Clrinovember2016

CLRI ISSN 2250-3366

eISSN 2394-6075

Featuring…

Abishake Koul Afaf (Effat) Jamil Khogeer Ananda Das Gupta Dr. Bani Dayal Dhir Christina Wilson Dr. Dalip Khetarpal Jen Walls Kavya Gollamudi Mohammed Wahajuddin Siddiqui Neha Yadav N. Manikho Dr O. P. Arora P C K PREM Dr. Sarada Balaji Thallam Shobha Diwakar Srishti Walia Veerinder Patwari & book reviews

Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016 CLRI Online Quarterly Edition

Contemporary Literary Review India ─ The Journal that brings articulate writing for articulate readers.

Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016

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Khurshid Alam Editor-in-Chief Contemporary Literary Review India http://literaryjournal.in

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016

Contents POEMS ........................................................ 7 ABISHAKE KOUL................................................. 8 Songs From The Past .............................................. 8

DR BANI DAYAL DHIR ...................................... 11 Why Die with a Smile? ........................................... 11

CHRISTINA WILSON ......................................... 14 The Rocking Chair .................................................. 14

JEN WALLS ....................................................... 16 Inside All ................................................................. 16 Earth and Heaven Sing .......................................... 17 Petals-Fresh ........................................................... 18

KAVYA GOLLAMUDI ......................................... 20 Flight ....................................................................... 20

STORIES ................................................... 22 MOHAMMED WAHAJUDDIN SIDDIQUI ............ 23 The Visiting Card .................................................... 23

SHOBHA DIWAKAR .......................................... 39 They Were Two ...................................................... 39

SRISHTI WALIA ................................................. 46 Thriving Loss by ..................................................... 46

VEERINDER PATWARI ..................................... 53 And Confessions Created Confusions!!.................. 53

RESEARCH PAPERS ............................... 62 ANANDA DAS GUPTA....................................... 63 4

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Byomkesh Bakshi of Kolkata and the Sleuth on the Baker Street ........................................................... 63

JEN WALLS ....................................................... 78 A Critical Analysis on Prof Pashupati Jha’s Taking on Tough Times .......................................................... 78

NEHA YADAV .................................................... 86 A Moveable Feast? Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight and Paris .................................................. 86

N. MANIKHO ...................................................... 97 The Different Facets of Nationalism through Time: A Literary Review ...................................................... 97

P C K PREM .................................................... 110 An Analytical Journey into in Dr Dalip Khetarpal’s Refraction ............................................................. 110

DR. SARADA BALAJI THALLAM ..................... 117 From Darkness To Light: Shakespeare's King Lear and the Indian Gunas ........................................... 117

BOOK REVIEWS .................................... 134 AFAF (EFFAT) JAMIL KHOGEER REVIEWS SHEKHER SRIVASTAVA’S YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL O' WOMAN: 7 VIRTUES OF A WOMAN ........................................................... 135 DR. DALIP KHETARPAL REVIEWS AJU MUKHOPADHYAY’S TIME WHISPERS IN MY EAR .................................................................. 141 DR O. P. ARORA REVIEWS DR DALIP KHETARPAL’S FATHOMING INFINITY .......... 151

BOOK RELEASES .................................. 170 GARY BECK .................................................... 171 Fault Lines – a poetry anthology .......................... 171

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NIDHI DALMIA ................................................. 172 Harp – a novel ...................................................... 172

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016

Poems

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016

ABISHAKE KOUL Songs From The Past I can feel the gentle wind And the nagging chill As I walk barefoot The sand is everywhere Yet it doesn't cling The rustling of leaves And the waves along the shore Calm me down Even amidst the ruckus I sometimes wish I can go back To those innocent times Dressed up as an elderly My pen resting in my diary As the shady trees Providing a cushion And the green grass Letting my thoughts soar I remember the face The smile and the eyes The boy who sold lemonade The library by a corner A seat for an elderly Always reserved, always waiting The guy who sold momos His free soup tasted better The winters were a delight

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Times of mindful aberrations Willful glances on mirrors Roaming without a care Long walks, long talks Of future and growing old More receptive to nature Its powers and sanctity There were certain beliefs But even bigger dreams Sometimes I still search For that smiling face And the earthly shade As I turn the smelly pages Of my old diary The simple valiant past All its songs unwritten Left behind in crevices Of an elderly brain.

