Tag: Tamil

A Doctor’s Diary: Life in the High Ranges

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date September 16, 2024
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By Ravi Shankar

The van suddenly went quiet. Night had fallen and our driver was negotiating the bends and turns in the road carefully. The yellow fog lights cut through the mists lighting up the dense forests on both sides. We were in Idukki district in the western ghats of the southern Indian state of Kerala. This region is called the high ranges. Areas above 600 m in height from the mean sea level in the central Travancore region of Kerala have rich biodiversity and a cooler climate. The weather was beginning to get colder.

We were ill prepared for the cold as we were students from Thrissur in the plains, where it was always hot and sticky. The road continued over the top of a dam. The security officer wanted to talk to us in person before letting us through. We boldly rushed out in our slippers and lungis[1] only to return at double the speed to the warmth of the van. It was freezing outside. The short but intense exposure to the cold may have frozen many vital organs. During winter, the temperatures here can dip to around 4 degrees Celsius once the sun goes down.

We were on a college trip to Idukki while studying for our undergraduate medical (MBBS) course. We had visited Thekkady and Peeramede and planned to spend the night in the hill station of Munnar. The trip was long and tiring as we drove through the mist along winding roads. The night in the hotel was freezing but we managed with the clothes we had, and the blankets provided by the hotel. The steaming tea with cardamom was the highlight of the morning. We hungrily gulped down several cups to chase away the cold.

I eventually completed my MBBS and got an offer to work at a hospital in the high ranges. The place was Ellakkal at a height of about 1100 to 1200 m. The road diverted from the main highway to Munnar at a place called Pallivasal, the site of one of the earliest hydropower stations in Kerala. The village is also known as the gateway to Munnar. The area had a mix of Malyali and Tamil culture. Many poor families from Travancore had migrated to Idukki in search of land and better prospects. Tamil families had migrated too. The nearest village to Ellakkal was Kunchithanny (little water in Tamil). I had seen a similar system of naming places after water in Nepal. There was Kalopani (black water), Ratopani (red water), Ghorepani (where horses are watered) and Tadapani (far water) among others.

St Xavier’s hospital where I was working was situated up an incline from the main road. The location was spectacular. The hospital was established in the 1960s and was once the only source of medical care for a large region but now several clinics and hospitals had been established in towns and villages. The view across the valley was breathtaking. In the evening the mist slowly moved down the valley eventually reaching the river far below. The thickly forested green hills draped in thick white mist that slowly cleared as the Sun gained in strength was the highlight of my mornings! The hospital was run by the Medical Sisters of St Joseph and owned several acres of land on the hill. They grew coffee and cardamom and other spices. My quarters were a newly constructed annexe to an old house situated halfway up the hill. The view from the veranda was spectacular. I used to spend my afternoons and evenings drinking in the magnificent views and reading my books and magazines. The hospital still exists and provides affordable health care to the people.

Dr Rodney Sebastian, the other doctor at the hospital had graduated from Kottayam Medical College. He was from the high ranges and a devout Christian. Many evenings there were prayer meetings at the hospital and people from the neighbourhood participated. The convent for the nuns was nearby. There was an old nun who was fond of gardening. Flowers grew well in the rich soil and the cool, moist climate. Multi-coloured roses were the highlight of the garden. There was a priest (Father) who lived on the other side of the hill next to the church. The deep phut-phut of his Enfield Bullet as he rode to the hospital was distinct. This heavy motorbike has a solid presence and is stable to drive on rough roads and undulating terrain. My cousin brother used to also ride one.

In the mid-1990s there was no internet and no mobile phones. The hospital had a landline. We lived more in the moment. Letters were still an important means of communication. My mother used to say that the arrival of a letter was as good as the arrival of a person. I have not posted a letter for a long time now choosing to go with email, voice chat, Skype and WhatsApp. During those days these were, however, all in the future. I never imagined the changes that would happen during the next two decades when I began working at Ellakkal.

We mostly had outpatients though we did admit people. Most of the admissions were for fever. Leptospirosis[2] was common. We also had X-ray facilities, and we sutured many wounds mostly caused by farm injuries. We did not handle surgeries and deliveries. We did not have any intensive care units and our lab investigations were basic.

We used to occasionally drop in to meet a doctor couple, Dr Verghese at Kunchithanny. His clinic was named John’s clinic, and he was called Dr Johnson by the locals. We knew some quacks, that is unqualified self-styled doctors, also practised in this area. The nearest big town was Adimali Adimali had a movie theatre, and a huge rock dominated the town. There were tribal settlements on top of the rock. The tribals were a deprived community. Long distance buses as local transport was something peculiar to the high ranges. The buses started from the town of Ernakulam over a hundred kilometres away and reached the high ranges through Kothamangalam. The buses had glass windows and were comfortable. Ellakkal was on the route to Rajakkad (literally the King’s Forest). There were many places named after rocks (para in Malayalam). Poopara (Flower rock), Santhanpara, Chaturangapara viewpoint were the most prominent.

Munnar was famous for heavy, dense white fogs that were almost opaque. The place was covered by a heavy mist most afternoons and evenings. The mist began a few kilometres from the town. Drinking cups of cardamom flavoured tea in the cold mist was a highlight of my visits to the place. The restaurant also served crisp dosas. We went on a trip to the Eravikulam National Park which took a lot of planning as both of us (Rodney and I) would be away from the hospital for over eight hours. Some of our local friends accompanied us. The route was through rolling Kanan Devan hills and expansive tea gardens.

The hills are owned by Tata Tea, and they grow the famous Kanan Devan brand of tea. I used to remember their advertisements starring the megastar, Mohan Lal. The park is famous for the Nilgiri Tahr. I remember it also for the leeches. We were badly set upon by them and the bites bled for over twelve hours. Once I also took a bus ride with my cousin to Maraiyur near the Tamil Nadu border. The route was through spawling tea estates. Maraiyur was an end of the Road Town those days. The place was famous for sandalwood. The security checks were strict to ensure people did not decamp with a few thousands of rupees worth of sandalwood in their pockets.

I visited Ellakkal once more after I left toward the end of the last century. The ensuing three decades must have brought about a lot of change to this spice garden. Tourism has boomed and Idukki district is a prime tourist destination. Internet has made steady advances and cable TV is now common. Several resorts have opened, and the roads have improved. They have opened a hospital called Morningstar. The pace of life has quickened with all the city folks coming to escape from their hectic city lives. Someone once said about Munnar and I quote, “In Munnar, time slows down, allowing us to savour every moment, appreciate the present, and find joy in

[1] A sarong is called a lungi in South Asia

[2] A blood infection caused by contaminated water and soil

Dr. P Ravi Shankar is a faculty member at the IMU Centre for Education (ICE), International Medical University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He enjoys traveling and is a creative writer and photographer.

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Review

Maya Nagari: Stories of Bombay-Mumbai

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date June 14, 2024
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Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

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

Editors: Shanta Gokhale, Jerry Pinto

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] Betting or gambling dens

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

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Musings

The Elusive Utopia?

By Farouk Gulsara

When I was growing up, the radio was the musical score constantly playing in the background. Blaring between Tamil movie songs and radio dramas were news of the hour and current issue discussions. The things that got imprinted on my impressionable mind as I was transforming from a teenager to a young adult were about violence, wars and bombings. I remember about the war in Vietnam as it was close to home. For every peace talk and the end of war announcement, there would pop up another bombing and a barrage of casualties. My simple mind wondered when the war would end, but it never did. It went on for so long that they had a Tamil film in 1970 named Vietnam Veedu (House of Vietnam), referring to a household forever in family feuds and turmoil.

Along with the war in Vietnam, people came by boat to the shores of Malaysia. The then leaders, in the late 1970s, dealing with a poor economic climate as they were reeling from a devastating racial riot, were not so cordial with their arrival. Malaysia went into the bad books of the international arena when the Marines were issued a ‘shoot-at-sight’ order on Vietnamese boat people by the then Deputy Prime Minister, Mahathir Muhammad. The refugees were eventually placed in barb-wired concentration camps-like holding centres. The last of the boat people left Malaysia in 2005. Even today, many former refugees who had started life anew elsewhere return to Pulau Bidong to perform ancestral worship or to remind themselves and their descendants of the hell they escaped.

Just as I thought Malaysia had seen the last of the people displaced from their homes gracing their shores, Malaysia had to play host to economic refugees from Myanmar, the ethnic Myanmarese and the Rohingyas. And the cycle of not wanting to spend the country’s precious resources and accepting them on humanitarian grounds continues to date.

My ever optimist friend is dreaming of a utopia on Earth. Her idea of utopia is one where people are kind to each other, not hurling grenades or aiming intercontinental missiles at each other and accepting each other’s citizens with open arms. In fact, in her world, there would be borders. She dreams of a world where people are happy, able to enjoy the fruit of their existence, a world where there is no destruction of Mother Earth and none of the species of plants and animals go extinct. She envisages a space where everyone communicates with one another with kindness without hurting their psyche. The search is still on, where people do not look at each other with scorn and suspicion and are willing to accept another as a fellow sibling from a common mother. She dreams of a borderless world where heart, mind and territories are a continual flow of ideas and messages for the betterment of humankind. Unfortunately, despite all the strides the world has seemingly made, she remains unhappy and is getting more discontent by the day.

