Sir Philip Sidney, in his AnApology for Poetry, argues that the primary purpose of poetry is to “teach” and “delight”. Kiriti’s Sengupta’s Selected Poems serves both purposes though the poems do not preach at any point but leave the readers mulling over the ideas with the play of words. The book contains more than 125 poems, selected by Dustin Pickering, a writer and the founding editor of Transcedent Zero Press. The content covers an eclectic range of subjects—from personal musings to ecology, memory to myths and more — mostly republications from his earlier collections and some from journals.
An award-winning poet, publisher, editor, translator and critic, Sengupta believes himself twice-born as he states in his poem of the same name — ‘Twice Born’, written specially for this collection. He has embraced the calling of a poet, forsaking the lucrative profession of a doctor. It’s not that he doesn’t vacillate: “The ink has dried on the paper; the pot can’t be refilled with scribbles. Do I now surrender my pen?” But poetry is his vocation; it would sound ludicrous if someone could ask a noted poet, “What if you weren’t a poet?”(“Intrinsic’)
There is a sense of flow in the poems despite his stylistic terseness. Water permeates his poetry. The poet believes: “…water is achromatic and otherwise called life.” As the poet is a deep observer of nature and its surroundings, he observes that water carries out its own duty: “Water has no call, no décor either; it floats the bone and/ the ash free.” In ‘Evening in Varanasi’, the poet assigns the water of the Ganges with exceptional qualities: “The water here is not/a fire extinguisher. /Flames rise through the water.” He connects the water to the Sun: “O Sun, I remember/I’ve bathed your feet/with the water of the Ganges”. ‘River of Tears and Mother’ airs the deep concern about the recalcitrance of those who ignore ecological issues: “Ganga has her stories to tell;/wish she had someone to listen to her.”
Ecological strains seep through Sengupta’s poems. In ‘The Pillars of Soil’, he draws a fine connection between human beings and trees through the image of the roots. The poet invokes a supreme spirit: “the world would need another maestro/who could sing for the seasoned flesh—/those who walked the earth—/whose roots ran deep into the ground”. In ‘Hibiscus’, he evocatively draws a curious connection between the colour of hibiscus flower and human blood: “…I’ll bloom/like a hibiscus:/the blush will endorse/my bloodline.” The epigraph of the poem, translated by Sengupta from a poem by the noted ‘rebellious’ Bengali poet, Sukanta Bhattacharya, re-enforces his stance.
Concern for extreme air pollution in cities yields sardonic poetry: “Nature made the nasal frame fragile. /How do they breathe the vain air?” He also highlights pollution caused by plastics: “The earth has grown plastic. Water takes eons to seep”.
Some of Sengupta’s poems convey a sense of domesticity. “Clarity”deals with gastronomy as the poet succinctly invites the reader to succor ghee with all their five senses. In this piece, the poet reminisces about the aroma of ghee that his mother used to prepare. The poet here compares his mother’s organic ghee with his organic memory: “So organic is my memory—/the granular residue lifted us to heaven. /Ah! Pious Ghee, and incorrigible.”
In poems such as ‘Experience Personified’, the poet records his experience of the commonplace things: “Tiny droplets envelop my feet/and permeate the toes. /I don’t call it a feeling, I will name it/my experience”. It reminds a me of lines by Tagore: “But I haven’t beholden/what lies two steps away from my home/on a blade of paddy grain, a dazzling drop of dew”. Sengupta also doesn’t shy away from the recent happenings in India. In ‘The Untold Saga’, the poet recalls the abominable “Nirbhaya episode” and rues that, unlike Durga, Nirbhaya could not create an epic due to her untimely death.
The poet turns metaphysical – almost like John Donne[1]— when he asserts, “I now look beyond the flesh, bone and keratin, /I’ve been told/the finer body dwells undressed.” Though most of the poems are contemplative, the book offers some light-hearted ones too: “To my complete bewilderment, if the ghost appears, I’ve decided to offer it a chair first, and then I’ll plead, ‘Take a seat and relax! Let us share our stories.’” In ‘Gravity’, the poet offers a lighter note for the turbulence caused in the aircraft due to the inclement weather. He gives solace to his terrified son: “Relax, Bumps help us/ realize the earth.” In a haiku, punning on the word ‘wisdom’, the poet realises that it’s a test of a surgeon’s wisdom to pluck out a wisdom tooth (biologically called ‘the third molar’) of a patient.
Sengupta’s Selected Poems is a fabulous collection. These poems are like chosen seeds that contain intrinsic vigour to sprout through the age-old concrete floor, giving a message of hope in the face of all odds. Sengupta’s penetrating observations, coupled with his poetic prowess, can be vividly experienced by delving into the rich treasures hidden in between the covers.
Pradip Mondal teaches at L. B. S. Govt. P. G. College Halduchaur, Nainital (India). He has been published in journals like Suburban Witchcraft (Serbia), Muse India (India), and Indi@logs (Spain).
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The wind is an old friend. We meet on Wednesday afternoons to catch up over a coffee.
Some days she’s late, held up by work in the Gulf Coast or Ireland, somewhere more interesting than the corn-plained fields of southern Michigan.
I never mind because her stories about broken quartz shattered into a thousand stars against limestone cliffs remind me that even destruction can be beautiful.
This week, I tell her over the hushed babble of other café-goers about my cat’s death. She promises to scatter its ashes over ancient pine forests in the upper peninsula. She pays
for my coffee. She offers two kisses on each cheek and a sincere ciao before returning to the world. It’d be nice
to be able to do the same.
Dustin P Brown is a US-born, Spain-based author of poetry, prose, and the occasional drama. His work has appeared in other journals like Lit Shark and Bacopa Literary Review.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Nico hurried off the steamer at Burgaz Island, oblivious of the swarming passengers disembarking and embarking. How long had it been since he had stepped foot on the island of his grandfather’s birth: twelve … thirteen years ? He made a bee-line for the central plaza. There he still stood, Saït Faïk, ever so thoughtful, leaning against that eternal tree. Nico approached the Turkish poet –Grandpa would have been so delighted to be here with us again. I’m sure he would have asked you about the talking seaweed and weeping mussels, Nico mused.
Vasiliki had passed away six years ago, a natural death, probably in his sleep. The old fisherman had asked Nico to have him buried between his wife, Nefeli, and daughter, Myrto, which he dutifully accomplished. Since the adolescent was the sole inheritor, he sold his grandfather’s little house for a good price, which permitted him to live comfortably in Athens while completing his university studies. Indeed, because he was parentless, and because his grades in grammar school were excellent, Nico had qualified for a scholarship. The ambitious student, thus, enjoyed financial ease to continue studying several more years for his doctorate. He excelled in Greek language and literature, French and English philology, in European History. At nights he read and spoke Turkish with several Turkish friends, for the vision of returning to Burgaz stole upon him like those perfumed nights on Burgaz with his grandfather as they contemplated the star-studded sky. That seemed so long ago …
Once his doctoral thesis defended, Nico left Greece and set off for Burgaz, off on an adventure. Poetry had been a major part of his thesis, and he had written quite a few poems, contributing to the university Literary Club’s weekly journal. Some of his poems and short stories caught the eye of an editor in Athens who had them published in a widespread monthly magazine. Soon he was invited to poetry readings and story-telling jousts, and because of these eventful evenings his circle of readers widened like concentric ripples in a pool of water after a rock had been thrown in …
The young poet left Athens not knowing exactly what Destiny held for him … nor what drove him so powerfully to return to the island. Was it because of his love for his grandfather ? His fascination for Saït Faïk? Or both? Saïk’s provided him with inexhaustible inspiration. Perhaps, too, it was the mystery of Burgaz of which his grandfather had so oftentimes spoke. Yes. It might have been that.
The horse-drawn carriage pulled up in front of the long flight of stairs to Zorba’s ‘humble’ home. Nico paid and began to ascend the worn-out mossy steps. Nothing had changed as the fretted gable slowly loomed in front of him. The perfumed scent of azaleas, roses, honeysuckles and pomegranate stirred distant memories. He had written to Zorba about his project to spend some time on Burgaz, and the good merchant, although away for several months in the United States on business, insisted that the young poet stay as long as he wished in his ‘humble’ home. He would be greeted and well-fed by his trusty maid, Zelda.
On hearing carriage bells Zelda rushed out, waiting for the ascending Nico arms akimbo. He dropped his knapsack, shoulder-bag and hugged the good woman. Speaking Greek had been her wont when Nico accompanied his grandfather years ago, but now, since the young man had decided to sojourn in Burgaz, she spoke to him in Turkish. Zelda was pleasantly surprised to hear him reply quite readily in Turkish. In fact, Zelda would prove an excellent tutor for Nico. Her grammar was excellent and her accent easy to understand.
So, after a solid diner, exhausted after a long day of travelling, Nico once again trudged up the steps of the floating stairway, the tinkling sound of the fountain below tickling his ears, opened the door to the room he knew so well with its frescoed ceiling of Greek heroes and large bay window looking out upon the darkened forests and the Marmara Sea. He washed and before drifting off to sleep, read a few chapters from Homer’s Odeyssus, which he always carried with him when ‘on the road’, and several paragraphs from Saït Faïk’s Son Kuşlar (Last Birds), underlining the words he couldn’t understand.
Up early the next morning, Zelda had prepared a breakfast of black olives, goat’s cheese, hard-boiled eggs, bread, butter, rose jam and black tea. She had gone to the local market (it was Tuesday) and would not be back before eleven.
Dressed lightly — the weather was very warm, Nico sauntered down the same long and winding path through the wooded slope that led to the stony beach, hoping Abi Din Bey would still be serving grilled-cheese sandwiches, and spouting poetry for his customers. How the brisk island breeze of the sea swept away the cobs of lingering doubt in Nico’s mind as he descended — doubts that had tortured him because his grandfather would no longer be at his side, physically. Yet, when he stepped upon the beach these doubts evaporated. Vasiliki was there and would always be there. He spotted several fishing boats out at sea. Had Nico built a new boat with the help of his grandfather? Indeed he had. It was the biggest and most beautiful of all his boats! Much bigger than the Nefeli which was still in route towards China. But this wonderful boat would not be launched into the leaden seas: it lay housed in a small museum in Hydra where it can be admired by both the young and the old. In fact, Nico even won an award for that marvellous construction. He had named her Myrto in memory of his grandfather’s daughter. The tombstone engraver, on Nico’s behest, carved the silhouette of his boat on Vasiliki’s gravestone.
Abi Din Bey’s welcoming gate had been sealed! The homely front gardens lay desolate, the trees devoid of fruit, clusters of weed and couch grass grew wild. The poet’s house, albeit perfectly intact, exhaled an odour of negligence. Nico stared at this bleak scene, his heart growing heavy. It had never occurred to him that Abi Din Bey would not come rushing out to greet him. That this solitary man was mortal like all other human beings … like his grandfather. He felt like a child who believes his or her parents immortal out of love for them.
From behind a middle-aged man walked up to him: “Abi Din died about ten or eleven years ago,” he began in a soft voice in broken Turkish. “He has no inheritors, so his house stands derelict and abandoned.”
Nico, snapped out of his despondency, eyed the stranger with mixed emotions. “What of his poetry?”
“Abi Din’s life of a poet held absolutely no interest for most who prefer to live in a cloud of unknowing. Abi Din Bey wrote some excellent poems, but alas no one had ears to listen to them.”
“We listened to them,” remonstrated Nico, though rather lamely.
“I know you did, you and your grandfather, Vasiliki.”
Nico reeled back as if struck by a blow. “How do you know … Who are you?”
“Oh, who I am makes no difference to anyone. But if you insist. I am the pilgrim of the heart, I voyage throughout the world admiring its marvels, an idler preaching the blessings of uselessness. Abi Din was one of those marvels, one of those brilliantly elevated idlers.” With those words, the stranger turned to leave.
Nico caught him by an arm: “Sir, where is the old man who piled up stones on the beach ? I haven’t seen him.”
“Nor will you ever see him again. Gone too, and some say that he recited several passages from Saït Faïk’s Son Kuşlar on his dying breath. Have you read Saït Faïk?”
Overcome by all these converging threads of some hidden or latent fabric beyond his grasp or comprehension, Nico could only stutter: “Well … yes … in fact…”
The other interrupted: “Listen, if you want to pay respects towards Abi Din and Saït, you should buy his house. It’s not very expensive.”
“But you …” The unnamed pilgrim put up a hand.
“I have no possessions. That is my first life principle. I idle my way through countries, people and books like a phantom. You buy it, my friend. Buy it before either Time brings about its ruin or the Burgaz municipality its demolition. For now, there are no plans to do either. It’s a mystery why that quaint house has not caught the eye of some eager artist.” And he gave Nico a wink.
“Mystery?” A sudden bout of remorse paralysed Nico. Had his grandfather not spoken of a mystery on Burgaz?
