Tag: Speaking Tiger

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Poetry

Poems for July by Snehaprava Das

From Public Domain 
 JULY CLOUDS

Night descends grudgingly 
Over my town.
In smoky July,
The breeze is a rustling 
Scrape of sand paper 
Rubbing against the face of 
A barren sky.

Like bored coquettes,
Stars lean against the walls of night
Faking a smile on their made up faces
And whispering light.

The evasive clouds
Drift away sheepishly 
Beyond the distant cliffs,
I don't know why --
But clouds have turned here
Strangely  reclusive
This July.

They say that the warm ocean-currents 
Have sucked them dry,
Leaving them ineffectual, hollow,
So, the clouds now sail languidly
Across a grey July sky --

Declaring their presence 
In impotent rumbles, stray gusts,
In spiralling dust columns,  
And scarce drops that become vapour
Against my window pane
Before the clouds slinked by! 

I know not why
But the clouds seem to 
Elude my town this July!!


AT LAST THE RAINS CAME

At last the rains came on a July midday 
In mild currents first,
And then in angry torrents, 
Washing the paan stains 
And the blotchy paints off the walls,

Filling the potholes on the
Bruised streets,
Overflowing the gutters,
Cleansing polythene and plastics
It cluttered on the sidewalks.

The rain came finally,
Carrying the smell of rotten garbage 
Dead leaves, sodden earth, and
Soaked paper boats in
Stale puddles.

At last, the rain spilled from a leaden sky
In tiny spikes of molten warmth
Pricking the skin, travelling
Into my blood, like a coaxing reptile,
Looping my parched desires
And my desiccated dreams.

At last the July clouds broke over
The row of bald hills,
And rain came down to my thirsting window
In  driving grey spills.

 
 *paan -- betel leaf

Snehaprava Das is an academic, translator and writer. She has multiple translations, three collections of stories and five anthologies of poetry to her credit. She has been published in Indian Literature, Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger, Penguin and Black Eagle Books.

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

Click here to access Wild Winds: The Borderless Anthology of Poems

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

Categories
Poetry

Look Not for Me in the Sunlit Paths

By Snehaprava Das

From Public Domain 
LOOK NOT FOR ME IN THE SUNLIT PATHS

Look not for me in the sunlit path.
Look for me
In a honey-hued forest
Where I gather the pieces of my soul 
Fallen apart under clouds 
Hanging from an ash-painted  sky,
Where the chill flutters and flits 
On the dead wings of a  butterfly.

Look not for me in the 
Glimmering morning meadow
But by the crumpled ribbon 
Of a  starlit  river
That has lost its way to the sea,
Where the wind like a wayward spirit 
Whispers to the tired trees.

 I do not move in  the sunlit path
Circling the castle coated in ancient clime,
I saunter along its crooked corridors 
Where the echo of a strangled melody
Settles firm on the walls of old time.


Look not for me by a pleasant door 
Opening to the sunlit lane,
I am a misbegotten shadow,
Waiting to crawl into the purple twilight 
On the cracked window pane.
From Public Domain

Snehaprava Das is an academic, translator and writer. She has multiple translations, three collections of stories and five anthologies of poetry to her credit. She has been published in Indian Literature, Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger, Penguin and Black Eagle Books.

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

Click here to access Wild Winds: The Borderless Anthology of Poems

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

Categories
Poetry

The Bird and the Tree by Snehaprava Das

A koel: From Public Domain
WHAT KEEPS THE CHAITRA* KOEL BACK?


The Chaitra koel's routine visit to the 
Lone mango tree in the compound 
Of a lonelier house,
Where life rests in a shadow of silence,
Is delayed this time.
Has it forgotten the tree
That stands shrunken, pale 
And waits patiently to gather 
The silk whisper of spring colours 
In its brittle arms and 
Coax music  out of it?

*

What is keeping the bird back, 
The tree wonders.
And the answer comes in 
A startling cacophony 
That loops and rolls in angry surges 
Across the neighbouring  vacant lot
Where  the mid-spring sun slants ,
Warm and oily, on the 
Massive drilling rigs, 
Excavators, concrete  mixers,
Behemoths from some alien world
Filling the empty hours
With too much life, 
Hurling ugly sermons of urbanity
At its placid apathy.