“Why is there so much hate? Why is there war after all the wisdom we have supposedly learnt as evidenced by our scientific advancements?” she asks. “Are we just developing creative ways to annihilate each other until the whole race reaches the point of no return?”

I see our newspapers and digital media. I became convinced that humans are evil and anthropocentric. They do not bother about other living beings. They are only interested in fending for themselves, fattening themselves, usurping treasures and fattening their coffers, and rapaciously wanting to leave a legacy for their descendants to savour to eternity. In typical situations, the world can accommodate all of Man’s needs, but not their greed.

Innately, I reminisce about the times when I was young, trees were tall, the air was clean, and adults were trustworthy. We long to go back to those innocent days.

Upon closer scrutiny, we realise we were presented with a false image of serenity. Beneath the surface of sobriety, even then, trenches were built to gun down brothers and chemical factories to neutralise them biologically. We think we are in the worst of times, but historians differ. Our current era is the most peaceful and safest throughout our existence. The chance of an average man in the current time, unlike his ancestors, to be directly involved or affected physically by wars is quite remote.

Our ancestors did not need the media to know the world’s plight because it often happened at their doorstep. The swords carved out people’s fate line, not consensus or democracy.

Life is cyclical. Peace and chaos have alternated all through our history. Like a phoenix, we keep rising from the rubble of destruction only to be broken to smithereens. Torrents of events around us bear testimony to this fact. It has been like this since time immemorial.

There was a time when Angkor Wat was the talk of travellers who could not stop praising man’s colossal achievement. With mind-binding engineering marvels, it testified to what the human mind could think next. Then, it got lost in the folly of human activities, only to be discovered as an ancient relic by passing foreigners.

Isfahan, an essential stop along the Silk Road, was once hailed as heaven on Earth with the highest level of culture. People with exquisite taste for art, literature, music and architecture made it their second home. Babur, who established the Mughal Dynasty, never synced with India as he felt the Indians were less cultured than the Persians because of what he was exposed to in the Safavid capital. Isfahan’s own glory brought its destruction.

All through Man’s sojourn on Earth, it has been anything but peaceful. The funny thing is that, amid all the destruction, we still managed to bring up our humanity and the science that would save us from extinction. In spite and amidst all the mayhem, we kept famine at bay, found cures for many infectious diseases and sent rockets to the moon and beyond. Paradoxically, the science that saved us becomes a thorn in our progress. From muskets to rifles to intercontinental missiles to the press of a red button, it is becoming easier to plan out our destruction.

So, the world has never been peaceful, and humans have not been kind. What can we do about it? Do you brood at our shortsightedness, or are we like Sisyphus? Knowing pretty well that, Sisyphus destined for life with the punishment of pushing a boulder up a hill only to see it roll down and for him to repeat the whole exercise again and again, he can take two paths. He can perform the task without thinking, like an automaton, go mad and die, or the alternative is finding simple pleasures in the seemingly mundane task. He could challenge himself to do it faster, explore newer routes to roll the boulder or experiment with various tools to aid in his task.

We continue doing our bit for humanity, knowing very well that it is just a drop in the ocean. Our efforts to promote peace and brotherhood will trigger small pockets of change and hopefully snowball into something earth-shattering for a good reason.

War, hardship and tragedy are bound to continue. It is too intertwined in our DNA. Many are even convinced that for seismic changes to occur, we need jolts and uncertainties. All these wars may be part of our search for a perfect system to pave Earth’s peace. A war to end all wars? Now, where have we heard that one before?

All through its existence, the Universe has seen it all before. If one were to believe Graham Hancock, the documentary maker or a pseudo-historian as some may call him, then one would be convinced that the world has experienced all these and even greater things before, only to lose everything because of human greed. Some other belief systems are confident that time does not go in a linear fashion but rather in a cyclical fashion. All that is happening today gives the Universe a deja vu.

Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.

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Excerpt

Out of Sri Lanka

Title: Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas

Editors: Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett.

Publisher: Penguin India (Vintage)

AAZHIYAAL
(b. 1968)

Aazhiyaal (the pen name of Mathubashini Ragupathy) was born in Trincomalee in Eastern Sri Lanka. She taught English at the Vavuniya Campus, Jaffna University, before moving to Australia in 1997 where she worked for two decades in the IT sector and commercial management in Canberra. Aazhiyaal has published four collections of poetry in Tamil: Uraththup Pesa (2000), Thuvitham (2006), Karunaavu (2013) and Nedumarangalaai Vazhthal (2020), the last honoured by Canada’s Tamil Literary Garden. Her poems have appeared in anthologies and have been translated into several languages. She in turn has translated Australian Aboriginal poetry into Tamil (Poovulagaik Kattralum Kettalum, 2017). Aazhiyaal writes about women’s place within patriarchy and uses her work to make sense of the war in Sri Lanka: ‘I believe that poetry is the antidote to the present rat-race. It is needed, it is necessary.’

Unheeded Sights

After the rains
the tiled roofs shone
sparklingly clean.
The sky was not yet minded
to become a deeper blue.
The tar roads reminded me
intermittently of rainbows.
From the entire surface of the earth
a ﬁne smoke arose
like the smoke of frankincense, or akil wood,
the earth’s scent stroking the nostrils,
fragrant as a melody.

As the army truck coming towards me
drives away,
a little girl transfers her candy-ﬂoss
from one hand to the other
raises her right hand up high
and waves her tiny ﬁngers.

And like the sweet surprise
of an answering air-letter
all the soldiers standing in the truck
wave their hands, exactly like her.

The blood that froze in my veins
for an instant, in amazement,
ﬂows again rapidly, asking aloud,
‘War? In this land?
Who told you?’

[tr. from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström]

BASHANA ABEYWARDANE
(b. 1972)

Rohitha Bāshana Abeywardane was a member of the founding editorial board and later editor in chief of the Sinhala alternative weekly newspaper Hiru. In 2003, he was one of the activists who organised the Sinhala-Tamil Art Festival. His journalistic commitments brought on threats to his life, and he had to leave Sri Lanka. He continues to publish and coordinates Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, an organisation founded by journalists in exile. Following a stay in the Heinrich Böll House, Langenbroich, Abeywardane took part in the PEN Writers in Exile Program from September 2007 to August 2010. Today, he lives in Germany with his wife.

The Window of the Present

Nightmares, long dead,
peer through the shattered panes
of the window of the present.

The dead of the south, killed on the streets,
with bullet-riddled skulls,
walk once again, through an endless night,

and those of the north drowned in deluges of ﬁre
when rains of steel drench their unforgiving earth,
gaze through the shards of glass empty eyed;

as slaughtering armies, prowl under starless skies,
upholding sovereignty
with blood-soaked hands.

PACKIYANATHAN AHILAN
(b. 1970)

Born in Jaffna in the north of Sri Lanka, Packiyanathan Ahilan has lived through the thirty-year civil war. An academic as well as a poet, he has published three collections of poetry and is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Jaffna. As well as writing about the visual arts, poetry, theatre and heritage, he curates art exhibitions and is co-editor of Reading Sri Lankan Society and Culture (Volumes 1 & 2). Ahilan’s poetry is sparse and staccato, like a heartbeat: he is one of the most inﬂuential poets writing in Tamil in Sri Lanka today.

Days in the Bunker III

Good Friday.
The day they nailed you
to the cross.

A scorching wind
blew across the land and the sea.
One or two seagulls
sailed in an immaculate sky.
The wind
howling in the palm trees
spoke of unfathomable terror.
That was the last day of our village.

We ﬁshermen came ashore,
only the waves
returned to the sea.
When the sun fell into the ocean,
we too fell
on our knees
and wept.

And our lament
turned slowly into night.

In the distance
our village was burning
like a body being cremated.

Good Friday.
The day they nailed you
to the cross.

[tr. from Tamil by Sascha Ebeling]

A Poem about Your Village and My Village

1
I do not know.
I do not know if your village
is near the ocean with its wailing waves
or near a forest.
I do not know your roads
made from red earth and
lined with tall jute palms.
I do not know
the birds of your village
that come and sing in springtime.
I do not know
the tiny ﬂowers along the roadsides
that open their eyelids when the rains pour down.
I do not know the stories
you tell during long nights
to the sound of drumbeats
or the ponds in your village
where the moon goes to sleep.

2
Tonight,
when even the wind is full of grief,
you and I know one thing:
Our villages have become
small
or perhaps large
cemeteries.
The sea with its dancing waves
is covered with blood.
All forests with their
trees reaching up to the sky
are ﬁlled with scattered ﬂesh
and with the voices of lost souls.
During nights of war
dogs howl, left to themselves,
and all roads and the thousands
of footprints our ancestors left behind
are grown over with grass.
We know all this,
you and I.
We now know about
the ﬂowers that died,
the abandoned lines of poetry,
the moments no one wants to remember.

