the diaspora itself.
I always dream of India as a caring, compassionate, egalitarian and ethical India. One that values all its citizens equally and brims with social and economic justice.
That is such a wonderful thought with which many of us agree wholeheartedly. You have written: “If humanity isn’t going to drown in the chaos of its own creation, the leading nations of the world will have to create a new world order, which may involve fewer international boundaries.” What is the world order you suggest?
For starter no order can be imposed by the so-called leading nations, no matter how powerful. It may take a significant amount of nudging and cajoling by them to change anything.
When I wrote my autobiography, I was imagining the world moving, at least to begin with, in the direction of regional groupings like the European Union. We saw that as the number of member states of the United Nations trended upwards, Europe witnessed the opposite where many countries dared to create the EU practically erasing borders; granted Britain rebelled – but even within its borders a referendum held today would most likely approve it re-joining the EU.
As a possible beginning for the rest of the world, our best hope lies in grand imaginings such as a South Asian Common Market at once reducing the expense of standing militaries staring angrily at each other across the borders; Southeast Asia, Africa, South America could follow; North American Free Trade Agreement already exists creating at least an economic union.
If to begin with the countries regionally moved toward the free flow of human beings along with the necessary and more convenient local trading, one could foresee the international will and desire developing toward a world populated by fewer borders and more freedom. Hopefully that would move humanity toward more international egalitarianism, prosperity and fewer wars.
Hopefully, the vision materialises. Thank you very much for giving us your time and wonderful books that make us think and emote.
Rishi Sunak’s appointment to 10 Downing Street has made people aware of the significant presence of Indians in the African Continent. Indian-African cultural and trade exchanges had been ongoing as early as the 7th century BC. Africans are also mentioned to have significantly influenced India’s history of kingdoms, conquests and wars.
The second wave of Indian migration to Africa happened mainly in the 19th century with British imperialism via the indentured labour system, a dignified name for slavery. It is all semantics. What essentially happened at the end day is a large Indian diaspora in countries like South Africa, Mauritius, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and many more. Many of the Indians who made their way there as labourers, over the generations, began to play significant roles in the economy and professional representations in these countries.
A certain famous Indian diva born in Zanzibar to British colonial civil service who kicked a storm in the rock and roll is, of course, Freddy Mercury (1946-1991) as Farrokh Bulsara.
Statue of Freddy Mercury in Montreux, SwitzerlandFreddy MercuryCourtesy: Creative Commons
Idi Amin declared himself the President of Uganda after a coup d’état in 1971. The first thing that he did was to expel Indians from Uganda. His reasoning is that the South Asian labourers were brought in to build the railways. Now that the rail network was completed, they had to leave. They had no business controlling all aspects of Ugandan wealth.
In Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1991), the protagonists, Jay, Rinnu and young Mina, had to uproot themselves from Kampala overnight when Amin decreed that all Indians were no longer welcome in Uganda. With a single stroke of the pen, they became refugees.
By 1990, they are shown to have become residents of Mississippi. The 24-year-old Mina is entangled with a local Afro-American man. This creates much friction between the two families. That is the basis of the movie.
It is interesting to note many Asiatic societies complain that the rest of the world practises discriminatory, racist policies against them. In reality, they are quick to differentiate each other within their community — the high-heeled, the aristocratic ancestors, their professions, the fairness of the colour of their skins, you name it. And they call others’ racists. For that matter, everyone is a racist. The Europeans subclassify their community by economic class. The seemingly homogenous Africans also differentiate themselves by tribes. Remember Rwanda with their Tutsi and Hutu civil war? Even the Taiwanese have subdivisions. China and Russia have varying ethnicities across the vast span of their lands.
Interestingly, the politics of the oppressed is much like what we read in George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and saw in the South Korean 2019 Oscar winner Parasite. Like how some animals are ‘more equal’ than others, the maids of the Parks feel more entitled than the freeloading dwellers of the bunker. Even amongst the oppressed, there is a class consciousness to sub-divide the oppressed.
Photo provided by Farouk Gulsara
Race-based politics is so passè. In the post-WW2 era, when the people of the colonies needed to unite to reclaim their land, it made a lot of sense to join under race. Past that point, it did not make any sense for the dominant ethnicity within the nation to claim the country as theirs. At a time when purebreds are only confirmed to be prized pets, it is laughable that politicians are still using racial cards to get elected. Each nation’s survival depends on its competitiveness, anti-fragility, and ability to withstand a Black Swan event. Race does not fall into the equation. With changing social mingling at school and the workplace, interracial unions are the norm. How is race going to be determined anyway? The fathers? The mothers are not going to take that lying down, of course!