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Abishake Koul, is a poet from the mountains. Born and brought up in Jammu & Kashmir, he did his engineering from BIT Mesra, Ranchi. He is currently pursuing MBA from IIM Lucknow.

He started writing poems in school, scribbling verses at the back of his notebooks and got published in the local newspapers and school magazines.

Contemporary Literary Review India The journal that brings articulate writing for articulate readers.

CLRI is published in two editions (1) online quarterly (eISSN 2394-6075) (2) print annually (ISSN 2250-3366). CLRI is one of the leading journals in India and attracts a wide audience each month. CLRI is listed/indexed with many reputed literary directories, repositories, and many universities in India. We promote authors in many ways. We publish, promote and nominate our authors to various literary awards. It is absolutely free to register, submit and get published with CLRI. Register with us at: Subscriber to CLRI

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016

DR BANI DAYAL DHIR Why Die with a Smile?

My quest for eternal joy, my search for peace, My dream of playing with sparkling pearls, A voice inside me whispers - will it ever be realized?

Unfolding flowers in the dawn, Their withering in twilight, Rising sun of new life, setting sun of mortality, Makes me vulnerable and ephemeral, Questions torment; but my search continue.

One day I saw, Childhood innocence playing in the cradle, Smiling face, twinkling eyes with a divine spark, Unaware of might, right and size, Playing, humming, throwing his arms in the air, Attempting to grab tinkling toys.

When his sonorous laughter echoed, Musical notes in harmony played on their own.

Suddenly merry child started weeping, lisping, Leaving all wise dumb and bemused at the twist in tale.

Amidst tears there was a sudden smile, As if some remembrance had pulled his thoughts.

Why smile on lips with misty eyes?

What glorious form did he envision?

His eyes rolled hither-thither, As if searched for Someone in the emptiness of crowd.

Stretched his arms as if wanting to hold Someone’s hand.

Can toys of the world ever please?

When he pines to be in his Father’s Lap again!

Oh! he wept not for them, but for Him! Who wasn’t anywhere in our thoughts!

Alas! his ethereal language was mere lisp and scream for us!

When materiality hovers, where is space for words of silence?

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Memories of his Father’s Love tormented him, Tiny creature, Ah! locked in the splendid rented mansion, Gasps for breath in the vast airy castle, And yells for the key of liberation.

Begs his Father to lift him from the thorny cushioned cradle, Longs to be in His Holy Arms From whence he had come.

Tenets are never owners!

The journey as rented ‘owners’ leaves us ailing and aging!

Until we realize, blessed are those, Who are forever in the Lap of True Father, Where only unfathomable Love flows.

Blue serene sky arches above, clouds of fears vanish, Death is no longer an affliction, When it becomes the path of salvation, When this realization dawns, Man prays ‘true salvation is all I need, I shall embark on my voyage with a smile to my ‘Own Home’.

Dr. Bani Dayal Dhir is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English Studies, Dayalbagh Educational Institute (Deemed University) Agra, India. Recipient of the Institute’s prestigious Director’s medals in BA Hons.

(English ), MA and M.Phil.(English) programmes, her primary research interests include Literary theory, Systems Theory and Consciousness studies. She was also honoured with National Young Systems Scientist award by Systems Society of India.

She has to her credit several research publications in international journals including International Journal of General Systems, Literary Paritantra (Systems): An International Journal on Literature and Theory, Paritantra: A Journal of Systems Society of India,

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016 Consciousness, Literature and Arts; Lincoln University UK. Her poems have also frequently find space in journals and magazines.