3
But
do you know
if the burnt grass
still has roots,
or if the abandoned poems
can still be rooted in words?
If, like them, you do not know
whether our ancient ﬂames
are still silently smouldering
deep down in that ocean
covered with blood,
know this today:
They say that
after he had lain in hiding
for a thousand years
one day
the sun rose again.

[tr. from Tamil by Sascha Ebeling]

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Out of Sri Lanka shines light upon a long-neglected national literature by bringing together, for the first time, Sri Lankan and diasporic poetry written in and after Independence. Featuring over a hundred poets writing in English, or translated from Tamil and Sinhala reshapes our understanding of migrational poetics and the poetics of atrocity. Poets long out of print appear beside exciting new talents; works written in the country converse with poetry from the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. Poems in traditional and in open forms, concrete poems, spoken word poems, and experimental post-lyric hybrids of poetry and prose, appear with an introduction explaining Sri Lanka’s history.

There are poems here about love, art, nature – and others exploring critical events: the Marxist JVP insurrections of the 1970s and 80s, the 2004 tsunami and its aftermath, recent bombings linked with the demonisation of Muslim communities. The civil war between the government and the separatist Tamil Tigers is a haunting and continual presence. A poetry of witness challenges those who would erase, rather than enquire into, the country’s troubled past. This anthology affirms the imperative to remember, whether this relates to folk practices suppressed by colonisers, or more recent events erased from the record by Sinhalese nationalists.

ABOUT THE EDITORS:

Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds, to Sri Lankan Tamils. His first book of poems, Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe, 2014), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. His second, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe, 2019) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the T.S. Eliot Prize and Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. After posts at Cambridge, Durham and Birmingham, he now teaches at Harvard.

Seni Seneviratne, a writer of English and Sri Lankan heritage published by Peepal Tree Press, with books including Wild Cinnamon and Winter Skin (2007), The Heart of It (2012), and Unknown Soldier (2019), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, a National Poetry Day Choice and highly commended in the Forward Poetry Prizes 2020.

She is currently working on an LGBTQ project with Sheffield Museums entitled Queering the Archive and her latest collection, The Go-Away Bird, was released in October 2023. She lives in Derbyshire.

Shash Trevett is a Tamil from Sri Lanka who came to the UK to escape the civil war. She is a poet and a translator of Tamil poetry into English. Her pamphlet From a Borrowed Land was published in 2021 by Smith|Doorstop.

Shash has been on judging panels for the PEN Translates awards and the London Book Fair, and was a Visible Communities Translator in Residence at the National Centre for Writing. Shash is a Ledbury Critic, reviewing for PN Review and the Poetry Book Society and is a Board Member of Modern Poetry in Translation. She lives in York.

Slices from Life

Serenading Sri Lanka

Photographs and Narrative by Mohul Bhowmick

Sri Lanka can be savoured best via its street food stalls; the aroma of the spices that emanates from the flurry of dishes left drying in the hot sun is supposed to hold the flavour of the country in its entirety.

Quite appropriately, I step out of the airport in Colombo just as dark clouds assemble overhead for an impromptu November gathering. The path to the bus terminal is waylaid in the melee, and the eventual taxi that comes around is met with immense gratitude for the warmth it emanates from within.

Meanwhile, the clouds have picked up pace and lambasted in full strength upon my flimsy raincoat. As the taxi — a Tata Nano — pulls out of the airport, I read a sign that tells me, rather ominously, ‘Welcome to Sri Lanka!’

But have I arrived? The drizzle accompanies me all day even as I try to venture out northwest from my dorm near the Galle Face Green towards Independence Square and Viharamahadevi Park. The park has a tinge of tenderness that makes me long for home barely six hours after I have left.

The soldier who has been entrusted to protect the monument of Gautama in the centre of the park slights me at first by asking me to put my camera away, but something about my nationality sparks enough curiousity and reverence in him to apologise and show me around its premises.

Named after the mother of the great Sri Lankan king Dutugemunu [161-137 BCE], who united the island under his banner after generations of oppression from Indian invaders, the park is tranquil in a manner that only the moneyed can afford to be. To be welcomed here by a member of the Lankan military seems ironic to me. Quite intrinsically, I discover that the affluent neighbourhood of Cinnamon Gardens is merely a stone’s throw away.

The sunset at Galle Face Green is where I lay my eyes upon the Indian Ocean for the first time; the gentle disappearance of the disk of fire in its graceful attire with lakhs of denizens of the city in attendance is not an event to be forgotten in a hurry.

It strikes me in the bouts of consciousness I still have with me on the start-stop train to Anuradhapura the next morning, which miraculously manages to reach the ancient capital of the island only moments after its scheduled time of arrival despite having spent about fifteen stoppages in the rough-hewn greenery of north-central Lanka.

The Isurumuni Royal Temple, Anuradhapura.

The Vanni, which separates the north from Anuradhapura, begins here, and I do not think I have gathered enough courage to bypass it just yet.

The Maha Sri Jaya Bodhi — a sapling of the Bodhi Tree under which the ascetic Sakyamuni had sat all night in meditation in the fifth century BCE and attained Enlightenment in Gaya — transposes much of the tranquillity one must have felt had Gautama himself been around; instead, hundreds of his lay followers deify his idol and consecrate his ideals with flowers and oaths of incorruptibility.

The compound where the Maha Bodhi stands allows one the permission to whisk the mind away from its constant whirl of thought and towards action based on feeling; its way, as Gautama’s, holds that offering the grant of ‘self-realisation’ to one’s fellow man is far more sumptuous a gift than an endowment of land or capital can ever accomplish.

Novice monks at the Ruwanwella Dagoba in Anuradhapura.

The Ruwanwella Dagoba, which the great Dutugemunu had painstakingly built, offers the refuge that the Maha Bodhi implores one to seek by going inwards. Two quarts of the Buddha’s relics are enshrined here, and the inflow of visitors ensures that the joyful policemen on duty are hard put to shred their visages of quietude, which one would have moments ago thought to be beyond them.

The next morning, with a German fellow traveller — whom I met at dinner while watching India decimate New Zealand on television in the semifinal of the cricket World Cup — I excavate whatever innards of peace and serenity I could from the Isurumuni Royal Temple.

My new friend from Germany tells me of of his experiences while travelling in Japan. He explains how he had made good use of the public parks (greens) at night as the locals did not use them after dark. He did not have money to sleep in hostels/ hotels and used benches in the public parks instead!

I offer him freshly plucked oranges from the gardens abutting the temple, where princes and princesses of an earlier age used to amble while seeking matches.

I get so drawn into the ethics that Gautama’s teachings must have instilled among the laypeople of the island that I almost forget to notice when my landlord — from whom I had also borrowed a bicycle — casually doubles the rate of his homestay when I check out. I learn — only much later — that he is no believer in the path Sakyamuni trod and speaks Tamil.

Sigiriya seems much hotter than Anuradhapura¹ was, and I write this even as the sun goes down and I climb up to a hidden rock far from the one which gives the town its name. The sun sets farther still from the Sigiriya Galla, and along with a bunch of British fellow travellers, I enjoy the last beads of light seeping past the horizon.

My evening is considerably brightened when our guide Vasu points me towards a green-looking hillock supposed to be the one Hanuman brought from the Himalayas as he sought for the life restoring ‘sanjeevani’ herb. While descending, a girl from Cornwall shrieks in considerable awe of the girth of the trunk of the first elephant she has ever seen.

The hike up Kasyapa’s fortress² takes little effort, and the sparse crowd makes it feel worthwhile all the more. My newfound British friends — devoid of the SAARC³ protection of a reduced entry ticket to the top — climb the eastward facing Pidurangala instead. They tell me much later that they found the visage of Sigiriya quite appealing from the top of the latter; in a picture they show me, I cannot help but speculate that the black spot on the top of the rock was my shadow.

A dip in a hidden lake authorised by the owner of the backpacker’s hostel we are in is sprinkled liberally with views of the fortress in the backdrop; even the arrival of a slimy water snake that nibbles at my friend Jackson Price — a former telecommunications manager from Bristol — is not enough to shatter our sense of innate wellbeing.

There is just about enough time to catch the temple near the centre of Dambulla town unawares before Rapahel Nuding — a mechanical engineer from Stuttgart — and I take the bus south to Kandy. The carvings on the rocks inspire us both differently; me to poetry and him to decode how it could possibly have been done without the help of modern-age machinery.

Kandy is damp and misty when we arrive; the flecks of raindrops prance around nicely as neither of us wants to close the window shades of the rusty old bus we are travelling in. The lake can be sensed before we can see it; within an hour, we are back in the area to witness the ceremony at the Temple of the Tooth Relic where the dante dhatu, or the tooth relic, is displayed to laypeople.

