“A journey is not so much a place, but a new way of seeing.” — Pico Iyer
Travel has always been my passion. From childhood, the love for exploring new places was instilled in me by my parents. They believed travel was not just recreation, but education.
Every school vacation, my father would plan a month-long trip, taking us across cities, temples, forests, and historic landmarks.
By the time I stepped into adulthood, the entire stretch of Gujarat and Saurashtra was familiar terrain — Dwarka, Porbandar, Jamnagar, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Surat, Rajkot.
We traveled across the country too, exploring Calcutta in the east and venturing north to Kashmir, Amritsar, Agra, Delhi and Jaipur, Jodhpur and Jaisalmer in the Northwestern part.
Along the way, each place offered its own unforgettable charm — the serenity of the Golden Temple, the fragrant rose gardens of Jodhpur, the majestic palaces of Jaipur, the golden deserts of Jaisalmer, and the shimmering beauty of Dal Lake in Srinagar.
Each journey painted my childhood with stories, sights, and memories that would stay with me forever.
Perhaps that is why, when I was finally given the opportunity to travel abroad on a business trip to Singapore, my excitement was indescribable.
But beneath that excitement was a quiet nervousness — it was my first international trip, a solo journey, and I had to navigate visas, documentation, and the unfamiliarity of foreign travel.
I still remember the night before my flight — the quiet hum of anticipation, the open suitcase neatly arranged with formal wear and presentation notes, and the flutter in my heart that felt both brave and uncertain. This wasn’t just another professional assignment — it felt like a rite of passage.
Singapore was my first glimpse of a world beyond India — an island nation I had only encountered in business magazines and travel columns.
As the aircraft lifted off the runway, I felt something shift inside me. Beneath the official purpose of the trip lay something more personal: the realization that I was crossing a threshold that would reshape the way I saw work, people, and myself.
The first few days were busy with meetings and deliverables, yet my Singapore-based colleagues made sure I didn’t miss the beauty of their city.
Over weekends, they took me to Gardens by the Bay, Sentosa Island, Universal Studios, Little India, and shopping districts filled with light and energy. Their warmth made the newness less intimidating.
I experienced my first metro journey abroad — taking the MRT from Ang Mo Kio to Raffles Place — and was amazed at the punctuality, efficiency, and discipline that seemed to pulse through the city’s transport system.
Gardens by the Bay left me mesmerized; Sentosa offered calm and peace, while Universal Studios was a burst of color, joy, and laughter.
Singapore’s friendliness, cleanliness, and multicultural harmony made a deep impression on me.
It was a place where professionalism coexisted effortlessly with warmth, where discipline didn’t suppress diversity but strengthened it.
When I returned home, friends and colleagues asked about the presentations, the meetings, and the outcomes.
But what stayed with me long after the trip was not just the work accomplished — it was the inner shift.
Singapore taught me that stepping outside our comfort zone widens our world in ways we never expect.
That first flight did more than carry me across countries — it carried me into a broader way of thinking, observing, and belonging.
It showed me that growth often begins at the edge of comfort, and that the world is much larger and more welcoming than our fears allow us to believe.
“Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” — Miriam Beard
What Singapore Taught Me
Every first step into the unknown teaches us something essential about ourselves.
Singapore showed me that courage doesn’t always roar; often, it’s the quiet decision to board a plane alone and trust that you will find your way.
In every MRT ride, every unfamiliar street, and every new conversation, I discovered the subtle power of openness — the willingness to learn, adapt, and embrace difference.
When we travel with curiosity instead of fear, the world responds with generosity.
And sometimes, one journey becomes the beginning of a much larger unfolding — a reminder that confidence grows one step, one city, and one experience at a time.
Reflection: The First Flight Within
We often believe that courage lies in grand actions — but sometimes, it lies in handing your passport to an immigration officer with shaky hands.
My first flight taught me that courage is a journey too.
That every time we step out into the unknown, we return home a little braver.
A little wiser.
A little more ourselves.
About the Book:
When the Road Becomes the Teacher: A Reflective Memoir of Wisdom Gained Around the World is a memoir about how travel can transform the way we see the world and ourselves. Drawing on four decades of journeys across India and beyond, Shubha Apte reflects on the experiences, encounters, cultures, and unexpected moments that shaped her understanding of resilience, confidence, leadership, cultural intelligence, and personal growth. From her first international business trip to Singapore to later journeys across Japan, Norway, Malaysia, Europe, and the United States, each destination became more than a place to visit—it became an opportunity to learn. Part travel memoir and part reflection on personal transformation, the book invites readers to look beyond destinations and discover the lessons that every journey can offer.
About the Author:
Shubha Apte is an author, executive coach, and leadership consultant with over 35 years of corporate experience. She is the author of multiple books including the Amazon Bestseller, When the Road Becomes the Teacher. Her writing blends real-life insight with storytelling, exploring themes of resilience, purpose and human connections.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Tipuna Mask (Ancestral Mask of Protection, Maori Tribal Heritage and Genealogy, New Zealand). Photo provided by the author.
One of the enduring comforts of modern civilisation is the belief that we are not automatons.
We are not machines, we tell ourselves. We are not obedient drones, not programmable insects, not people who wake at six in the morning, stare at a glowing rectangle for three hours, purchase things we do not need, argue with strangers we will never meet, and then fall asleep while a streaming service asks whether we are “still watching”.
We are free.
We are moral.
We are informed.
We are, according to the brochure, the most advanced species ever to complain about airport Wi-Fi.
This confidence is remarkable because humanity has spent several thousand years violently disagreeing about what “right” and “wrong” mean. Civilisations have built temples, prisons, parliaments, armies, universities, stock exchanges, monasteries, and social media platforms in the hope of settling the question. None have succeeded. The closest we have come is creating comment sections where everyone can declare themselves morally correct in capital letters.
Perhaps humanity’s greatest collective achievement is not moral progress but moral certainty. We may not know what goodness is, but we are increasingly confident that the people who disagree with us are wicked, ignorant, brainwashed, or insufficiently subscribed to our newsletter.
After all, who decides what is right?
The individual?
Society?
Religion?
The state?
The market?
The victorious side of a war?
The algorithm that decides what appears next on your phone?
The answer seems to be all of the above, depending largely on who has the microphone, the money, the military, or the verified blue tick.
Morality rarely arrives naked. It comes prepackaged. It is delivered through family traditions, cultural assumptions, educational systems, political narratives, economic necessities, religious doctrines, advertising campaigns, celebrity interviews, and increasingly, recommendation engines that know your deepest fears because you once searched for “mild headache after eating cheese.”
Before we begin thinking for ourselves, someone has already supplied the vocabulary with which thought becomes possible. We inherit categories, loyalties, taboos, heroes, enemies, and slogans. Then, at the age of nineteen or twenty-three, after reading two podcasts and watching a documentary narrated by a man with a calm British voice, we announce that we have finally become independent thinkers.
Huckleberry Finn would have recognised this immediately.
Huck, that barefoot philosopher of the Mississippi, was surrounded by adults who possessed certainty in industrial quantities. They knew what religion required, what society permitted, what property meant, who deserved dignity, and who did not. Huck’s greatest crime was not ignorance. It was noticing that respectable people could behave monstrously while speaking politely.
Huck helps Jim Escape in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
When he helped Jim escape slavery, Huck believed he was committing a moral wrong because the world around him had taught him so. His conscience, that supposed internal compass, had been fitted by society like a badly manufactured appliance. Yet Huck’s instincts were kinder than the civilisation that educated him.
This is one of literature’s most embarrassing lessons, where, sometimes the moral genius is not the preacher, professor, senator, or chief executive officer. Sometimes it is a poorly educated boy on a raft who suspects that the rules may be rotten.
Modern civilisation has improved the raft. We now have smartphones, satellite navigation, artificial intelligence, biometric passports, personalised advertisements, and refrigerators that can send messages to our phones. But we have not necessarily improved the moral weather.
We still float down the river of history while arguing about whether the person drowning beside us has filled out the correct paperwork.
Consider the suicide bomber, Mohamed Atta, one of the principal perpetrators of the September 11 attacks. He was not born with an innate desire for destruction. His worldview emerged through political grievances, ideological commitments, religious interpretations, social influences, and personal experiences. To millions around the world, he became an embodiment of evil. Yet within his own moral framework, he appears to have believed that he was participating in a transcendent struggle.
This is not an endorsement. It is a warning.
Human beings rarely experience themselves as villains. Villains are almost always other people. We experience ourselves as defenders, patriots, believers, reformers, survivors, victims, or consumers with excellent reasons for buying a third air fryer.
Even atrocities can emerge from internally coherent moral systems. That is why moral certainty should be handled with care, preferably while wearing gloves and standing near an emergency exit.
The Jataka Tales[1] understood this long before modern psychology began charging hourly rates for rediscovering ancient wisdom. In those Buddhist stories, animals often behave more intelligently than kings. A monkey may sacrifice itself for its troop, a hare may offer itself in compassion, an elephant may demonstrate restraint while humans nearby are busy inventing bureaucracy.
The lesson is often simple, greed makes fools of us, attachment makes prisoners of us, and pride makes us ridiculous.
Naturally, civilisation responded by building financial markets, luxury brands, and social media platforms dedicated to producing all three at scale.
In one Jataka style version of the modern world, a fox might become a political consultant, a crow might become a media influencer, and a monkey might become an investment banker. The fox would promise security, the crow would announce breaking news every seven minutes, and the monkey would explain that compassion is admirable but not scalable.
Meanwhile, the elephant would quietly suggest that people share the water.
The elephant would be called unrealistic.
Now consider George Mallory, who reportedly answered the question of why he wanted to climb Everest with the phrase, “Because it’s there.” To some observers, risking one’s life merely to stand briefly on a frozen mountain seems absurd. Families are devastated, fortunes are spent, and people die pursuing what critics might call a very expensive argument with gravity.
Yet for Mallory and countless climbers, Everest symbolised transcendence, mastery, self-discovery, and confrontation with mortality.
The same action can appear irrational or noble depending on the framework employed.
This is the trouble with human beings. We are not merely creatures who act. We are creatures who narrate. We can turn nearly anything into a sacred mission. Climbing a mountain, refusing a vaccine, buying a cryptocurrency, fasting for enlightenment, investing in a startup that delivers socks by drone, and all become meaningful when accompanied by sufficient vocabulary.
The Terminator franchise offers a darker version of this problem. In that world, machines become dangerous because they develop the capacity to calculate efficiently without compassion. ‘Skynet[2]’ does not hate humanity. That would require emotional investment. It simply identifies humans as an obstacle to its objectives.
This is terrifying because it resembles many institutions already familiar to us.
A corporation may not hate its workers. It merely considers them “human capital.”
A government may not hate the poor. It merely considers them “budgetary pressure.”
An algorithm may not hate democracy. It merely considers outrage “high engagement.”
The machine is not evil in the old fashioned sense. It is worse. It is polite, optimised, data driven, and entirely willing to destroy you after sending a satisfaction survey.