“Yes, mystery! Isn’t that why you’ve returned?” With that last question left unanswered by a flummoxed Nico, the pilgrim strolled away along the beach, chanting some sea-faring tune.
When Nico came to his senses he literally jumped for joy. he would buy Abi Din’s house, settle on Burgaz and pursue his artistic life simply, wholeheartedly. He could become a resident of Turkey merely by depositing enough money in the Osmanlı Bankası[1]. The anonymous figure of the pilgrim had since vanished into a haze of blue. Nico ran up the winding path to Zorba’s home, where Zelda had been preparing lunch. Excitedly he explained his project. She thought it a smashing idea, and promised to help him with the paper work. They ate, had their coffee, and at two o’clock walked to the crossroads, hailed a carriage and rode to the Town Hall, a majestic, white-washed villa near the centre of town.
On the way, Nico asked Zelda whether or not she knew of a middle-aged man who walked about the island, idling his way here and there. Zelda giggled: “Oh yes, him. The Turks call him Mister başı boş[2]and the Greeks tempelis[3].”
“But he’s far from empty-headed,” remonstrated Nico.
“I’m sure he isn’t, that’s why I call him ‘aylak‘.”
“I don’t know the word.”
“Someone who idles about without any definite destination.” Nico nodded, puzzled none the less at these attributes of a person who seemed quite ‘full-headed’ to him …
The irksome formalities to purchase Abi Din’s house would fill a book. Suffice it to report that in two weeks the house belonged to Nico, once he had deposited enough money in the bank, and of course, bought the house in cash …
Although Nico now spent most of his time in his acquired house, he always ate lunch with Zelda at Zorba’s house, and sometimes dinner. It must be recorded here that Nico was better versed in writing stories than in culinary skills.
Every morning after breakfasting, Nico would roam the hilltops of Burgaz sauntering cheerfully along the dirt paths, jotting down in his little notebook details that caught his eye or thoughts that scudded across his mind. The island air intoxicated him as he conjured up characters and events for future stories or poems.
On Sundays, Nico would attend services at St John’s Greek cathedral, there mingling with the small community members who had taken a liking to this young man, calling him their ‘island writer’! He became a novelty for the islanders, who invited him dine or to read his creations. Meanwhile, several of Nico’s short stories and poems were being published in Athens by his editor and were read by the Greek community in Burgaz. Nico even attempted to write poems and stories in Turkish which Zelda not only corrected, but suggested a more fitting word or subtle syntax structure.
Once a month, Nico took the steamer to Heybeliada, or in Greek, Chalki[4], the third of the four Princess Islands where he was fortunate enough to consult the books at the library of the massive Greek Theological Centre, opened in 1844 for seminarists but closed by the Turkish authorities in 1971. Although prohibited, Nico’s reputation, which had spread to all the islands, allowed him to study at the library, the second largest religious library in the western world, several million tomes behind the Vatican’s. The young artist even managed to work two days a week there. How he managed that remains a mystery.
Once or twice a month, accompanied by Zelda, Nico would go to Büyükada (Big Island) called ‘Prinkipo’ in Greek because it is the largest island of the four, and stroll along a tarred road to contemplate the largest wooden building in Europe, a former Greek orphanage, built by the French in 1898. The Greeks bought it and children who had lost their parents were lodged here until its forced closing in 1964. This eerie-looking structure remained intact. Surrounded by high barb-wire fencing and guarded by savage dogs, no one could enter it. Every time Nico stood before this ominous edifice, he thought of his grandfather who had salvaged him from such a parentless fate. Perhaps, the children here were well taken care of…
One day as Nico sauntered along one of the myriad paths in the wooded hills of Burgaz he came face to face with the idling pilgrim. So delighted was Nico to meet this eccentric character that he began to pour out all the good news that had occurred to him since their last encounter many months ago. The other smiled kindly: “No need to repeat what many have already told me,” he stated indifferently. “Nothing on Burgaz goes unnoticed, especially novelties such as yourself. I wouldn’t want to puff up your pride, but some have considered you as a new Saït Faïk.”
Nico stared at the pilgrim disconcertedly. “I can assure you, my dear friend, that you have made quite a reputation for yourself on Burgaz. And who knows, you may be able to solve the mystery of which your grandfather so often spoke.” Baffled, Nico remained speechless. The other took his arm and they strolled together downwards into the sinking sun.
Nico could not contain his surprise: “How could you know about …”
“About Vasiliki’s mystery? Ah, that would entail hours of explanation, Nico. For now let us discuss your writings, for the intention behind those writings may have given you the key to unlock the mystery.”
The pilgrim paused sniffing the pine- and spruce-scented air. “You know, many writers have lost touch with reality, or have been completely overwhelmed by it. They seem incapable of telling a story, transmitting the joys and sorrows of their characters whose traits lie deep in their own hearts, imprisoned like birds in a cage, fluttering frantically, unable to express the Truth of what lies beneath the masks and costumes. Saït Faïk, Edgar Poe, Dino Buzzati[5], Guy de Maupassant[6], Somerset Maugham, Katherine Mansfield all drew their inspiration from fragments of a separate reality, the glints of a deflected flood of light, the shards of a broken vase to disclose the experiences of their characters, to bestow upon their readers the amalgamated emotions that flew freely from their hearts. Their stories and poems are not talk-of-the-day productions. They were derived from the unlocking of the cage, the flight outwards into the battlefield between joy and sorrow. You would think that their eyes were turned both inwards and outwards at the same time. There is something powerful, even sacred, if I may use that word, in their narrated experiences, which does not necessarily entail the use of I, nor does it insinuate a ‘message’ to be harnassed or brought into line by the opinionated or bigoted. The syntax rhythms and word combinations expose the élan or the coming and going between the inward and the outward regard … I discern in your regard that inward and outward alternating vision, the aura that enhaloes your stories and poems. But mind you, this is only an idler’s perception.”
“What do you mean by aura?” Nico, crimsoning under the weight of so many complex compliments, managed to ask, almost out of breath.
“The halo of tradition that all sincere writing bears,” came the succinct reply. “A poem or a short-story, as in your case, bears an aura familiar to the reader, yet whose tale and expression of this tale transports him or her to strange, unfamiliar places. This is especially noticeable in your Turkish writings, an uncanny concoction of familiarity and eeriness. Perhaps it’s due to Zelda’s mixed origins.”
Nico stopped in his tracks, a blank look on his face. “Yes, Zelda, who, when we cross paths, addresses me as the ‘aylak‘. Her father was a remarkable writer and professor of philosophy in Greece and in Turkey. She inherited much of his wisdom as well as her mother’s strong character.” Nico stood stunned by this revelation.
“Zelda is only …”
“Only what, my friend ? Zorba’s maid or servant ? Ah ! I see you haven’t delved deep enough into the hearts of those who are very close to you. I’ve noted, too, that you have never written one line or verse about your deceased grandfather.”
Nico, stung to the quick by the very truth of that remark, bowed his head. He felt a surging wave of shame, and on this billowing wave rode an undulating image of a squealing seal that he and his grandfather had admired on their fishing adventure — an image gradually over-shadowed by another, more fuzzy, the stiffening body of a seagull on a pebbly shore near the mouth of a cavern.
The mild voice of his companion brought back these troubling scenes: “When all is said and done you will surely open wider the cage and let fly the encaged birds towards brighter poetic heights. Heights that perhaps you have yet to imagine.” With those comforting but enigmatic words the pilgrim turned to leave. He halted and asked: “Tell me, have you been to Granada?”
“Granada, Spain? No I haven’t, why?”
“You look like someone I met there.” The idler disappeared downwards into the crimson glint of sunset.
Nico ran back to Zorba’s house, undecided whether to speak to Zelda about her family. He never dreamed of broaching the subject to her as she herself had never bought up.
When the young writer had lumbered up those mossy steps he found Zelda seated on an armchair in the corner of the dining room, a shadow of gloom etched on her face. Her eyes were red. Wordlessly, she handed him a letter. It was written in faulty Greek, addressed to Zelda from an associate of Zorba’s in New York. A moment later Nico looked at Zelda with deep compassion. Zorba had died of a heart attack. His body would be sent to Burgaz for burial, accompanied by several of his associates who intended to buy his house.
“What will happen to me?” were Zelda’s first strained words. “I refuse to live in the same house with strangers even if they are Zorba’s associates.”
“Have you any family, Zelda? Anywhere to go? Anyone to help you financially?” She nodded in the negative to all these questions.
Nico sat down beside her: “Listen Zelda, come live with me, it’s a bit cramped, but at least you will have a roof over your head, food on the table, and a good friend who will always be at your side.”
Zelda dried her eyes and stared at Nico in embarrassment.
“I’m old enough to be your mother,” she said faintly.
“Exactly!” responded Nico excitedly. “You shall be the mother I hardly ever knew, in the same way that the presence of Abi Din in his house has been the father I hardly ever knew. How my grandfather would rejoice at that family reunion, however surreal, if I may say so.” Zelda smiled.
And with that acquiescing smile the two orphaned destinies appeared to converge into one …
[1] The biggest bank of Turkey at the time of Nico’s arrival specializing in international transactions. (Ottoman Bank).
Paul Mirabile is a retired professor of philology now living in France. He has published mostly academic works centred on philology, history, pedagogy and religion. He has also published stories of his travels throughout Asia, where he spent thirty years.
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Landscape of Change by Jill Pelto, Smithsonian. From Public Domain
Hope is the mantra for all human existence. We hope for a better future, for love, for peace, for good weather, for abundance. When that abundance is an abundance of harsh weather or violence wrought by wars, we hope for calm and peace.
This is the season for cyclones — Dana, Trami, Yixing, Hurricanes Milton and Helene — to name a few that left their imprint with the destruction of both property and human lives as did the floods in Spain while wars continue to annihilate more lives and constructs. That we need peace to work out how to adapt to climate change is an issue that warmongers seem to have overlooked. We have to figure out how we can work around losing landmasses and lives to intermittent floods caused by tidal waves, landslides like the one in Wayanad and rising temperatures due to the loss of ice cover. The loss of the white cover of ice leads to more absorption of heat as the melting water is deeper in colour. Such phenomena could affect the availability of potable water and food, impacted by the changes in flora and fauna as a result of altered temperatures and weather patterns. An influx of climate refugees too is likely in places that continue habitable. Do we need to find ways of accommodating these people? Do we need to redefine our constructs to face the crises?
Echoing concerns for action to adapt to climate change and hoping for peace, our current issue shimmers with vibrancy of shades while weaving in personal narratives of life, living and the process of changing to adapt.
An essay on Bhaskar Parichha’s recent book on climate change highlights the action that is needed in the area where Dana made landfall recently. In terms of preparedness things have improved, as Bijoy K Mishra contends in his essay. But more action is needed. Denying climate change or thinking of going back to pre-climate change era is not an option for humanity anymore. While politics often ignores the need to acknowledge this crises and divides destroying with wars, riots and angst, a narrative for peace is woven by some countries like Japan and Rwanda.
Suzanne Kamata recently visited Rwanda. She writes about how she found by educating people about the genocide of 1994, the locals have found a way to live in peace with people who they addressed as their enemies before… as have the future generations of Japan by remembering the atomic holocausts of 1945.
In translations, we have poetry from varied countries. Ihlwha Choi has self-translated his poem from Korean. Ivan Pozzoni has done the same from Italian. One of Tagore’s lesser-known verses, perhaps influenced by the findings of sensitivity in plants by his contemporary, Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937) to who he dedicated the collection which homed this poem, Phool Photano(making flowers bloom), has been translated from Bengali. Professor Alam has translated Nazrul’s popular song, Tumi Shundor Tai Cheye Thaki (Because you are so beautiful, I keep gazing at you).
Stories travel around the world with Paul Mirabile’s narrative giving a flavour of bohemian Paris in 1974. Anna Moon’s fiction set in Philippines gives a darker perspective of life. Lakshmi Kannan’s narrative hovers around the 2008 bombing in Mumbai, an event that evoked much anger, violence and created hatred in hearts. In contrast, Naramsetti Umamaheswararao brings a sense of warmth into our lives with a story about a child and his love for a dog. Sreelekha Chatterjee weaves a tale of change, showcasing adapting to climate crisis from a penguin’s perspective.
Trying something new, being out of the box is what helped humans move out from caves, invent wheels and create civilisations. Hopefully, this is what will help us move into the next phase of human development where wars and weapons will become redundant, and we will be able to adapt to changing climes and move towards a kinder, more compassionate existence.
Thank you all for pitching in with your fabulous pieces. There are ones that have not been covered here. Do pause by our content’s page to see all our content. Huge thanks to the fantastic Borderless team and to Sohana Manzoor, for her art too.
In 1974, the modest, starless Hotel du Commerce, at 14, Rue[1] Sainte Geneviève, in Paris became my home for over six months, and its owner, Madame Marie, my adopted mother.
