Tag: Sukant Deepak

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Contents

Borderless, September 2024

Art by Sohana Manzoor

Editorial

And Wilderness is Paradise Enow… Click here to read.

Translations

Raja O Praja or The King and His Subjects, an essay by Tagore, has been translated from Bengali by Himadri Lahiri. Click here to read.

Nazrul’s Roomu Jhoomu Roomu Jhoomu has been transcreated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

The Mirror by Mubarak Qazi has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.

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

Suprobhat or Good Morning by Tagore has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.

Poetry

Click on the names to read the poems

Rhys Hughes, Cal Freeman, Jackie Kabir, Jennifer McCormack, Pramod Rastogi, Miriam Bassuk, K B Ryan Joshua Mahindapala, Paul Mirabile, Shamik Banerjee, Craig Kirchner, Thomas Emate, Stuart MacFarlane, Supriya Javalgekar, George Freek, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, Michael Burch

Musings/Slices from Life

Finding the Fulcrum

Farouk Gulsara gives a poignant account of looking after an aged parent. Click here to read.

Watery World

Keith Lyons finds the whole world within a swimming pool. Click here to read.

Days that don’t Smell of Cakes and Candy

Priyanka Panwar muses on days which not much happens… Click here to read.

Rayban-dhan

Uday Deshwal revisits his life with his companion sunglass. Click here to read.

In Favour of a Genre…

Saeed Ibrahim argues in favour of short stories as a genre. Click here to read.

Musings of a Copywriter

In Shades of Grey – Hair and There, Devraj Singh Kalsi writes of adventures with premature greying. Click here to read.

Notes from Japan

In Sneaky Sneakers, Suzanne Kamata grins at life in Japan. Click here to read.

Essays

Ah Nana Bari!

Fakrul Alam writes nostalgically of his visits to Feni in Noakhali, a small town which now suffers from severe flooding due to climate change. Click here to read.

A Manmade Disaster or Climate Change?

Salma A Shafi writes of floods in Bangladesh from ground level. Click here to read.

A Doctor’s Diary: Life in the High Ranges

Ravi Shankar writes of his life in the last century among the less developed highlands of Kerala. Click here to read.

Stories

The Useless Idler

Paul Mirabile writes of a strange encounter with someone who calls himself an ‘idler’. Click here to read.

Imitation

Naramsetti Umamaheswararao explores parenting. Click here to read.

Final Hours

Mahila Iqbal gives a poignant story about aging. Click here to read.

Friends

G Venkatesh writes a story stirring environmental concerns. Click here to read.

Conversation

Ratnottama Sengupta converses with Reba Som, who recently brought out, Hop, Skip and Jump; Peregrinations of a Diplomat’s Wife. Click here to read.

Book Excerpts

An excerpt from Mineke Schipper’s Widows: A Global History. Click here to read.

An excerpt from Anuradha Marwah’s Aunties of Vasant Kunj. Click here to read.

Book Reviews

Somdatta Mandal reviews Karan Mujoo’s This Our Paradise: A Novel. Click here to read.

Rakhi Dalal reviews Swadesh Deepak’s A Bouquet of Dead Flowers translated from Hindi by Jerry Pinto, Pratik Kanjilal, Nirupama Dutt, Sukant Deepak. Click here to read.

Meenakshi Malhotra reviews Anuradha Marwah’s Aunties of Vasant Kunj. Click here to read.

Bhaskar Parichha reviews Ayurveda, Nation and Society: United Provinces, c. 1890–1950 by Saurav Kumar Rai. Click here to read.

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

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Categories
Editorial

And Wilderness is Paradise Enow…

Prayer Wheel at Nurulia, Ladakh. Photo Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara
We lock eyes, find glimmers
of smiles, trust our leaders.
We break bread with strangers
because there aren’t any.

--Imagine by Miriam Bassuk

Imagine the world envisioned by John Lennon. Imagine the world envisioned and partly materialised by Tagore in his pet twin projects of Santiniketan and Sriniketan, training institutes made with the intent of moving towards creating a work force that would dedicate their lives to human weal, to closing social gaps borne of human constructs and to uplifting the less privileged by educating them and giving them the means to earn a livelihood. You might well call these people visionaries and utopian dreamers, but were they? Tagore had hoped to inspire with his model institutions.  In 1939, he wrote in a letter: “My path, as you know, lies in the domain of quiet integral action and thought, my units must be few and small, and I can but face human problems in relation to some basic village or cultural area. So, in the midst of worldwide anguish, and with the problems of over three hundred millions staring us in the face, I stick to my work in Santiniketan and Sriniketan hoping that my efforts will touch the heart of our village neighbours and help them in reasserting themselves in a new social order. If we can give a start to a few villages, they would perhaps be an inspiration to some others—and my life work will have been done.”  But did we really have a new social order or try to emulate him?