The Afro-Americans were emancipated in 1863 after the Civil War, after generations of living as slaves. The black community, at least, still complained that they had received an uncashable cheque from the Bank of America for insufficient funds. Many Indian (and other races, too) labourers were no longer labourers by the second generation and had managed to springboard themselves out of poverty to occupy important positions in society. What gave? Did the coveted American dream slip them by?
Coming back home to Malaysia, it appears that we will forever be entangled in race politics. In an era when minions around us who were basket cases decades ago have leap-frogged by leaps and bounds in science and technology, our leaders and people stay inebriated in the intoxicating elixir of race superiority. Imagine starting a political party in the 21st century where only people of a certain race can hold critical positions. In day-to-day dealings, expertise is compromised to maintain racial purity. Intertwined with race these days is religion.
Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, ‘Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy’ and ‘Real Lessons from Reel Life’, he writes regularly in his blog ‘Rifle Range Boy’.
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Johannesburg or Jozi. This was the first city I visited outside my country at the age of thirty-two. Quite late for someone to embark on a foreign trip. Of course, my parents had never been abroad, but I was comparing myself with coevals here. And what a sojourn that was! Quite like a debut test for a cricketer where he gets into his own and looks forward to more stints at the crease or more overs to bowl. And there are many names which stand out in my mind’s eye – Rhoda (Anglicised version of Radha), Richard, Ruleman…Interestingly, the people I interacted most with during my short stay in the city, have names beginning with the letter ’R’!
Before I embarked on my journey, and even after I arrived there, I was told that Johannesburg was notorious for the rampancy of crime – car thefts, knifings, muggings, rapes, daylight robberies and what have you. I was told:
“Never take any valuables with you when you go out.”
“Well, man, even if you do that, they will put a knife on you and ask you to give them your short and trousers and the ordinary footwear you would be wearing…these are guys who need to sell things to get money for their drugs, you see.”
“Take care, friend, your first visit to our country should not leave behind bad impressions on your mind. We want you to take back good memories and share them with your folks and friends in India.”
The Westerners and Indians in the city were concerned. I would hear these words of advice from almost every South African and Indian I would meet during my stay there. They cared and never let me venture out alone anywhere. Many offered to drive me down wherever I wished to go. I felt protected…a kind of informal Z security, unasked for. But perhaps I felt safe, perhaps imprisoned and fettered. It is hard to say.
I arrived in the city with the intention of meeting a publisher who was keen to employ me if it would be possible to obtain a work permit for me from the Government of South Africa – a gargantuan task even now. I wanted to get away from India, experience different working cultures and live a fuller life – professionally. It was at this magazine-publishing office that I met Richard and Ruleman. Richard of Dutch and English parentage, working as the editor of a mining magazine, and Ruleman of Zimbabwean origin, was employed as the office-boy.
While every minute of my stay in Jozi was memorable, considering that this was my first sojourn outside India, the last two days left a lasting impact on my mind. The dreams of obtaining a work permit were shattered, and I started making plans to wend my way back to India. I had purchased a return ticket and would have travelled back in any case – of course to return in case the work permit was granted. On the last day but one, I was working late in the office, in order to do full justice to the project which has been assigned to me, even though I knew I had no future in the outfit or the city.
Only Ruleman was waiting, sensing that I should not be left to work alone in the office – burglars had broken into this office as well, I was told, a few months ago, and taken away some of the computers. Ruleman came into my room and assured me that he was waiting downstairs and that I could call him if I needed anything. At around 5.00 pm (work normally was wound up in Jozi at around 3.30 pm…they started work at 7.30 am) – which by Johannesburgish standards was late, I wound up, and walked down the stairs. Ruleman nodded, smiled, went around running a last-minute check of the doors and the lights and fans, and then escorted me out of the office. I used to walk back home – it was a 20 minute walk. Ruleman’s house was on the way. As we walked down, he asked me how I liked my stay here and felt sad that I would be leaving. He asked about India, and said he had always considered India as the ‘Land of Mahatma Gandhi’. I recalled that the African cabbie who had driven me down from the Jan Smuts International Airport two months ago, also told me the same thing. We reached his house. He told me that his parents would be delighted to meet me, if I could come over for tea the next day. I smiled and said that I would love to. I thought that he would bid goodbye for the evening.
He did not. ‘I shall drop you at your doorstep. You see, this is not a safe time to be walking around in this city…I do not want anything to happen to you just when you are about to leave Jozi.’ I was thankful, though I would not really have bothered about walking down alone. ‘My father talks a lot about India. He had a lot of good Indian friends when he was working in East Africa in his younger days. You should come over tomorrow. He would be very pleased, and so would I.’ Ruleman dropped me off at the gate of the house I stayed in as a tenant and bid me goodnight.