The clangs, the clatters and the grinding;
Stones gritting, metals rattling,
Smell of smouldering tobacco and toxicity
Hang over the mounds of red earth
Like a crumpled canopy 
Of noisy ash.

Will the koel return to the Chaitra tree
With its gentle silky lilts 
Drowning the tumults,
The tree wonders, but waits
Shaking dust and doubt
Off its welcoming fragrant boughs 
Throbbing, trembling in the 
heavy vibrating breeze
And gathering itself back 
Steadfast in its hope  and trust.

  

*Chaitra: March
From Public Domain

Snehaprava Das is an academic, translator and writer. She has multiple translations, three collections of stories and five anthologies of poetry to her credit. She has been published in Indian Literature, Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger, Penguin and Black Eagle Books.

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

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

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Poetry

Who am I?

By Snehaprava Das

I could be a molecule of thought
Uncanny, secret,
Dimension less.

I could be all elements  
--immense, eternal --
A cosmos holding galaxies of passion.

I may be a note of music
Hanging in the air, faint, feeble,
But repeating like an echo,

Or a speck of silence in a wind-funnel,
Gyrating into a tornado,
Sonorously lingering to infinity.

I’m  overwhelmingly tender.
I hold worlds in a gentle embrace.
I’m also a razor blade,
Can slash love with a single stroke
And leave it to bleed to death.

I am war. I am peace.
Dispassionate and diligent,
I’m a nuance undulating through
Sangfroid  and turbulence.

I’m a bubble forming, dissolving,
Forming again, breaking again,
Floating relentlessly to join waters 
On alien shores
And linking minds.

I’m a length of thread from a kite that is
Stubborn in its desire to fly, 
Connecting to the Earth 
While scanning the strip of its sky.

I wander free, unfettered by
Diverse minds and tongues,
Wearing my happy pan-world face,

Spanning dams and deserts,
Oceans and mountains,
Freezing and erupting in alternate moments,
I travel borderless.

Snehaprava Das is an academic, translator and writer. She has multiple translations, three collections of stories and five anthologies of poetry to her credit. She has been published in Indian Literature, Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger, Penguin and Black Eagle Books.

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

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

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Poetry

Poems on Seasons by Snehaprava Das

From Public Domain 
SEASONS 

Seasons gently fold into one another
Silently,
Not making too much noise but
Leaving no space for 
A signature smell of each till finally they could not be told apart.

The secret summer koel sits stiff hidden in the wet boughs
Flapping rain off its drenched feathers,
Its song gone hoarse in the thunder storm.

Monsoon paper-boats lie cramped in parched puddles 
Amidst dead dragonflies littered around in a mess.

A sedate autumn, heavy in its
Yellow bounteousness,
Waits behind the frost-draped trees,
Scorched by the day 
And soaked by the night.

Winter kites struggle
Through the smoky warmth
Of a sweating sky.
Their long curvy tails,
Caught in the crisscrossing strips of clouds,
Wriggle and writhe and roll clumsily
Like flying serpents in many hues.

This is yet another world 
That experiences terrible mood swings.
Seasons blend into one another
In obscure irregularity,
And the century old pattern of living
Goes haywire.
Mankind's mood changes too --
Is really life falling apart 
In this absurd mess?

I wouldn't know, 
I just sit fixing my aching gaze
On the path of another time,
For the return of a tomorrow of a foregone age that has shifted from 
Its course in the anomalous days.
But is sure to find its way one day 
To my waiting window!


LET US MOVE OUT IN TO THE UNKNOWN

Let us move out into the unknown 
In the smoke of sunlight,
Breathing the hollow whispers in the wind,
Straining our ears for the morning music 
That struggles to 
Wriggle out of the frosty boughs.

When the dwarf days reflect on the
Parchment of streets,
When the afternoons slant grim on the terrace 
And hibiscus buds blur on the
Misty splotches of glass, 
It is the time to move into the unknown,
Brushing off the patina on the bones
And fingers of ice tracing out a 
Warm tomorrow
On the shivering edge of the 
Season’s map.