If we had acted out of compassion and kindness towards redefining with a new social order, as Miriam Bassuk points out in her poem based on Lennon’s lyrics of Imagine, there would be no strangers. We’d all be friends living in harmony and creating a world with compassion, kindness, love and tolerance. We would not have wars or regional geopolitical tensions which act against human weal. Perhaps, we would not have had the issues of war of climate change take on the proportions that are wrecking our own constructs.

Natural disasters, floods, fires, landslides have affected many of our lives. Bringing us close to such a disaster is an essay by Salma A Shafi at ground level in Noakhali. More than 4.5 million were affected and 71 died in this disaster. Another 23 died in the same spate of floods in Tripura with 65,000 affected. We are looking at a single region here, but such disasters seem to be becoming more frequent. And yet. there had been a time when Noakhali was an idyllic vacation spot as reflected in Professor Fakrul Alam’s nostalgic essay, filled with memories of love, green outdoors and kindnesses. Such emotions reverberate in Ravi Shankar’s account of his medical adventures in the highlands of Kerala, a state that suffered a stupendous landslide last month. While Shafi shows how extreme rainfall can cause disasters, Keith Lyons writes of water, whose waves in oceanic form lap landmasses like bridges. He finds a microcosm of the whole world in a swimming pool as migrants find their way to New Zealand too. Farouk Gulsara muses on kindness and caregiving while Priyanka Panwar ponders about ordinary days. Saeed Ibrahim gives a literary twist to our musings.   Tongue in cheek humour is woven into our nonfiction section by Suzanne Kamata’s notes from Japan, Devraj Singh Kalsi’s piece on premature greying and Uday Deshwal’s paean to his sunglasses!

Humour is wrought into poetry by Rhys Hughes. Supriya Javelkar and Shamik Banerjee have cheeky poems that make you smile. We have poetry on love by Michael Burch and poetry for Dylan Thomas by Ryan Quinn Flanagan. Miriam Bassuk has described a Utopian world… but very much in the spirit of our journal. Variety is brought into our journal with poetry from Jackie Kabir, Jennifer McCormack, Craig Kirchner, Stuart MacFarlane, George Freek, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal and many more.

In translations, we have Nazrul lyrics transcreated from Bengali by Professor Alam and poetry from Korean by Ihlwha Choi. We pay our respects to an eminent Balochi poet who passed on exactly a year ago, Mubarak Qazi, by carrying a translation by Fazal Baloch. Tagore’s Suprobhat (Good morning) has been rendered in English from Bengali. His descriptions of the morning are layered and amazing — with a hint of the need to reconstruct our world, very relevant even today.  A powerful essay by Tagore called Raja O Praja (The King and His Subjects), has been translated by Himadri Lahiri.

Our fiction hosts two narratives that centre around childhood, one by Naramsetti Umamaheswararao and another by G Venkatesh, though with very different approaches. Mahila Iqbal relates a poignant tale about aging, mental health and neglect, the very antithesis of Gulsara’s musing. Paul Mirabile has given a strange story about a ‘useless idler’.

A short story collection has been reviewed by Rakhi Dalal, Swadesh Deepak’s A Bouquet of Dead Flowers, translated from Hindi by Jerry Pinto, Pratik Kanjilal, Nirupama Dutt, Sukant Deepak. Somdatta Mandal has written about a book by a Kashmiri immigrant which is part based on lived experiences and part fictive, Karan Mujoo’s This Our Paradise: A Novel. Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed Ayurveda, Nation and Society: United Provinces, c. 1890–1950 by Saurav Kumar Rai, a book which shows how healthcare was even a hundred years ago, politicised. Meenakshi Malhotra has reviewed Anuradha Marwah’s novel, Aunties of Vasant Kunj, of which we also have an excerpt. The other excerpt is from Mineke Schipper’s Widows: A Global History. Ratnottama Sengupta converses with Reba Som, author of Hop, Skip and Jump; Peregrinations of a Diplomat’s Wife.

We have more content that adds to the vibrancy of the issue. Do pause by this issue and take a look. This issue would not have been possible without all your writings. Thank you for that. Huge thanks to our readers and our team, without whose support we could not have come this far. I would especially like to thank Sohana Manzoor for her continued supply of her fabulous and distinctive artwork and Gulsara for his fabulous photographs.