A young, aspiring journalist, I was sent to Paris by the editor of a worthless monthly magazine in Palermo, Sicily, to write an article on the monuments of Paris. I took up my long residence at the Hotel du Commerce for two reasons: it was very cheap — that is, ten francs a day — and conveniently located in the centre of the city, only a ten minute walk to the Notre-Dame Cathedral. Madame Marie, ninety kilos of joy and laughter, rented me a room on the fifth floor (without a lift) with two other residents: Caban across from me and Paco at the end of the corridor. The rooms had neither attached toilets – there was one for each floor — nor showers (none). Like all residents and tourists, we washed from the washbasin in our rooms. My little window looked out on to the red-tiled rooftop of a Russian bookshop.
To tell the truth I never wrote that article on the monuments of Paris. What a boring subject! On the other hand, my stay at Madame Marie’s hotel afforded me enough material to write a book — a sketch of her and her residents, their trades, joys and sorrows … their uncelebrated destinies. My editor would have probably sacked me for this ‘breach of contract’, but as luck would have it, his magazine went out of business before my return to Palermo.
I shall never know why Madame Marie took such a liking to me. Everyday, she would invite me for coffee and a chat. We would even watch television in the evenings in her sitting-room which separated the tiny kitchen from the reception. From there she kept an alert eye on the comings and goings of everyone. She was a jolly old woman, and this, despite the loss of her husband at an early age, and the terrible events that occurred in her hotel during the Algerian war in the fifties and sixties[2]. She was indeed fat, but quick-witted with plenty of pluck. She had rolls of flesh rumbling under her eye-catching flower-dotted red robe.
“You know, I was a young girl during the Second World War. I hid some French Resistance fighters in my parents’ house in the Alps. The Germans who hunted down the French fighters couldn’t scare me with their rifles and threats. I sent them packing whenever they pounded at our door!” she would repeat proudly when I was alone with her. When her husband died, she was left on her own to manage the hotel, and in the 50’s that was no asset. Deserters, police informers, merciless OAS members[3] and their equally ruthless adversaries, the FNL[4] all came and went causing rows, arrests, even murders. The plucky Madame Marie handled it all with her sang-froid and flair for compromise.
“My sixth-sense got me through that lot,” she would laugh, her jowls shaking. By the 1970’s, however, things had calmed down in Paris. The lodgers were mostly Japanese and American tourists with a sprinkling of North Europeans. No more brawls, police raids or murders. Madame Marie spoke no foreign language but she understood everything that she needed to understand. She had hired an old woman to clean the rooms. The sprightly widow had learned how to say in English, after having knocked on the lodger’s door at eight in the morning: “You stay or you go?” It was enough to get her point across.
Madame Marie disliked the police. She flared at their scent even before they stepped through the front door in incognito on the trail of someone except on one occasion. I shall let her narrate that exceptional episode: “How that flic[5] fooled me I’ll never forget. Dressed like a hippy, long hair, a torn knapsack, he took a room in the courtyard. He spent two weeks here and never said a word. He got in no later than eight o’clock at night. I thought he played the guitar on the metro[6] for money. Then one day, dozens of police stormed through the front door into the courtyard. I was in the sitting-room and rushed out the back door of the kitchen to see what all the hullabaloo was about. The door of one of my clients was wide open, a young bloke who used to play the guitar on the metro; he had been handcuffed by the ‘hippy’ and was being walked out. I couldn’t believe it. It was like a film. When everything settled down, a police officer came over to me and politely explained that my lodger was a notorious drug-dealer and had been under surveillance for weeks by the ‘hippy’. He apologised for the inconvenience and paid the rent for both the dealer (who hadn’t paid me) and the hippy-policeman.” Madame Marie sighed. “He’s the only flic who ever fooled me.” And she laughed her usual jolly laugh.
She got up to make some more coffee for at that moment Caban and Bebert came in for a chat, both a bit tipsy from their usual drinking bouts before, during and after work. Then Bebette made her appearance, the prostitute to whom Madame Marie ‘lent’ one of the courtyard rooms every now and then to exercise her profession. Madame Marie had no moral qualms about such professions. Everyone had to earn a living … Close behind sailed in an elderly woman whose name I no longer recall. Madame Marie considered the woman to be her best friend. She would sit in front of the television and shout insults at the politicians whom she disliked, much to the displeasure of the others, especially Bebert, who would shower her with mocking abuse. When things got too rowdy Madame Marie would shout them all down or threaten to turn them out if they didn’t settle down.
Madame Marie was at times brusque but fair. She liked Caban, the former butcher and now factory worker hailing from southern France, shy and lonely, drunk by mid-morning. He had been living in Hotel du Commerce since the late sixties. She was fond too, of Bebert, the chimney-sweep, a small, taciturn, melancholic chap straight out of Dicken’s David Copperfield, drunk before ten in the morning. He constantly coughed. His clothes were impregnated with soot and cigarette smoke. Bebert hardly spoke at the table, smoking like a chimney, drinking his coffee whilst Caban smiled and winced at the others’ ridiculous jokes and jibes. Day after day and night after night that sitting-room typified for me – and for the others, I suppose — a sanctuary of friendship and convivial exchange. Oftentimes, I read myself into a page of Balzac’s novel Le Père Goriot [7].
The other two residents rarely joined at that cheery table. One of them, Bolot, stayed in a room in the courtyard. He was a former German soldier who joined the French Foreign Legion after his capture during World War II. The other was called Paco, a Republican Spaniard, who escaped Franco’s persecutions after the Spanish Civil War[8].
I got to know them all, save Bebert. We had no time to get really acquainted. “Poor Bebert,” Madame Marie would sigh. One evening as we sat watching a film Bebert knocked at her kitchen door, then staggered in towards us, blood streaming from his mouth, drenching his night-shirt. His face was ghost white. He kept murmuring, “Madame Marie … Madame Marie,” through clenched, blood-filled teeth. The chimney-sweep appeared lost in a daze. Madame Marie quickly took him by the shoulders, laid him on the sofa then trotted off to get the police. They arrived quickly (the station was two doors away). An ambulance shortly followed. Bebert was placed carefully on a stretcher and carried out.
We never saw Bebert again nor had any news of him. Madame Marie presumed that he had died of a haemorrhage from too much smoking, drinking and chimney soot. She had his room cleaned and fumigated. His belongings amounted to a pair of torn slippers, two shirts and trousers and two used razor blades. On the other hand, she gasped at the hundreds of empty packs of cigarettes. Bebert’s world had been compressed into a nebulous routine of cigarette and alcohol fumes and chimney soot. A bleak, Dickensian world to say the least.
Poor Bebert. He had been living at Hotel du Commerce for eleven years. A fellow without a family, friends … known to no one. He practiced a trade that was gradually dying out. No one ever asked for him at the reception — never a phone call. He was the unknown toiler whose burial stone carries no name because he had no money for a headstone. He was probably buried in the fosse commune[9].
Caban, whom I knew much better than Bebert, fared no better. His salary flowed away upon the torrent of fumes of cigarettes and drink, or as Madame Marie put it coarsely: “He pissed it all against a wall!” Too much gambling, too. So his wife left him, after that, his sixteen-year-old daughter. They were never to be heard from again. Caban was soft-spoken, very shy. Quite frankly, I never saw Caban sober, except at six in the morning before catching the bus to work at the wine-bottling factory. He had asked the foreman, Mister Tomas, to have me hired on for the summer since many of the workers had gone off on holiday. In the café whilst waiting for the morning bus, he began his inglorious day with coffee and a few shots of cognac. He continued his indulging all through the working day on the first floor of the factory where he drank the last dregs of wine from the bottles that were to be washed. By five o’clock he was completely sloshed! Mister Tomas kept him on out of pity. Besides, Caban was inoffensive. Madame Marie even told me he had saved a girl from drowning in the Seine River in Paris. But let Madame Marie tell this very true tale: “He was walking along the banks of the Seine after work when he heard the screams and splashings below him. Caban was a strong swimmer at that time, so he took off his shoes, dived in and grabbed the girl in the water. In a few minutes he had brought her back to the banks safe and sound where a crowd of people had gathered, applauding him. The young girl cried and cried but was unhurt. And you know, her father was the owner of the France-Soir daily newspaper. So, to thank Caban, he gave him a certain sum of money and offered him the France-Soir freeeveryday for the rest of his life. All he had to do was give his name at the news-stands.”
“Does Caban read the France-Soir? I never see him reading a newspaper,” I asked naively.
She laughed. “No, Caban never reads. He never had much instruction.”
I became quite friendly with Caban since we worked together at the factory, although he would constantly upbraid me for not joining him in his ritualised morning concoction. I insisted that I never drink. He would snicker and shrug his bony shoulders. “All men drink!” he slurred. That of course was a subject of conjecture which, and this goes without saying, I never pursued with him.
One day whilst I translated for Madame Marie at the reception, I mentioned that I hadn’t seen Caban for more than a week. Neither had she. Mister Tomas had telephoned, too. Caban never missed a day at work … never. She told me to go upstairs and knock at his door. Which I did for several minutes. Silence. When I returned without news of him she immediately dawdled out to the police station. She was back in no time with two policemen. I accompanied them upstairs. They pounded at the door then kicked it open. There knelt Caban over his bed, his face black as coal. The stench in his room made us gag. I hurried down to tell Madame Marie. And as we stood in the reception, the ambulance arrived and four men, escorted by the police, placed Caban’s frail, limp body into a plastic bag and dragged it down the steps, one by one : thump … thump … thump … Madame Marie started to cry. I covered my ears …
Poor Caban had been dead for over a week, due no doubt to a blood clot of the brain. Madame Marie never forgot those thumps on the flight of stairs. Nothing was said of his death in the newspapers, even in the tabloids. Like Bebert, he succumbed to a companionless death, without flowers or prayers. Without sorrow or tears … He too was probably buried in a fosse commune. He had no bank account. The police found six Francs in his pocket … Six more than in Bebert’s …
Paco, the Spanish refugee, had been living in Hotel du Commerce for seven years. His lack of good French isolated him from the Paris scene, so he took refuge in the clusters of Hispanic scenes that peppered the Parisian streets, especially the taverns where flamenco music could be heard on Rue Moufftard, only a fifteen-minute walk from our hotel.
Since I speak Spanish quite well, I had on many occasions accompanied Paco to these musical haunts of his, where the paella was copious, the sangria flowed like water, the music, if not excellent, loud enough to forget one’s trials and tribulations of the day. Above all, it was cheap …
Paco drank heavily, rum and coke or sangria, but never behaved uncivilly. His deep, black eyes bore into mine whenever he spoke of his luckless past: “My older brother was killed in the war against Franco. I escaped via the Pyrenees leaving behind my parents. Since 1940, I’ve been living in France, working in factories or in the fields. And you know, I still don’t have my French papers. I have no identity! I can’t go back to Spain because of Franco[10], so I must stay here unloading lorries at the Halle Market or washing dishes in grotty gargotes[11].” Paco clapped to the sound of tapping feet and to the rhythmic chords of a furious guitar. “Every now and then I repair the toilets at the hotel which are constantly clogged up.” He snapped his fingers, ordered tapas[12], spoke to his friends in the language of his parents.
The fiery Spaniard would introduce me to his Spanish artist friends, all of them sullen, sad figures whose love of Spain had evaporated into hazy fumes of sangria, nostalgia, gaudy flamenco music, tasteless tapas and brief love affairs. As to Paco, he appeared to be a loner, an ill-starred chap lost in a huge city of lost souls, of crowds so busy that their business took no heed of such a shadowy figure, fugitive and fleeting, drifting from tapas to tapas, sangria to sangria.
Paco hated Paris, but it proved the only place for a stateless refugee to avoid police roundups. For Paco, Hotel du Commerce symbolised a haven for marginals, the homeless and stateless. “Madame Marie is my guardian angel,” he would croak. “My very fat guardian angel” as he clapped and stamped to the riotous music. “The police will never find me … never!” he boasted raising his glass to Madame Marie’s health.
He was wrong. One hot September week, Paco couldn’t be found in the hotel. Madame Marie suspected foul play. Two days later the police arrived, informing her that a certain Paco Fuentes had been apprehended without papers. He had been extradited to his country of origin. His belongings? He had none, like Bebert and Caban. The little he did possess were thrown into a bag and out into a rubbish bin. Poor Paco — would he ever find his parents?
On my many jaunts through Spain, after Franco’s death, I tried to locate Paco Fuentes, but it was like finding a needle in a haystack as the expression goes. Here, however, I must thank the excellent Spaniard, for it was he who introduced me to the world of flamenco.
Bolot kept very much to himself. Unlike the other residents he never drank nor smoked. You didn’t want to muck about with Bolot — a massive fellow, indeed. But then again who would muck about with a former French Foreign Legion soldier?