I help Raphael tuck into his — and my first this trip — masala dosa in the hordes of Tamil restaurants near the temple; I wonder if he asks for a second helping of the mango lassi to cool his inflamed tongue down or merely because he has liked the sensation the frozen — and possibly preserved — fruit. He stays back for a day, but I sling my bag to get on the morning train to Nuwara Eliya, having had enough of the cultural capital of Lanka already.

The bitter cold that greets me in Nuwara Eliya is only slightly lessened by the endless cups of tea that keep rolling through the night at the Laughing Leopards backpackers’ hostel. I struggle to explain to Helen Brinkmann, a post-graduate student from Dortmund, why I shall go to bed in tears having watched Australia demolish India in the final of the World Cup; the memories keep plaguing me a few days later in Ella when I sit down to get a grip upon myself and form an understanding of the ill-fated event.

Of the twin haunts of Nuwara Eliya and Ella, it is the journey that fascinates me the most; the rickety old contraption that passes off as a train is as old as I am in spirit and wanders only slightly off the gorgeous trails that have to perforce be left behind. Quite like the train, I am too enamoured by the countryside to trade it for the capital a week later.

The hills that rise from the extensive green wildernesses filled with shrubs of undefinable assortment catch my eye in Ella, and it is some time before I can catch a grip of my sentiments and force myself to sit down. The bats and monkeys that gather in numbers at the Ravana Ella — or Ravana’s cave — scare me out of my wits before I can even put my foot into the mouth of the opening. Outside, the sun shines generously on a creek drifting past the hills in a muted whirr that only the sapient can perceive.

It speaks highly of the natural largesse that Sri Lanka possesses. Within hours of leaving the cool climes and peaks of Ella, I arrive at sea level, and the Indian Ocean peeks in patches to the left when the bus turns right from Matara, the southernmost tip of the isle. Indeed, I have breakfast in the hills and lunch on the coast.

Mirissa, where I am headed next, brags of pristine beaches uninjured by the droves of tourists that fill it during the season. On arrival that evening, I find a rock to the west that garnishes a panorama that is stunning. My first encounter with kottu roti is astride a charitable helping of coconut sambal which my tongue finds excitable, and I tell myself that I am finally in the south.

Excursions are made to the beaches that litter the southern Lankan coast without rhyme or reason, or even distinction to one’s name or creed. Weligama, Midigama, Ahangama, the air force base at Koggala, Habaraduwa and Unawatuna all become names interchangeable with rapture perpetuated by the lack of inaccessibility. From another country, people struggle to reach me on my cell, and their needs stay blissfully away from my purview.

The sun shines on the coast much like it had done when I was in the west; the north and central parts of the country are barraged by untimely rains and I am glad to have left them behind.

Galle, where I am to stay for a night before heading back to Colombo, charms me out of my wits and looks askance as I walk away evincing a wry smile from the preposterous shindig that one might as well call a fort. The cricket ground stirs a longing for a home I have no rush to return to; on account of the goodwill and record I enjoy, I am allowed into the members’ stand for a gracious helping of a local under-19 match.

The entrapments that the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British had all in turn instituted — that now passes off as a spectacle of great pleasure — protect the town of Galle from outsiders, and also, it seems to me, from itself. Inward-looking to a fault, the Sinhalese of Galle have been known to open their hearts and hearths to all but those who have boasted of a skin tone less plentiful than white.

Upon being given to understand the intricacies of such delights and lodging in a palatial mansion owned by a Lankan Muslim family, I exult in the first serious gelato I have had in my life; an egg roti earlier in the day had barely served the purpose it was intended for.

Return to Colombo. I see the capital with eyes that I had not been endowed with when I first landed on these shores; it seems to be a lifetime ago now. The polished highway outside the President’s House, which abut the Chinese-funded port and end up at the imperial inheritance of the Galle Face Green purport me to a world I thought I had left behind in the countryside.

I put it down to my lack of vision but the night creeps up on me unannounced even as I try to trudge out of the humongous man-eating machine they call the One Galle Face shopping mall. It is not without some discomfort that I take flight, aware that it may not be for the last time.

Kingdom of Dutugemunu ↩︎
Built during the reign of King Kasyapa [477-495 CE] ↩︎
South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation ↩︎

Mohul Bhowmick is a national-level cricketer, poet, sports journalist, essayist and travel writer from Hyderabad, India. He has published four collections of poems and one travelogue so far. More of his work can be discovered on his website: www.mohulbhowmick.com.

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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Tags Ahangama, Anuradhapura, Australia, Bodhi Tree, Bristol, British, Chinese, Colombo, Cornwall, Dante dhatu, Dortmund, Dutch, Dutugemunu, Ella, Gautama, Gaya, German, Habaraduwa, Hanuman, Himalayas, Indian Ocean, Japan, Kandy, Koggala, Maha Bodhi, Midigama, Mohul Bhowmick, Muslim, Nuwara Eliya, Portuguese, Ravana, Ravana Ella, Sakyamuni, Sinhalese, Sri Lanka, Stuttgart, Tamil, Unawatuna, Weligama, World Cup

Contents

Borderless, December 2023

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date December 14, 2023
No Comments on Borderless, December 2023

Editorial

Celebrating the Child & Childhood… Click here to read.

Special Tributes

An excerpt from Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘The Child‘, a poem originally written in English by the poet. Click here to read.

Vignettes from an Extraordinary Life: A Historical Dramatisation by Aruna Chakravarti… Click here to read.

Conversations

A conversation with the author, Afsar Mohammed, and a brief introduction to his latest book, Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad. Click here to read.

A conversation with Meenakshi Malhotra over The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle, edited by Meenakshi Malhotra, Krishna Menon and Rachana Johri and a brief introduction to the book. Click here to read.

Translations

The Monk Who Played the Guitar, a story by S Ramakrishnan, has been translated from Tamil by T Santhanam. Click here to read.

The White-Coloured Book, a poem by Quazi Johirul Islam has translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

Indecisiveness has been written and translated from Korean by Ihlwha Choi. Click here to read.

Tagore’s 1400 Saal (The Year 1993) has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.

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

Poetry

Click on the names to read the poems

Ron Pickett, Prithvijeet Sinha, George Freek, Sutputra Radheye, Caroline Am Bergris, Thoyyib Mohammad, Kumar Bhatt, Patricia Walsh, Hamza Azhar, John Grey, Papia Sengupta, Stuart McFarlane, Padmanabha Reddy, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Jee Leong Koh, Rhys Hughes

Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes

In His Unstable Shape, Rhys Hughes explores the narratives around a favourite nursery rhyme character with a pinch of pedantic(?) humour. Click here to read.

Musings/ Slices from Life

Trojan Island

Nitya Amalean writes of why she chooses to be an immigrant living out of Sri Lanka. Click here to read.

Wayward Wayanad

Mohul Bhowmick travels to the tea gardens and hills of Wayanad. Click here to read.

Musings of a Copywriter

In Visiting Cards & Me…, Devraj Singh Kalsi ponders on his perspective on the need and the future for name cards. Click here to read.

Notes from Japan

In Kyoto: Where the Cuckoo Calls, Suzanne Kamata introduces us to Kyoto. Click here to read.

Essays

Peeking at Beijing: The Epicentre of China

Keith Lyons travels to the heart of Beijing with a sense of humour and a camera. Click here to read.

To Be or Not to Be or the Benefits of Borders

Wendy Jones Nakanishi argues in favour of walls with wit and facts. Click here to read.

Where Eagles Soar

Ravi Shankar gives a photographic treat and a narrative about Langkawi. Click here to read.

Stories

Heather Richards’ Remarkable Journey

Paul Mirabile journeys into a womb of mystery set in Thailand. Click here to read.

The Untold Story

Neeman Sobhan gives us the story of a refugee from the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Click here to read.

Wrath of the Goddess?

Farouk Gulsara narrates a story set in 1960s Malaya. Click here to read.

No Man’s Land

Sohana Manzoor gives us surrealistic story reflecting on after-life. Click here to read.

Book Excerpts

An excerpt from Dr Ratna Magotra’s Whispers of the Heart – Not Just A Surgeon: An Autobiography. Click here to read.

An excerpt from Manjima Misra’s The Ocean is Her Title. Click here to read.

Book Reviews

Somdatta Mandal reviews Indian Christmas: Essays, Memoirs, Hymns, an anthology edited by Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle. Click here to read.

Christopher Marks reviews Veronica Eley’s The Blue Dragonfly: healing through poetry. Click here to read.

Basudhara Roy reviews Kuhu Joshi’s My Body Didn’t Come Before Me. Click here to read.