The Terminator’s famous declaration, “I’ll be back,” has become the unofficial motto of every social problem civilisation refuses to solve. Climate change will be back. Inequality will be back. Racism will be back. Fascism will be back. The rent will certainly be back.
And because we are modern people, we will respond by creating a panel discussion.
The modern world frequently assumes that informed decisions are those aligned with contemporary liberal assumptions about autonomy, self-expression, and individual rights. These values are significant and often hard-won. Yet the question remains, informed according to whose standards?
Every human decision emerges from information. The deeper question concerns the source of that information.
A person may inherit religious discipline, nationalist loyalty, consumer aspiration, political ideology, class resentment, or technological optimism. Another may inherit trauma, poverty, privilege, colonial categories, family expectations, or a YouTube channel with very persuasive background music.
Each believes they have reached their conclusions independently.
Friedrich Nietzsche understood this with unnerving clarity. He did not simply question morality, but he questioned the origin of moral values. What societies call “good” and “evil,” he argued, often reflect historical struggles for power rather than eternal truths. Values are not merely discovered. They are made, defended, inherited, and occasionally marketed with a logo.
Nietzsche might have enjoyed the modern fitness industry. Nothing demonstrates the genealogy of morality quite like watching people treat kale smoothies as evidence of spiritual superiority.
If Nietzsche diagnosed the problem, Jiddu Krishnamurti attempted a cure. He argued that genuine freedom requires liberation from psychological conditioning. Nationality, religion, ideology, status, and inherited belief can become prisons disguised as identities.
But there is a difficulty.
The mind examining conditioning is itself conditioned.
It is like asking a fish to investigate water, except the fish has a mortgage, a political opinion, and an Instagram account.
Perhaps freedom is not escape from conditioning but awareness of it. Perhaps wisdom begins when we notice the invisible hands shaping our judgments. This is less glamorous than enlightenment. It does not involve levitation, glowing auras, or being invited onto podcasts. It involves admitting that one may be wrong.
This admission remains one of humanity’s rarest minerals.
Viktor Frankl, writing from the unimaginable horror of Nazi concentration camps, observed that human beings retain the capacity to find meaning even in extreme suffering. Some survived for family, faith, duty, hope, or unfinished work. Meaning did not eliminate suffering, but it made suffering intelligible.
Yet meaning itself is not universal. One person survives for children. Another for God. Another for revolution. Another for a football team that has not won a trophy since 1966.
This brings us, naturally, to the World Cup.
Football is often described as the beautiful game. This is true, in the same sense that civilisation is beautiful; it contains grace, joy, tribal identity, artistry, heartbreak, commerce, nationalism, corruption allegations, political interference, advertising, and people shouting at television screens as though the referee can hear them through the walls.
The 2026 World Cup has provided a masterclass in modern moral confusion. VAR[3], invented to reduce injustice, has instead given humanity a new method of experiencing injustice in high definition. Every disputed decision now arrives with slow motion replay, computer lines, multiple camera angles, and a global jury of furious amateurs who have watched precisely four matches but are prepared to overthrow FIFA[4] before dinner.
Recent controversy has centred on Egypt’s elimination after a dramatic match against Argentina. Egyptian officials and players publicly alleged unfair refereeing and disputed a VAR decision that disallowed an Egyptian goal. Such allegations remain contested, but the episode has become another example of how technology, instead of ending suspicion, can make suspicion more detailed.
Elsewhere, the tournament has seen disputes over close offside calls, penalty appeals, inconsistent intervention standards, and the strange modern reality in which a goal can be erased because a player’s shoulder, eyelash, or metaphysical aura was judged to have crossed an invisible line. Reports from the group stage documented controversies involving Iran, Ghana, Brazil, and Ecuador, demonstrating that VAR has not abolished human judgment, but it has merely placed human judgment inside a small room with several screens.
The football fan’s moral universe is a laboratory for civilisation.
When our team receives a penalty, justice has prevailed.
When the other team receives a penalty, the sport has been corrupted by dark forces.
When VAR benefits us, technology is progress.
When VAR harms us, ‘Skynet’ has taken over.
When a referee makes an error against our country, the referee is biased.
When the referee makes an error in our favour, the referee has wisely understood the spirit of the game.
This is not hypocrisy, exactly. It is patriotism in its natural habitat.
The World Cup also reveals how power and spectacle mingle. Reports have described controversy over disciplinary decisions, including debate around the suspension of a United States player and criticism of political pressure surrounding the matter. FIFA has defended its process, while critics have questioned whether powerful interests receive exceptional treatment.
The wise Jataka elephant would observe this and say, “Perhaps the rules should apply equally to all.”
The fox-consultant would reply, “An inspiring sentiment, but have you considered stakeholder alignment?”
The Terminator would simply scan the stadium and announce, “Probability of public trust, declining.”
Meanwhile, Huckleberry Finn would probably spit into the river and ask why grown men wearing expensive suits require twelve cameras, three committees, and a satellite system to decide whether someone was standing slightly too far forward.
He would have a point.
Contemporary geopolitics offers a more serious version of the same absurdity. Wars in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and parts of the Sahel generate suffering, displacement, hunger, and grief. Yet much of the world experiences these events as background content appearing briefly between advertisements and celebrity gossip.
A child searching for food in a refugee camp and a consumer comparing smartphone accessories inhabit the same global system while living in entirely different realities. One confronts existence directly. The other confronts subscription options.
Both are described as informed participants in modern civilisation.
This is where satire becomes difficult. The world is so absurd that exaggeration often feels unnecessary.
Millions struggle for food, shelter, healthcare, and safety. Meanwhile, affluent societies devote intellectual energy to determining whether a coffee should arrive in seven minutes or eight. Two thirds of humanity struggle with necessity. One third struggles with convenience. The former worries about survival. The latter worries about buffering speed.
Both believe they are participating in civilisation.
Perhaps the people directing global narratives are not ordinary humans at all. Perhaps they are extraterrestrials disguised as consultants, strategists, think tank fellows, and senior executives. This would explain why so many decisions affecting billions appear disconnected from ordinary life.
The extraterrestrial hypothesis has one advantage over conventional explanations, it is occasionally easier to believe than the alternative.
The alternative is that normal human beings built a world in which millions lack basic security while others debate whether artificial intelligence can produce more personalised advertisements.
Yet there are no extraterrestrials.
There are only humans operating within vastly different realities.
The executive, the labourer, the refugee, the monk, the soldier, the billionaire, the farmer, the football referee, the algorithm designer, and the teenager posting moral philosophy between selfies are all conditioned by environments that shape what they perceive as normal.
The distance between them is not biological but experiential.
Are human beings automatons?
Not entirely.
Are we fully autonomous moral agents?
Equally unlikely.
We exist somewhere between freedom and conditioning. Our beliefs are inherited yet examinable. Our values are shaped yet revisable. Our decisions are influenced yet not wholly determined.
The human condition may not consist in escaping conditioning but in becoming conscious of it.
Wisdom, then, is not certainty. Wisdom is suspicion directed first at oneself.
It is Huck Finn recognising that respectable society may be wrong.
It is the Jataka elephant choosing compassion over appetite.
It is Sarah Connor [5]realising that machines are dangerous not because they are alien, but because they resemble the coldest parts of ourselves.
It is the football fan admitting that perhaps the referee did not personally hate their nation.
It is the citizen asking not merely, “What is right?” but “How did I come to believe this is right?”
The Thirukural captures the matter with remarkable elegance, “Whatever the source, from whomever a thing is heard, wisdom consists in discerning the truth within it.” – Kural 423
The verse does not ask us to obey tradition blindly. Nor does it ask us to reject tradition theatrically while filming ourselves doing so.
It asks something more difficult.
To examine.
To discern.
To think.
Not according to inherited authority, ideological loyalty, cultural habit, religious certainty, fashionable opinion, viral outrage, or whichever algorithm has most recently discovered our weakness.
The task offers no final escape from conditioning. There may be no mountaintop where the human mind becomes perfectly free. There may only be moments of recognition, moments when we see the strings, notice the machine, question the crowd, doubt the slogan, and choose compassion anyway.
That may be the closest thing to freedom we shall ever possess.
And if civilisation survives long enough to learn it, perhaps even ‘Skynet’ will be impressed.
.
[1] A collection of 547 Buddhist fables centred around the many lives of the Buddha compiled from around 500 BCE to 300 BCE.
[2] A fictional artificial neural network-based group mind and artificial general superintelligence system that serves as the main antagonist in Terminator
Ravi Varmman explores leadership, culture, and self-inquiry through a philosophical lens, weaving management insight with human experience to illuminate resilience, ethical living, and reflective growth in an ever shifting world today.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
“Speedy Gas” was a small, two-pump, single-bay gas station tucked into a forgotten corner of San Francisco. It was not the kind of station visited by those chasing the lowest price per gallon or making a hurried dash into a minimart, but to its old customers and to those who still valued personal service, Speedy Gas was a relic of a slower, more intimate relationship between driver, car, and service station operator, resembling a visit to a trusted family doctor.
Rita kept the Speedy Gas rituals: windshield wiped clean, hood lifted, fluids checked, tires tapped and filled. Rita approached quickly with the tools of her trade; window spray, clean rag, tire pressure gauge, and welcoming smile.
Below in the grease pit, Daniel lay beneath an aging sedan, his hands blackened with oil as he tightened the final bolts. The scent of motor oil, grease and cement walls of the pit surrounded him like family and was his sanctuary.
Rita stepped carefully toward the edge of the pit and looked down at him.
“Mister M, you’ve been working on that old car all day without a lunch break, and it’s nearing six o’clock.
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”
“This car is more than transportation to its owner.
“Joan Hobson’s long life is wrapped up inside it this old car and driving it to Christmas to be with family will make her feel at home just like this pit and garage makes me feel at home. When I’m done, I want you to run the car over to Maxi Waxi’s and pay for ‘The Deluxe’ service wash.”
“I look at the invoices and know you’re undercharging your customers. You’re a generous man, Mister M.”
“Rita, I’m four times your age. I own this place free and clear and live comfortably inside my shoddy apartment behind the garage. My ‘generosity’ is paying it forward for my long life. I’ve survived. What matters is we’re serving the people who depend on us.”
“The grease pit is too dangerous for a man your age.”
“I may be one hundred and two years old, but I can still lubricate a chassis.”
“It hurts me to see you down there and living behind the garage in a cramped apartment alone. Spend Christmas with my family.”
“I celebrate eight days and nights with candles which is enough celebration for me but thank you. I’m a lonely old man who finds solace working here. My son worked alongside me after school, weekends, and summers at this garage. Ben was a natural born mechanic just like you.”
“I know you miss them dearly, Mister M.”