Yet, Bolot’s aloofness and reserved demeanour attracted many people to him. He had that sort of winning smile, and since he spoke very good French, albeit with a heavy German accent, he befriended those who came into contact with him. Moreover, he shared a passion for stamp-collecting. That was Bolot’s raison d’être[13]! His collection had become very well known to both specialists and amateurs. I would accompany him to the Flea Market on Sundays and there he would trade stamps with the best of stamp-collectors. Stamps from the Soviet Union, China, India, Cuba, several African states, Turkey and Libya. Bolot didn’t need the money, his pension as a soldier was comfortable enough. He simply enjoyed the thrills.
One day as we strolled back to the metro as he towered above me, Bolot acknowledged his good luck: “I volunteered for the army at seventeen, an enthusiastic patriot. Was captured by the French after two days of combat and given a choice: prison or the Foreign Legion. I chose the second, changed my nationality and name.”
“What was your German name?” He smiled but left the question unanswered.
“So I fought for the French. A traitor to my homeland. Call me what you like, I couldn’t sit out the war in a prison for years and years. You know, I never went back to Germany. When I quit the Legion I received my pension and came straight to Paris, the City of Lights.”
“To do what?”
“To sell stamps!” Bolot laughed. “No, I worked as a mechanic in factories until retiring.”
I got to know Bolot as well as Caban since all three of us worked at the same wine-bottling factory in the summer of 1974. He left earlier than me because of a fight between him and an obnoxious individual who abhorred Germans, even though Bolot had acquired French nationality long ago. Bolot refused to fight him, despite the other’s punches, which the former Legionnaire dodged or blocked with considerable ease. If Bolot had really fought, he would have killed him. Mister Tomas broke up the squabble, sacked the young rowdy on the spot and apologised to Bolot. Bolot exercised the noble art of self-restraint.
When I left for grape-picking at the end of September, then on to Italy and Sicily, it was Bolot who helped me repair the broken spokes of my bicycle. Outside Hotel du Commerce, Madame Marie and Bolot wished me the best of luck, inviting me back whenever it suited me. There would always be a spare room for me she insisted. I cycled out of Paris in the direction of Burgundy. I had spent six months at Hotel du Commerce …
After a month of grape-picking I returned to Palermo only to discover that the magazine had failed due to lack of interest … and funds. Relieved, I went to Madrid to begin a career as a flamenco guitarist. Time passed quickly. Or as Madame Marie would philosophically say: “It’s not time that passes but us!” Exhausted from so much playing in studios and taverns, I decided to take a break and travel to France and visit Hotel du Commerce.
It was under new ownership. The manager, an Italian, informed me that Madame Marie had died years ago from dementia after a spell in a nursing home. How everything had changed: the reception room had been refurbished and Madame Marie’s Balzacian sitting-room had become a dining-room for guests. The once starless hotel had become a three-star hotel.
I stayed two nights and paid sixty euros a night! In the seventies, I paid the equivalent of one and a half euros! True, all the rooms had been painted in bright, cheery colours, fitted out with toilets and showers. But sixty euros? Besides, I like a hotel that is lived in, not just slept in …
With the death of Madame Marie, a whole era had come to a close. Hotel du Commerce had decidedly conformed to the standards of kitsch. There were no more residents, only tourists. All the single rooms on the fifth floor had become large rooms suitable for modern travelling couples. Gone were the days and nights round Madame Marie’s convivial table, her coffees and conversation. Those colourful figures who had imprinted their existence there, whose joys and sorrows had been shared by Madame Marie and myself, no longer painted those refurbished walls simply because the epoch ignored the very existence of such figures.
Indeed, who during those two nights reminisced the glittering epoch of Madame Marie’s Hotel duCommerce? Who even imagined her singular story and those of her likeable, touching residents? No one. No one, perhaps, except me, who vouched to safeguard those memories. Memories of the anonymous whose faces will never be seen on photos, nor names ever printed in books.
Paul Mirabile is a retired professor of philology now living in France. He has published mostly academic works centred on philology, history, pedagogy and religion. He has also published stories of his travels throughout Asia, where he spent thirty years.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
No one knew his name nor wished to know it. Only his face attracted those who came into contact with him. So it was said. A face whose huge, glowing eyes were turned both inwards and outwards, simultaneously. A face whose florid complexion, cheery and unfurrowed, bespoke a life of leisure, albeit not one of procrastination; a life of ease, but not sloth. In short, a life of early, unfought for independence.
I met my nameless stranger one fine autumn day in the Andalucian town of Granada, Spain, where he had been residing for several months, visiting the Alhambra Palace every day during those months. We had met in a small, non-distinct eatery, and he was very willing to converse with anyone who had leisure to tete a tete. We fell into lively conversation. Taken aback by his daily visits to the remarkable Palace, I enquired why he spent so many hours there.
“The Palace was built as a sign of religious, political and cultural power,” he began, munching energetically on his paella of rabbit. “But since 1492, that sign has been condemned to utter uselessness, reduced to a mere tourist attraction, however noteworthy. It has become completely useless since its mediaeval abandonment because it’s been drained of its original value.” Here he paused, I imagine, for me to intercede. I didn’t …
“You see, this is what attracts me most to the Alhambra; its utter uselessness for our world today. I do not consider mass tourism as an instrument of usefulness.” I kept silent to goad him on, for the turn of conversation piqued my curiosity. “The Alhambra epitomises all that I have spent my own life experiencing, consciously: the pleasures of uselessness.”
“Is uselessness a pleasure?” I nettled with a sunny smile.
“That depends upon whom it has been bestowed, sir. That depends for whom it has benefitted. The circumstances of my life and will to understand and decipher them, have conspired to draw me now into and outside of myself. My own self has become as useless as the objects that I set my eyes on each and every day as I saunter through the streets, gardens or palaces of wherever I happen to be. I have realised that such an absorption into social uselessness, and thus distance from social use, has constituted my raison d’être. And there lies the pleasure: this mode of existence is a project of life; a pure project of pleasurable uselessness to society and to myself.” His face, alit with integrity, bent low to attack the chorizos cooked in white wine sauce.
“When did you begin experimenting your project?” I asked, sipping my sangria.
“I would formulate it differently: When did uselessness experiment me!” he mumbled, his mouth full of chorizo. “It all began in Africa some thirty or forty years back, during my youthful days wandering through the Sahara desert en route to Timbucktoo. The Blue Men of the Sahara appeared absolutely useless to anyone or anything that we Europeans would call useful.”
“Such as?”
“Well, a roof over one’s head, a shower every hour, a steady, well-paid job, a car and such things … what we Europeans would term as useful, conditioned to adhere to the philosophy of infinite progress; to infinite social and political usefulness. All the Blue Men seemed to require were a few hours of sleep, food, water and the desire to procreate. Needs that all mankind need so as to account for our very presence on Earth. I lived in the desert for over a year, and little by little discovered that this lifestyle suited a possibility of existence, a life not of a desert-nomad mind you, but one of a useless idler, which as time went by, proved possible, be it in the cities of Europe and Asia or in their countryside towns and villages.”
“As I understand it, social success has no meaning for you at all?”
“Not at all. Success only invites humiliation or cruel jealousy, and the pursuit of wealth is a path marked by ruthlessness. I earn my living simply to eat, to dress according to the climate, to have a roof over my head when needed.”
“But a roof over one’s head could be expensive…” I intervened.
“I spend most of my nights out under the stars when the weather is warm. With the coming of winter, I seek refuge in Catholic missions, poor men’s shelters or in the numerous Salvation Army shelters. Any asylum that will not turn me down. As far as any permanent residence, I have taken up lodgings in the homes of generous people for a meagre fee, or have laboured on farms for my food and bed. Do not confuse uselessness with doing nothing. I’m no couch potato; I have done many things, but they do not fit into our social machine of imposed well-being. My life may appear negative to those who hold me in contempt, but my usefulness is as useful to mankind as it is to myself. Don’t forget what one Belgium writer once wrote: ‘It is thanks to a certain number of men who seem useless that there will always be a certain number of useful men.’”
“Who wrote that?”
“I forgot. But what difference does it make?” He wiped his mouth delicately, smacking his lips. He proceeded: “I imagine you probably believe me to be a social parasite or a social zero as Balzac once wrote, useless even as a human being. But read Friedrich Nietzsche on this point,” and he quoted: “’Thevalue of a human being does not lie in his usefulnes; for it would continue to exist even if there were nobody to whom he could be useful.’”
“Quite an imposing thought,” I acknowledged, sitting back. “But you must admit that you have been useful to the kind people who hire you on or who lodge you, even for a small fee.”
He snorted: “Perhaps. But I cannot speak on their behalf, only mine.” I noted that he wiggled out of that one quite ingeniously. His face shone with a strange light. An aura of mystery gradually covered it like a gossamer veil. The light suddenly went out.
“I’m sure your effort to separate yourself from the social body must be a terrible struggle,” I pursued without irony. “I believe that to be estranged from the social body is commensurate with being estranged from one’s own self. Am I right in assuming this?”
“Perhaps, but not from the individuals of those societies. I am not a misantrope. This being said, solitude, fasts and meditation have prepared me for outer trials and tribulations, which I believe, without vanity, to have overcome.” He began picking his teeth with a very long fingernail.
“And God?” I rebounded, eyeing him steadily. His lips broke into an artful grin.
“He has been my only Friend since the beginning, sir. And why is that? Because we have been useless to each other since our initial communion.” He stood, evidently undesirous to develop this rather paradoxical statement. I let it drop …
We slipped outside and my nameless companion suggested that we have a quick jaunt through the ‘Arab Market’ in Zacaten. Indeed, the weather was warm, that Autumn weather which I have always found so stimulating in Granada; Granada, perched high in her mountainous refuge like an eagle in her lofty nest. My strolling companion strolled into my reverie.
“Look at the sky, a bluish turquoise which reminds me so much of the domes of the mosques in Bukhara, Uzbekistan. That turquoise which solicits silence and contemplation.”
“So you’ve visited Uzbekistan?”
“More than visited, my friend. I lived there for five years studying under the spiritual guidance of the Nakishbendi Brotherhood, a Sunna movement founded by the Shah Nakishbend, and which has survived the anti-religious crusade of the Soviet Union. With those kind and learned monks I learnt the virtues and powers of silence, contemplation, discipline, simplicity and periodical talks.”
“In what language did you speak to them?” I ventured, a bit intrigued by this singular experience.
“In Uzbek, of course!” he responded dryly. “I also learned to read Arabic.”
“But are silence and talks not contradictory?”
“Not at all, sir. Clusters of roses certainly grow silently, but good soil, air and pure water are needed for their basic growth. If accompanied by a soft, melodious voice, they grow better. Roses heed to that voice as silence heeds to constructive talks. It was during the alternating passages of silence and talks that our spiritual guides opened our eyes and senses to the uselessness of worldly matters, and since then, this uselessness has become my second nature, even my first! Mind you, this discovery has nothing to do either with self-love or atomistic individualism. As I said, I have relations with people, albeit brief; and although I keep aloof from community aggregation and national gatherings, I have never spend my life gloating in an ivory tower. No sir, I live for wanderlust not social or individual hubris! The lust for wandering … And when one wanders one cannot but converge with people, learn from them. This does not necessarily mean that I derive an extraordinary pleasure from communicating with them. To tell the truth, I prefer my own company, if I may say so …”
“But you surely feel a responsibility towards others?” I pursued, more and more fascinated by this nameless chap, who by now had led me into a marvellous little garden out of whose spouting fountain splashed tinkling sprays here and there.
“Responsibility?” he chortled, as we sat down enjoying the perfumed scents of honeysuckles and roses. “Responsibility is only towards oneself. My words or gestures will be felt by others. Would you harm or humiliate your fellow man? Uselessness does not mean selfishness or egoism. In fact, it disciplines you to an awareness of others, an awareness those who whole-heartedly believe in social relevance will never come to understand for they must belong to a community, club or ideology in order to give pride and reason to their usefulness. They discredit the experience of uselessness. Don’t get me wrong, I do not live in a fantasy world like those who tout infinite progress or community spirit. These are abstract schemas for me. My Way is to strive to overcome anger, hate and jealousy within my own sphere of existence. This entails peeling away the veils that dim the lucidity of reality; my reality of being useless to the devastating machine of the useful well-being of mankind.”
“I would then conclude that your manner of living may be called cynical or indifferent?”
He was mortified by my question. “Cynical? A cynic questions then condemns derisively the circumstances that emerge before him or her; I neither question nor condemn. I simply carry on from place to place, experimenting novel circumstances, accepting them as if they had always been mine. Indifference? Well, if you mean stepping back and out of the world’s commerce, and not to take either that commerce or oneself seriously, then I am indifferent. The crisis of many individuals today is that they take themselves much too seriously, much more seriously than the seriousness of their work or vocations. And when this self-seriousness is struck down or dethroned a dreadful sense of uselessness seizes them, causing depression, or worse, suicide. My uselessness to myself and to others is more serious than myself. I am in the world but not of it!”