Bhaskar Parichha reviews Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World by Gordon Brown, Mohamed El-Erian, Michael Spence, Reid Lidow

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

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

Tags 1400 Saal, Afsar Mohammad, Aruna Chakravarti, Basudhara Roy, Beijing, Bengali, Bhaskar Pariccha, Caroline Am Bergris, Christopher Marks, Devraj Sngh Kalsi, Fakrul Alam, Farouk Gulsara, George Freek, Gordon Brown, Hamza Azhar, Ihlwha Choi, Jee Leong Koh, Jesus Christ, John Grey, Keith Lyons, Krishna Menon, Kuhu Joshi, Kyoto, Langkawi, Malaya, Manjima Misra, Meenakshi Malhotra, Michael Spence, Mitali Chakravarty, Mohamed El-Erian, My Body Didn’t Come Before Me, Nazrul, Nitya Amalean, Padmanabha Reddy, Papia Sengupta, Patricia Walsh, Paul Mirabile, Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World, Prithvijeet Sinha, Quazi Johirul Islam, Rachana Johri, Ratna Magotra, Ravi Shankar, Reid Lidow, Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad, Rhys Hughes, Ron Pickett, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Sohana Manzoor, Sri Lanka, Stuart McFarlane, surrealistic, Sutputra Radheye, Suzanne Kamata, Tagore, Tamil, Thailand, The Blue Dragonfly – healing through poetry, The Child, The Gendered Body: Negotiation Resistance Struggle, The Ocean is Her Title, Thoyyib Mohammad, Veronica Eley, Wendy Jones Nakanishi, Whispers of the Heart – Not Just A Surgeon: An Autobiography

Editorial

Celebrating the Child & Childhood…

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date December 14, 2023
No Comments on Celebrating the Child & Childhood…

Mother & Child by Jamini Roy (1887-1972)

‘Victory to Man, the newborn, the ever-living.’
They kneel down, the king and the beggar, the saint and 
the sinner, 
the wise and the fool, and cry:
‘Victory to Man, the newborn, the ever-living.’

— ‘The Child’ by Rabindranath Tagore¹, written in English in 1930

This is the month— the last of a conflict-ridden year— when we celebrate the birth of a messiah who spoke of divine love, kindness, forgiveness and values that make for a better world. The child, Jesus, has even been celebrated by Tagore in one of his rarer poems in English. While we all gather amidst our loved ones to celebrate the joy generated by the divine birth, perhaps, we will pause to shed a tear over the children who lost their lives in wars this year. Reportedly, it’s a larger number than ever before. And the wars don’t end. Nor the killing. Children who survive in war-torn zones lose their homes or families or both. For all the countries at war, refugees escape to look for refuge in lands that are often hostile to foreigners. And yet, this is the season of loving and giving, of helping one’s neighbours, of sharing goodwill, love and peace. On Christmas this year, will the wars cease? Will there be a respite from bombardments and annihilation?

We dedicate this bumper year-end issue to children around the world. We start with special tributes to love and peace with an excerpt from Tagore’s long poem, ‘The Child‘, written originally in English in 1930 and a rendition of the life of the philosopher and change-maker, Vivekananda, by none other than well-known historical fiction writer, Aruna Chakravarti. The poem has been excerpted from Indian Christmas: Essays, Memoirs, Hymns, an anthology edited by Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle, a book that has been reviewed by Somdatta Mandal and praised for its portrayal of the myriad colours and flavours of Christmas in India. Christ suffered for the sins of humankind and then was resurrected, goes the legend. Healing is a part of our humanness. Suffering and healing from trauma has been brought to the fore by Christopher Marks’ perspective on Veronica Eley’s The Blue Dragonfly: healing through poetry. Basudhara Roy has also written about healing in her take of Kuhu Joshi’s My Body Didn’t Come Before Me. Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed a book that talks of healing a larger issue — the crises that humanity is facing now, Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World, by ex-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Nobel Laureate Michael Spence, Mohamed El-Erian and Reid Lidow. Parichha tells us that it suggests solutions to resolve the chaos the world is facing — perhaps a book that the world leadership would do well to read. After all, the authors are of their ilk! Our book excerpts from Dr Ratna Magotra’s Whispers of the Heart – Not Just A Surgeon: An Autobiography and Manjima Misra’s The Ocean is Her Title are tinged with healing and growth too, though in a different sense.

The theme of the need for acceptance, love and synchronicity flows into our conversations with Afsar Mohammad, who has recently authored Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad. He shows us that Hyderabadi tehzeeb or culture ascends the narrow bounds set by caged concepts of faith and nationalism, reaffirming his premise with voices of common people through extensive interviews. In search of a better world, Meenakshi Malhotra talks to us about how feminism in its recent manifestation includes masculinities and gender studies while discussing The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle, edited by her, Krishna Menon and Rachana Johri. Here too, one sees a trend to blend academia with non-academic writers to bring focus on the commonalities of suffering and healing while transcending national boundaries to cover more of South Asia.

That like Hyderabadi tehzeeb, Bengali culture in the times of Tagore and Nazrul dwelled in commonality of lore is brought to the fore when in response to the Nobel laureate’s futuristic ‘1400 Saal’ (‘The year 1993’), his younger friend responds with a poem that bears not only the same title but acknowledges the older man as an “emperor” among versifiers. Professor Fakrul Alam has not only translated Nazrul’s response, named ‘1400 Saal’ aswell, but also brought to us the voice of another modern poet, Quazi Johirul Islam. We have a self-translation of a poem by Ihlwha Choi from Korean and a short story by S Ramakrishnan in Tamil translated by T Santhanam.

Our short stories travel with migrant lore by Farouk Gulsara to Malaysia, from UK to Thailand with Paul Mirabile while chasing an errant son into the mysterious reaches of wilderness, with Neeman Sobhan to Rome, UK and Bangladesh, reflecting on the Birangonas (rape victims) of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation war, an issue that has been taken up in Malhotra’s book too. Sobhan’s story is set against the backdrop of a war which was fought against linguistic hegemony and from which we see victims heal. Sohana Manzoor this time has not only given us fabulous artwork but also a fantasy hovering between light and dark, life and death — an imaginative fiction that makes a compelling read and questions the concept of paradise, a construct that perhaps needs to be found on Earth, rather than after death.

The unusual paradigms of life and choices made by all of us is brought into play in an interesting non-fiction by Nitya Amlean, a young Sri Lankan who lives in UK. We travel to Kyoto with Suzanne Kamata, to Beijing with Keith Lyons, to Wayanad with Mohul Bhowmick and to Langkawi with Ravi Shankar. Wendy Jones Nakanishi argues in favour of borders with benevolent leadership. Tongue-in-cheek humour is exuded by Devraj Singh Kalsi as he writes of his attempts at using visiting cards as it is by Rhys Hughes in his exploration of the truth about the origins of the creature called Humpty Dumpty of nursery rhyme fame.

Poetry again has humour from Hughes. A migrant himself, Jee Leong Koh, brings in migrant stories from Singaporeans in US. We have poems of myriad colours from Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Patricia Walsh, John Grey, Kumar Bhatt, Ron Pickett, Prithvijeet Sinha, Sutputra Radheye, George Freek and many more. Papia Sengupta ends her poem with lines that look for laughter among children and a ‘life without borders’ drawn by human constructs in contrast to Jones Nakanishi’s need for walls with sound leadership. The conversation and dialogues continue as we look for a way forward, perhaps with Gordon Brown’s visionary book or with Tagore’s world view of lighting the inner flame in each human. We can hope that a way will be found. Is it that tough to influence the world using words? We can wish — may there be no need for any more Greta Thunbergs to rise in protest for a world fragmented and destroyed by greed and lack of vision. We hope for peace and love that will create a better world for our children.

As usual, we have more content than mentioned here. All our pieces can be accessed on the contents’ page. Do pause by and take a look. This bumper issue would not have been possible without the contribution of all the writers and our fabulous team from Borderless. Huge thanks to them all and to our wonderful readers who continue to encourage us with their comments and input.

Here’s wishing you all wonderful new adventures in the New Year that will be born as this month ends!

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

Indian Christmas: Essays, Memoirs, Hymns edited by Jerry Pinto & Madhulika Liddle ↩︎

Click here to access the content’s page for the December 2023 issue

READ THE LATEST UPDATES ON THE FIRST BORDERLESS ANTHOLOGY, MONALISA NO LONGER SMILES, BY CLICKING ON THIS LINK.