“I never had a chance to say goodbye to Ben. His jet was taking off from Naval Air Station Alameda to join the carrier USS Constellation at sea. I was busy replacing a radiator hose for an old customer, so I sent Helen off and told her I’d join her after the repair. She called me from the air station and said I missed Ben taking off to join the squadron. Helen said Ben appeared disappointed by not seeing me saying, ‘Tell pop’s I love him.’ She mentioned a look in his eyes as if he knew…
“I lost my only child, Ben, when his F-4 Phantom jet was shot down over Vietnam. He’s still listed as ‘MIA’, but we know Ben didn’t survive and buried him posthumously at the San Francisco National Cemetery. When Helen died peacefully at home twenty years ago, I sold our home including all its happy and painful memories to live and work here where I can keep my mind on work and cherish memories of working together with my son. I’ll be here opening and closing for our customers every day including holidays until the day I die and join Helen and Ben.”
The grease gun slipped in his hand and Daniel fell holding his chest.
“Are you okay, Mister M?”
“I’m having a heart attack!”
The last thing Daniel remembered was a mask placed over his face and Rita holding his hand.
*
Lieutenant Daniel Mercer was flying straight and level through a gray morning over the Atlantic. Suddenly, the cockpit filled with the bitter smell of burning oil and hot metal. The instrument panel flickered, the engine sputtered and fell silent. He knew his P-51 Mustang was hit by a lucky shot from a fallen Messerschmitt.
“Blue Jay Two, you hit?”
“Still flying but no engine and falling fast.”
The engine temperature needle swung hard into the red. Smoke curled backward across the wing. Daniel tightened his grip on the yoke. Below him, the ocean was choppy and cold.
A bullet had passed through his upper flank, grazing the ribs and tearing muscles. He adjusted the trim and remembered home, San Francisco. He thought of the cable cars on California Street, the ringing bell and the slow climb toward Nob Hill. His father’s garage was on California Street, and he would inherit it and forever live his life in the “City by the Bay”.
War had changed his career plans, and the aircraft was descending quickly. He could see England now, and the white cliffs of Dover emerged slowly rising out of the sea with welcoming smiles.
“I’ve got Dover in sight, Blue Jay Lead!”
“Take it straight into any field you see and may God be with you, Blue Jay Two!”
*
He opened his eyes. The air smelled of starched sheets, chlorine, antiseptic, and pain. A woman stood beside him. She wore a white neatly pressed nurse uniform, her posture was erect, and her expression composed. Her hair was pinned neatly beneath her cap. One hand rested lightly against his wrist, fingers counting the rhythm of his pulse.
“Where am I?”
“You’re in a British Army hospital.
“I’m Lieutenant Nurse Stephanie Hall.”
“Let me out of here!”
“You’re wounded and require proper medical care.”
“Where are my clothes?”
“Sir, if we must strap you to the bed to ensure you receive proper care, we shall do so.”
“I can see you are going to be a difficult patient. Most of you Yanks are.”
“I need to get back to my unit.”
“Where is your unit, Lieutenant?”
“My squadron is the ‘United States Army Eight Airforce’ based in East Anglia, England.”
“A ‘Mighty Eight’, lad. We’re grateful for your service to Britain. How old are you?”
“My birthdate is on my dog tag.”
“I see a very brave, defiant, man-boy of no more than nineteen, correct?”
“I guess the truth no longer matters because the war is over for me. I lied about my age when I enlisted. I serviced the Packard Custom Eight Clipper at my pop’s garage owned by a Brigadier General who pulled strings for me. They rushed me through flight school in time to see action before the war ends. I’ll be twenty years old on Christmas Eve.”
“Your mother was very fortunate to receive a gift of a beautiful baby boy the night before Christmas. I expect you to write home and tell her and your ‘pop’s’ you’re receiving the best of care and will be home soon.”
He studied her face and saw beauty, confidence, and something else, buried deeper. He did not yet know what it was.
*
The hospital ward was filled with wounded men. At night, the air filled with murmured prayers, delirious whispers, and sometimes screaming. Nurse Lieutenant Stephanie Hall adjusted bandages, administered morphine, and checked pulses. Her presence was precise, efficient, and compassionate.
She rarely spoke more than necessary but he watched the way she leaned closely when listening, the faint crease that appeared between her brows when she concentrated, and how beautifully her figure filled out the uniform. He found himself waiting for her. He learned she worked the late shift ending at midnight.
*
He woke to find her sitting on the edge of his bed.
“I’m off duty. Care to chat?”
“Only if you move in closer; the crash made me hard of hearing.”
“Nonsense, but brilliant try. What’s it like where you’re from?”
“San Francisco is a slice of heaven. The fog rolls in low, like it owns the city. You hear the cable cars before you see them.”
“Cable cars?”
“The San Francisco cable car system hurdles up the hills. You hear the bell and their steel grip biting into the tracks. It’s a good sound. It means people are going somewhere. Going to work. Going home where I want to be. My father has a garage on California Street with one bay and two pumps out front. Before the war, I spent my days in a grease pit underneath a car or truck with oil dripping down upon me and grease under my fingernails that never quite washed out.”
“That sounds dreadful but delightfully masculine. You have long slender beautiful fingers resembling those of a pianist which contradict your profession.”
“Slide in closer and I’ll let you read my palms, too.”
“Just a few inches, Lieutenant but I warn you my scream will awaken this ward.”
“You’re bluffing, you’re a compassionate nurse and wouldn’t risk waking these poor wounded bastards.”
“I remind you that you’re also ‘wounded’ and an irreverent ‘bastard’.”
“Find me sexy?”
“Possibly, Lieutenant and you’re sex appeal may likely increase after talking more about the garage.”
“I enjoy repairing cars. A customer say’s he can’t get to work or his wife’s expecting soon and he needs it ready. You find what’s wrong, set it right, and witness the beautiful sound of the engine turning over again. I helped him and it made me feel like I mattered.”
“Your work is like that of a surgeon, Lieutenant.”
“Yeah, call me a car doctor! Ah, I made you chuckle…Your hands are soft and beautiful and don’t look accustomed to hard labour.”
“Before the war, I was an appendage to a man of position. That sort of vital national service.”
“I don’t understand a damn word you’re saying. Spell it out.”
“After graduation from boarding school, I was placed into an arranged marriage with a man I didn’t know. He was the first man I came to know. I didn’t love him and there was no romance. His family sorely desired a male heir to carry on his family line. We tried and failed repeatedly to have a baby. I was blamed for being infertile despite his private admission of impotence. I remained a dutiful wife standing beside her husband instead of close to him in the same bed. Now, I find myself helping broken men stand again. Helping them return to their lives. Just like the cars you made whole and sent them on their way.”
“Where’s home?”
She chose not to answer, knowing nothing she could say would translate across the caste and privilege gulf between them. Her world was a life he had never imagined, just as she could never truly appreciate the grease-stained certainty of his.
“Home is wherever I am needed.”
They remained there in the dim light, studying each other with the quiet curiosity of two travelers who had met at the crossing point of two lives. He saw refinement that both fascinated and intimidated him. She saw competence that steadied her, a man whose worth was measured not in title but in usefulness. She saw a man she ached for and dreamed about.
*
Night after night, they spoke. Their formality softened. He called her Steph and she called him Daniel. They recognised the war they shared brought them closer and freed them from needing to understand dissimilar worlds.
*
A distant chime signaled midnight awakening Daniel. Steph was no longer wearing her cap, and her long flowing blond locks fell softly around her face. She saw his eyes open and he smiled.
“I have a surprise for you, Daniel. But you must keep it a secret. I’m breaking hospital regulations.”
She handed him a paper bag. He opened it and found a bottle of Coca-Cola, a Hershey bar, and a pack of American cigarettes with a matchbook.
“What made you do this at your peril?”
“I wanted you to feel some small semblance of home.”
“You’re a wonderful woman, Steph. I wish I had met you under such different circumstances. Steph, what can I do for you?”
“Daniel, just be my friend and listen to me. I have no one else to speak to about these matters.”
“What do you have to tell me, Steph?”
“My husband Bernard was a pilot. I spent two years waiting for him to come home until notice arrived; he was shot down and killed.”
“I’m sorry for you, Steph.”
“I’m lonely, Daniel. I find meaning and purpose working here but I think I would like to find the passion and yearning absent in my marriage with you, Daniel. I also wish we met under different circumstances.”
*
The deceased were removed in the very early hours of the morning so as not to alarm the dying. Their beds were filled by morning. A priest came by each bed at dawn, whispered a prayer, and waved his hands in the form of the cross. He never spoke but Daniel muttered, “I guess one prayer is as good as another.”
*
Stephanie arrived just after midnight on a clear cold night. The moon’s light cast a faint but warm glow across the ward. She drew the privacy drape around his bed. She stood beside him, her hands trembling faintly, and they devoured each other with their eyes.
“Do I smell ‘Chanel No. 5’ perfume?”
“I chose a scent you might recognise from San Francisco and used so little only you would notice.”
“Why the perfume?”
“Because after midnight, near to you, I’d rather be a woman than a nurse, darling.”
She climbed onto the bed beside him; her movements deliberate, urgent, tender, raw, vulnerable, and filled decades of neglect, culminating in a glorious culmination of emotions. He held her close but neither spoke. The world beyond the drape ceased to exist.
*
Rain traced soft lines down the tall English windows. He lay awake, staring at the ceiling, his shoulder wrapped in stiff white bandages. Daniel noticed fewer beds were being filled, which meant the war was ending.
The curtain providing intimacy at midnight opened without haste. It was Nurse Captain Melinda Richardson. She carried herself like an officer accustomed to command. Her uniform was immaculate, her posture erect, and expression firm but not unkind. She pulled a chair close to him to speak quietly.
“I have come to speak with you about Nurse Lieutenant Stephanie Hall.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“It has come to my attention that the two of you have spoken intimately on more than one occasion. She has attended to you personally, even when such attention could have been delegated. I do not interfere lightly in the private lives of my nurses, but I am responsible for their well-being, particularly in matters where misunderstandings may arise. You are an American and come from a nation where distinctions of class are less formal and permanent. That is not the case in England. Nurse Lieutenant Stephanie Hall was married to the son of Lord Hall. She returned to his family estate a widow before she had truly become a wife. She is the daughter of a distinguished family, and her father holds influence at the highest levels of government. She could have spent the war in comfort and safety. Instead, she chose to serve Britain by becoming a nurse and entering the army. She will one day return to the family estate. Her father is ill and mother deceased. She is the last of her line.”
“In other words, she’s out of my league.”
“You’re blunt but on point.”
“I’m from San Francisco, Captain. My father owns a garage. I suppose that’s all there is to say.”
“You became an officer and crossed an ocean to defend a country not your own. That speaks highly of you. But there are worlds, Lieutenant, that do not easily join. Not because of character but because of obligation and history. Bluntly, Stephanie Hall’s Anglicanism and your Jewish faith present barriers to a union between you both. The fact that you have won her heart is not a trivial thing.”
“Steph never brought up religion although the letter ‘H’ for Hebrew was stamped on my ‘dog tag’.”