Next day, when it was time to leave, I remembered Ruleman’s invitation. However, till the day I had walked down with Ruleman back home, Richard used to drive me down to my place of residence before turning right and heading home. This being my last day, Richard wanted to drive me down at 4.00 pm, for one last time. Ruleman said that he wanted me to visit him, as decided on the previous day. I did not know what to say or do. If I had told Richard that I would visit Ruleman, perhaps, it would not have been appropriate. Turning down Ruleman’s invitation would also not have been a very nice thing to do. And clearly there was no via media.
Richard drove me down eventually. I rued my decision. I may possibly never see that ever-smiling, do-gooder Zimbabwean again. I sent Ruleman a card from India on my return and Richard wrote to me conveying Ruleman’s thanks for the same. Small consolation perhaps. Man often talks about looking for the via media – the middle path – the path or course of action which would leave none the worse for it. There are occasions where a middle path does not exist at all. A take it or leave it situation stares one in the face…just to remind man that no matter how hard he tries, there are many things beyond his control.
On a different note, when one sees goodness around, and care and concern for strangers who one would possibly not see again, one’s faith in God’s kindness being expressed through human agents gets reinforced. Jozi taught me a lot of lessons, which changed my perspectives towards life immensely. I was a totally different person on my return to India – calmer, spiritually aware, more respectful towards my parents, and in a nutshell – ‘grown-up’! I realised that deep down, we are all connected to the Super Soul….and a desire to do good and a willingness to help, resides in all human hearts.
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G Venkatesh (50) is a Chennai-born, Mumbai-bred ‘global citizen’ who currently serves as Associate Professor at Karlstad University in Sweden. He has published 4 volumes of poetry and 4 e-textbooks, inter alia.
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I dislike giving advice almost as much as I dislike receiving it, but as a friend recently asked me if I knew of any easy techniques to generate ‘inspiration’ when creating an outline for a story or script. I replied to her request. Somewhat pompously and just a little ponderously, I’d now like to share the answer I gave to her with everyone, even with you out there. This is what I said:
(a) Don’t sit around waiting for inspiration.
(b) Don’t chase it too hard.
Some people appear to assume that ideas are difficult to come by, and if we mean very good ideas, then that’s true. But if we concentrate on workable ideas, the fact is that they can be manufactured easily. Strange useful juxtaposition is one reliable and simple way to create new ideas. Think of the elements hydrogen and oxygen. Pretty neat on their own? Yes, but a bit overdone.
Put them together and what do you get? Water! The first time water was created I am sure that its originality was astounding, far more astounding than might have been anticipated. After all, water is a fusion of hydrogen and oxygen but not just that. It is also something entirely itself, with all its own qualities and properties, most of which hydrogen and oxygen don’t have. Indeed it would be virtually impossible to anticipate the properties of water by examining the behaviours of the elements that constitute it, no matter how minutely detailed the analysis.
Water is a new thing. You can’t pre-empt thingness. It can’t be modelled before it exists. Only with hindsight can we have understanding. We may work backwards as a consequence and then model it as the necessary outcome of a combination of the two elements that constitute it, but this doesn’t change the fact that water is not obviously contained in embryonic form in hydrogen and oxygen. The empirical truth came first, the chemical formula followed, and only later did we nod at each other with the false wisdom of experience disguised as physics.
I repeat, there is nothing in the attributes of the atoms of elements to give us specific clues about the attributes of the compounds they would generate when they are clashed together. The same may be true for ideas, if we regard archetypes or clichés as the atoms of story elements and decide to combine them unusually. This method is one I might use when I want to come up with an outline for a story from scratch. I’ll take two things that aren’t connected and put them together to see what will happen. The less naturally connected those things already are, the better the process and the nicer the outcome, because you can have more fun trying to connect them, and more surprising ideas will be generated as a result.
These original ideas will come with very little effort, because they have no other choice. The simple act of colliding and fusing a pair of unrelated items will mean that such ideas naturally come into being, the same way that water comes into being when we bash hydrogen and oxygen atoms into each other. And one way of finding pairs of things that aren’t naturally connected is to flip open a dictionary at random and jab a finger down onto the page. The finger chooses a word, the first word, then repeats the process for the second word, and the two consequent words are the magnetic poles of the story. They run right through it just as the magnetic poles of our planet spear our globe like a blue pumpkin on a skewer.