Contemporary Literary Review India The journal that brings articulate writing for articulate readers.

CLRI is published in two editions (1) online quarterly (eISSN 2394-6075) (2) print annually (ISSN 2250-3366). CLRI is one of the leading journals in India and attracts a wide audience each month. CLRI is listed/indexed with many reputed literary directories, repositories, and many universities in India. We promote authors in many ways. We publish, promote and nominate our authors to various literary awards. It is absolutely free to register, submit and get published with CLRI. Register with us at: Subscriber to CLRI

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016

CHRISTINA WILSON The Rocking Chair Fen-to sat in the rocking chair.

Pipe smoke wrapped around him, Sweet smelled the night time air.

When a knock, knock, knock, On the door frame came.

Fen-to froze as the South wind sang, “Sin, sin, let me in, I come to play With the souls of men.”

Fen-to stiffened, he knew this game.

That dreaded girl, she had come again.

Flirting at the window, she let down her hair; The whistling wind blew it everywhere.

Swirling and curving her body danced.

Fen-to fell once more into that trance.

With heavy heart he rose to his feet.

Her body swaying, she picked up the beat.

He couldn't resist, temptation would not pass, His power gone, her spell was cast.

Fen-to grasped the handle and turned it sharp, The wind roared by and he let in the dark.

“Fen-to, Fen-to,” she caressed his face; Kissing him seductively without losing pace.

He hated her and what she did, What about his wife and kids?

She was so pleasing to the eyes, Beautiful, young, but so full of lies.

Cunning to get the things she would want, She knew her gifts and with them she'd taunt.

No other reason than just because she could, Men were her slaves for what she gave.

A loss, a loss, he took her in,

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And again committed that deadly sin.

Only to sob alone by himself; Once she had left, having satisfied herself.

Guilty, guilty, Fen-to lay, Not knowing who had watched from the back doorway.

“Again Fen-to you betray my love!

No explanation will save you because, Honest to you I have always been, Your weakness as a man I have truly seen.

Now shut out the light and cry to sleep, For you no longer will I weep.

You had your chance, you made your choice.

No more silence, I raise my voice.

Good-bye Fen-to, I will not stay, For the one I love will not betray!”

Fen-to sat in the rocking chair, Holding a strand of the South wind's hair.

It pained him as he watched her go— The kids, the dog, now an empty home.

“Fool, fool Fen-to,” he cursed, As he buried the hair deep in the earth.

He had lost it all, what had mattered most, Love, trust, and faithfulness most devote.

Alone, Fen-to sat in the rocking chair, An old man now with thinning hair.

The guilt he kept close to his heart, As he rued the day he let in the dark.

Christina Wilson has no formal degrees, no profession or career. She believes these labels could not define her well, rather they would confine her. She believes that the human beings have the potential to be the masters of their destiny.

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JEN WALLS Inside All Chant love's cosmic swirl belong then not to this world; fly in sky's vastness Bring heart soul-solace let go and be inside-bliss; live with nothing else Breathe song ─ share heart-thrusts dew bubbles upon spirit; light the inner-world Drop all this rushing fall softly as drizzling dew; love each moment through Pray and meditate sing quiet breaths ─ true oneness; wake up soul-kindness Bless with bliss-flowers come inside heart ─ only feel; give breaths into love Hear whispered dewdrops share joy ─ divine heart word-chimes; abide with light-bliss Reflect well in soul flow vision through heart-journey; see God inside all

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Earth and Heaven Sing Sound peace ─ grow rainbows shine and flow through cloudy day; meditate sun-rays Pray long ─ vibrate song be joy’s symphony-splendor; bring alive wonder Surrender fragrance fly with sun ─ hot flares of beam; flower fair beauty Search motherly-bless live free ─ breathe love everywhere; find heart-perfect rest Give forever soul-devotion cross ocean of ignorance; let earth and heaven sing