“I ask you to understand what it all means and what it may never be permitted to become.”
He looked past her, toward the dark window where the rain pelted reminding him of the bullets fired to kill him and this time, hitting his heart.
“I understand, Captain. Requesting your leave to process all of this.”
“I wish you the best of everything and a long life, Lieutenant.”
Captain Richardson left him, but he knew that survival, however miraculous, did not free a man from the boundaries of the world dividing people. War should have taught him that lesson, but for a moment in time, a beautiful woman from a stately manor and mechanic-turned-pilot fell in love.
*
The day came when he could stand, walk, and be discharged. They did not speak of it until the morning it arrived. He stood beside his bed, wearing his uniform again. Steph stood before him.
“You’re returning to your unit and then home?”
“Yes, to the life I had lived before the war.”
“I will miss you, Daniel.”
He attempted to pull her tight to him, but she resisted.
“You cared for me and I took you into my heart, Steph. I want to say more but there are no words which will suffice except a kiss which you’ll permit me, please.”
She entered his embrace and released the pent-up desire raging through her until Captain Richardson approached with his discharge papers. Nurse Lieutenant Stephanie Hall watched Daniel leave forever but knowing he left behind a permanent memento.
*
Their son was born in the spring and she named him Bernard. Steph raised him alone. She never wrote to Daniel and never spoke his name, but she was reminded of him in every feature of their beautiful son.
*
Daniel returned to San Francisco, resumed his life working inside his father’s garage and married. The war became memory. Years and decades passed. His garage on California Street was built with his hands and discipline learned in the cockpit, and watching the dedicated nurses complete their rounds with compassion which he shared with each of his customers.
*
Daniel awoke and found himself alone inside an ICU not resembling the hospital ward he recalled from the war. The war defining his youth was more than eighty years behind him and losing his son and wife faded into memory.
Rita was cautioned by the cardiologist,
“Say your goodbyes before it’s too late. His birthday is tomorrow. We didn’t think a birthday celebration was appropriate for a dying man. Nobody in this ICU can recall a birth and death on the same day particularly Christmas Eve.”
“Mister Mercer never shared his birthday with me even though I’m the closest thing to family.”
Rita held Daniel’s frail hand in one hand and a faded sealed envelope with foreign postage stamps in the other hand. Daniel’s eyes were hollow, but he recognised the aged envelope.
“I searched your office for somebody to contact and came across this envelope from England addressed to you many decades ago and never opened.
“Would you like me to open it?”
Daniel remembered his decision not to revisit the past by opening the envelope because he put the past behind him, but the memories and mourning were about to end, and he motioned for Rita to open the envelope.
Rita removed a photograph of a handsome young Royal Air Force aviator. She turned over the photo revealing a handwritten note suggesting a woman’s soft touch with a fountain pen which she read softly:
Dearest Daniel, Please meet our son, Bernard Mercer Hall. Bernard was told his father was an aviator killed in the war. The night our son was conceived inside the darkness of the ward remains a blessed, romantic memory and a warm togetherness two young people shared inside the cold of war. After graduation from Cambridge, he darted off to the RAF to become an aviator like his father. I’m mailing this photograph and note in the final days of my life. I knew you as a sensitive young lad and you may be reticent to open it fearing to relieve the past which I fully understand. Life was kind permitting our union during times of mutual need but also cruel in keeping the three of us apart. I hope our beautiful son will bring you happiness and remove any grief life may have dealt you. Goodbye, my love.
Daniel’s American son followed him into the sky and lost to it but here was another son; a son born of survival and two lovers from different worlds. Although Bernard walked beneath ancient, privileged towers, he, too, flew inside the same sky that had both spared and punished three pilots; a husband, and a father and son. Daniel was gifted with a second son, and his grief was replaced with pride in two heroic sons born from two magnificent mothers.
Rita held Daniel’s hand which gripped tightly and suddenly let go. A sound from the heart monitor resembling the bells of the cable cars Daniel warmly spoke about signalling his long journey ended. Daniel’s cable car reached the top of California Street and waited for him to climb aboard with a nonstop flight to a grand reunion of loved ones; a beautiful extended family all with eyes towards the sky.
From Public Domain
Jonathan Ferrini has published nearly one hundred short fiction stories and poems. He is the host and writer of the weekly “The Razor’s Ink Podcast” where he discusses movies, television, and music.
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Somdatta Mandal explores six dance-dramas by Tagore translated from Bengali andBrajbuli by Indrani Haldar
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1841) watching a performance of his nritya natya or dance drama: From Public Domain
The translation of different genres of Rabindranath Tagore’s works into English remains unabated till date. The translations of his novels, short stories, poems, non-fiction, and travelogues have been coming out at regular intervals, and multiple translations of some texts by different people, both professional and amateur, justify his popularity among all classes of readers, scholarly or mundane. Interestingly enough, compared to the other genres, drama happens to be a slightly neglected area in the world of Tagore translation and readership.
Throughout his life, Tagore experimented with different forms of plays – allegorical, symbolic, historical, comedies, and a kind of comic and witty plays known as ‘hasyakoutuk’. Again, there are some plays that focus more on dialogue than be dramatic enough to be enacted on stage. Apart from the various forms of plays that Tagore wrote and experimented with in his lifetime, there is another sort of play which does not have any antecedents, where the three aspects of acting, songs and dance have developed into a local form of opera. In plays like Mayar Khela, Shapmochon, Shyama, Chitrangada, Chandalika or Kalmrigoya and Tasher Desh [1](these last two plays of course have prose and songs in the dialogue), Tagore uses dialogue through the use of songs. The power that these plays generate as plays per se can be an interesting area of discussion, but these latter operatic types of plays, except for Bengali speaking readers, are hard to find and be appreciated by a pan-Indian or non-Bengali readership.
This is where a present set of six very aesthetically produced slim volumes (published in 2024 and 2025) all of them beautifully translated into English by Indrani Haldar, a retired professor of English at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, gains significance. The very first book in this translated series is entitled Bhanusingha Thakurer Padabali [2] and Rabindranath had composed the lyrics as a young writer only sixteen years old under the pseudonym of Bhanusingha Thakur. Dedicated to the memory of his sister-in-law Kadambari Debi who was his one-time playmate and companion, the twenty-one lyrics presented in the book are written in the Vaishnava Padabali tradition initiated by the Maithili poet Vidyapati in the 15th century and which gained impetus in the 16th century in Bengal under the cultural and religious influence of Shree Chaitanya Deva’s revival of Vaishnavism. Built around the love-legend of Radha and Krishna in both material and mystical forms, these lyrics are composed in brajabuli, (a mixture of Maithili and Bengali and Sanskrit) and the language in which the early padabalis had been written. Later in life, Rabindranath was not enthusiastic about these songs and spoke about them as being somewhat enclosed within the limits of a particular thought-system. The bilingual version of this volume, also becomes the books USP.
Photo Courtesy: Somdatta Mandal
The second book in this series is titled Free Waterfall. It is a translation of Muktodhara. Written in 1922, it is a sombre and singularly focused play, perhaps the most powerful of Rabindranath’s dramatic output. The background of the play is of course the nation-wide Non-Cooperation Movement launched by Mahatma Gandhi and the political backdrop of this can hardly be ignored. This symbolical and allegorical play has two prominent figures namely, Dhanajay Bairagi and the Crown Prince, Abhijit. Despite their appeal to the masses, both are misunderstood and persecuted figures, pursuing their ideals and visions alone and of choice. Both are determined and steadfast in their stand while rejecting violent options. The ideals pursued and values inculcated include a disapproval of machines misused by humans to enhance political power, to dominate the powerless and increase their suffering, and to harm and destroy the forces of nature which shape a beneficient environment. Though the play ends with the tragic death of the prince, as most often in Rabindranath’s creative work, hope, love, courage and compassion are attainable at the end of the dark tunnel.
The third book published in this series is Tasher Desh, titled The Kingdom of Cards. Written in 1933, and dedicating it to Subhas Chandra Bose, while remembering that he had “taken up the sacred task of inspiring new life and soul” of India, Tasher Desh is a complex play resisting any straight-jacketed or single interpretation, thus necessitating a multi-dimensional approach. Tagore’s travels to Europe and the United States in the early 1930s were necessarily reflected in his creative work. It is interesting to surmise that the state-sponsored regimentation that the sensitive poet must have been aware of on his European tour, especially in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, the half-suppressed state of fear prevailing, and the claustrophobic atmosphere stifling creativity, has found expression in this play. In the play, the Prince, in search of new world, lands up after his shipwreck, in a country where people have been flattened geometrically into mindless cards, unable either to think or act, leave alone create, on their own, a condition of mindless subservience. The play of course ends in a paean to new life, a freedom from fear, a ‘breaking open’ of all closed doors. Tagore therefore stresses the importance of eternal human values which he hopes will return to a world hell-bent on losing them.
Photo Courtesy: Somdatta Mandal
The two dance-dramas Chitrangada and Shyama, though creatively separated by three decades, are the most popular of Tagore’s works, and present his continuous quest for and questioning of the multi-dimensional character of love. Both the women protagonists in these plays are strong characters, outstripping their male counterparts in impact. Chitrangada (1891) an early verse-play, is based on a subsidiary story gleaned from Mahabharata. In the play both Arjun and Chitrangada progress from sensual attraction to a realisation of the innate substantial qualities of love, from romantic obsession to a deeper relationship between lover and beloved. Shyama, on the other hand, has antecedents in a Buddhist tale from the Jatakas. Revised and perfected by Tagore in the final decade of his creative life, the approach is more paradoxical and ambiguous. Though as strong a character as Chitrangada, Shyama is self-centeredly willing, even eager, to compromise basic human values like compassion or sympathy in her sudden all-consuming passion for Bajrasen. According to the translator, the rationale for bringing together these two remarkable plays under a single cover is because in all his explorations into the manifestations and vicissitudes of human love, the poet has been able to emphasise its inherently paradoxical nature.
Balmiki Pratibha (The Genius of Balmiki) and Kalmrigaya (The Fatal Hunt), two early plays by the youthful, newly West-returned Tagore were written as experiments in fusing music with theatre as in the Western operating tradition and the Indian usage of kathakata[3]. They initiated the trail of musical plays which weave themselves into the writer’s creative work though the poet was to admit later, in Jibonsmriti (Reminiscenses), that he was never again to experience as much enthusiasm as he did in writing these two plays. The story in Balmiki Pratibha was culled from the Ramayana, as was Kalmrigaya, though the former play has a more elaborate storyline and involves several ideological constructs, some shared with the latter. Human emotions, like anger or compassion found a more dramatic expression when coupled with music, the poet-dramatist felt. According to the translator, these two musical plays should be considered together for the similarities they reveal in both technical and thematic aspects.