I tried the method recently and here are my combinations:
Caffeine addiction and macramé.
Frogs and tangerines.
The fashion world and tropical diseases.
Astronomy and crossbows.
Economic downturn and pickled gherkins.
Liver salts and scarves.
Tinted windows and army trousers.
Bananas and canoes.
Howler monkeys and world peace.
Bellybuttons and cacti.
Castigation and dirigible accidents.
Zoetropes and cheese.
Almost any two unconnected things will work. Maybe pairing together ‘modulus’ and ‘reciprocal’ would cause difficulties. ‘Oneness’ and ‘duplicity’ too. ‘Contradiction’ and ‘congruence’. I am sure there are many others, and that you can devise pairs that defy my technique. But generally speaking the method is sound. And perhaps a very clever person could work perfectly well with all combinations, even those that cancel themselves out, especially with those, one suspects. It ought to be remembered that if two words are picked that the picker doesn’t especially like, the random page flipping can be done again. The method is a tool, not an order. ‘Tool’ and ‘order’ are two words that can surely be combined productively.
Recently I learned that the old British comedy show, The Goodies (1970-1982), used the same technique at the script stage. Perhaps that was where I learned it, for I was a devoted follower of the show when I was very little, but it must have happened by a process of mental osmosis, for I never consciously understood that this was how the writers Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor generated their initial scenarios. In one episode, a satire on apartheid, the piano in the South African embassy had the white notes grouped at one end of the keyboard and all the black notes at the other. I am wandering off the point, of course, but the joke still seems especially poignant in its absurdity. Back to the day’s business!
There is absolutely no need to stop with only two unusually juxtaposed elements. More may be used according to taste. For example, three parameters may be selected for the structure of the story: (a) location, (b) activity, (c) participant. I open an atlas at random for the location, which turns out to be Rangoon. Now I need an activity. I turn on the radio, which is broadcasting a cricket match. Very well. Now a participant must be found. I look out the window and see a rabbi walking past. So the story must be set in Burma and involve a religious scholar who is a wicket keeper. The basics of the work are already in existence. But what happens next? Another application of the method will bring forth something for this fellow to do. He won’t sit around waiting for inspiration. Nor will he chase it too hard.
A lot of hydrogen and oxygen has combined in his vicinity. Rangoon is flooded. A canoe is provided for him and a bunch of bananas for sustenance. He paddles down the watery streets seeking his only friend, a tailor who has succumbed to malaria. The search is fruitless, so he moors his canoe next to a stall in the market and buys some tangerines while frogs hop all about him. Yes, he has already eaten the bananas. The day is over, night comes and the stars twinkle above him. He is surprised to observe a constellation previously unknown to him.
The twang of a discharged crossbow alarms him. A soldier on a roof is aiming at the new pattern of stars in the shape of a howler monkey. How might world peace be achieved with people like this about? Suddenly the stars vanish. Has the soldier killed them? No, it is merely an unlit dirigible looming from out of the sky. Let’s shout at it for doing so! There is no need for me to continue. The point has been made. The man in the tale has a fictional fate mapped out. This doesn’t mean that his adventures will be any good. That isn’t up to me, but you.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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“Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
John Keats (1795-1821), Ode to a Grecian Urn
‘Beauty is Truth’ : The Potato Eaters(1885) by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). Courtesy: Creative Commons
What makes for great literature? To me, great literature states the truth — the truth that touches your heart with its poignancy, preciseness, sadness, gentleness, vibrancy, or humour. If Khayyam, Rumi, Keats, Tagore, Frost or Whitman had no truths to state, their poetry would have failed to mesmerise time and woo readers across ages. Their truths – which can be seen as eternal ones — touch all human hearts with empathetic beauty. Lalon Fakir rose from an uneducated illiterate mendicant to a poet because he had the courage to sing the truth about mankind — to put social norms and barriers aside and versify his truth, which was ours and still is. This can be applied to all genres. Short stories by Saki, O’ Henry or plays and essays by Bernard Shaw — what typifies them? The truth they speak with perhaps a sprinkle of humour. Alan Paton spoke the truth about violence and its arbitrariness while writing of South Africa — made the characters so empathetic that Cry, My Beloved Country(1948) is to me one of the best fictions describing divides in the world, and the same divides persist today. The truth is eternal as in George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) or Suskind’s Perfume(1985). We love laughter from Gerald Durrell or PG Wodehouse too because they reflect larger truths that touch mankind as does the sentimentality of Dickens or the poignancy of Hardy or the societal questioning of the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, and Jane Austen. The list of greats in this tradition would be a very long one.