Let us look forward to a festive season which awakens each autumn and stretches to winter. May we in this season find love, compassion and kindness in our hearts towards our whole human family.

Have a wonderful month!

Mitali Chakravarty

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

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Review

A Bouquet of Dead Flowers

Book Review by Rakhi Dalal

Book Title: A Bouquet of Dead Flowers

Author: Swadesh Deepak

Translators: Jerry Pinto, Pratik Kanjilal, Nirupama Dutt, Sukant Deepak

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

“Hindi literature, Swadesh Deepak maintained, had to be forced out of its comfort zone. The reader here is treated no less savagely,” writes Jerry Pinto in his introduction to this collection of ten stories by Swadesh Deepak, an author and playwright who was born in Rawalpindi on 6th  August, 1942. After his masters in English Literature, he taught for a long time at the Gandhi Memorial National College, Ambala Cantonment. Following a period of illness from 1991 to 1997, when he had little contact with anyone other than his family and close friends, he made a momentous return to the world of letters with an autobiographical account of his illness, Maine Mandu Nahin Dekha[1], and the play Sabse Udaas Kavita[2]. He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 2004. He has a total of 15 published books to his name including short-story collections such as Tamasha, Baal Bhagwan[3]and Kisi Ek Pedh Ka Naam Lo[4]and hugely successful plays such as Court Martial and Kaal Kothri[5]. In 2006 he left home for a walk and never returned. He has been missing ever since.

These stories, deeply unsettling, challenge readers by taking them into a world where unknown forces work mysteriously, upending and affecting the lives of its characters, leaving them vulnerable at the mercy of chance happenings which rarely bring them relief. Much akin to what Thomas Hardy called as the Immanent Will — a blind and indifferent force determining the fates (and generally blighting the lives) of the privileged and the common people alike.

Whether it is the hunger for food, a ravenous longing of the starved and the deprived as portrayed in the stories ‘Hunger’ and ‘The Child God’, the mystery around the fate of a loved one in ‘For the Wind Cannot Read’, the struggle with depression in ‘Pears from Rawalpindi’ or ‘Horsemen’[, the unrequited yearning for a life of togetherness in ‘Dread and Dead End’, the author’s masterful play of the elements comes to the fore with an intensity that shakes and stuns the reader. Pinto refers to the author as the master of neo gothic,

The sunlight, the wind, the trees, the figure of a broken man, appears again and again. It seems as if it is just not the fate but also the forces of natural elements that keep rattling the course of the lives of the characters.     The trees stand as guards, or sway in delight or offer a refuge, the sunlight “makes a hesitant arrival” sitting quietly or climbing the hills or sometimes streaking in the rooms, the wind is at times playful and at others vindictive. Then there are the flowers, the dead flowers of memories, whose bouquets one keeps holding, clinging to and clasping. And then there is the poetic play of words – “a pale yellow georgette afternoon in November” – bringing to life the patchy sunlight of autumn.

In the figure of broken man which appears again and again in stories, the author seems to be questioning the role that society has forced upon a man – that of a provider of the family, a role sometimes begrudgingly assumed in the stories because “no one respects a man without work, no matter how talented he is.” 

In each story, the author weaves a tale that becomes a commentary — on society and its inherent evils, on relationships within a family stifled by arrogance, ignorance or circumstances and quietly working on the minds of those inhabiting it, on human greed engendered by depravity, hunger or lust, on the mysteriousness of fate whose force makes the mighty cower.  

The translation, well executed, offers a closer reading experience and leaves a bilingual reader with the wish to approach the author’s works in original as well. I must make a special note on the introduction by the acclaimed writer and translator Jerry Pinto who offers a peek into the mind of Swadesh Deepak through a couple of excerpts of the author’s conversations with his psychiatrist and also with a convict brought to the hospital for evaluation. Perhaps these ideas had haunted him in the mental ward of the hospital and later seeped into his stories. Pinto in the introduction not only seeks to make sense of Deepak’s writing but also makes for a compelling reason to read his works – to read on without looking over one’s shoulders.

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[1] I have not seen Mandu

[2] The Saddest Poem ever Written

[3] The Child God

[4] Name a Tree, any Tree

[5] Dark Chamber

Rakhi Dalal is an educator by profession. When not working, she can usually be found reading books or writing about reading them. She writes at https://rakhidalal.blogspot.com/ .

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

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