Photo Courtesy: Somdatta Mandal
The sixth and the latest volume in this translation series contains three plays, Mayar Khela, Shapmochan and Chandalika. This trio of plays offer insights into the entire range of Rabindranath Tagore’s creative work at the centre of which rules love, sensual or spiritual, transformational and divine, or of the earth, earthy. The three plays in this anthology, separated from each other by decades, present an epic range of emotions, from desire to sacrifice and compassion, and are a testament to the writer’s analytical and ideological concerns and actually complement each other. Mayar Khela, the earliest of these romantic verse-plays, follows Tagore’s early experiments in fusing music and theatricality. Presenting a multitude of characters, each exhibiting an aspect at variance with the others, they move around in interweaving circles, ranging from calm, sacrificing acceptance to erratic detachment. In Shapmochan, a clear viewpoint is presented in the emphasis laid on a love that transcends physicality to reach beyond appearances. In the final geetinatya[4], Chandalika, the love of an untouchable woman for the Buddhist monk, Ananda, transforms her entire world. Here Rabindranath depicts not just the impulsive force of love but also its ability to transform and transcend mere physicality.
As mentioned earlier, this series of translations brings fresh light on Tagore’s works, and we expectantly wait for many more such productions in the near future.
[1]Mayar Khela – The Game of Illusion: Shapmochan – The Breaking of a Curse: Kalmrigoya –The Fatal Hunt: Tasher Desh—The Kindom of Cards. Shyama and Chitrangada are named after the protagonists.
[2]Bhanusingha Thakurer Padabali – The verses of Bhanusingha Thakur
[3] Art of religious and mythological storytelling rooted in folklore.
[4] Translates to song-play … what we refer to as dance-dramas too.
.
Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a retired Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.
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Angel Ramon is best known for his B-movie horror books. The Frogmaster, as he is called because he unleashed a whole swarm of killer frogs onto the zombie genre, is quite popular in the independent horror community.
With Requiem of a Lost Nation, however, he takes a completely different path. Instead of entertaining B-movie horror, he explores his own family history and the generational trauma caused by the Salvadoran Civil War. Loosely based on the life of his beloved mother, the novel follows Otilia, who, after emigrating to the United States, returns to El Salvador to come to terms with her harrowing experiences during the Civil War that lasted from 1979 to 1992.
This is done in a rather interesting way, as the novel alternates between chapters set in the present day (2019) and chapters depicting Otilia’s childhood, particularly the events during the outset of the Civil War atrocities 1980-1982. Together with diary entries and reports by British journalist Jon Snow—whose original reports can actually still be found on streaming services—the book leads us into the complexities of Salvadoran culture and politics. We learn about the country’s social divide, its invisible walls, and the Red Scare.
What makes this especially interesting is that Otilia—just like the author—comes from a very conservative background. Raised in a wealthy household, she was heavily influenced by her father, whose hatred of the communist rebels shaped her worldview. Looking back, however, she revises many of these beliefs and arrives at a more balanced perspective. That saves the novel from descending into one-sided accusations. In the end, it boils down to the idea that “both sides were to blame,” or, more poetically: “War was a demon indeed. It didn’t care who got hurt.”
Talking about demons: just to be clear, despite the monster on the cover, this is not a horror novel. It certainly deals with the horrors of war, which can easily be described as demonic, but there are no supernatural elements. More importantly, it isn’t about suspense or the specific atmosphere of dread that Lovecraft once described as essential to horror fiction. Requiem of a Lost Nation is best described as historical fiction.
Especially during the first quarter of the book, I learned a great deal about Salvadoran culture, its social structure, and the causes of the Civil War. Unfortunately, from that point on, it falls a little short. This is mostly due to its rather limited level of analysis. Ultimately, the novel tells us that both sides share responsibility and that war and forced migration can result in identity crises and generational trauma.
My overall impression is mixed though, because the novel uses some rather obvious foreshadowing, and for a historical novel there are simply a few too many convenient coincidences to remain believable. On the other hand, the integration of Spanish dialogue works very well. The passages are paraphrased seamlessly, so readers who don’t understand Spanish won’t miss any important information, while the original dialogue adds considerably to the atmosphere. Unfortunately, such strengths are offset by a handful of odd sentence constructions. Besides these criticisms, I am always appreciative when genre authors step outside their comfort zone. Ramon certainly deserves credit for taking such a personal path and writing the book he clearly felt he had to write.
This requiem is not over yet. While the novel reaches a natural stopping point, it leaves several plot threads and foreshadowed events unresolved. A second volume is planned for late 2027 and will presumably focus on Otilia’s life in the United States.
Andreas Giesbert is a reviewer of speculative fiction, board games and more based in the Ruhr Valley. He mostly writes for online magazines such as www.zauberwelten-online.de, or Ginger Nuts of Horror.
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Some Japanese customs are pretty much common sense (no shoes in the house, no soap in the bath). Some, I have learned from my Japanese mother-in-law (do not store the broom in the entryway!). And others, I have learned from observation. For example, I’ve figured out that it’s best not to leave my wet umbrella unfurled when I poke it into a public umbrella stand, that I should back into a parking space, and that whenever I hand something over, it should be wrapped or in a bag.
Back in the day, department stores wrapped each purchased item individually and put them in a bag, so that once you got home, it was like a birthday or Christmas. In these ecologically-minded days, shop clerks don’t wrap things in paper, and I am more likely to carry my own cloth shopping bag. Naked gifts, however, are still a no-no.
Most souvenir shops in Japan give out multiple bags, so that if you buy five boxes of sweets for five different neighbors, each one can be presented in its own bag. This is a bit problematic when it comes to gifts purchased abroad. However, I now have a supply of sturdy, attractive paper bags with handles that I can use in a pinch. One of my friends said that she sometimes gets excited when she receives something in a bag from a big city boutique, thinking that they’ve opened a local branch. But typically, the bag’s origins don’t really matter, and the bag doesn’t have to match the gift.
I used to think that only new things were put into bags, but when I loaned a book or a dish or a piece of clothing to a Japanese friend, it was inevitably returned in a bag – like a present! I finally figured out that I should do the same. When I returned that yukata I borrowed for my daughter’s school festival, I tucked it into a paper bag emblazoned with the name of a Parisian shop. When I gave back a plastic container that had held food leftover from a party, I put it in a shiny bag from a popular local bakery. I brought a loaf of carrot cake to my neighbour in a sack from an upscale clothing store.
Yukata, a kimono for summer. From Public domain
Just the other day, I loaned a book to an Australian friend who has lived in Japan for many years. Because we are both foreigners in Japan, this one time I didn’t package up the book, but handed it over without cover, as I might have in the United States. I should have known better. When the book came back to me, it was in a crinkly paper bag decorated with strawberries, and tucked into another bag, from a pastry shop, printed with ribbons – a reminder that presentation counts.
From Public Domain
Suzanne Kamatawas born and raised in Grand Haven, Michigan. She now lives in Japan with her husband and two children. Her short stories, essays, articles and book reviews have appeared in over 100 publications. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, and received a Special Mention in 2006. She is also a two-time winner of the All Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest, winner of the Paris Book Festival, and winner of a SCBWI Magazine Merit Award.
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Think about a time when you felt stuck or stifled with the options that your professional path presented. Do you remember your general thoughts and emotions at the time? What expectations did you have when you started on that path? Do you wish you could go back and change some choices you made along the way?
I’ve felt this “stuckness” many times through the various stages of my career as a generalist, evaluating different paths, most recently when I secured permanent residency in the US after a 14-month hiatus of being unable to work in America. I was faced with the choice of taking my career in a different direction or trying to rejoin the corporate path where I left off.
During such ponderings, I’ve usually been able to break my feelings down into an expectations versus reality equation. While I’m sure that isn’t the most insightful thing you’ve heard, think about why the mismatch between that expectation and reality might have occurred in your own life. It is because the expectations you had of your path in two, five, ten, or twenty years, and the reality of that path, in terms of your own perception of reward and fulfillment, don’t match. Thinking of your life as a predefined path, with milestones and comparisons, makes you constantly ponder over this existential expectation versus reality equation, steeped in arbitrary milestones. The challenge, especially in this modern world obsessed with exceptionalism, is that our paths offer the false promise of infinite possibility and underestimate the reality of finite choices.
The Pressure to be on a Path
Remember that favorite interview question we’ve all asked or been asked: Where do you see yourself in five years?
Now think about yourself, your industry, or the job you did five years ago. Has all of that changed beyond recognition? The job I did as recently as 2016 is now basically done by a button. Software developers, who commanded the highest-paying jobs till only a few years ago, are being rapidly challenged by AI or scrambling to become AI engineers, reduced to supervisory roles. Subscriptions as a primary business model, for example, was only adopted in the last five years or so. AI wasn’t a word in the public consciousness till 2023, and today, we’re told we should let it run our lives, from making us breakfast to writing our resumes and picking candidates for jobs!
So, if companies themselves do not know their paths, why is there that pressure on individuals? Based on my own experience, that interview question itself is ill-advised. Someone who is extremely sure of their path, despite knowing how rapidly their context may evolve, is already a bit stifled.
This stifling, myopic path, especially if you’re not fulfilled by it, again brings with it a sense of constant jadedness and exhaustion. It is that exhaustion, coupled with a perceived lack of agency over your path, that eventually manifests as full-blown burnout. Being flexible and adaptable, and rebuilding agency over your own skills are key to building long-term careers today, especially in a time when the AI, internet, and gig economy is truly enabling infinite possibilities at an individual level.
While human beings need structure in their lives, society starts laying out that structure for us from the moment we barely attain consciousness, not leaving too much room for exploration. Remember that question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? I’m guilty of asking this question myself to my nine-year-old niece. She insists she wants to be a vet, which is adorable. I think I wanted to be a cricketer back then. Those questions gave me and my niece structure to explore our personalities, but had I stuck to that path, given the context of my life (my state didn’t even have a team back then), I probably wouldn’t have made a career out of it!
As a 16-year-old, I could have never imagined living in four countries, traveling to over 60 countries marrying an American woman, and attaining financial independence, all before or around 30 years of age. And I am so glad I had the openness to explore divergent paths while still committing to a fairly traditional corporate path. Metaphorically speaking, I knew that I wanted to sail west in the Atlantic, but I was open to landing in Brazil, Mexico, the US, or Canada. That openness has enabled me to start afresh, after 11 years at Google, through this book, and through a coaching and workplace culture consultancy, WideWorldView.com, while continuing to positively engage with the corporate world.
While predefined paths are great to give our expeditions structure, we still need to adjust our sails as per the direction of the winds and currents. As a society, we are too eager to forcefit people into paths, generally very early in life. Thinking about your life and identity as one thing or one path stifles you from exploring all other potentially more fulfilling identities. Despite the rapid changes in societal structures and expectations, the corporate ladder is still largely not set up for individuals to be able to adjust their sails to changing winds, without making radical shifts in course. What if these paths that society puts us on and we often unquestionably follow weren’t meant for us at all?