Our focus this time is on a fearless essayist in a similar tradition, one who unveiled truths rising above the mundane, lacing them with humour to make them easily digestible for laymen – a writer and a polyglot who knew fourteen languages by the name of Syed Mujtaba Ali (1904-1974). He was Tagore’s student, a Humboldt scholar who lived across six countries, including Afghanistan and spoke of the things he saw around him. Cherished as a celebrated writer among Bengali readers, he wrote for journals and published more than two dozen books that remained untranslated because his witticisms were so entrenched by cultural traditions that no translator dared pick up their pen. Many decades down the line, while in Afghanistan, a BBC editor for South and Central Asia, Nazes Afroz, translated bits of Mujtaba Ali’s non-fiction for his curious friends till he had completed the whole of the travelogue.
The translation named In a Land Far from Home: A Bengali in Afghanistan was published and nominated for the Crossword Awards. This month, we not only run an excerpt from the translated essays but also have an interview with the former BBC journalist, Afroz, who tells us not only about the book but also of the current situation in ravaged Afghanistan based on his own first-hand experiences. Nazes himself has travelled to forty countries, much like our other interviewee, Sybil Pretious, who has travelled to forty and lived in six. She had been writing for us till she left to complete her memoirs — which would cover much of history from currently non-existent country Rhodesia to apartheid and the first democratic election in South Africa. These would be valuable records shared with the world from a personal account of a pacifist who loves humanity.
We have more on travel — an essay by Tagore describing with wry humour vacations in company of his niece and nephew and letters written by the maestro during his trips, some laced with hilarity and the more serious ones excerpted from Kobi and Rani, all translated by Somdatta Mandal. We have also indulged our taste for Tagore’s poetry by translating a song heralding the start of the Durga Puja season. Durga Puja is an autumnal festival celebrated in India. An essay by Meenakshi Malhotra explains the songs of homecoming during this festival. It is interesting that the songs express the mother’s views as highlighted by Malhotra, but one notices, never that of the Goddess, who, mythology has it, gave up her life when the husband of her own choosing, Shiva, was perceived by her family as ‘uncouth’ and was insulted in her parent’s home.
In spirit of this festival highlighting women power and on the other hand her role in society, we have a review by Somdatta of T. Janakiraman’s Wooden Cow, translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Kannan, where the protagonist upends all traditional values ascribed to women. Another book which is flavourful with food and would be a real fit on every festive occasion is Mohana Kanjilal’s A Taste of Time: A Food History of Calcutta. Bhaskar Parichha tells us in his review, “In the thriving universe of Indian food books, this clearly stands out.”
Aruna Chakravarti’s review of Shazia Omar’s Golden Bangladesh at Fifty also stands out embracing the colours of Bengal. It traces the title back to history and their national anthem — a Tagore song called ‘Amaar Sonar Bangla – My Golden Bengal’. Gracy Samjetsabam’s review of Suzanne Kamata’sThe Baseball Widow, a cross cultural novel with an unusual ending that shuttles between America and Japan, winds up our review section this time.
As Kamata’s book travels across two continents in a pre-covid world, Sunil Sharma in reality moved home from one continent to another crossing multiple national borders during the pandemic. He has written an eye-opening account of his move along with his amazing short story on Gandhi. Another unusual story creating a new legend with wonderful photographs and the narrative woven around them can be relished in Nature’s Musings by Penny Wilkes. This time we have fiction from India, Malaysia, Bangladesh and America. Steve Davidson has given a story based partly on Tibetan lore and has said much in a light-hearted fashion, especially as the Llama resumes his travels at the end of the story. Keeping in step with light humour and travel is Devraj Singh Kalsi’s account of a pony ride up a hill, except it made me laugh more.
The tone of Rhys Hughes cogitations about the identity of two poets across borders in ‘Pessoa and Cavafy: What’s in a Name?’ reminds me of Puck or Narada! Of course, he has given humour in verses with a funny story poem which again — I am not quite sure — has a Welsh king who resisted Roman invasion or is it someone else? Michael Burch has limericks on animals, along with his moving poem on Martin Luther King Junior. We have much poetry crossing borders, including a translation of Akbar Barakzai’s fabulous Balochi poetry by Fazal Baloch and Sahitya Akademi winning Manipuri poet, Thangjam Ibopishak, translated by Robin S Ngangom. A Nazrul song which quests for a spiritual home has been translated from Bengali by no less than Professor Fakrul Alam, a winner of both the SAARC award and Bangla Academy Literary Award.