Tags 1400 Saal, Afsar Mohammad, Aruna Chakravarti, Bangladesh Liberation War, Basudhara Roy, Beijing, Bengali, Bhaskar Parichha, Birangona, Borderless Journal, British Prime Minister, Christ, Christmas, Christopher Marks, Devraj Singh Kalsi, Earth, Farouk Gulsara, George Freek, Gordon Brown, Greta Thunberg, Humpty Dumpty, Ihlwha Choi, India, Indian Christmas: Essays Memoirs Hymns, Jamini Roy, Jee Leong Koh, Jerry Pinto, Jesus, John Grey, Keith Lyons, Korean, Krishna Menon, Kuhu Joshi, Kumar Bhatt, Kyoto, Langkawi, Madhulika Liddle, Malaysia, Manjima Misra, Meenakshi Malhotra, Migrant, Mitali Chakravarty, Mohamed El-Erian, Mohul Bhowmick, My Body Didn’t Come Before Me, Nazrul, Neeman Sobhan, Nitya Amalean, Nitya Amlean, Nobel laureate, Nobel laureate Michael Spence, Papia Sengupta, Patricia Walsh, Paul Mirabile, Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World, PIcasso, Prithvijeet Sinha, Quazi Johirul Islam, Rachana Johri, Ratna Magotra, Ravi Shankar, Reid Lidow, Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad, Rhys Hughes, Ron Pickett, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, S Ramakrishnan, Singaporean, Sohana Manzoor, Somdatta Mandal, South Asia, Srilankan, Sutputra Radheye, Suzanne Kamata, T Santhanam, Tagore, Tamil, Thailand, The Blue Dragonfly – healing through poetry, The Gendered Body: Negotiation Resistance Struggle, The Ocean is Her Title, Uk, Veronica Eley, Vivekananda, Wendy Jones Nakanishi, Whispers of the Heart – Not Just A Surgeon: An Autobiography

Stories

The Monk Who Played the Guitar

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date December 14, 2023
2 Comments on The Monk Who Played the Guitar

Short story by S Ramakrishnan, translated from Tamil by T Santhanam

It was Malavika who sent me the video of the monk who plays guitar. Malavika is my daughter. She is pursuing fashion designing course in Kingston University, England. Her desires and interests are a puzzle to me. Some days ago, she sent a recording of a poem by William Blake in her voice. After that, she sent a photo of her carrying a placard in a demonstration against global warming. As clouds change to forms unimaginable, her interests keep on changing. After watching a butterfly, she had sent her impressions in writing. It seemed as though it was from a seasoned writer.

Children who leave home for far off places, in a sense, leave us. She was no longer the girl she was in Chennai. The new country and new environment have changed her. The changes are reflected in her appearance and deeds. My wife did not like these alterations. Below the video of the monk who played guitar, she had given the caption: “Music is Meditation”. I could not understand her. At the age of twenty-two, I thought she would be fondly giving herself to worldly pleasure. But she was immersed in meditation, agitation and museum visits.

In the video sent by Malavika, the monk must have been about thirty years old. His head was tonsured. He wore a robe coloured orange. His ears were slightly big. He had a sharp nose and small lips where a smile was frozen. It was hard to find out if he was a Nepali or a foreigner. On his left arm, was tattooed the image of Buddha.

It was funny to see a Monk with a guitar. The image we have formed about saints and the looks of current day saints are not alike. Perhaps, we refuse to update that image. Perhaps, the meaning of sainthood has changed.

The musical piece was given the title “Falling flowers”. From the way he was playing, it seemed as real as the blossomed cherry leaves falling gently. The normal rapidity and gush associated with guitar music was not there. Like an insect that moves in the water, his fingers moved on the guitar strings. Music tunes to the past more easily than photographs. A small piece of music is enough to take us back to our school days.

I saw the video once or twice. I felt the urge to listen to it again and again. While listening at night, I felt as if the fragrance of incense was wafting into the vacant spaces of my heart. I found His name was Limang Tolma while searching for his other videos. There were hundreds of musical pieces by him. All of them were only seven minutes long. Evidently, he played the guitar for only seven minutes in a day. That too under the sal tree in Coben Monastery seated on a stool. Hundreds of people from various countries pour in to listen to his performance. All this I gathered while browsing the internet. His music was melodious and sweet. Why did he play for seven minutes only at each stretch was beyond comprehension.

To know more about Limang Dolma, I called Malavika on her mobile. She sent a message that she was observing silence for the past five days. Why this silence? Tongue can be tied down. But the mind?

I told my wife. She responded that she had scolded Malavika and that was why she was doing this.

I could not understand. What was the skirmish between mother and daughter? I sent a message to Malavika asking her how long her silence would continue. “God only knows,” was her reply.

As I am a senior executive in an automobile company, I had to conduct two to three meetings in a day. My blood pressure sometimes would rise after returning from these meetings.Sometimes, I would have a headache too. At times, the meetings would last for ten hours. After the meeting, I would feel as if somebody has placed a pile of iron on my shoulders. I would feel sick, wondering why we could not conduct our work without talking, discussing or fighting.

One day, before the commencement of the meeting, I started to listen to the monk’s guitar music from my cell phone rather impulsively. I closed my eyes for seven minutes as though I was in a deep meditation. It was as pleasant a feeling as a moist breeze caressing my body. There was peace in my heart and an exhilaration I had never known before. On that day, I could sense the change in my voice and the way I was moving towards a solution. Somehow the officials of the sales department seemed to understand this. After the conclusion of the meeting while coming down in the lift, Amarnath said, “There was something new in your speech today. You spoke like a Zen Master.”

“Yes” I nodded approvingly with a smile. I was just wondering how a small piece of music could bring such a tremendous change in me.

I wanted to know more about Limang Dolma. Searching through the internet I was more and more astonished. The real name of Limang Dolma is Christopher Cane. He was born in Milan. He had pursued Anthropology. After coming into contact with a Buddhist monk, he has embraced Buddhism and become a monk in the Buddhist Monastery. He plays the guitar only under the tree of the monastery and nowhere else. Young people throng to him. They listen to his music. Some of them stay there for days together to savour his music. They wear T-shirts bearing his image with the words, “Buddha plays Guitar”. In an interview, a young lady asks him. “All saints in India hold one or other instruments. Why does Buddha not play any instrument nor is seen holding one?”

“He himself is a musical instrument. One who knows how to tune himself finds no need for a musical instrument. In the same way, Nature tunes itself. Is there any tune better than what the water plays?”

“Why do you play only for seven minutes?”

“Seven is the symbol of consciousness in Buddhism.”

“Seven minutes is not enough for us. Can’t you play more?”

“Will you take honey in a gulp? Is a spoonful not enough?” he asks.

I admired Limong Dolma fo his speech, poise and the way he handled guitar. I too felt like wearing a T-shirt bearing his image. I sent the video of Limang Dolma to some of my friends asking them to listen to his music. Only Mohan Muralidharan, a neurologist and my school mate, sent a reply saying that a man from Turkey played better than the monk and shared the video. Why should one musician be compared to another? Can’t this foolishness be avoided?

I called Mohan and blurted out my irritation. He said in a mocking tone, “You’re aging. That is why you listen to a monk playing the guitar. Music should make us feel young. It should twinge our nerves. You have never touched a musical instrument in your entire life. Can you whistle atleast?”

Mohan was right. I haven’t even played the mouth organ which many played during my school days.

I felt like owning a guitar. The same evening, I went to a musical store in Leo mall. I showed the video of Limang Dolma and asked for a guitar like the one in the video. The face of the girl at the counter brightened. “Limang Dolma?” she asked. I felt glad that she too has listened to the music. She brought a guitar from inside. I told her, ” I don’t know how to play guitar. This is for my daughter.”

The girl told with a smile, “Limang Dolma was a thief. He was in prison. After his release, he became a Monk. People say he speaks to Buddha through his music.”

“Really!”

“I overheard two girls talk of it when they came to purchase a guitar.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I believe it partially.”

“Which part?”

“That he speaks to Buddha,” she smiled.

She looked like my daughter when she smiled. Perhaps for young girls Buddha is a different personality. May be, the Buddha known by the ones who have crossed fifty years like me and the Buddha these young girls adore are not the same.

When I brought guitar home, my wife chided me.

“Why have you brought this? Who will play?”

“Just let it be,” I responded.

“Is it a show piece to be kept just like that?” she asked.

I did not reply.

I placed the guitar in Malavika’s room close to her bed. I had a feeling that Malavika had returned. I sent that night the picture of guitar to Malavika by WhatsApp. She sent an emoji of two clapping hands. Also, she sent a message “We are going to visit Limang Dolma.”

Though I felt happy, I was eager to know who was the other in the ‘We’. I did not venture to ask Malavika. Instead, I asked, “When?” She did not respond.

After five days, she sent a picture to me. She was among the hundreds of youngsters before Limang Dolma, as he was playing the guitar. My eyes were cast on a young man with long hair, not on Limang Dolma. The young man hung his arms around Malavika’s shoulder.

Who was this fellow? How long had she known him? I could not see his face properly. I widened the image. An European face. Perhaps was he also a musician? I thought of asking Malaviika. But I curbed that thought and went on to ask about the musical event, as I called her. She was full of cheer. She told me,” Listening to Dolma’s music, one feels like a kite fluttering in the air. I do not know what to say. Flying to heaven.”

“I read somewhere that he was a thief,” I said.

” Oh, that’s a myth constructed by magazines. When asked about this, Dolma says raindrops do not have a past. Jonah and myself were in the Monastery for three days. Wonderful experience!”

A question arose on my mind as to who Jonah was. I was not sure whether to ask her or not. Why wouldn’t she talk about him?

I asked, “Is Jonah a musician?”

“Dad, how do you know? Indeed, he is. He plays the guitar well. It was he who introduced me to Dolma’s music.”