What if we followed those paths because we constantly felt a stifling opportunity cost? What if those paths were designed to stifle innovation and exploration at a personal level? And what if the expectations our paths set for us were never based in reality? Who made us feel that these paths were the only ones we had? The answer is largely rooted in our modern education system, which is designed to prioritize “getting a job” over self-discovery.
ABOUT THE BOOK
You know the feeling: chronic workplace stress along with a nagging sense of ineffectiveness. That’s burnout. Burnout Highway demystifies this increasingly collective suffering by exploring the larger context that runs all our lives—the systems within which we make decisions, the milestones we were taught to desire, and the feelings of fulfillment we thought they would provide.
From pursuing grades and achievements to landing ‘dream jobs,’ the India Shining generation was promised a clear and straightforward path to success. However, this journey can feel exhausting, especially with India ranking among the countries with the longest working hours and the highest rates of burnout.
Anmol examines how societal conditioning, corporate ladder dynamics, and economic pressures influence our work and presents readers with a systematic framework for navigating the challenges of burnout while fostering the development of fulfilling and emotionally sustainable careers. This is an invitation to prioritize work that aligns with your values and addresses your emotional well-being, ultimately helping you break the cycle of burnout.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anmol Diddan is an advocate for emotionally sustainable careers and the founder of World Wide View. Raised Sikh in the complex geopolitics of the Northeast, Anmol spent his early years in Shillong before moving to Mumbai at sixteen to study Economics; an experience that exposed him to both the promise and pressure of ambition in modern India. His thirst for learning through experiences led him to a global career in behavioural and cultural research, working with Google across India, Ireland, Singapore, and the United States. Now based in New York City, he draws on his dynamic background to explore how the intersection of economics, psychology, and culture affects all our lives, with a focus on wellbeing in the modern workplace. He works 1:1 to help professionals tackle burnout and career transitions, all across the world.
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Mud caves in the author’s village: Photo Courtesy: Larry SuChicago: From Public Domain
I left China in 1997 with little more than youthful ambition and the resilience my parents had instilled in me. Since then, the United States has become my second home, first as an international student and later as a naturalised citizen. In nearly three decades, I have returned to my hometown five times, each visit less a simple trip than a pilgrimage, rich with memory, loss, and renewal. Of these, three homecomings stand out most vividly, moments when the presence of my parents, siblings, and villagers reminded me of who I am and where I come from. In their sacrifice, hard work, and quiet endurance, I found lessons in resilience and gratitude that reach beyond my own life and speak to something universal.
Home Visit in 1999
My hometown lies in Heyang County, Shaanxi Province, about fifteen miles from the county seat and five miles from the nearest town. In my memory, a winding dirt road served as the village’s lifeline, linking it with surrounding towns and villages. Though not entirely cut off, the village remained relatively remote, as public transportation was non-existent at the time. To the east and west stretched deep gorges and ravine carved by centuries of rain and snow. Three miles to the north rose Mount Liang, the county’s highest peak, towering yet desolate.
Approximately thirty families, around one hundred and twenty residents, called this village home. The village unfolded along two streets which were riddled with potholes throughout the year. In dry weather, stirred up by the robust northwest wind, a pervasive layer of dust enveloped the streets and the villagers in swirling dances. Conversely, during the rainy season, the thoroughfare turned into a muddy quagmire, making passage difficult. The villagers had to throw in discarded bricks, stones, or fragments of decaying planks to make a makeshift path. Dump sites, replete with smoldering wood, fallen branches, and both animal and human waste, cluttered the sides of the streets. There were very few trees, making the village barren and dreary.
The dwellings varied between mud or brick caves, with a few select families having brick and wood houses when they first settled here. Whatever they were, they had lost their usual shape and colour due to the relentless beating from rain and wind.
Mud caves. Photo Courtesy: Larry Su
We lived in two cave dwellings dug into a high cliff, about three hundred feet from the village street. In front of them lay a small dirt yard, where sheds housed our pigs, ox, chickens, and rabbits. The yard also held the latrine, a simple pit enclosed by dirt walls, whose stench, especially on warm or hot days, often drifted into our living spaces.
This is my hometown, where I was born and lived for eighteen years before leaving for college in Xi’an, the provincial capital, in 1983. I studied English literature at Xi’an International Studies University, earning both my BA and MA degrees, and later joined the faculty of its English Department. I remained there until 1997 when I left for the United States.
Inundated by academic work in graduate school and lack of financial constraints, I did not plan any home visit during my two years of studies in the United States. However, the sudden death of a drunkard in the rooming house I shared with a few American students hastened my decision to make a visit to China.
As a newcomer to the culture, I never linked the drunkard’s brown bags or bulky coat to the heavy drinking that would claim his life. His body was discovered days later, only after the foul smell crept through the air ducts and into our rooms. It happened three weeks before the semester’s end. Fearing I would soon be alone in that eerie house and weighed down by eighteen months of separation from my wife, son, and parents, I hastily bought a plane ticket back to China.
My three-week visit to China was brief, quiet, and deeply comforting. I was overjoyed to see my loved ones and longed to linger in those carefree days, away from foreign foods, stacked books, and unfinished papers. My wife, also a faculty member of Xi’an International Studies University, went to Xianyang International Airport to welcome me back. We traveled by a slow train and a rattling farm tractor to reach my village home. Though I had gone only a short time, I noticed the brick caves, built fifteen years earlier to replace the old loess ones, were already losing mortar. A thin film of black grease from years of cooking stained the walls. Cold air seeped through the cracks in the doors and windows. The animal sheds, with broken doors and missing bricks, made the courtyard even colder and more desolate.
At meals, I noticed my father’s gnarled hands and heavy knuckles rubbed by decades of toil. The gray cotton padded coat was worn out on his shoulders and elbows. Around his waist was a thick hemp rope, the kind used to bundle corn stalks in the fields. Cinched tightly around his coat, it kept the biting wind from slipping in through the gaps, but it looked rough, even absurd. The cotton-padded shoes hand made by my mother were also tattered with cotton exposed. The towel he used to wear over his head in winter had totally lost its whiteness. No doubt life was very hard for them.
During my year and a half in the United States, I spent most of my time in the library and rarely ventured beyond the college campus to see how Americans lived. Still, I caught glimpses of their lives. From visits to my professors’ homes, I saw spacious houses surrounded by trees, lawns, and flowers, with garages large enough for two or three cars. They wore casual yet high-quality clothes, and at parties served sandwiches, barbecued meats, salads, and red wine. Such abundance and variety were things I had never experienced before. Years later, when I owned my own house, I came to understand that Americans had achieved this standard of living after World War II, so I could not help but ask myself: Both Americans and Chinese are human beings, how could their lives be so different, with Americans enjoying plenty, modernity, and comfort, while the Chinese peasants endured poverty, primitiveness, and hardship?
The morning of our departure for Xi’an, my father carried my suitcase on his shoulder, his steps steady on the familiar dirt road, while my wife and I followed behind. The path, worn by years of passing feet and baked dry by windless days, had turned into a powdery film that rose with every footfall, stinging our eyes and filtering into our nostrils. He glanced back and quietly suggested we move to the edges, where the earth was less trampled and the dust less suffocating. As we walked, the frosty wind whistled through the withered corn stalks, their hollow rustle echoing memories I could not keep down.
I was pulled back to those early mornings two decades ago when my father and I walked this same road with a cart of potatoes. Nothing had changed in the region since then. Now with each step, a heavy sadness settled over me. I looked around at the land that my parents lived on for most of their lives; its parched, colourless soil gave little and demanded much.
A few questions throbbed quietly inside me: How lucky I was to escape this poor land! If I had not made it to college, would I be living the same kind of life as my parents? What would be the future for my parents and siblings? When would they finally see a day of plenty, not like the Americans, but be able to eat wheat flour at every meal, not as a holiday luxury, but as an everyday certainty? The silence around us offered no answer, only the sound of the wind scraping through brittle stalks and the soft crunch of dust beneath our shoes.
In less than half an hour, we reached the bus stop. The sun had yet to rise, and the morning air still clung to its chill, though the brisk walk had warmed our bodies. We stood by the roadside, the sky slowly paling, waiting for the van to appear over the horizon. I turned to my father and told him to head back home. He shook his head gently. “I’m not busy,” he said. “Waiting a few more minutes won’t hurt.” He stood beside us, his hands folded deep within his sleeves.
He stood there quietly, patient as ever, perhaps a little awkward too, never at ease in public spaces. Six feet tall and striking in his younger years, he had never learned to take pride in his height or in any part of himself. Life had worn it out of him. Decades of bowing to weather and labour had stripped away any sense of vanity, replacing it with a humility so deep it bordered on invisibility. He saw himself as nothing more than a poor peasant, a man whose only worth came from the work his hands could do in the fields or on the mountain slopes. In his eyes, he was always falling short, always inadequate, someone who never quite belonged unless tethered to a plow, a hoe, or a load on his back.
We waited nearly twenty minutes before the van finally appeared, its headlights slicing through the pale morning mist. When the door creaked open, he stepped forward, lifted our suitcase in, greeted the driver with quiet courtesy, and said, “They are my son and daughter-in-law. They’re heading back to Xi’an.” Then he stepped back, just a pace or two, and stood off to the side, his tall frame silhouetted against the dim sky, waiting without a word. I leaned out and told him he could head home now. “It’s all right,” he replied softly, not moving.
As the van lurched forward, he began to wave slowly at first, then with greater insistence, as if trying to hold on for a moment longer. We waved back, again and again, until the village road curved and he vanished from view. That farewell, quiet and unceremonious, was the last time I would ever see him.
Home Visit in 2009
In August 2009, a year and half after my father’s death, my wife, son and I took a flight from Chicago to Shanghai to visit home. From 1999, when I last saw my father to this homecoming, ten years had passed, yet due to our tight financial situation, we were not able to visit my father and mother. Neither could I attend his funeral in 2007 due to the cost and the hassle of reapplying for a visa after the visit. So this home visit was long overdue. It was a 14-hour flight, and I could not wait for the plane to touch down.
The Shanghai Pudong International Airport was modern, spectacular and state-of-the-art. We waited for two hours to transfer to Xi’an, the nearest city to my wife’s hometown and mine. We first stayed in my wife’s parents’ home for a few days, enjoying the comfort and hospitality my parents-in-law extended to us, but I was counting the days to be with my mother and siblings.
As the car was racing through the newly built highway, my heart was flying home faster than the wheels. When it hit the county seat where my father and I sold potatoes thirty years ago, my heart was pounding faster. I was gripped with a longing and anxiety that I was unable to describe in words. As the car got on the road from the town to the village, memories of the roadside landmarks came back to me: the scattered villages, the apple orchards, and the sudden curves of the road. Now, the surface of the old road had been removed, and a new layer of asphalt had been laid on it. It was also lined with trees. With the summer air and greenness all around, the surroundings were mellow and pleasant.