As we sat in silence, I gradually felt myself transported to another dimension of time and space. Scenes of my own life flashed before my eyes, lively colourful scenes and gloomy ones. I could not resolve whether this nameless fellow fascinated or revolted me. My own life had been ensnared in a web of social irresponsibility and imposed representations. I had become one of the many cogs in the slow and steady vast social wheel that turns and churns, and I sensed that mine had become worn-out and useless. I had so yearned to be of some use to society … But now? Yes, now? How could I restore my previous enthusiasm that had long been abandoned? I had to admit, though, that this man’s experiments heightened my ardour to … to do what? Was he sent to me like some mentor? He suddenly stood and bid me a good day with a whimsical smile, as though he had been reading my thoughts.
Before leaving, however, he said: “Tomorrow I shall have a walk in the gardens of the Alhambra. Please join me, I’m sure we have much to discuss. Meanwhile, let silence be your companion until that walk.” And he disappeared into the milling crowd.
Waking early the next morning, I resolved to meet my new and somewhat eccentric companion at the beginning of the long avenue that leads to the Gate of Justice. An avenue lined with sentinels of cypress and other trees, within whose morning freshness ran a warren of narrow paths.
We met at precisely eight o’clock. With a sort of fraternal benevolence, he took my arm and we strolled upwards past the Gate of Justice, the pompous palace of King Carlos the Fifth, paid our tickets and entered the palace proper, almost religiously, under the storied vaulted corridors, by the pencilled ornaments and tiled walls of arabesque blue, over the smooth, shiny marbled floors.
“Have you read Washington Irving?” he asked in a quavering voice, as if not to disturb the mediaeval palace denizens.
“Yes, a marvellous story-teller and keen observer,” I replied softly.
“You know he led a life of ridiculous usefulness until sojourning within the walls of this soporific fairyland. Gradually Irving fell under the pleasant and industrious spell of uselessness.”
I stopped walking.
“How so? That’s contradictory!”
“Is it?” he beamed, smiling that wide, wicked, whimsical smile. “Yet so it was. He learnt through daily experience that this whole palace of enchantment lies under the layers of absolute uselessness. Layers and layers of poetry, conversation, lyrical jousts and insignificant gestures which disappeared as quickly as they were conceived. Nothing! Nothing remains of that imagined uselessness. And that is precisely why he wrote his Tales of the Alhambra[1] ; it was out of the need to express his useless life within these lyrical stones.”
My sauntering companion fell silent. Only our footfalls could be heard weaving in and out of the slender colonnades, intermingling with the chanting fountains. The blue ceramic shone on the walls like a mirror reflecting the azure …
“I see your point, I think. Before dusk, at times I watch the sun glide from East to West over the Palace walls, the dark greys slipping into ochre reds, soon to be daubed, as the sun sets, by the overglow tones of chestnut, roan and dun.”
“Yes!” he whispered excitedly. “That is perfect uselessness. It serves absolutely no purpose to anyone … even to yourself. For, unlike Irving, who snapped his experiment in uselessness, succumbing to the desire of writing it down for all and sundry to share, I presume that in your case you have no urgency to express any posthumous glory?”
I shook my head thoughtfully, then asked: “You don’t feel the desire to keep a diary?”
“Write? A diary? What for — to satisfy my blotted ego seeking a useful outlet? These are vain insinuations, my good friend. No, it is quite enough to feast my sovereign eyes, to feed my independent emotions on this marvellous honeycomb frostwork and these fine, mullioned windows[2]. These artifices are as useless as the ephemeral poetry and conversations that rang euphoniously within the hallowed halls and courts. And indeed, why should we, mere strangers to this mediaeval marvel, impose an artificial usefulness to it all? Why should we break into lyrical extravagances of the budding rose or the flight of the owl? Into flights of phantasy poeticising upon the Towers above us where verses of love spilled forth their honied fragrances into a void of mute forgetfulness? None of that for me, sir. Within these courts and gardens I have come to the inevitable conclusion that my Destiny lies in perfect uselessness; namely, in my refusal to reanimate the beauty or the ugliness that has crossed my path for the past fifty years in Asia, Europe, the Americas and Africa. I decline to spoil the uselessness of beauty and ugliness, to encumber my spirit and soul by searching for a ‘proper use’ for such human emotions and achievements.”
We had walked through the remarkable Court of Lions and were now entering the gardens of Lindaraxa, Sultan Boadil’s[3] wife. We sat down inhaling the gay scents of roses, oranges and lemons.
He sniffed the air, then murmured: ”A vague of indescribable awe was creeping over me,” here hepaused, lifting his eyes upwards: ”Everything began to be affected by the working of my mind, the whispers of the wind among the citron-trees beneath my window had something sinister…” My companion had chanted this broken sentence in a sort of drawn-out litany. “Yes, something sinister, indeed,” he ruminated to himself. “That point of inspiration led Irving from absolute uselessness to the search for putting uselessness to use. I enjoy reading Irving, but will never convert a ‘something sinister’ to a million-copy, world-wide read book.”
The sun rose higher and higher coating the pink tongues of dawn with a purplish blue. I turned to him: “Still, I cannot see how we as humans can escape from being useful Beings!” He looked at me, his facial features had suddenly hardened, or perhaps it was due to the effects of the shadows off the sun-lit fruit trees.
“Does my speaking to you now fulfil an emotional need? Was our conversation a psychological issue to such a profound hoarding of uselessness?” I asked.
He laughed so loud that a few puffy-eyed guards turned their heads in our direction. “Dear fellow, you have hardly understood our morning jaunt. We are simply idling our time away as uselessly as possible, as useless as a leaf dropping from that citron-tree, as a person who labours all his life to survive, a hermit in his remote cave, a desert-dweller, a traveller without name or record. How many of those intrepid souls took refuge in monasteries of the East and there left no trace of their earthly footfalls? They experienced true uselessness …”
“Even to God towards whom they must have addressed their prayers?” I enquired. He raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“That is neither for you nor me to answer, my friend.” He stood, shook my hand and left the gardens back through the Palace halls.
I felt a bit put out by his prompt and unexpected departure. It were as if he had abandoned me to unravel that last enigmatic thought of his. A silly feeling of course, but one that clung to me like the scents of the roses, oranges and lemons. My mind slowly became dull, my body numb. Had the nameless wanderer put me under a magical spell? The redolence and balminess of the gardens added to my discomfiture. At the same time, however, I understood that idleness is not a state or a condition which I could bear or champion as he does. I rose, heavily. Enough of this palatial beguiling and futile jaunting. That man, whoever he is, taught me a sound lesson: a person is born into our world to accomplish a particular use, one that is his or hers alone. There is no doubt in my mind about this.
I dragged myself from the gardens back to my hotel in the Old Market at Zacatin, an effort that enlisted all my emotional and physical strength.
I must confess that during the following days, in spite of my firm resolution towards usefulness, I idled my time away seeking out that nameless idler, tramping from street to street, garden to garden, restaurant to restaurant. Every morning I rose early and scoured the halls, courts and gardens of the Alhambra.
He had vanished into thin air, as the saying goes …
*
A few years later back in Amsterdam, my eye caught sight of a book entitled The Denizen of theUnderworld : The Art of Uselessness. I bought it out of some urgent curiosity that I could and still not explain rationally. The first sentences read : ”I am without shame, without guilt, without bad conscious. I truly prefer my cave swimming with mermaids, dwarves labouring at the furnaces, fairies hunting out medicinal plants. Here I breathe the air of pure uselessness, shielded against the charm and seduction of use.”
The author of the book had an odd name — Vigilius de Silentio — a name that might have fitted the face of my nameless companion whom I had met so many years ago in Granada. On second thoughts, though, that name could have fitted any face.
To tell the truth, the book bored me to death …
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[1] Washington Irving, edition Edilux, Granada, Spain.
[2] A vertical element made of wood or stone that divides a window in two. It is applied in Islamic and Armenian architecture.
[3] The last Sultan of Muslim Spain, exiled to North Africa.
Paul Mirabile is a retired professor of philology now living in France. He has published mostly academic works centred on philology, history, pedagogy and religion. He has also published stories of his travels throughout Asia, where he spent thirty years.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
A brief introduction to Rhys Hughes’ Sunset Suite, published by Gibbon Moon Books this year, and a discussion with the author on this ‘Weird Western’ and more…
Rhys Hughes
Perhaps — that’s the wrong way to start a review or any article— but given that this is a book that offers immeasurable possibilities, like sunsets or stars, one could still start with a ‘perhaps’… You might start with another word of course!
Perhaps, Rhys Hughes’ TheSunset Suite is a novel? Or, is it not? It seems to be a group of short, tall tales tied neatly into coffee lore, coming closest structurally to The Arabian Nights — stories told by the Scheherazade, originating around Middle Ages, much after coffee was discovered in Ethiopia by a goatherd in 800 CE. The book departs in various shades from the One Thousand and One Nights, even though magic creeps in every now and then.
Hughes also seems to have a fascination for coffee lores for he redid TheRubaiyatof Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), translated from Persian by Edward Fitzgerald, substituting the wine with coffee a year ago. And here you have two men in the Wild West, telling tall tales, inspired by 26 mugs of coffee.
In The Empire Podcast by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, there are a couple of episodes on coffee. Coffee houses sprouted around the fifteenth century in the Middle East and flourished during the Ottoman Empire, spreading over time to Europe, and even to America… if we are to believe Hughes! In those times, soldiers, among others, gathered in coffee houses, much to the dismay of kings. The warriors started turning to tall tales, philosophy and gossip instead of training all the time. The rulers were unhappy at the turn of events. Germany went so far as to ban coffee. An article on food history tells us: “One of the most curious of these events happened in Prussia, a precursor to modern-day Germany, where it’s leader Frederick the Great banned coffee by decree in 1777. And he did it for a reason that is almost baffling to modern notions of health and what’s good for society: He wanted people to drink more beer.” In the podcast, they do tell us Germany produced beer. In those days, coffee was seen as a suspicious drink, an aphrodisiac with magical qualities. It is these magical qualities that are invoked in TheSunset Suite.
Brand and Thorn are two coffee drinkers under the stars, sitting over a bubbling pot — and each cup from the pot has a tale in it, professes the author. That the tales are part of a dreamscape of darker hues verging on the absurd, bringing out the strangeness of the illusion we call life and its endless possibilities, comes as a surprise.
People turn into corn cobs, biscuits, musical notes, sombreros and are resurrected in paintings of nightmares at the end, tying the characters loosely into a frame. Phoenixes swim underwater and horses turn into boats and ‘a hill of beans’ becomes a ‘mountain of beans’. The transformations seem to be reminiscent of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) or Pinter’s The Room (1957) … but we are left wondering, are they?
The settings are often realistic at the start but head for the absurd as they end. Each story has a punch and leaves the reader open mouthed in amazement. They are imaginative, clever — sometimes playing on words — like the story of a genie who was told by a robber to make money ‘no object’ — a turn of a phrase which should mean that money is so plentiful that anything is affordable. But the genie, trapped in time and traveling over centuries, misunderstands the grave robber. He makes money into a literal ‘no object’— ‘abstractions, vague colours, mental scents and other intangible things’.
Hughes expands the literary world to a frog, a dog and even an armadillo who are yet to publish their books. This seems almost like an inversion of Luigi Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an author (1921), where the characters left incomplete by a deceased author are looking for a resolution. Hughes’ reader, who talks of these authors from the animal kingdom, waits patiently for the books to turn up. In another story, evocative of the same play by Pirandello, the characters from his earlier tales are trapped in a painting and talk to the artist, ‘the keeper of Lore’, who paints his own nightmares peopled by the creations of Hughes. One of the last narratives, this one ties the stories into a loosely structured unit.
“I am Grampsylvania. That wasn’t my original name, but it’s my name for the foreseeable future. He changed me, you see, from a man into a gigantic but sapient corncob pipe. I don’t mind.”
“And he changed me into a biscuit,” said another voice. “I was just George Lewis once but now I’m The Biscuit Kid.”
A third voice added, “Turned me into a hat, a sombrero. I was Max Grizzly originally. Not that I dislike being a hat.”
“Wonder what he’ll turn you into?” they said to Henry [the artist inside the painting].
“I don’t want to change.”
“Well, you don’t have a say in the matter.”