Let us move out into the unknown.
Who knows, we might discover 
The stolen moon in some other sky
Before a star skewered night
Descends in a crumpled heap 
On the stiff shoulders of time...

Snehaprava Das is an academic, translator and writer. She has multiple translations, three collections of stories and five anthologies of poetry to her credit. She has been published in Indian Literature, Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger, Penguin and Black Eagle Books.

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

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

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Poetry

Nobody by Snehaprava Das

"I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you a nobody, too?"
(Emily Dickinson)

NOBODY

It is not easy to tell the tale of nobody.
A nobody's tale is without a
beginning or an end,
Like jumbled up letters on a mussy page,
Obscure sketches from a hand untrained.

A nobody's anonymous world 
Battered by the day, and
Bruised by the night,
Spins and shatters in a gyrating vortex 
Of liquid darkness and light.

A nobody lives and dies and again lives
And breathes a dream in between,
Desperate to see just one come true, and
For a glimpse of green in a bald ruin.

The crimson dawn in a nobody's sky 
Burns hopes to ash.
A moon flings shards of silver 
At nobody’s world, aiming a cruel slash.

The fog settles forever thick and grey
Outside a nobody's  window.
In a nobody's land, seasons don't change.
There settles permanent a season of snow.

Songs painted black by storm clouds
Croak beyond a nobody's door.
The wind mourns in the hollow orchards
Roses bleed on a cracked floor;

It is hard to tell a nobody's tale
That has neither a beginning, nor an end.
It's the story of a doomed  soul, 
That neither has a foe, nor a friend!!

From Public Domain

Snehaprava Das is an academic, translator and writer. She has multiple translations, three collections of stories and five anthologies of poetry to her credit. She has been published in Indian Literature, Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger, Penguin and Black Eagle Books.

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

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

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Poetry

Poetry by Snehaprava Das

NIGHT OF THE ECLIPSE

That night a shadow spread over the 
Moon's face. 
The moon, heavy in its 
Pain of loss became red
And shed scarlet tears
On the nocturnal earth caught in a
Warm vaporous net.

The shadow lengthened down to
A morning full of rain and river
And the waves screaming a vow
To drag the fields into
Coffins of sand even while
They still breathed in green.

The morning after, 
No sun peeped through the clouds of east.
No music dropped from the wind 
Or the drowsy trees.

The green lay inert in its grave
And rotted.
Dreams rotted too, eaten away
By worms swarming in grey abandon.

The shadow swallowed everything
Like a desert, like an ocean,
Like the endlessly expanding time.

Everything, like the moon 
went inside the dark, crippling net.
The sparkle in a thousand pairs of eyes
sank in the shadow of the river
In a permanent eclipse.

From Public Domain

Snehaprava Das is an academic, translator and writer. She has multiple translations, three collections of stories and five anthologies of poetry to her credit. She has been published in Indian Literature, Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger, Penguin and Black Eagle Books.

.

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

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

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Review

A Tribute to the Human Spirit

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: The Past is Never Dead: A Novel

Author: Ujjal Dosanjh

Publisher: Speaking Tiger

Ujjal Dosanjh’s latest novel, The Past is Never Dead, sheds light on the stranglehold of caste on Punjabi Sikh immigrants in the UK – a unique perspective of caste violence in a faith outside of Hinduism, one that was born out of the noble teaching by Guru Nanak and his followers that every human being is equal in the eyes of God. Borrowing the prologue from William Faulkner’s famous statement, “The past is never dead. It is not even past,” Dosanjh makes it his project to challenge this idea about Sikhism, as he writes about a poor family that migrates to England soon after India’s independence in the hope of escaping the indignities of caste back home – only to be confronted by it again, and in the most horrifying ways possible, in a western foreign land, where caste is supposed to be an insignificant marker of identity.