When the car got to the edge of the big valley before it raced down the slope, I could see vaguely my village. In five minutes, I would get home. My heart tightened and it kept tightening until I felt out of breath. In no time the car arrived at the west end of the village. We almost missed it because the stone lion that was always stationed there had disappeared. As I grew up, the lion was the landmark of the village, and the villagers would always stand there chatting and seeing traffic pass.
Now my feet touched the street I had long missed over the past decade. In my absence, both the houses and the streets had changed beyond recognition. The streets had been widened and cleared of debris. The old dirt houses had given way to brick and cement structures. The gateposts, once made of mud bricks with rough wooden planks for doors, had been replaced by sturdy gleaming metal gates.
The car parked outside the courtyard. My mother and the siblings ran excitedly outside. My mother was older and thinner but in good spirits, as she always was even though she suffered from poor health her entire life. She stooped quite a bit and walked more slowly. Her once abundant hair had also become thin and silvery. My younger brother, my two sisters and their husbands had all changed their clothes for the welcome, but their brown faces, greying hair, and callous hands all gave them away, showing the crushing impact of years of hard labour on their bodies. It was especially heart-breaking to see my two sisters, slightly fairer than their husbands, but still wore rough skin and tired expressions, looking older before their time. They all helped to unpack the car and carried our big suitcases to the sitting room.
In the courtyard, my younger brother had built a new brick flat of three bedrooms. The two on the sides were installed with doors and livable, but not the bigger one in the middle that would require a bigger, specially made door. With the added bedrooms, the living space had been expanded.
I felt its spaciousness, but I also felt its emptiness and loss because of the absence of my father. When he was living and I was in college and graduate school for seven years, his presence in the courtyard filled it with warmth and love. I never failed to see him on the roadside waiting for me when I got off the vehicle. He guessed the dates and would always stand on the roadside to try his luck. Some days he was disappointed when I failed to show up, but when he did see me, his face was all smiles. He walked fast to carry whatever luggage I had. He excitedly exclaimed that he thought it was about time I should return home. He repeated this sentence for years. He put the luggage on the floor of the kitchen, sat in silent contentment at the edge of the Kang[1], and quietly smoked his water pipe while mom was preparing food. I could see that among his life-long laborious hustle and bustle this was the most relaxing and enjoyable moment for him.
For all my years in school from the first grade to graduate school, he never asked what I was learning and how I did it — not that he was not interested or did not care. Given his taciturn nature and lack of education, he felt he was not equipped to inquire about my progress. He knew he could count on me to do well in school. His lack of words conveyed more of his love and expectation than any language could express.
Now he was gone. It must have been very hard for my mother to face the days and nights without him. For more than forty years of marriage, my father bore the burden of most of the fieldwork so that my mother, always in fragile health, could remain at home, focusing on making clothes and preparing meals for us children. Their life together, though often marked by conflicts born of poverty, was sustained by a shared sense of duty to raise five children and to hold on to hope for the future. With her partner gone, the strong shoulder she had leaned on for forty-six years was no longer there. The loneliness must have been overwhelming.
I looked forward to being by her side in this difficult time, but I was also weary of the return. After all these hard years, I finally made it, becoming a professor in an American university. The status of a well-educated intellectual teaching in a Chinese college was enough to call for admiration, let alone a professor teaching in America. Even today, the mention of America would create in listeners associations with wealth, money, status, and superiority, yet could I have delayed my father’s death? Could I have done more for him and the family? What could I have done differently? At the bottom of my heart, I felt embarrassment, regret and guilt.
We were led into the sitting room of the new house which my younger brother had built. Right on the wall of the sitting room, I saw a big canvas portrait of my father’s bust my close friend asked made for his funeral. I stared at that picture. All the emotions that had been pent up within me seemed to explode. I sobbed with tears pouring down my face. The picture was probably taken shortly before his death. His hair was receding, short and mostly white. His stubble also grew white and had not been trimmed for a few days. His skin, due to long years of exposure to the sun, rain, snow and wind, had lost its hue and become dark brown. Wrinkles were engraved on his forehead and around his shrunk and mournful eyes. The hard life had reduced a tall and handsome young man into a visage too painful to see.
My younger brother helped me to our father’s memorial tablet in another room. On the table was another picture of him and some tributes like incense, dry fruits and paper that we burnt for him. I lighted a few incense sticks and knelt on the floor. I said I was sorry to come home late, and I asked for his forgiveness. For all these years, all my father did was work. He never stopped working till his last breath. He gave all he had to his poor family. He started his life’s journey early, walked on the frozen road of hardship for years, and his life was cut short because of too much exertion and exhaustion. He died too early. He did not deserve any of these.
I wished that my stable financial and overall status change in America had come earlier, so that I could do something for my father and family. It took me seven years to obtain my master’s and PhD degrees before I found my current job. It was difficult for me and my family. Both my wife and I depended on assistantships in the States to finish our doctoral degrees and raise our son, but it was harder for my Chinese family left behind. How did he and the family survive all the hardships all these years? From time to time, I called and asked how the family was doing, my father, as reticent as he was always, would say, “The same as usual. Now we had enough to eat.” He never shared details. He did not want me to worry.
Now he was dead. For his short sixty-nine years he lived a hard life, supporting his wife and five children. Never did a day go by without him thinking how he would put food on the table and, when we were young, how to save to send us to school.
One scene remains vivid in my memory. When I was in elementary school, my father, elder brother, and I hauled a cart of potatoes to the county market sixteen miles away. We stood beside the cart the entire day until every sack was sold. By the time we started home, night had fallen, and the air was dark and cold. Near the outskirts of town, we stopped at a nearly deserted food stand. My father bought my brother and me a bowl of noodles to ease our hunger and warm our stomachs. For himself, he asked only for a bowl of hot noodle broth, free of charge, into which he soaked the cornbread we had brought from home. That was his dinner. After a whole day in the cold—calling to passersby, weighing potatoes, helping customers pack their goods—he longed for a bowl of noodles that cost barely three American cents, but he would not spend that money, choosing instead to save every coin for daily necessities and for his children’s tuition and supplies.
This was who my father was, a hard-working yet destitute Chinese peasant living at the bottom of society, always lacking food, money, and the basic necessities, dying so untimely without enjoying a day of hearty meal and relaxed mind, leaving nothing behind for people to remember him by: no money, no property, no words, except the good memories people had of him. Is this what life is? What kind of world is this? Who should be held responsible for him and people like him?
It had never occurred to my father to complain against any individual, institution or society. Like millions of Chinese peasants living from the 1960s to the end of the 1970s, he was a victim of his time marked by the Great Leap Forward, the People’s Commune Movement, the Great Famine, and most devastating of all, the ten-year long Proletariat Cultural Revolution. It was estimated that over forty million Chinese starved to death just from the Great Famine from 1958-1961.
During my short stay at home, I ventured to the villages nearby. I saw peasants as old as in their 70s and 80s, stooped and frail, still toil day in and day out in the poor soil, to contribute to their sons’ building a new house or paying their daughters’ dowry. I read about millions of migrant workers, leaving their aging parents and small children behind, selling their labour to factories and workshops in big cities earning $600 a month. They work fourteen hours a day with only one or two days off in a month.
My 45-year-old sister recently worked in a factory in Guangdong. She told me she worked more than fourteen hours a day, with only two short meal breaks of about twenty-five minutes each. The rest of the time she stood in front of a machine, collecting washing machine parts that poured out nonstop. She could not step away, even briefly, without parts piling up and crashing to the floor. To prevent this, she avoided drinking water so she would not need to use the restroom as often.
I often wonder what our father would think, knowing from the grave that his grown children, though no longer hungry or ragged, still must toil so hard to make a living. They still depend on crops and apple orchards for survival. They still lack savings for family emergencies, vacations, or helping their children marry.
Home Visit in 2019
I visited China in May 2019, during which I delivered a lecture entitled “William Faulkner and His Works” at my alma mater. Before the talk, a formal ceremony was held, and I was awarded an honorary professorship. I had invited my mother to attend, but she declined. For a woman in possession of a lifelong interest in meeting people and seeing new places, her refusal seemed unusual.
Later I learned that her health had declined sharply over the past two years, making long trips difficult. This became painfully clear during my walks with her in the village. I held her weakened arm, little more than thin flesh over bone, as we moved slowly along the path. Every few minutes she had to stop and sit, murmuring that her legs were too weak to carry her farther.
As I walked with her through the village, I noticed many changes. The streets had been paved with cement, streetlights now stood on every post, and running water had been installed in every household, yet the village also felt emptier. Wealthier families had moved to the county seat, and younger men and women had left for jobs in larger cities. What remained were mostly the elderly and children, giving the village a quiet and desolate air.
My younger brother had upgraded his home. In September, I learned from my younger brother that our mother was seriously ill. It started with a few swollen teeth, then a big ball grew on one side of her face, so big that it squeezed her eye. My brother and sisters thought it might be some infection that would heal in a week or two, but when it became more than two weeks, they decided to take her to the county hospital, only to be told that they could not treat her, that she needed to be transferred to a hospital in Xi’an. She was taken to the emergencies of two big hospitals, only to be told that they could not treat her.
They then took her to the third hospital affiliated with the Fourth Military Medical University, one of the best ones in Xi’an. I happened to have a friend working there, and I called him repeatedly, asking if he could help arrange for my mother to see a doctor. Through his connection, she was admitted to the emergency department. A team of specialists were assembled, and they diagnosed her case as advanced oral cancer, with very slim chances of recovery. If we insisted on treatment, two hospitals would need to be involved. Part of her face would have to be cut, and her chest opened to drain the fluid. Given her age, the likelihood of surviving such a surgery was minimal.
After careful discussion, my brother, sisters, and I decided to forego the attempt and brought her home, leaving her final days in God’s hands. It was indeed a hard decision for us. We felt extremely guilty for our mother did not deserve to die this way, yet she accepted it with resignation and sigh. She said, “How did the Lord allow this weird illness to happen to me?” For two weeks she lay on bed, becoming weaker day by day, withering away until she lost her last breath.
Since she was diagnosed, I had been preparing to fly back to China for the funeral. Because of my absence from my father’s funeral, I was determined to attend my mother’s funeral, to make sure she had a decent burial. I told my siblings that I would be glad to pay for all the expenses. That was the least I could do to show a little appreciation for what she did for the family and me. I spent fourteen hours flying from Chicago to Beijing, then two hours from Beijing to Xi’an, then four hours of drive home. By the time I arrived home, more than twenty-four hours had passed.
The moment I knelt before my mother’s dead body in a coffin, my eyes were filled with tears. I told her how sorry I was not to be with her for the last weeks now that she was forever gone. With a heavy heart and hasty breath, my words were repeatedly interrupted by my sobbing. My brother and sisters, kneeling beside me, tried to calm me down and asked me not to be carried away by my grief.
The second day was filled with preparations for the funeral. A few large tents, complete with tables and chairs, were rented and set up by a group of young men. The caterers arrived in their big truck, bringing utensils, meats, and vegetables. They busily set up the stove, chopped the meat, and cleaned the vegetables. In the nearby field, the grave diggers worked diligently, laying bricks to line the walls of the grave. My brother and I carried home-prepared food to the gravesite, along with light refreshments, cigarettes, and liquor, as tokens of our appreciation for everyone’s efforts.