The idea of the writer as the ultimate creator stretches through tall tales to experimental forms. ‘The Biscuit Kid’ is a one-and-a-half-page story written in one sentence — is it an attempt at what is known as the stream of consciousness technique (as in James Joyce’s Ulysees, 1918) or just a quirky experiment? A strange tale about a man turning into a biscuit in a sulphurous pond with tea dunked into it with an allusion to the Boston Tea Party has the victim floating in infinite circles … is it a comment on history repeating itself? The narrative of ‘Reintarnation Smith’ maps the history of the world rather randomly through the many reincarnations of the protagonist, from a palaeolithic shaman (were there shamans in that time frame?) to a Napoleonic soldier and a First World War trooper to an intelligent tree in a world where humanity has become extinct! The alternatives offered and suggested are mind boggling…
Each story sees itself as a possibility expressed in a light gripping vein, characteristic of the author, who has ostensibly been seen as a cult writer… though I am not sure what that term means or how Hughes, who has authored more than fifty books and writes up storms of stories and poems, feels about it — Let’s ask him. We start with the most pressing question —
This is on something that has me perplexed after reading Sunset Suite. How do you think a frog, a dog or an armadillo would hold a pen? Can we read frog/ dog/ armadillo — or would one need to download a special app from Google to read their books? Or is it better to have a frogman/ dogman/ armadilloman translate these? Please enlighten us.
Armadillo: Image from Public Domain
I hadn’t really thought about it until you asked the question. They would have to use telekinesis to hold a pen. The power of their minds. Maybe they have bigger minds than we think. Having said that, I don’t know why we always assume that if you have a bigger mind, you will be able to move physical objects just by thinking. When I was young, I often tested my own telekinetic powers. They never worked, of course. Except for once, when I made a cardboard box cover a daisy during a storm. I was staring out the window and willing the box to fall on the daisy and protect it from the wind, and that is what actually happened! All of a sudden, the box rose in the air and came down over the flower. Certainly it was the wind that did the trick, rather than my mental powers, but at the time I wondered if perhaps I had found the secret of telekinesis. Frogs, dogs and armadillos would write books using telekinesis. The real question is how much we would understand of what they had written. I don’t suppose we have much in common with frogs or armadillos. The dog’s books might be more accessible. I guess most of the descriptive writing in a dog’s novel would be smell-based because that’s how dogs map the world. But while reading a dog’s novel, should we dog-ear the pages to keep our places? Or human-ear them?
That’s an astute observation… Maybe we can dino-ear them! Did all dinosaurs have ears…? Let’s leave that discussion for another time. Next, I need to know what is a cult writer? Are you one? Please explain.
I don’t really know, to be honest, and I’m not sure if I am one or not. Many years ago, I was told that I was one. I think it’s another way of saying, “Your books aren’t very popular,” but softening that blow by implying that, “At least some people read and enjoy them.” I embraced the definition for want of any better label. We do like labels, that’s the problem. When I write, I write just for myself. Not quite. I do try to write in a similar mode to the writers I most enjoy, and they have audiences. If they didn’t, I wouldn’t know about them. I adore the books of Italo Calvino [1923-1985], but I don’t know many other readers who read him. Does that make him a cult writer? I don’t think so. I think it’s just more likely that I am a little isolated and simply don’t know the readers who do read that kind of fiction. And yet I am in contact with some people on the internet who seem to share my taste in fiction. In fact, they give me recommendations of authors I’d never heard of, who turn out to be wonderfully in tune with my taste. Apparently, if you are a writer who is more loved by other writers than by readers who don’t write, you are a writer’s writer, and that’s a form of cult writer. Last year, I read the nine novels of the almost forgotten Henry Green [1905-1973], who was described as a writer’s writer’s writer, in other words a cult writer cubed. I suppose that to be a cult writer is simply a stage for some writers as they work their way up to greater popularity. It’s probably possible for writers who were once hugely popular but who are no longer appreciated by a sufficiently wide readership to turn into cult writers on the way down.
Why did you not write of a squonk in this book since it is your favourite fantasy animal? Will you be writing on a squonk soon?
A squonk: A mythical creature in American Folklore. Image from Public Domain.
There are no squonks in The Sunset Suite because I have written too much about them elsewhere. I don’t want to oversquonk myself. I first learned about squonks from Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings [1957] I think. And then I noticed references to the creature in all sorts of places. Years ago, I wrote a short story called ‘The Squonk Laughed’ because squonks are the saddest of all entities. I wanted to write about one that cheers up. And one of my longest ever poems is about a squonk ragtime pianist who works in a Wild West saloon, ‘Honky Tonk Squonk’. The very word is funny. It sounds round but also squelchy, rather like a cream-filled pastry. There is an excellent song by the band Genesis about squonks called simply ‘Squonk’ and it’s a song that will tell you absolutely everything you need to know about squonks if you listen carefully to the lyrics. In my book, it seemed to me that it was time to show some restraint when it came to squonks. You can have too much of a good, weepy thing.
How long did this book take to germinate into a full blown one and how did it come about?
Not long at all. Some of my projects proceed very slowly, they take years or even decades to be completed. But most of my projects are done fast. This is because if I take too much time over them, I worry that I will lose the thread or threads of the plot or plots, or that the mood and atmosphere of the work will change and be lost. That’s not always a disadvantage. I might begin work on a book thinking it is going in a certain direction. Then I put the project aside for a long time. When I return to it, I have often forgotten the direction I had intended to take the book. So I make it go in a different direction, and it seems to me that sometimes this other direction is a superior journey to the original intended direction. Who knows? But that has no relevance to The Sunset Suite because I wrote it in just a few weeks. I can’t recall exactly how long it took, but it wasn’t a drawn-out process. It happened to be one of those projects that flowed easily. Many do, and I am always grateful to them. It is almost as if I am not doing the work but simply acting as a channel for a set of stories that exist in some cosmic cloud. This is probably a fanciful delusion, but it is one that many writers have had over many centuries. We are conduits as well as creators. We are pipelines as well as pipers.
Have you actually been to the Wild West? Why have you set your book against this backdrop?
I have never been to the Wild West. I have never even been to the West. Even the most easterly part of the American continent is west to me. The furthest west I have been is Ireland. Yet I love Westerns, especially so-called ‘weird’ Westerns. Having said that, I have been to Almeria in Spain, the only desert in Europe, where many ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ were filmed. It looks the way I imagine Mexico or Arizona might look, but I can’t know that for sure because I haven’t been there. Maybe one day I will. I have written quite a few Westerns, all of them weird and unusual. The first was a novella called The Gargantuan Legion. I had the idea for that when I was very young. Much later I wrote a novel called The Honeymoon Gorillas [2018], and then a collection of stories, poems and short plays called Weirdly Out West [2021]. Shortly after finishing The Sunset Suite, I wrote a Western novel
called Growl at the Moon that has been accepted for publication. I am currently working on a novel titled The Boomerang Gang. I find writing weird Westerns to be great fun, relaxing too, yet they apply a strong stimulus to my imagination. Next year I hope to write a novel called Fists of Fleece, which will combine Welsh folklore with Wild West tall tales, creating an especially offbeat hybrid.
You have strange names given to characters peopling The Sunset Suite. Why? Please elaborate.
I enjoy giving my characters strange names. I also think it’s safer. Suppose I have a character in a story named Tim Jones and something absurdly odd happens to him. There might be a real Tim Jones out there in the world who will start thinking that I am referring to him and maybe even mocking him. It is better to give the character a name that surely no real person will ever have. Argosy Elbows, for example, or Crawly Custard. Readers can regard these as nicknames, if they wish. I often make lists of offbeat names for characters that I will use in future stories. Some of these names have been waiting decades to be used. Other names I invent on the spur of the moment while writing. Invention on the spur of the moment is an appropriate thing to do when writing a Western. But in fact the names in The Sunset Suite are still fairly conventional. Jake Bones, Shorty Potter, Killy the Bid, Grampsylvania, Max Grizzly, Cowboy Bunions, Dan Flyblown, Lanky Ranter. It’s not beyond the bounds of plausibility that real people out there do have such names.
Why do you keep obsessing over coffee? Please explain.
I hope it’s not quite an obsession. I like coffee, that’s all. I guess it’s my favourite drink. No offence to water, tea or beer! I am in the process of cutting down on my coffee consumption. I have been reducing my intake for the past twenty years, but it’s still not at zero. I am reducing it very slowly indeed, that’s why. Mind you, the reason why there is so much coffee in The Sunset Suite is simply because cowboy films always show the characters drinking coffee around a campfire. They surely told stories to each other at night while drinking the coffee. It occurred to me that I could use this as a frame for my book. A sequence of strange stories set in the Wild West linked together by the fact that each tale was generated by a cup of coffee. At the end of the book, the two tale tellers have drunk too much coffee. The book is a warning that will be heeded too late. But we are all adults. We don’t really need to be warned about such perils as coffee consumption.
Since classification is an important aspect of human existence, how would you classify your book?
It’s a ‘Weird Western’. That’s what I have been calling it. This is a real sub-genre, and I think my book can be labelled as such without any objections. I might also call it a comedy, a picaresque or portmanteau farce, a speculative whimsy. But it remains a Western, that’s undeniable. It makes substantial use of parody, pastiche, paradox and probably other things beginning with the letter ‘p’. At the same time, I don’t mind if the book is classified just as a fantasy or even only as fiction.
What have been the influences on this book? On your writing?
The main influences on this particular book of mine were other weird Westerns by writers I admire, in particular The Hawkline Monster [1974] by Richard Brautigan, which was marketed as a Gothic Western. Brautigan was especially good at writing short but thoughtful passages that are often at tangents to each other but nonetheless do combine with each other satisfyingly. Another influence was probably a collection of stories I read when I was young, The Illustrated Man [1951] by Ray Bradbury, in which a sleeping man’s tattoos come alive one at a time and tell stories as they do so. But in my book, it is the cups of coffee that come alive in a fictional sense. I also think that the pulp Western author Max Brand was an influence on my book, especially his stranger works, such as The Untamed [1918], which seem to blend echoes of ancient mythology with the more conventional cowboy motifs and clichés.
Would you call these stories humorous? They do linger with absurdity and a certain cheekiness.
I like to think they are humorous. I like to think that The Sunset Suite is a comedy among other things. Most of my fiction has some comedic elements, even if the general tone of the story is serious. Real life is a mishmash of tragedy, comedy, indifference, absurdity, beauty, and who knows what else, so it’s only right and proper for fiction to be such a mishmash too. Obviously, in a short story there’s not much room in which to throw everything, so one has to be more careful when it comes to constructing the piece. The mode of the book, which features a framing device in which is found a set of individual tales that echo each other’s themes, is one I especially enjoy using. I am planning other books that follow this structure.
What books are you whipping up now?
I always work on several projects at the same time. I am currently working on two novels. One of them is a satirical thriller called Average Assassins, and the other is another weird Western called The Boomerang Gang, which is about an Australian immigrant to the Wild West in the late 19th Century and it features an experimental aeroplane with boomerangs for wings. I am also working on a large project called Dabbler in Drabbles, which consists of four volumes of drabbles. A drabble, as I’m sure you know, is a flash fiction exactly 100 words in length. There will be one thousand drabbles in total when the project is finished. The first three volumes have already been published and I am pushing ahead with the fourth. Yet another project I’m working on is a collection of short meditations called City Life. These meditations are supposedly written by the cities themselves and there will be sixty of them in total. I am working on other projects too, but I won’t mention those yet.
Thank you Rhys for your fantastic writing and your time.
(This interview has been conducted through emails and the review written by Mitali Chakravarty.)
Christopher Columbus (1451-1506)From Public Domain
I, Roberto Mendoza, in this year 1550, ship’s boy on Christopher Columbus’ first and second voyages to the West Indies before my promotion to sailor on his third and fourth voyages, testify to the veracity of the eye witness events that I record for posterity. And in spite of their devastating raw truth, it is my troubled conscious that has conducted my hand, goaded my intelligence to write down these sorrowful facts. For facts they are, regardless of the prestige and boons that Columbus received from his protectors and admirers.
Where shall I begin? How do I burrow through the layers of unquestionable fame that has marked that name to reverberate with the clanking of the slave chains, the death rattles in the gold and silver mines, the gnashing of teeth, the hangings and dismemberments … the insensible apathy of the subjugation or submission of the Indian masses?
It has always appeared to my young eyes that Columbus’ achievements were enveloped in an aura of mystery or incomprehension. I may even add an aura of fantastic falsifications, mainly initiated and authorised by Columbus himself and his unquestioning gallants.
I knew him well, too well to be duped by those seductive charms of his, that subtle cunning, a mask donned whenever a fruitful occasion arose, yet under which lay a brutal, tyrannical individual bent on attaining his greatest ambition: wealth and glory, and this at any price. What was the little ditty that some fool invented for innocent children and naive adults to recite: “In fourteen ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue?” A ridiculous rime to recall that wretched year. Yes, I say that wretched year for it celebrated the Genoan hero’s glorious voyage.