“Is Jonah your classmate?”

“No, he works in a bar where I hold a part time job.”

“You didn’t tell me,” I pretended to be angry.

“Dad, don’t tell Mom about this.”

“About your working in bar?” I asked deliberately.

“About Jonah too?” she laughed. As she was so laughing, she seemed to be some other young girl. After she hung up, I was thinking about Jonah. Was he a good person or bad? Was he also a thief earlier? Or could he be a drug addict? Who were his parents? Was he in love with Malavika? Had I become old? Was Mohan right? I

admired a Monk playing guitar somewhere. But I do not like Jonah who also plays guitar. Why? I was perplexed. Suppose if Limong Dolma put his arm around the shoulder of my daughter, would I dislike him too? I was confused.

Two days later, Malavika forwarded a video of Limang Dolma downloaded in her phone. Limong Dolma walked as though he was floating in the air. He sat under the tree. Peace was on his face as he tuned the guitar — the same music that I savoured earlier. No longer did I feel close to that music. Somehow, instead of Limang, Jonah’s face came before me. I felt as if a bitterness had settled down on my tongue.

The same night, Malavika called me. Before my asking anything, she said, ” After visiting Limang Dolma, I do not feel like listening to his music again”

“Why?” I asked as if I did not know anything.

“I do not like it any more just the way I suddenly liked it before.”

“How is Jonah?” I asked intentionally.

“Do not talk about him. I hate him. I hate whatever he introduced to me.”

Inwardly I was happy.

” Any problem? Shall I talk to Jonah?”

“Why should you talk to him? The days I moved with him, it was a nightmare. Daddy, why do you not rebuke me?”

“You are not a kid, after all.”

“But you think of me as a kid only. You don’t know me as Mom does.”

I was flummoxed. I could hear Malavika sobbing for the first time ever. I did not know how to console her. I hurriedly gave the phone to my wife. She started walking towards the kitchen with her words of consolation. What has transpired between her and Jonah? Why was she weeping? I could not make out. At the same time, I was happy that she disliked the world she created for herself and moved back towards my world. A thought arose that she was coming home. I asked my wife what Malavika had said.

“That boy is not good. I told her from the beginning itself. But she did not pay heed.”

“Did you know about Jonah before?”

“She told me six months back. I scolded her saying that your Dad will not like this. I have spoken to Jonah also.”

“To Jonah? You?”

“Yes, I could not understand a bit of what he spoke.”

“What is the problem now?”

“It’s over. No use talking about it!”

I could not understand what happened. But Malavika had been closer to her mother than to me. She had shared everything with her mother. I was pained at this. Why then did she asked me not to tell her mother? Why this drama? Children after growing up, treat their father as a plaything. The daughter I know is now the girl I do not know. I could not reconcile myself to this.

I heard the guitar music of the monk that night. I was more attracted to the tree than to the music.

Leaves do not stay on the tree for long. When a leaf falls, the tree does not reach out to catch it. When falling leaves sail along the wind, the trees can do nothing but look at them in silence. Somehow, the music stirred a grief in me.

As I prepared to leave for office next morning, I saw my wife keeping the guitar next to dustbin. What was the fault of the guitar after all?

” What are you going to do with this?” I asked.

“Anish told me, he will take it. What do we do with this? Malavika does not want it any more.”

I nodded giving the impression that she was right. But I felt sorry while doing that.

S. Ramakrishnan is an eminent Tamil writer who has won the Sahitya Akademi Award in the Tamil Language category in 2018. He has published 10 novels, 20 collections of short stories, 75 collections of essays, 15 books for children, 3 books of translation and 9 plays. He also has a collection of interviews to his credit. His short stories are noted for their modern story-telling style in Tamil and have been translated and published in English, Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada and French.

T Santhanam is a retired Bank Executive in Bangalore, India. He has a passion for literature with a special affinity for poetry. He writes poetry in Tamil. He is also a blogger.

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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Tags Bengali, Buddhism, Budhha, Chennai, English, French, Global Warming, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Milan, Nepali, S Ramakrishnan, Sahitya Akademi award, T Santhanam, Tamil, Telugu, WhatsApp, William Blake, Zen

Contents

Borderless, November 2023

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date November 14, 2023
No Comments on Borderless, November 2023

Editorial

Counting Colours… Click here to read.

Conversation

Banjara author Ramesh Karthik Nayak discusses his new book, Chakmak (flintsone), giving us a glimpse of his world. We also have a brief introduction to his work. Click here to read.

Translations

Demanding Longevity by Quazi Johirul Islam has been translated from Bengali by Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

Moonlight, a poem by Bashir Baidar, has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.

Maithili Poetry by Vidyanand Jha has been translated from Maithili by the poet himself. Click here to read.

The Window and the Flower Vase has been written and translated from Korean by Ihlwha Choi. Click here to read.

Tagore’s Tomar Kachhe Shanti Chabo Na (I Will Not Pray to You for Peace) has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.

Poetry

Click on the names to read the poems

Michael Burch, Aineesh Dutt, Stuart McFarlane, Radhika Soni, David Mellor, Prithvijeet Sinha, John Grey, Ahana Bhattacharjee, Ron Pickett, Suzanne AH, George Freek, Arshi Mortuza, Caroline Am Bergris, Avantika Vijay Singh, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Kisholoy Roy, Rhys Hughes

Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes

In A Parody of a Non-existing Parody: The Recycled Sea, Rhys Hughes uses TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ to create a new parody. Click here to read.

Musings/Slices from Life

The Theft of a River

Koushiki Dasgupta Chaudhuri tells a poignant truth about how a river is moving towards disappearance due to human intervention. Click here to read.

In Quest of Seeing the Largest Tree in the World

Meredith Stephens writes of her last day in California. Click here to read.

Beyond Horizons: A Love Story

Sai Abhinay Penna shares photographs and narrative about his trek at Chikmagalur. Click here to read.

Musings of a Copywriter

In Crush on Bottles, Devraj Singh Kalsi inebriates his piece with humour. Click here to read.

Notes from Japan

In Address Unknown, Suzanne Kamata shares a Japanese norm with a touch of humour. Click here to read.

Essays

Peeking at Beijing: The Wall

Keith Lyons travels to The Great Wall and writes of the experience. Click here to read.

Cinema, Cinema, Cinema!

Gayatri Devi writes of the translation impact of cinema, contextualising with the Tamil blockbuster, Jailer. Click here to read.

Coffee, Lima and Legends…

Ravi Shankar explores Lima, its legends and Peruvian coffee. Click here to read.

Stories

Jonathan’s Missing Wife

Paul Mirabile sets his story in a small town in England. Click here to read.

The Tender Butcher

Devraj Singh Kalsi weaves a story around a poetic butcher. Click here to read.

Book Excerpts

An excerpt of The White Shirts of Summer: New and Selected Poems by Mamang Dai. Click here to read.

An excerpt from Ramesh Karthik Nayak’s Chakmak. Click here to read.

Book Reviews

Somdatta Mandal reviews Ali Akbar Natiq’s Naulakhi Kothi, translated from Urdu by Naima Rashid. Click here to read.

Ranu Uniyal reviews I am Not the Gardener: Selected Poems by Raj Bisaria. Click here to read.

Anita Balakrishnan reviews Lakshmi Kannan’s Guilt Trip and Other Stories. Click here to read.

Bhaskar Parichha reviews Akshat Rathi’s Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions. Click here to read.

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

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International

Tags Ahana Bhattacharjee, Aineesh Dutt, Akshat Rathi, Ali Akbar Natiq, Anita Balakrishnan, Arshi Mortuza, Avantika Vijay Singh, Balochi, Bashir Baidar, Bengali, Bhaskar Parichha, California, Caroline Am Bergris, Chikmagalur, Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions, David Mellor, Fakrul Alam, Fazal Baloch, Gayatri Devi, George Freek, Guilt Trip and Other Stories, I am Not the Gardener: Selected Poems by Raj Bisaria, Ihlwha Choi, Jailer, Japan, John Grey, Kisholoy Roy, Korean, Koushiki Dasgupta Chaudhuri, Lakshmi Kannan, Maithil, Mamang Dai, Meredith Stephens, Miathili, Michael Burch, Mitali Chakravarty, Naima Rashid, Naulakhi Kothi, Prithvijeet Sinha, Quazi Johirul Islam, Radhika Soni, Raj Bisaria, Ranu Uniyal, Rhys Hughes, Ron Pickett, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Sai Abhinay Penna, Sohana Manzoor, Somdatta Mandal, Stuart McFarlane, Suzanne AH, Suzanne Kamata, Tamil, The Waste Land, The White Shirts of Summer: New and Selected Poems, Translations, TS Eliot, Vidyanand Jha

Essay

Cinema, Cinema, Cinema!