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Petals-Fresh Shelter inside calm love within freedom of soul; delight in love-breaths Bloom the heart-flower shower-burst with sparkling light; live as joy-oneness Glow eternal truth ─ bliss burn true soul-lamp ─ ignite flame; wake from ignorance Weave life into light share loving kindness ─ beauty; flow with grace of peace Rest ─ give kind care-breaths live full-soul ─ witness inside; unfold petals-fresh

Jen Walls is an award-winning author, literary reviewer, and critic. She brings soulful love inside joyful heart’s radiance; pulsating us deeply inside a personality of rare positivity. Her first poetry collection, The Tender Petals was released November 2014, through Inner Child Press, USA. Her second book of co-authored poems OM Santih Santih Santih combined to offer divine nature was

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016 released November 2015, through The Poetry Society of India.

Her peace-filled poems come alive inside renowned print and electronic world peace anthologies from the USA, UK, Africa, and India. She recently received a 2016 Distinguished Poet Award, from Writers International Network (WIN, Canada) in Burnaby, British Columbia (May 27, 2016).

Jen currently resides in Saint Paul, Minnesota, U.S.A. with her loving family.

Contemporary Literary Review India The journal that brings articulate writing for articulate readers.

CLRI is published in two editions (1) online quarterly (eISSN 2394-6075) (2) print annually (ISSN 2250-3366). CLRI is one of the leading journals in India and attracts a wide audience each month. CLRI is listed/indexed with many reputed literary directories, repositories, and many universities in India. We promote authors in many ways. We publish, promote and nominate our authors to various literary awards. It is absolutely free to register, submit and get published with CLRI. Register with us at: Subscriber to CLRI

Get your book reviewed by us.

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Donate to Us We seek donation.

Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016

KAVYA GOLLAMUDI Flight I fly towards the seashore Walk on the gravel path Into the sun The cascade of waters kisses my feet And I walk into the sun The twilight cradles me With hopes and dreams, I fly into the glorious stars I cannot but smile Lose myself in this unknown land Wherefore the heavenly delights await me I fly into the abyss The wind hugs me and my hair dance As I fly into the sun to you Will you be there?

I crave your presence night and day Why have you forsaken me?

I stand – a solitary dreamer Perchance unworthy of you What woes must I sleep with?

The soothsayer says naught I am ensnared in this lacuna forever What will release me?

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Kavya Gollamudi is presently working as a researcher in a not-for-profit organisation based in Gurgaon (Haryana), India. When she’s not working, she likes to spend her time reading and binge watching films.

Contemporary Literary Review India The journal that brings articulate writing for articulate readers.

CLRI is published in two editions (1) online quarterly (eISSN 2394-6075) (2) print annually (ISSN 2250-3366). CLRI is one of the leading journals in India and attracts a wide audience each month. CLRI is listed/indexed with many reputed literary directories, repositories, and many universities in India. We promote authors in many ways. We publish, promote and nominate our authors to various literary awards. It is absolutely free to register, submit and get published with CLRI. Register with us at: Subscriber to CLRI

Get your book reviewed by us.

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Donate to Us We seek donation.

Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016

Stories

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016

MOHAMMED WAHAJUDDIN SIDDIQUI The Visiting Card "This is a long day. I want to just rest." Ishtiaq moaned at the glare above. His eyes were set upwards but to no particular direction.

Ishtiaq soaked in the glare until he faced a familiar carmine symphony of shapes. This disconnect between intention and action increased every passing minute.

"This free?"

Ishtiaq nods his head as the contents of the basket is dumped on his belt. He picks each article and swipes it against a bar-scanner.

Beap! The screen blurts out the name and the price of the article in green. The name is atrophied to a random array of numerals and letters. The price is seen at the bottom corner of the screen. As the customer glances at the screen, mentally calculating the total amount purchased, Ishtiaq extends his arm and places the article on the other end of his workstation.