During that fatal year of 1492, two other major events occurred in Spain which I believe to be in relation to Columbus’ conniving his way into Isabella’s confidence: the expulsion of the Jews to North Africa, Italy and Constantinople, and the capitulation of Granada, the last stronghold of the Muslims in Spain, to the Christian kings. Henceforth, Spain rid herself of those ‘impure’, centuries-laden ‘foreign’ plunderers. Did not Columbus write in his logbook (if we are to believe Bartolomé de Las Casas’s transcribed copy of it) that he was overjoyed by those two events: ”thus you (the Monarchs) have turned out all the Jews from your kingdoms and lordships”, and ”the royal banners have been placed on the towers of Alhambra”[1].
This being said, because of the expulsion and the reconquest, Columbus’ true birthplace had to be concealed, for any negotiation with Isabella or Ferdinand. This hero was not born in the city of spaghetti and banks, Genova, as commonly known. The darling of the Spanish monarchy was born in the land of the corsairs, in Calvi, a lovely port town in Northern Corsica, indeed conquered by the Genovans and governed by them during five centuries, but none the less born and bred far from the banks of Italy. Corsica, where for centuries Vandals, Ostrogoths, Greeks and Lombards, and ill-bred Aragonese and Genovans vied for domination, intermingling, integrating and assimilating.
Why would Columbus lie about his place of birth? Was it out of fear of a possible ‘corsair descent’? One that connoted piratry, pillage and other misdeeds [2]? Be that as it may, the rogue managed to cajole Queen Isabella into giving him enough maravedis[3]to undertake a voyage that would heighten the glory of the conquering Spanish Monarchy and the new-founded kingdom.
And that was how Admiral Don Christopher Columbus frayed his way to fame and fortune!
With the Queen’s glittering maravedis he commissioned three caravels : the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, the third of which he navigated himself, the other two by the Pinzón brothers. How I happened to be aboard the Santa Maria is a long story with which I shall not bore my readers.
So there he stood at the prow, mantled in a vaporous circle of pride and arrogance whilst we, his sea-faring companions, sweated away on deck or in the hold, were fed rotten food, furled and unfurled the sails without respite, hunted out the innumerable rats that ran amok below, withered under the insufferable heat of September. I myself almost fainted under the long, long hours of tedious work, boredom and especially fear; fear that we and our tiny caravel, surrounded by thousands of leagues of far from blue waters, would be food for the horrible undersea monsters that had swallowed many a brave crew and their vessels with yawning jaws and leathery tentacles. All of us were terrified, and the five weeks we spent crossing a swelling ocean towards the East, or so we all thought, triggered a feeling of panic, alienness and remorse. The admiral described the ocean like a river; I myself felt like a cork in a rainswept pond, jostled and jolted, no land in sight, our water and meat, taken aboard at the Canary Islands, foul-tasting, half-eaten by the enormous black rats.
Did the great Admiral not consult the stars? Eastward? There was nothing — only rolls and rolls of higher and higher walls of water battering the fragile sides of our vessels. And I, so young, asked myself time and time again, how did an incompetent sea-faring fellow like Columbus ever win the confidence of Isabella and Ferdinand ? Oh how I recall his bulky figure at the prow, oftentimes behind the helm, screaming orders or simply staring out into the watery vastitude, dreaming no doubt of gold … gold … and more gold … He had written the word ‘gold’ seventy-five times in his logbook during the first two weeks of our crossing!
How many of our poor sailors had been beaten for insubordination, had suffered the excruciating trial of keelhauling[4], one or two even hanged for attempting mutiny, so fearful were they of being devoured by sea monsters, dying of thirst or hunger or being bitten by the furry rats that thrived below in our beds of straw?
At long last I heard the cry “Land ahoy!” coming from the crow’s nest. Yes, we finally reached a cluster of islands that would be named Guanahani[5], Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic on the maps of future cartographers. It was on these islands that my first glimpses of a barbaric and despotic Columbus would not only be corroborated, but magnified to the heights of psychopathic insanity. For it became more and more evident to me that the Admiral, whom I considered in my youthful age as a hero, had no intentions of treating the indigenous peoples of these islands either as equals or with a soupçon of humane sympathy. He indeed judged them somewhat higher than animals, yet whose only human value was how much they would bring him as slaves sold in Spain, or how much gold and silver they would extract for him from the mines and rivers. All he saw in these peaceful peoples was the glitter of gold fastened to their noses and the rings of equal glitter hanging off their ears and arms. He saw gold everywhere, even gold stones shining in the rivers! He wrote in his logbook that gold grew in clusters and could be plucked off trees like fruit!
The way in which he ferreted information out of the Indians about gold deposits turned my stomach. His obsession with gold drove him into periodical frenzies during which time he would beat, even torture the poor indigenous man or woman who failed to locate the deposits. He spent his sweltering nights tossing and turning in bed, totally possessed by this maniacal craving.
But his brutality was not limited in this direction: The Spaniards or other Europeans who disobeyed him or sought to outmanoeuvre him in the pursuit of power or riches were tracked down and hanged, accused of criminal acts. His barbarity knew no bounds, nor his slave-selling which began to enrich him immensely.
On our second and third voyages, which led us to the islands of Granada and Tobago, the abundance of gold extracted was tantamount to the number of Indians he enslaved for his own ‘household’ purposes, and those he sold into a slavery which by then had become a thriving, lucrative business. We navigated from island to island sowing the seeds of destruction as the stoic Admiral described their beauty, the exotic animals and birds, and especially the immense, awaiting riches buried under that beauty. How many of the indigenous he had killed when several tribes revolted against him, and how many committed suicide cannot be accurately tallied. I would learn much later that Las Casas put that tally at 1,500 Taion Arawaks.
Indeed, as time went by Columbus’ wrath found merciless outlets against Indians and Europeans alike as the settlements grew in economic and political importance. Indians who failed to extract enough gold from the mines had one of their arms cut off[6]. On many occasions he had rebellious Spaniards dismembered in public much to the outrage of the governors appointed to the settlements by the Spanish Monarchy.
The governors of these settlements began sending reports to the King and Queen relating the horrendous behaviour of Columbus, his obsession for power and riches, his masquerading as a ruling god-like figure over the ignorant natives. Testimonies piled higher and higher on the Queen’s pearl-inlaid writing-table, relating cases of rape, murder and mutilation.
On his return trip to Spain she immediately had him seized, chained and thrown into prison. She also expropriated all his extorted possessions, be they gold or land. There he rotted away for six weeks, so enraged was the Queen, betrayed by this ‘foreigner’. However, his brother Bartholomew, on his knees, pleaded tearfully in favour of his brother’s heart of gold, his innocence in all matters of governance, having been slandered by the governors and their lackeys who wrote defamatory reports to wreak vengeance upon a man whose glory and greatness surpassed theirs. The Queen hesitated. It was King Ferdinand who decided to have him released.
His release from prison had puffed up his ego, unlocked his megalomania.
Columbus’ fourth and last voyage, between 1502 and 1504 with four caravels, took us to Martinique, Honduras, Jamaica, Costa Rica and Nicaragua. I had been appointed a full-fledged sailor by then and relished the idea of accompanying the Admiral, jotting down all his actions, prudently of course, so that I would not to be arrested for bearing witness to his ruthlessness, perhaps even hanged as a traitor. The ‘civilising’ process undertaken by him included plundering, murdering, enslaving and mutilation. Amidst the unbridled violence and sadism, he posed as an evangelist, a disinterested zealot deeply desirous to convert the ‘savages’ into God-fearing Christians, into ‘civilised’ beings like himself.
Columbus returned to Spain a hero of piety, magnanimity, sanctity. The impostor even wrote two books : the Book of Privileges[7] in 1502, an indecent mass of statistics which enumerate all his accumulated rewards wrested from the Crown under which lay the beaten and mutilated bodies of the indigenous, and the Book of Prophecies[8] in 1505, a shameful scream of smut comprising hundreds of citations from the Bible, all of which spell out in his vapid style his Christian ‘mission’ in the New World, ever so charitable and lenient towards the ignorant, child-like ‘natives’ ; a mission, indeed, pure in spirit, rightful in act.
With Columbus’ death the unwarrantable fervour that he had kindled slowly shrivelled into ashes. I retired from sea-life and found work in the Custom’s Bureau, a most comfortable employment. Besides, I was disgusted by all the tales told about him by the sailors, especially their bawdy narratives about the native women in the New World. I wished to leave my sea-legs behind and tread more earthy paths. Furthermore, my new tasks gave me ample time to read the posthumous reports about Columbus[9], many of which belied the benignant deeds and bountiful achievements of the monarchial and New World idol. It was after these important readings that I decided to begin my memoirs …
The rogue’s Book of Prophecies created quite a stir amongst the aristocratic castes : Columbus’ fantasies of promoting Isabella and Ferdinand as heads of a new crusade to the Holy Lands to defeat the Muslims, and there spread Christianity kindled many a nostalgic and gun-ho heart. The monarchs, wary of the old Admiral’s apocalyptic inaccuracies and religious bigotry, never took him seriously. I wonder if they had even read his book …
None the less, Columbus certainly provided an excellent example for other freebooters to follow in the wake of his doughty adventures. The slave trade between the Old and the New World thrived as well as the gold and silver that flooded the Spanish markets. It is no mere metaphor that this period in Spain was called as El Siglo de Oro (The Golden Century).
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[1] Bartolome de Las Casas (1484-1566) a Dominicain priest who spent forty years in Hispaniola (Haiti and the Domican Republic) transcribed an abstract of Columbus’ lost logbook. How accurate or truthful is this copy is difficult to assess. Journal of the First Voyage of Christopher Columbus (1492-1493), translated by Clements R. Markhma : London, Hakluyt Society, 1893, pp. 15-93
[2] Corsica : Columbus’ Isle, Joseph Chiari, edition Barrie and Rockcliff, 1960.
[3] Gold coins used in mediaeval Spain during the 11th and 14th centuries.
[4] A maritime punishment by which the sailor is ‘hauled’ under the ‘keel’ of the ship with ropes.
[5] As called by the Indians. Columbus called this island San Salvador. Today it is called Watling.
[6] On this point see Howard Zinn, Christopher Columbus and Western Civilization, Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, 1992.
[7]El Libro de Privilegios. The English edition : Book of Privileges, The Claiming of the New World, John W. Hessler, 2014.
[8]El Libro de Profesías. The English edition : Book of Prophecies, Repertorium Columbianum, Blair Sullivan, 2004.
[9] Columbus and Las Casas : Two Readings on the Legacy of Columbus(1542 (The Devastation of the Indians. A brief Account) and 1550 (In Defense of the Indians).
Paul Mirabile is a retired professor of philology now living in France. He has published mostly academic works centred on philology, history, pedagogy and religion. He has also published stories of his travels throughout Asia, where he spent thirty years.
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Ratnottama Sengupta in conversation with Sohini Roychowdhury, who uses dancing to build bridges across cultures
“Meet my daughter Sohini,” Uma Di was introducing the dancer who then lived in Madrid. And my first response was, “Why isn’t she in the movies?!”
Sohini Roy Chowdhury. Courtesy: Sohini Roy Chowdhury
Tall, fair, lissome, agile, Sohini Roychowdhury is the stuff beauty queens and show stoppers are made of. That wasn’t surprising: after all, Uma Roychowdhury herself is the picture of perfection in aesthetics.
It didn’t take me long to realise that, much like the well regarded sculptor’s bronzes, her daughter too was made of enduring stuff. One day she was teaching Bharatanatyam to French, Spanish, and Italian enthusiasts. The next day she was lecturing on mythology in New York. One day she was dancing to ‘Jai Ho![1]’ for the director of the Oscar winning Hollywood movie[2]. Another day she was delineating Durga in an Anthropology Museum…
None of these saw her run out of breath. Nor does she, ever, run out of time. When she’s not holding her fingers in a dance mudra, she is holding a metaphoric pen. This month she unveiled her second book, Dance of Goddess Kali. Yes, she has rings on her fingers and bells on her toes — and wherever she goes, there’s dance on the cards!
Here is what she had to say when I spoke to her:
The Dance of Kali follows Dancing with the Gods. How are the two books different?
Dancing With the Gods and The Dance of Kali are two distinct works, each focusing on different aspects of my artistic and spiritual journey.
Conceived by Monideepa Mukherjee and Sutapa Sengupta, featuring photos from Sohinimoksha
Dancing With the Godsis a pictorial, coffee-table book stemming from my journey as a classical Indian dancer with a multinational dance troupe. Its vivid visuals showcase my onstage performances and behind-the-scenes moments. These are highlights of my career as a dancer, both solo and with Sohinimoksha World Dance and Communications[3].
This visually captivating book focuses on imagery and aesthetics. It offers glimpses into my artistic expression through dance, celebrates my journey around the world, and highlights my life-mantra of connecting civilisations through my craft. This tracing of Sohinimoksha’s journey is for a broader audience: Indian dance enthusiasts, art lovers, and individuals interested in my achievements. The aim is to inspire through visually compelling storytelling.