Former Arts Editor of Times of India, Ratnottama Sengupta, has shared an essay on how kantha (hand embroidered rug) became a tool to pass on information during the struggle against colonial occupation. The piece reminded me of the narrative of passing messages through mooncakes among Chinese. During the fourteenth century, the filling was of messages to organise a rebellion which replaced the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) with the Ming (1368-1644). Now the filling is delicious lotus paste, chocolates or other edible delicacies. Women were heavily involved in all these movements. Sameer Arshad Khatlani has highlighted how women writers of the early twentieth century writing in Urdu, like Ismat Chughtai, created revolutionary literature and inspired even legendary writers, like Simone de Beauvoir. There is much more in our content — not all of which has been discussed here for again this time we have spilled over to near fifty pieces.
We have another delightful surprise for our readers – a cover photo of a painting by Sohana Manzoor depicting the season titled ‘Ode to Autumn’. Do pause by and take a look at this month’s issue. We thank our writers and readers for their continued support. And I would personally like to give a huge thanks to the team which makes it possible for me to put these delectable offerings before the world. Thank you all.
Sybil Pretious in Morocco. Photograph provided by Sybil Pretious
She paints. She writes. And she has lived through history. She was born in a country that no longer exists. The borders changed with movements of history. In South Africa in the late 80’s, early 90’s she ran a Nursery School attached to the local Primary School for whites. She lived through Nelson Mandela’s movement. As laws changed she admitted the first black child into the school in 1993. She writes of celebrating the first democratic elections in South Africa: “I felt ecstatic. I realised that it was not only the Africans who had been freed to be equal citizens, but I felt free too. I had been released from the enormous guilt and helplessness that had been part of daily living during apartheid.” She lived through it all and soared out to explore more…
Sybil Pretious is a woman who has travelled through life with an élan for assimilating the best in all cultures she has lived in, and she has lived in many. She has lived in six countries and travelled to forty. I met her in China, where she was teaching in an international school. She was like a beam of sunshine. She retired and left. Then we met virtually in a world devoid of borders. While she wrote of her travels from China, the part of her life where she lived through incidents we only read of in history remained silent. That is what we set out to explore in this interview. At an age where others retire and complain of aches and pains, she is writing a biography of her mother and looks forward to traveling, painting, and writing more. Now, this traveller in time, with a heart full of compassion, calls herself a South African, lives in United Kingdom and unfolds for us the story of her life.
Tell us about your childhood in South Africa.
My childhood was never spent in South Africa. The first 23 years of my life were spent in Southern Rhodesia/ Rhodesia. Rhodesia joined Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland as the Federation – 1953-1963). Rhodesia declared UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) from Britain in 1965. This lasted for 13 years and in 1980 after much conflict Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
Only now, when I look back do I realise how much of an influence my childhood had on my passage through life.
Rhodesia, part of the British empire, a land-locked country almost in the centre of Africa, was first colonised by the BSA Company (British South Africa Company) lead by Cecil Rhodes in 1890 when mineral rights were granted by the chief, Lobengula. The country was named after Rhodes. It had a perfect climate and was known as ‘The Breadbasket of Africa’ for the high-quality food crops the farmers produced. Sadly, now, there are many people who do not have enough to eat in the country.
My parents met and married in in 1934. My dad was born in Rhodesia in 1901. His father had been one of the early pioneers in the 1890’s. My mother travelled from Kimberley in South Africa where she was born, to Rhodesia in 1926.
My dad refused to go to university because his father would not allow him to study Mine Engineering. My mother had little education because she was so involved with helping her mother with her six siblings.
I was born in 1942. Fortunately, my father was too old to enlist for World War II. I arrived six years after my elder brother and sister and my arrival was greeted with joy. I was the centre of attention and loved it, generally revelling in the light shining on me and responding to it. From then on, I tried to please everyone. I was not enamoured when two-and-a-half years after my birth my younger sister made an appearance followed a year after that by my younger brother. Of necessity they became the focus of attention, and I became more of a loner and learnt to enjoy my own company.
My father had a great love of the outdoors, prospecting, and mining for gold. Mum grew to love the peace of the veld in his company. During my parents’ first few years of marriage, they moved often as gold reefs ran out. They also farmed during this period. Eventually when they settled in the capital, Salisbury, and made their money by purchasing land, building a house, living in it for a short while before selling it and moving on to the next project.
This made for a rather interrupted childhood where we changed homes and schools often. I attended four different schools in the first four years of my schooling. When I finally had some settled years in a Primary School, I did well. I was the star of the family, but it put a lot of pressure on me to perform.
As children we found it difficult to make and keep friends, but this constant change equipped us for adapting to many different situations. My elder sister insisted on going to Boarding School just so that she could make friends and I think get away from her three younger siblings.