In the year 1952, Kalu escaped Banjhan Kalan in Punjab’s Hoshiarpur for Bedford in the British Midlands, hoping to find a life of dignity that he had been denied because of his untouchable caste. He was in his late teens and had grown up believing in Sikhism’s tenet of equality preached by Guru Nanak and Ravidas, a principle the villagers never sincerely practised. They had maimed his father, accusing him of stealing a zamindar’s ox; they had thrown father and son out of a Quit India rally; they had mercilessly thrashed young Kalu himself for daring to enter a temple. He had never been allowed to forget—even by his schoolmates—that he was a Chamar, destined to skin dead cattle like his ancestors. His father Udho was determined to get his son out of this life of indignity and had said, “Son, I don’t want you to grow up a Chamar. You will never do what made my hands and feet like this.” Soon Udho borrowed money from a kind merchant, bribed the officials, got a passport and left for Britain.

England promised a new life of respect and opportunity. Udho laboured hard to give his son a college education and his wife a decent life that was denied to them back in India. The way Kalu and his mother ultimately bribed their way onto an earlier flight to escape from the powerful connections his propertied travel agents had, and who could create obstacles in their journey to Britain, speaks a lot about the plight of scores of rural people in the Punjabi villages who dreamt of building a new life in the West. But freedom was illusory. Kalu’s fellow expatriates had brought caste along when they came to that country, and he would be forced to adhere to its degrading rules just as he was in Banjhan.

Apart from the story of a rural Punjabi family’s search for better life, the novel is also a powerful depiction of the stranglehold of caste over Sikh immigrants in Britain. We have read about honour killings of Sikh women during the riots that took place after the Partition of India when family patriarchs forced their wives and daughters to jump into the well or commit suicide to avoid being kidnapped by the Muslims, but the horror behind the story of honour killing within the Sikh community in England based on caste differences is something terrifying. The construction of different gurdwaras in the same locality according to caste affiliations including local politics, enmity, and gruesome killings by the Jats, who considered themselves racially superior to the other Sikhs, expose the horror and obstinacy of caste even in the middle of the twentieth century, and is just unimaginable. Determined not to bend—as he had refused to do back home—Kalu fights back as he could not suffer indignity silently, but his resoluteness in the struggle puts him and his family at serious risk.

With many turns and twists in the storyline, including the abduction and death of his doctor wife, Kalu’s hair was shaved by his caste-hate-obsessed kidnappers as revenge for what they considered his audacity in describing a Jat’s daughter as mini bell unsuited to be married to his Jat friend. Eventually, he discards his hair; the act acknowledges the impotence of religion and religious symbols in the struggle for equality and against caste. In the end, through his indomitable will force, we find how Kalu manages to overcome all odds and contest for a MP seat in the Parliament as a Labour Party candidate under the name of Dr. Kalha Chamar — “He was done fleeing, escaping or dressing up caste in surnames, unshorn hair or turban.” The concluding paragraph of the novel which gives a positive message of hope for the future is worth quoting here:

“Angad made chai. Between the sips of chai, the humpbacked Banti, the limping Udho, the hairless Kalu and the adolescent Angad danced. When Robert, Janice and Gurbat knocked on the door to congratulate him, Udho Chamar and his son, Kalu Chamar MP, were standing with raised glasses, about to down neat double Johnnie Walkers.”

Though the story of Dosanjjh’s own life and the timeframe of the novel bear a lot of similarities with the incidents narrated in the story, he does not mention it to be an autobiography. Instead, he fills the novel with various other racist perspectives that the Sikhs in Britain still cannot steer clear of. So, he safely adds other issues and titles it “A Novel.” But how far some of the incidents narrated in the novel have moved him becomes clear when we read in an interview given to scroll.in where he states:

“It was emotionally quite exacting to write The Past Is Never Dead. The toll of the issues I wrote about has been a lifelong companion. Age has rendered me shameless enough for me to confess that I often cried as I wrote many parts of the novel…. The human incapacity to learn from the past astounds me. It aids us in veiling the past from ourselves and abets our continuing cruelty in the name of dumb tradition and comatose culture.”

The novel is surely worth reading and is strongly recommended as it pays tribute to the courage and tenacity of the human spirit and its capacity for hope despite all odds.