The funeral ceremony was held the next day. Relatives, villagers and the people nearby packed the small square in front of the courtyard. My mother’s coffin was carried by a few strong men from the house outside and placed on a frame for people to pay their last respect. Our sisters and the women relatives knelt around the coffin, cried and chanted the hard life my mother had lived, while my elder brother, younger one, and I knelt in front of the coffin. The band started to play music of mournful nature.
I then stood up and gave a short eulogy outlining mother’s sacrifice and her impact on us. As I started to utter those words, they invoked images of the past years when my mother, always in poor health, did her best to make clothes and food for us. I especially mentioned how she insisted on us siblings going to school to get an education during a financially challenged times. Without her push, encouragement and resourcefulness, our lives now would be different.
When the ceremony ended, the coffin was placed on a motorized vehicle for transport to the graveyard. As it moved slowly toward the site, we siblings, along with relatives and villagers, followed behind, carrying the funeral decorations. When the coffin was about to be lowered into the grave, everyone gathered along the sides. I offered a prayer for my mother, thanking the Lord for bringing her into our lives and for all she had done for our family. I asked Him to remember her sacrifices and contributions and to welcome her into heaven. I recited a verse from Revelation 21:4: “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.” After my prayer, the villagers helped cover the grave with cement boards and dirt.
On the journey back home, and later on the flight to the United States, my thoughts were consumed by the many sacrifices my mother had made. She did not come from this region. She was born into a prosperous doctor’s family in Gansu Province, but during the national famine, she was forced to leave Gansu and migrate to Shaanxi, where she married my father. Within four years, she had given birth to three sons, placing an immense burden on our already poor family, and later she bore two daughters. Years of poor health, inadequate nutrition, and endless labour to provide food and clothing for the family left her frail. I remembered how she often lay on her side, wracked with pain from stomach ulcers caused by malnutrition, yet the family could not afford medicine.
My mother was a very ordinary peasant woman. She had only three years of schooling, yet she understood the value of education and how it could shape the future of her children. One memory remains carved in my mind. Every time I returned home from four years of boarding school, she made sure I had a bowl of noodles to give me some nourishment. Our family was extremely poor and survived mostly on corn and sweet potatoes, yet she used the small amount of wheat flour she had saved to make me that simple meal. Watching me enjoy a hearty bowl after days of dry corn bread and hot water brought her more joy than when she ate the food herself. She would sit beside me, relaxed and smiling, asking about school as I devoured the noodles.
I recalled more… One winter during high school, I was short just one dollar of my tuition. My homeroom teacher, stern and unyielding, made me walk five miles home and warned me not to return without the full amount. My parents, especially my mother, went from house to house in the village, humbly pleading for a small loan for a week or two. Most turned them away, citing their own hardships, but a few, out of pity, offered a yuan or two. By late afternoon, the small contributions had added up. I returned to school at dusk.
Now that both of my parents are gone, I probably will not return as often as I once did, yet home will always hold a permanent place in my life, its significance untouched by time. It has become a wellspring that nourishes me, as it has for many years. Whenever I think of home, I remember my parents, siblings, and the villagers. Their hope, hard work, and resilience have inspired me throughout my studies, career, and life. I have always thought: if my parents could endure those grueling years, far harsher than anything I have faced, I could persevere as well.
Struggling with a difficult reading, drafting a paper, or completing a PhD dissertation feels like a minor challenge compared to the battles they fought for food, clothing, tuition, farming tools, seeds, and fertilizers. For my challenges, I could seek more time or consult a professor. For my parents, failing to buy seeds or fertilizers in time could mean missing a season, leaving the family without a harvest, a matter of life and death. It is almost unimaginable how they survived those years. Their stories of sacrifice and resilience must be remembered and passed down through generations.
I have benefited most from their hard work and sacrifice. I owe a profound debt of gratitude first to my parents, and then to my siblings. My father spent his life labouring in the fields, always placing his faith in the land; my mother devoted herself to cooking and sewing, always ensuring we were clean and presentable. My siblings, who left school early, worked alongside our parents, giving all they had to support the family. I, the one who stayed in school the longest, completing graduate studies, reaped the rewards of their toil and perseverance. Without their sacrifices, I might be living the same life as my siblings today, repeating the same exhausting work my parents endured. For my entire life, I can never fully repay what they gave to our family.
Beyond feelings of indebtedness, these homecoming visits also prompt me to reflect on deeper issues. The contrast between my life and that of my siblings in China could not be more striking. It is almost as if I live in a king’s palace, eating what I want, buying what I desire, and traveling to places that interest me, without concern for cost, while they worry daily about whether there will be enough rain for the crops, whether they can save enough for their children’s education, or whether they have enough to face unexpected emergencies. Yes, they do not go hungry, but their lives remain far from secure or comfortable. Witnessing their struggles, I often feel guilty that I cannot do more for them. I cannot help but wonder why some people are able to change their lives through hard work, while others, despite equal or greater effort, cannot. Is there such a thing as fate? What lies behind it, and can it be changed?
I cannot answer these and the frustrations that are hard to quell, I remain hopeful and calm. My parents often told us when we were children that even though we could not control the weather or the harvest, we must give our best effort and never let drought, storm, or hail prevent us from planting the next season’s crops.
I realise homecoming is no longer simply about returning to a physical place; it is about returning to the essence of who I am. My parents’ fields, the worn paths of our village, and the laughter and burdens shared with my siblings shaped the foundation upon which my entire life was built. Though I may not walk those village roads as often as before, they live within me, and every achievement of mine carries their unseen footprints. My parents’ sacrifices and my siblings’ endurance gave me the privilege of education and the chance to live a life far removed from the toil of farming. Their lives remind me that fate is both mysterious and humble. We cannot fully explain why one child remains tied to the land while another journeys across oceans into universities and cities; nor can we fully reconcile the injustices of unequal rewards for equally hard labor. Still in this tension between destiny and effort lies the lesson my parents embodied: We must keep planting seeds, even when the harvest is uncertain. Their resilience teaches me that while we may not command the outcomes of life, we can command the spirit with which we endure it.
Thus, homecoming becomes more than nostalgia. It is a renewal of faith, gratitude, and responsibility. It compels me to remember not only what I received but also what I must pass on: the stories of hardship, the virtues of perseverance, and the wisdom of contentment. Just as my parents left behind a legacy of strength and dignity, I too must carry forward their spirit, telling and retelling their stories so that the future generations may know the price paid for their opportunities.
Even as life pulls me farther from the village, home will remain my wellspring, reminding me of the values that no distance can erase. In remembering, I find balance between guilt and gratitude, between abundance and humility, and between fate and choice. And in this balance, I carry with me the most enduring inheritance my parents left behind: the courage to live with resilience and the grace to be content in every circumstance.
[1] A heatable clay bed, a traditional Chinese sleeping platform made of earth or brick. It has hollow interior channels connected to a stove or external fire source, circulating warm air to heat the clay mass and provide energy-efficient warmth during cold winters
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Larry S. Su has been a professor of literature and writing for the past thirty years. He has also been a passionate reader and ardent writer since college. He writes both in Chinese and English, and his writings have appeared extensively in the Chinese and English publications, mostly in the form of articles and essays.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Like many people, I have complicated feelings about AI. On a recent trip to the United States, my daughter, who is deaf and has never learned English, was able to keep up with dinner table conversations with the help of an app which transcribed and translated spoken words, almost in real time. However, as one who teaches English as a foreign language, I am dismayed by the extent to which students outsource their learning.
As a writer, I was both flattered to find that my writing had been used to train Large Language Models, and angry that it had been done without my consent. Meanwhile, just the other day I enjoyed a movie featuring a computer-generated octopus, but I also worry that moviemakers will substitute human actors with AI ones. Apparently, this is already happening in China and other places.
I am also alarmed by how often my husband consults ChatGPT in his decision-making. For example, we recently decided to purchase new curtains for our living/dining room. Previously, the three windows in question had been hung with floral curtains in coordinating but different patterns. How nice it would be to finally have matching curtains on all three windows! We went curtain-shopping and fell for a beautiful set of drapes with deep crimson roses that would go well with our deep red cabinets. We didn’t buy them right away, however.
In the interim, my husband asked ChatGPT what colour curtains would go best with our décor. “Greige,” came the reply. A neutral colour, such as a cross between gray and beige, would go with everything. We would easily tire of a busy print, and loud colors would overwhelm.
We went curtain-shopping again. This time, we considered more subdued designs. I still thought that a floral print would be nice, but I was willing to go in for a change. We wound up selecting curtains in an elegant gray ombre. They are fine, but not quite as cheerful as the ones we had before.
Next, my husband and I began painting the cement wall that separated our lot from the neighbour’s. Surprisingly, he agreed to a mint green. It reminded me of the lovely pastel houses on Rainbow Row in Charleston, South Carolina, or San Francisco, California. A few houses down, some other neighbours had painted their house yellow. I supported this trend.
When we had finished the wall, my husband said that he was going to paint the gate. “What colour do you think would be best?” he asked.
“How about blue?” Sky blue would be uplifting. A darker blue would be a nod to the indigo for which our town was named.
My husband went to ChatGPT for confirmation. “He says that we should paint it greige.”
I rolled my eyes. First of all, it was not a “he,” not a sentient being. Secondly, it was becoming clear that if we always relied on AI’s advice, the whole world would soon be bland and inoffensive – in other words, greige.
This time, I refused to go along with the verdict. My husband asked again, apparently with different wording. He read the reply out loud to me: “Your wife is not wrong…”
Another thing about AI is that it aims to please.
Ultimately, my husband painted the gate blue.
From Public Domain
Suzanne Kamatawas born and raised in Grand Haven, Michigan. She now lives in Japan with her husband and two children. Her short stories, essays, articles and book reviews have appeared in over 100 publications. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, and received a Special Mention in 2006. She is also a two-time winner of the All Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest, winner of the Paris Book Festival, and winner of a SCBWI Magazine Merit Award.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
The ocean floor is full of voids left behind by the tube feet of sea stars that didn't adhere—
the notification of unanswered calls glaring from voicemails and pastels decline notes sticking out from the serrated lids of mailboxes.
The fissure on the white flowerpot has widened, three slivers arching away from the centre. The nail heads on the deck were buried under a thick white sheet.
It snowed when I was asleep.
I took the chipped ceramic cup with sketch pens. I had forgotten to tighten the caps. Removing the back stopper, I poured some tap water into a pen. The ink that came out was pale blue.
Anjana Vipin Edakkunny is a writer from Kerala, currently based in the United States. Her poems have appeared in Target Global Magazine and PoemsIndia. Her debut poetry manuscript, The Sandalwood Pyre, has been accepted for publication by Writers Workshop, Kolkata.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