By Gayatri Devi

Is it appropriate to speak of transnational glee as a legitimate audience response to a film? If so, that might be a fitting label for the global spectator reaction to the blockbuster Indian film, Jailer, released worldwide on August 10, 2023. The film whose OTT rights were purchased by Amazon Prime is streaming online while simultaneously playing to packed theatres in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, China, the Middle East, Australia, Canada, the US, the UK, France, and other countries. In its first month of theatrical release, Jailer brought in an impressive 300 crores in India alone with over 600 crores and counting (just shy of 22 million US dollars) as its worldwide earnings. Many Indian blockbuster films have had a worldwide high-performance index recently with the likes of Ponniyin Selvan, Pathaan, Bahubali etc. thriving on an exoticised glamour of an India of kings and queens and palaces and freedom fighters and medieval breakdance routines, a sort of mystified enchanting India of the travel brochure version for viewers both inside and outside India. Even a mediocre film like RRR had a localised transnational success in the United States during the academy award season as well.

Unlike these historical and revisionist costume dramas, Jailer is a full-on pop culture phenomenon, a movie of the moment, a tale of its time; it is as au courant as cellphones and police corruption. It is full of attitude, and packed chockful of allusions and homages to both Indian and western movies in what is essentially a fun romp. Shot mostly in sumptuous wide shots and rhythmic cuts, it establishes an onscreen India, dry and dusty, with industrial warehouses running forgery, guns and knives, roadside ice cream vendors, fly-by beheadings, and struggling gardens along with elementary school YouTube influencers. Its real distinction is that people all over the world get it. But it is as Indian, specifically, it is as Tamil as a Tamil can be, and it puts a smile on the face of anyone anywhere who watches it. The international blockbuster with no pretensions to anything other than cinematic entertainment is back, thanks to Jailer and its vibrant young director Nelson Dilipkumar.

Jailer tells the story of two men, a hero and a villain, a retired police officer Tiger Muthuvel Pandian, the eponymous jailer, and a criminal mastermind Varman who runs an art forgery ring. They make counterfeit Indian statuary and sells them in the international market. Their encounter becomes complicated when the jailor’s son, a corrupt police officer, starts working for the villain, the male melodrama of father-son conflict being a favorite trope in Tamil cinema from older films like Thangappathakkam (The Golden Badge, 1974) that starred an earlier era’s superstar Shivaji Ganesan. Jailer belongs to the same pedigree of male melodramatic films. The hero is played by the Tamil superstar Rajnikanth and the villain, the psychopathic leader of the forgers by Vinayakan from the nearby Malayalam film industry in Kerala.

Both Rajnikanth and Vinayakan belong to the highly successful world of mainstream, commercial Indian cinema with strong populist reception while also maintaining a certain level of middle-class entertainment sophistication. When compared to Rajnikanth, Vinayakan is relatively a newcomer, but one who has very quickly claimed his own space in Mollywood, Kerala’s film industry that produces Malayalam language-based films.

Vinayakan’s breakout performance as an underworld operative, an executioner and strongman, a complex character who is right, wrong and everything in between in Kammatti Padam[1] (2016) earned him a Kerala State Film Award for Best Actor. Jailer sees him as a criminal psychopath with unpredictable ticks like instructing his lackeys to dance for him, drowning his enemies in big vats of sulphuric acid, delivering his Tamil-Malayalam pidgin with menacing comic timing etc. The overall excesses of his character have the potential to turn him into a stereotypical villain, especially since the sulphuric acid dunking trope has a colourful cinematic legacy in Indian popular culture. (The “sulphuric acid joke” is an instantly recognisable film joke in Indian pop culture attributed to the persona of an outlandish villain played by the erstwhile Bollywood star Ajit who is credited with asking his henchman Raabert (Hindi pronunciation of Robert) the following purely apocryphal lines: “Raabert, is haraami ko liquid oxygen mein dal do; liquid ise jeene nahin dega, oxygen ise marna nahin dega” (Robert, drown him in Liquid Oxygen; the Liquid won’t let him live, and the Oxygen won’t let him die!”). Jailer abounds in many such recognisable “quotation marks” throughout the film, including an ear-slicing scene, an evident homage to Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs(1992), and “Stuck in the Middle with You”. These artfully placed allusions create an enjoyable self-reflexive layer in the film where Jailer talks to film materials that have provided evident inspiration. The self-conscious scripting and direction, and the sheer enjoyment and abandonment with which Vinayakan embraces the deranged psyche of Varman makes him a bonafide villain and not a caricature.

Rajnikanth who plays the title role of the jailer is the 72-year-old veteran superstar of Tamil cinema known to his massive adoring fan base as thalaivar (“Leader/Chief” in Tamil). Rajanikanth started his film career with the 1975 romantic drama Apoorva Ragangal (Rare Melodies), a far cry from the action crime thriller genre which would soon become synonymous with his name in the industry. With his trademark moustache, lopsided pursed lips, thick mop of straight black hair swiped across the forehead, lean frame, and long lanky legs, Rajnikanth from the 80s onwards played the righteous underdog on both sides of the law who took on the snobbish elite as well as the violent underworld players and won. He played orphans, rickshaw drivers, underworld consigliere, police officer, milkman, engineer, writer, grandfather, father, son, brother, husband, lover – he played the full spectrum of masculine roles in mainstream Indian cinema.

There is an underacknowledged colour line in Indian films where the relatively whiter-complexioned actors and actresses are considered stardom material. Rajnikanth with his dark-complexion and Midas touch at the box office demolished this industry practice and became the mirror for the ordinary darker Dravidian face on the Indian silver screen. Jailer sees him aged but fuller and lighter than his earlier years, though what has not changed are his instantly recognisable dance moves; underworld or the penthouse, underdog or the aggressor, Rajnikanth’s dance moves set the tone in his films. The standing jogs, the high kicks, the hip shake, the robotic arm movements and hand props like dark glasses and hand towels showed a new definition of “cool” to his fans. His tentative dance performance in Jailer is reminiscent of another accomplished dancer who exhibits a pretend stage fright; John Travolta in Pulp Fiction dancing with Uma Thurman to Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell.”

Other significant performances include Vasanth Ravi as the jailor’s corrupt and clueless son, Ramya Krishnan as the jailer’s visibly irritated wife, along with hilarious cameos by Malayalam superstar, Mohanlal, Bollywood star, Jackie Shroff, and Kannada star, Shiva Rajkumar — all of them act as outlaws who help the jailer in his fight against Varman. An equally hilarious subplot involves a love triangle between the dancing beauty Kamna, her lecherous costar “Blast” Mohan, and her lover, the timid film director.

The film clocks an impressive two hours and fifty minutes on the strength of these men and their vivacious performances, smart, sharp, and funny dialogue, over-the-top violence, and a sizzling cameo dance sequence, popularly known in Indian film lingo as an “item number” by the alluring Bollywood actress Tamannah. The single “Kaavaala[2]” composed by the music director, Anirudh, is a proper earworm turned worldwide viral hit with the young and the old alike shaking their hips to its mood altering percussive rhythm, the latest being a Japanese version of the song. Perhaps as a testament to the song’s instant infectious popularity, the original dance features dancers of multiple ethnicities, a global potpourri as it were, with a set reminiscent of the production design of Raiders of the Lost Ark[3] (1981) as well as a flute intro that calls out to Andean musicians. If any song can bring the world together, “Kaavaala” can.

Indeed, the multiple references to Quentin Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are unavoidable while watching Jailer. As with Tarantino, director Nelson (as he is popularly known) too operates inside a similar vision of cinematic storytelling.

The proper subject of Jailer is cinema, cinemas of India, cinemas of the world. Tamil melodramas of the 1970s, the middle class Tamil comedies of the eighties and the nineties, Bollywood action flicks, Hollywood adventure films, the black crime comedies of Quentin Tarantino, the epic blood splatter of Robert Rodriguez, the bumbling and menacing sociopathic capers of Guy Ritchie films – Jailer tips its hat to all of these crime-as-entertainment influences through its multilayered dense scripting, the large cast of characters, and the no holds barred display of gory violence. It is a refreshingly confident film without any false notes though some of the repeated explosion scenes could be tightened.

Jailer tells an old story familiar to the Tamil audience, a story as old as Shivaji Ganesan in Thangappathakkam(1974)—the upright police officer father and the fallen corrupt son. The film chugs through its dense thicket of plot and counterplot towards an inevitable moral resolution to this impasse. This is where the power of the star system in Indian cinema, a status equal to that of gods, plays its trump card. With Rajnikanth playing the jailer father there can be only one moral resolution, son, or no son. It is a formula that never fails, and speaks of a justice perhaps unique to cinema.

[1] Kammatti Paadam — is the name of a slum in Kochi, Kerala. It is a place name. Kammatti is a proper noun without any traceable etymology. Paadam means “field” in Malayalam. “The Slum Fields” of “The Slum” could be an appropriate translation.

[2] Kaavaalaya — A Telugu phrase, “I Want You, Man”

[3] Set in 1936

Gayatri Devi is a teacher, translator and writer living and working in Savannah, Georgia.

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