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

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

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

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Categories
Review

The Story of Arunachal Pradesh

Book Review by Gracy Samjetsabam

Title: Escaping the Land

Author: Mamang Dai

Publisher: Speaking Tiger

Escaping the Land (2021) by Mamang Dai is a gripping saga of turbulent times in Arunachal Pradesh from the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) days to the present times. Padmashri and Sahitya Akademi Awardee, Mamang Dai, is an anglophone poet and novelist from Arunachal Pradesh.

In Escaping the Land, Mamang Dai weaves the history, myth and politics of Arunachal Pradesh across time. Maying, the narrator returns to her homeland from Delhi to do a project on the land of her birth and its people. Dai uses Maying to recount the story, blending fiction and history from when the state was governed as the NEFA[1] to becoming the twenty-fourth state of India as Arunachal Pradesh in 1987.

Maying meets Lutor, the ageing veteran politician and the son of a shaman, who is loved by the people and has had a long and successful career in politics since the formation of the state, to share “the story of a long ago when everything had been different and full of possibilities”. As she runs through the flow of time from the past to the present, Maying ruminates over Lutor’s idea of the “original obsession” that all of us are born with and the power of “dreams” and “instinct”. As the story begins, Maying picks up an old journal marked NEFA notebook and shuffles through the old piece of memorabilia to reflect, “The lives of people in every village and district had changed since the time this piece of fern had been so carefully pressed in between the thin pages of the book”.     

Dai divides the book into five sections. The story opens with the view of a traditional house that stands on a hill with thick bamboo thickets and mountainous region. The author talks of the essence of dates and calendars in the lives of the people of a close-knit community in a remote part of the state, where tradition and family mattered. Time is an overarching theme in the novel. “Time had a method”, where everything happened in stages and history was written as it came. Dai’s novel recounts changes in time and history in the place and culture of the people of the state with emphasis on Pasighat, which was also her hometown.

Dai’s story interestingly accommodates an avalanche of landmark incidents in the history of the north-eastern state of India including battles against oppression starting from 1911,  the Achingmori incident (1953), the India-China War (1962), the liberation of Bangladesh (1971) and its impact on the state, the passing of the infamous Bill for Control of Organised Crime Act (APOCO), and also, on migration and infiltration of outsiders. References to attending boarding school in Shillong, going to Delhi for higher education, or taking long hours of ferrying across the tumultuous tributaries of the Brahmaputra river that flow in the region for a sarkari[2] job, Dai reflects through the fiction the sea of change experienced in the lives of men and women in terms of education and perceptions of security in moving in or out of their homes.    

Experiences of the horrors and violence in the face of insurgency, militancy and atrocities in the times of war that the people faced are vividly incorporated in some sections of the story. In times of uncertainty in the story, dreams and reality collide in a delirious mix of magic and mystery. Dai fuses myth as a consolation to the harsh realities of history. A mystic rain man heralds that change and loss of solitude cannot be halted. Though it is often reiterated that “We are safe in the hills” speedy changes in time made Lutor and his close friends rethink the credibility of this remark. Dai explodes beautiful metaphors that are specific to the culture, cross-cultural references to the exchange of people and culture from outside India, other parts of India and of the neighbouring states of Assam, Nagaland, and Manipur.   

In the shifting times, money and greed have engulfed traits of love and loyalty for one’s land and people. Time moved to stages of no return from how it was in the mythical time of the ancient civilization of the Kojum-Koja [3]of the land, to when politics seemed to overtake every move in the place. The story highlights the sentiments of the people in the midst of  the politics of inclusion and exclusion in the periphery.

As candidate for the office of Chief Minister, Lutor promises of development, “caught between a feeling of great humiliation and a pitying love for his homeland” but lost to his corrupt and crooked political rival Tanik, who had more money and men.  Varied interesting characters add flavour to the story. With the non-retreating timber trade, where greedy traders, politicians, local middlemen and forest mafia no longer care to uproot the whole of the virgin forest in the state, the ecology at stake is echoed in the corruption portrayed in the story. Lutor in a dire strait between the memory of a lost time acknowledges that times have changed but continued to believe and live in anticipation of a pan-Arunachal unity and hopeful idea of home.