In contrast, The Dance of Kali is a treatise on the ethos of Goddess Kali and Shaktism. It delves into the deeper spiritual and philosophical aspects associated with the goddess, exploring Kali’s symbolism, mythology, and significance within the context of Shaktism, a Hindu tradition of worshiping the divine feminine energy. The tone of this work is contemplative, as it delves into the profound symbolism and the spiritual aspects associated with the Goddess. It incorporates scholarly research, analysis, and interpretations from various perspectives. Hopefully it offers readers a deeper understanding of Kali’s significance in Hindu spirituality.
May I point out here that The Dance of Kali is not a religious book. It is for readers with a specific interest in Hindu mythology, spirituality, or the myths and legends around the resident Goddess of Kolkata. Those seeking a deeper understanding of Kali’s symbolism and philosophical underpinnings within the context of Shaktism, will find this book dispels disrespectful misrepresentations and unfounded Western misconceptions surrounding the images of Kali as a demonic goddess.
To sum up: both the books reflect different facets of my artistic and spiritual journey. However, they differ significantly in their subject matter, focus, tone, and intended audience. One celebrates my achievements as a dancer through captivating visuals. The other is an academic tome exploring the profound symbolism and spirituality associated with Goddess Kali.
What prompted you, an international dancer, to pick such a rooted in mythology subject?
I have always had a personal affinity with or inclination towards Goddess Kali. Many artistes draw inspiration from their own beliefs, experiences, and cultural backgrounds when choosing subjects for their work. I am no different. For me the depiction of the Goddess is an opportunity for artistic exploration. Kali, with her complex symbolism and multifaceted persona, offers rich material for creative interpretation through the arts, be it dance, literature or visual arts.
This book also celebrates India’s rich mythological heritage and the way it connects to other ancient cultures, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Spain and France. Kali, with her global soul sisters Ishtar or Sara La Kali, holds significant cultural and religious importance, not just in Hinduism, but other cultures as well, particularly within the contexts of worshipping Mother Goddesses. I delve into Kali’s mythology and symbolism to honour this aspect of Indian life, and its universal resonance.
Yes, Goddess Kali is rooted in Indian mythology. But the themes she embodies — feminine power, transformation, and liberation —transcend cultural boundaries. I hope this book will serve to explore universal themes of empowerment and spirituality. It also aims to provide a deeper understanding of Hindu mythology, and the symbolism associated with the Dark Goddess. Effectively I seek to promote intercultural dialogue and foster greater appreciation for diverse religious traditions. Most significantly, I hope to dispel the uneducated interpretations of Kali as a horrific, savage, demonic goddess. How often she is typecast as a symbol of evil — in popular Western films, books and even as Halloween costumes for disrespectful celebrities like Heidi Klum!
I have witnessed your performance as Durga in an anthropology museum in Madrid. I have noted your commitment to meaningful, even profound themes in your endeavours. What has been your grooming in dance?
I started dancing at a young age under renowned Bharatanatyam Guru, Thankamany Kutty. Later I learnt from Kalamandalam Venkitt in Kolkata. I received rigorous training in Bharatanatyam, the dance that originated in the temples of Tamil Nadu. My dedication to classical art led me to delve deep into its nuances. I mastered intricate footwork, expressions, and storytelling techniques. Over the years, I refined my technique and expression through consistent practice and performance and came to embody the essence of Bharatanatyam.
Your father was a renowned sitarist living in Germany. Your mother is a reputed sculptor of Kolkata. Why did you, an only child, not take to any of these streams of creative expression?
Indeed I was born into a family of accomplished artists. My father, Pandit Subroto Roychowdhury was a renowned sitarist, and my mother, Uma Roychowdhury, is a reputed sculptor. But I chose a different path for myself.
As an only child, I was exposed to various forms of creative expression. But my passion for dance was ignited after watching a riveting performance by Yamini Krishnamurthy when I was about four years old. While I deeply respect my family’s artistic legacy, I followed my own calling and embarked on a journey to carve my niche in the world of dance.
What are the values you have imbibed from them individually?
My father’s sitar schools in Germany have produced hundreds of students — including distinguished sitar players. From him I imbibed a profound appreciation for music and rhythm. I learned discipline, dedication, and the importance of perseverance in mastering an art form. From my sculptor mother I inherited a keen love for aesthetics and eye for details. I learned the importance of expressing emotions and stories through visual and performing arts.
Together these values have steered me towards excellence and innovation in my journey as a dancer and communicator.
Mixed genre performance by Sohini Roychowdhury. Courtesy: Sohini Roy Chowdhury
You have lived in Moscow and Madrid. You are guest professor in far-flung Universities, in America and Columbia. You have danced Bharatanatyam and you have danced to Jai ho! at the premiere of Slumdog Millionaire. What have you gained through your international exposure?
My international exposure has enriched me both personally and professionally. Living in cultural environments as diverse as Moscow and Madrid have broadened my perspectives and deepened my understanding of global arts and communication.
More than 2000 students have ‘graduated’ through my two dance schools in Spain — Casa Asia and Sohinimoksha Artes de la India. In Moscow, more than 80 Russian students performed with me on stage at the Embassy of India and Nehru Centre at the end of their course. As a guest professor in universities across Europe, USA and Latin America, teaching dance, Natyashastra [theory of dance] and Indology, I have not only shared my expertise — I have learnt from students, artistes and scholars from different backgrounds.
Through my performances of Bharatanatyam, and collaborations with international artists, have bridged cultural divides. My dancing to Jai Ho! at the European premiere of Slumdog Millionaire showcased the universal appeal of Indian dance and music. It highlighted its ability to connect with people across borders. Today I can confidently claim to have promoted cross-cultural exchange globally.
Coming from an aristocratic, old Calcutta background, what merit do you see in Bollywood dancing?
Despite coming from an aristocratic background rooted in old Calcutta, I recognise the merit in Bollywood dancing which has become a global phenomenon. Not surprising. For, characterised by vibrant energy, expressive movements, and fusion of multiple dance styles — from Salsa to Tango, Twist to ChaChaCha – Bollywood dancing holds mass appeal. It serves as a platform for artists to showcase their talents to diverse audiences and has contributed to the popularization of Indian culture worldwide. It is rooted in traditional Indian dance forms, yet embraces modern influences. And it reflects the evolving tastes of contemporary audiences.
Since the 1960s, Bollywood has drawn inspiration from various musical traditions across the world. This imparted its films a rich tapestry of global influences. This fusion of world music and dance enriched the aesthetic of Bollywood — and in turn contributed to its cultural significance and global appeal.
In the 1960s, Indian cinema underwent a transformation with the emergence of filmmakers like Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoor, who infused their films with elements of Western music and dance. The most iconic example of this is seen in the song Mera joota hai Japani [my shoes are Japanese] from Shree 420 (1955): here Raj Kapoor’s character sings about wearing Japanese shoes, English pantaloons, and Russian caps — all of which symbolised the growing influence of the West in post-colonial India. And yet, as the song stresses, at core these films are Hindustani — Indian.
Throughout the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, the industry witnessed the rise of dance and music directors who played a pivotal role in incorporating world music and dance forms into Hindi cinema. Composers like OP Nayyar, Shankar Jaikishan, SD Burman, C Ramachandran, Kalyanji Anandji, RD Burman, Laxmikant-Pyarelal, and Bappi Lahiri experimented with disparate musical styles. These ranged from rock-n-roll, rumba, flamenco to disco, reggae and jazz. This infused their compositions with international flavours.
Similarly, choreographers Sohanlal, PL Raj, Herman Benjamin, Suresh Bhatt, Saroj Khan, Chinni and Rekha Prakash, Shiamak Davar, Farah Khan, Remo D’Souza, Terence Lewis, Vaibhavi Merchant, and Prabhu Deva have blended Indian classical dance with Western styles. This has created the unique dance style that is now identified as Bollywood dancing. It has homogenised movements from hip-hop to salsa and contemporary dance.
Soon stars like Shammi Kapoor, Helen, Asha Parekh, Hema Malini, Rishi Kapoor, Mithun Chakraborty, Jeetendra, Govinda, Hrithik Roshan, Madhuri Dixit, and Sridevi became synonymous with Bollywood’s larger-than-life dance numbers. For, it showcased their versatility and flair for different dance steps. Embracing the twist and turn era of the ’60s to the disco craze of ’70s and the hip-hop-inspired moves of the 2000s, Bollywood stars captivated audiences with their energy and charisma.
Along with Western influences, Bollywood also drew from traditional Indian dances. Its choreography incorporated elements of Bharatanatyam, Kathak, and Odissi. Dance sequences like Dola Re Dola from Devdas (2002) and Pinga from Bajirao Mastani (2015) exemplify the fusion of classical and contemporary dances, blending intricate footwork with dynamic movements and expressions.
In recent years, Bollywood has continued to evolve, reflecting the changing tastes and preferences of global audiences. Directors, like Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Farah Khan, have pushed the boundaries of traditional filmmaking, creating visually stunning spectacles that showcase the diversity of world music and dance. Stars like Priyanka Chopra, Deepika Padukone, and Ranveer Singh have embraced this eclectic mix of styles, bringing their own unique interpretations to the screen.
Spanish, Bulgarian and other European dancers from my own troupe, Sohinimoksha World Dance, have performed specially choreographed fusion dance items set to popular Bollywood tracks. Kristina Veselinova danced toMere Dholnafrom Bhool Bhulaiya; Violeta Perez and Lola Martin to Senorita! from Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and Maria Sanz on Padmavat’s Ghoomer on stages across India and the world. So I readily acknowledge the significance of Bollywood dance in preserving India’s cultural heritage while adapting to changing times.
Would you say our films are taking our dance traditions to votaries abroad? Just as Indian musicians of the 1960s had taken our ragas to the West?
In the 1960s, Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan and other maestros played a crucial role in initiating the West in the rich notes of Indian classical music — and that had enriched the global cultural landscape. My own father, Pandit Subroto Roychowdhury, spent more than 40 years in Germany and other European countries, spreading and popularising Indian classical music through concerts and classes. Today Indian films, particularly Bollywood, are carrying forward this legacy. They are showcasing the wealth that is Indian dance — often fused with world dance influences. Just as our musicians shared the wealth of ragas with the West, Bollywood films are spreading the infectious exuberance of Indian dance to enthusiasts around the globe. This is fostering cultural exchange on an international scale. Small wonder that Bollywood is now acknowledged as India’s most potent soft power.
What, in your opinion, is needed to make GenNext learn from our past traditions?
If we want GenNext to learn from our past traditions, we must provide them with comprehensive exposure to our rich cultural heritage. For this, we must integrate our arts and cultural practices into educational curricula. We must foster appreciation through interactive experiences — workshops, performances, cultural events. Additionally we must leverage modern technologies and platforms to disseminate information. Let’s make traditional arts more accessible and engaging for the young. Let’s cultivate mentorship programs and intergenerational exchanges. For, we must bridge the gap between past traditions and contemporary lifestyles, to ensure their relevance and continuity for the generations to come.
Sohini I have seen you at close quarters, as a mother, wife, daughter, and daughter-in-law even as you criss-cross the world for your dance. How do you still find time to write, which is such a demanding, reflective expression?
I am fortunate to be able to balance my roles as a mother, wife, daughter, daughter-in-law, and a performing artiste. My experience as much as my dedication to my craft honed my time-management skills. Despite crisscrossing the world for performances, lecture tours, and other professional commitments, I carve out time to write, for I recognise its significance as a reflective form of expression.
To effectively manage my time, I set priorities, create schedules, and maximize productivity during the available windows of time. I designate specific periods for writing, be it early mornings, late evenings, or during travel downtime. I try to integrate writing into my daily routine, seizing moments of inspiration and reflection to jot down ideas or draft passages.
My passion for writing is a driving force — it motivates me to make time for it amidst my busy schedule. Writing provides a creative outlet for introspection, and intellectual exploration. It complements my artistic endeavours and enriches my personal and professional growth.
I am grateful for the support I receive from the network of my family, friends, and collaborators. They play a crucial role in facilitating my writing pursuits. My latest book, The Dance of Kali, was co-written with my son Rishi Dasgupta, an Economics MSc from the University of St Andrews, UK.
However, at the end of the day, that I find time to write amidst my multifaceted life, reflects my passion for engaging in reflective expression. Because? It contributes to my holistic development as an artist and an individual.
[1] A song from the 2008 Bollywood movie, Slumdog Millionaire
[3] A dance troop started by Sohini Roychowdhury with presence in Madrid, Berlin and Kolkata
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Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and write books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award.
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In Cherry Blossom Forecast, Suzanne Kamata brings the Japanese ritual of cherry blossom viewing to our pages with her camera and words. Clickhere to read.
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