With the wonderful climate in Rhodesia, I spent much of my free time during childhood out of doors. We had one-acre gardens that were generally virgin veld. They provided many opportunities to explore, invent games, problem solve, and use our imaginations.
I loved going to the library in Salisbury and taking out many books, especially adventure stories and visualised myself in the roles of the characters. I created imaginary people and used the natural world to feature in my make-believe stories. Although we were always moving, there was no lack of childhood company as our cousins lived close by. But of course, they were not the same as friends.
Our holidays were spent mainly in Rhodesia, camping in the Eastern Highlands. I loved camping and still do even at my age. On occasion we travelled to Natal in South Africa or Beira in Mozambique for seaside holidays. In our teens we went in friend’s cars on wonderful picnics to dams where we swam and water-skied. We visited the beautiful outdoor places with names like ‘Mermaid’s Pool’ and Sinoia Caves with its mysterious bottomless pool. We scrambled over rocks and climbed hills and had parties on friends’ farms. It was generally a carefree existence in the open air.
My contact with Africans was mainly when we lived on farms. I enjoyed sitting in the dust with a few of the children and pretending to ‘teach’ them. I had a small blackboard, and I would write a word and say it and they had to repeat it and copy in the sand. I used fingers to indicate numbers and showed them how to count (though I am sure they could do that in their own language). They did not attend our schools and we rarely saw the children or mothers in towns. The African men worked as servants in our homes.
Did you often visit other countries during your childhood?
The only other countries I visited during childhood were South Africa and Mozambique for holidays. I loved reading about other countries and was always fascinated the by different peoples, climates, and lifestyles.
Can you recall a memorable event?
The most memorable day in the whole of my time in Africa must be the day of the first democratic elections in South Africa on 27th April 1994.
On that day I remember rising early, stowing a water bottle, some sandwiches and fruit in my backpack. The closest polling station was not far from where I lived so I walked. It was a beautiful day. Clear sky, warm sun (though that proved to be hot after many hours of standing). My husband had decided to go later. I was astonished at the long queues that had formed – some literally miles long. I approached and found myself standing behind two Africans and Indian lady. We all greeted each other warmly clasping two hands together and greeting in our own languages. Later as the time wore on in the heat I shared my water, fruit and sandwiches. Our discussions were general – the weather, our families, where we had come from and how glad we were to be there at this historic time. They had all travelled further than I had but there was no grumbling as we stood patiently.
There was an air of calm euphoria.
I felt ecstatic. I realised that it was not only the Africans who had been freed to be equal citizens, but I felt free too. I had been released from the enormous guilt and helplessness that had been part of daily living during apartheid. We could only treat the people in our employ with sympathy and fairness, but the rules of apartheid shackled our relationships. It was a day of hope for everyone chatting, showing kindness, laughter and waiting patiently to vote.
There was not one adverse incident throughout the country and foreign journalists were disappointed that violence had not broken out. This day was the greatest example of forgiveness and acceptance that I have ever witnessed. I feel privileged and blessed to have been there.
You are writing your mother’s memoirs tell us about it.
My mother was born in 1904 and lived until 2001. At sixteen, she was the eldest of seven siblings in Kimberly, South Africa, when her mother was tragically killed in a shooting accident which involved her brother. When her father remarried, she felt rejected and left to stay with a friend. With little knowledge except of cooking and shopping for her mother she took on the job of manageress of a bakery and improved her education by reading the newspaper to her friend’s blind father and writing letters for him.
Eventually she decided to relocate to the newly annexed colony of Southern Rhodesia. The story records her many personal challenges in this pioneering country – some sad, some hair raising, some very amusing and others poignant. When she married my father, their resourcefulness was tested to the limit with five children to raise. She is an example of courage, inventiveness, creativity, love and sheer grit in pioneering times. It encompasses family life in a fledgling country.
I want my children and grandchildren to know about their roots so that they may be as fearless and resourceful as my mother was in very testing circumstances.
Why did you write about your mother specifically?
I wrote about my mother because the first sixteen years of her life were very demanding as she helped her mother with her six siblings at home while missing school. The death of her mother left her without a purpose in life as the family was dispersed.
She is a shining example of getting on with life no matter the circumstances. Subsequently with her marriage the story includes my father. They have both been inspirational in different ways. My mother for her love, steely determination and creative thinking, my father for his quiet, never-ceasing support of her and us.
My mother, despite her poor schooling manged a bakery, worked in a department store, designed the houses they built, helped build them and was there for her children. She never hired any help to look after us. She was thrifty, made all our clothes and was a tower of strength in our family as well as being adored by her siblings.