Dai through Lutor’s nostalgia for a peaceful land and longing for a homeland devoid of greed and corruption, implicates that love can heal and restore the state to a humane land as it had been in the past. Time brought changes and the world infringed by investing more money into the state. While business boomed, Lutor, as the title suggest, looked outward to escape from the land not as one defeated but with a hope to explore newer possibilities so that he could return with a better tomorrow. 

In the engrossing historical novel, Escaping the land (2021), Dai works on a huge canvas to lyrically voice a tale of time, geography and changes that leads to a cohesion with the larger world.

[1] The North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA), originally known as the North-East Frontier Tracts (NEFT), was one of the political divisions during the Raj

[2] government

[3]  Kojum-Koja was supposed to be an ancient civilisation that established villages, part of the ancient tribal lore.

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Gracy Samjetsabam teaches English Literature and Communication Skills at Manipal Institute of Technology, MAHE, Manipal. She is also a freelance writer and copy editor. Her interest is in Indian English Writings, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, Culture Studies, and World Literature. 

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Categories
Review

Going by Keki N Daruwalla

Book Review by Indrashish Banerjee

Title: Going: Stories of Kinship

Author: Keki N Daruwalla

Publisher: Speaking Tiger

There are short stories where the ending is a collective culmination of all their subplots and themes, somewhat like a novel, but if you have read Somerset Mugham, you know what I mean. And there are stories which couldn’t care less. They move from one event to another, one subplot to another, make abstract observations and then suddenly come to an end. Maybe because every story must come to an end, but it’s the journey you must enjoy; it’s the journey that’s of greater importance. There are readers who like the former style – they appreciate its logical pattern of one thing leading to another. And there are readers who like the journey and believe disorderliness is a better reflection of life’s idiosyncrasies – and reflect on the sudden ending to connect it with what happened earlier.  It is a delight to discover a writer. I knew Keki N. Daruwalla’s works – For Pepper and Christ – but had never read him. And now that I have read Going: Stories of Kinship, I will move back and try out his other works.

Among Keki N. Daruwalla’s acclaimed short story collections are Sword and Abyss (1979), The Minister for Permanent Unrest and Other Stories (1996) and Love Across the Salt Desert (2011). His first novel, For Pepper and Christ, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Fiction Prize in 2010. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2014. But Keki N. Daruwalla is better known for his poetry. His poetry volumes include Under Orion, The Keeper of the Dead (winner of the Sahitya Academy Award, 1984), Landscapes (winner of Commonwealth Poetry Award, 1987) and the Map Maker. Most recently he was honoured with the Poet Laureate award at the Tata Literature Live, Mumbai Litfest, 2017.

Thematically connected short stories are in fashion. But it’s difficult to identify any common thread running across the stories in Going. Each one is different.

Sometimes that sudden or understated ending can be a reference to a subplot within the story. Lionidas Campbell, in ‘The Bhahmaputra Triology’, many years after making love to an Indian woman discovers that he had sired a son from the relationship – and the story ends there. It can sometimes be reflective of the larger message the story wants to convey.  After Ardeshir’s daughter, Arnavaz, elopes with a Muslim boy against her father’s wishes refusing to be dissuaded by her father’s attempt to invoke the history of persecution of Parsees by Muslims, Ardeshir is a heartbroken man.  At the end, while wallowing in grief, sitting on armchair, Ardeshir suddenly feels the “frail silhouette of Arnavaz adrift on his memories” – and a yearning for his daughter grips him. The climax makes two messages very clear. The helplessness of a man seeing personal concerns of his daughter triumphing over a need for historical justice; filial love prevailing over community loyalty and concerns about history.

As much as all the stories, to an extent, explore the inner lives of characters, Bikshu is more so. The entire story is about Bikshu’s inner journey, its conflicts, evolution, emotional layers with occasional detours to Bikshu’s past, his family and mother. At the end of the book, I discovered the commonality.  When you have read the stories and reflect on them as a collective, you feel they are about human relationships and how they evolve over time.

Indrasish Banerjee has been writing and publishing his works for quite some time. He has published in Indian dailies like Hindustan Times and Pioneer, and Café Dissensus, a literary magazine. Indrasish is also a book reviewer with Readsy Discovery. Indrasish stays and works in Bangalore, India. 

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