She remains the most positive person I have ever known despite having no help with getting over the death of her mother. Her influence on my outlook in life is tremendous and while the story is mainly hers, it honours both of my parents.
How many countries have you lived in? Tell us a bit aboutwhy you moved.
I have lived in six countries but travelled to about forty. My home country is of course Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
I travelled to UK age 23 and lived here for a year working and travelling.
When I married in 1967 my husband was from Swaziland, so we lived this beautiful mountainous country for three years. Our first precious daughter was born there.
We moved to South Africa in 1971 and lived mainly in Durban and Johannesburg in the next 30 years. Our precious two younger daughters were born in Durban. This was during the apartheid years. In 1988, we bought a trading store in the rural cane farming area out of Durban and with no experience plunged into that way of life. Our customers were mainly Zulu farm workers. During that time, I started a Pre-School and admitted the first African child. These were the years leading up to the first democratic election and there were many tumultuous incidents during that time. Our venture failed and we returned to Johannesburg to recoup our losses.
While I was teaching, I studied for my BA by correspondence, and did a Remedial Teaching qualification.
In 2003, I obtained a teaching post at an International School in Maputo, Mozambique, commuting back to Durban during the holidays. After two years, I realised that I needed to be on my own and in 2005 our divorce went through.
In 2006, I secured a teaching post at an international school in Suzhou, China. I spent the next six years in this fascinating country. This was a really special time in my teaching career and life and fuelled my passion for travel. Precious people in a spectacular country, they will always remain dear to me. In 2012, I had no choice but to retire at age 70.
I have not taught since moving to the UK but have enjoyed the history, walking in gentle countryside, painting, singing in a choir, Circle Dancing and of course writing. This has been a beautiful retirement.
Which country has been the most memorable and why?
Many people ask me which is the best country I have ever been to or lived in. My answer is simple:
“The best country in the world is wherever I am.”
Of course, no one is satisfied with that answer even though it is perfectly true. I look for the best in each country I go to and tell the people I meet.
I generally find that it is then very easy to settle into a new place.
If I was forced to choose a country, my home country would be the one – wonderful people, perfect climate and terrain and a relaxed lifestyle.
What has been your learning from all your travels?
I have learnt that there is no substitute for my own very special daughters. While on my travels they and their families were so often in my thoughts, and I have learnt that sacrifices are made when you are away from your family.
I have learnt to welcome differences instead of looking for similarities in cultures.
I have learnt that you need not speak a language to communicate. Communication comes in many forms.
I have learnt to go with the unexpected as wonderful surprises often ensue.
I have learnt that the way in which you approach people is usually what will be returned to you.
I have learnt that this world of ours is infinitely beautiful in so many different ways.
I have learnt that we need to take better care of our precious planet.
I have learnt to take risks and not to fear the unknown.
And I have learnt to appreciate and understand differences and similarities in countries and peoples.
How did you get impacted by the pandemic? How did you tackle it?
I did not weather the pandemic very well during the first lockdown in 2020. In 2019, I had just moved into a new complex, gone through winter, then spent a month in South Africa with my family so had little time to meet people and settle in. I returned to UK the day that lockdown started. My youngest daughter and family lived fairly close, but I was unable to see much of them.
I am usually positive in most situations, but my mind appeared to lockdown during this time.
I gave up painting, playing the ukulele and at times writing during those months. I cleared out a lot of stuff that I didn’t really need so that was good, but it was a very frustrating time for me as I was considered too old to volunteer for anything. I didn’t consider myself vulnerable and resented being told what was supposedly ‘good for me’. By the time the second lock down came in 2021, I had inherited my granddaughter’s little dachshund called Hope. She has indeed brought hope and joy to my life. And now that we are almost back to normal, I seem to be re-igniting my creativity.
Do you see any commonality among people across different cultures and in different places?
People are people throughout the world. Unfortunately, borders are created by governments. Wherever I have travelled my reception has always been generous and helpful. People are curious and show exceptional interest in the differences between our cultures. Laughter often follows explanations. I have been asked to give a speech at a Chinese wedding and had toasts in my honour. I have slept on beds with bamboo pillows and climbed mountains with local people. I feel blessed for the acceptance I have experienced.
Travelling without expecting other cultures to mimic your own; expecting and experiencing exciting and interesting differences is the most gratifying point of travel. I have been privileged to be accepted into the homes of local people in many countries which is why I like to travel on my own or perhaps with one other. The real joy of travel and culture is to be found in local places with local people, not in hotels and on organised tours.
Borderless 