The article slides on a gentle slope and rests with its companions as they wait to be placed in sterilized, white bags.

"71.50" Ishtiaq feeds the plastic card into a machine and enters the relevant details. The purchase is made.

Ishtiaq is now free to do what he wants. The time afforded to him however is short, he grimaces as another customer makes his way to the now vacant workstation. Sometimes, there are no voids of activity. Lines longer than dozen people, connected to each other like a carriage passes through him for a large part of his day.

His day ends when the last nocturnal couple, usually draped in crucial garb, exit the establishment.

Ishtiaq puppeteers his elongated fingers on the cash register to review and tabulate his efforts. As the brightness trickles down, his cohorts leave their workstation and head for the company bus.

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A few coveted seats for a large bunch of people, not so different from Ishtiaq, are duly occupied. Not to compound his workplace confinement with the inconvenience of standing throughout a lengthy bus ride, Ishtiaq raced ahead of them. A day of his uprooted living was completed.

Occasionally, his monochrome activities caught up with him and he would avoid this race altogether.

His preferred haunt was a small stretch of jagged rock. The rocks bled sand as the winds brushed past them. The cigarette box was adorned by the invisible man's warning and somebody's cancerous lung. Ishtiaq picked one of its contents, felt his pockets for a box whose outline he felt a few moments later, lighted the cigarette.

He would roll the cigarette to feel the contours of the budded end.

Unbeknownst to him, his companion pulled up from the highway, the driver of a beige sedan with blue decals near its windows. Kazi was of a wheatish complexion and long-faced, with eyes infused with a lighter shade of viridian which rested between a pair of groggy and darkened sockets. He left the car and approached the pensive man in blue.

"Had a long day?"

Ishtiaq simply nodded in agreement. He was occupied. His tensions were released by yet another nicotine rush.

"Same, same." Kazi inferred the nod." My shift beckons in a quarter of an hour. Night-shifts."

He spoke in an Urdu shaped by his time and place. Urdu and Bengali had a similar visual palette of tapered, wafting letters.

They couldn't sound more different though, and his inflection had pronounced dab of his rooted Bengali.

“You’d like this to change?”

"Perhaps." Kazi gazed unto the dying embers of the cigarette. "We are the water-carriers of the night. And the night? We both know the city could not live without it." Now, Ishtiaq's wandering mind was drawn to the conversation. "That's why we are here, I suppose,

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sacrifice ourselves under the sun while they revel under the moonlight.

"I'd think this occupation of critical importance would give me reason to withstand those Westerners reeking of liquor and piss."

Both laughed. The hands of the Clock Tower crept closer to each other.

"How is the new job?"

“It bores me. Sit on that chair and swivel 100 times a day. The bloody beeps testing my patience."

"You'll quit this too?" He laughed.

"I'll stick. I'll stick. People need money back home."

"So do we all. But that didn't stop you from..." He wasn't allowed to finish.

"I won't quit."

"Unless you fancy staying without papers."

"Go, drive." Ishtiaq retorted. However, Kazi's train of thought seemed to ignore the growing unease.

"Think sitting for hours moving that dreaded wheel is easy. I feel my body harden every passing hour. Like a statue or a robot. With the kind of money they throw these days, they will replace people like us with some machine or software. Heh, what am I thinking?

Because computer can work more efficiently at a less charge. We sell ourselves way too easily."

"Maybe we should exchange our jobs for a bit. Checking out items is quite bearable, no added pressure to capture more customers, fixed wages, a bonus too if t…"

“Interesting.”

Ishtiaq stared onto the black space above, the embers of dying cigarette were getting to him. He was an admirer of the night.

Hailing from a place where light was a valued commodity after dusk, he adored the ubiquitous interplay between light and the surrounding darkness in the city. Here, they wait for nightfall, as

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if they loathed the sun for gorging the city with its radiance.

Perhaps, the night gave the city's architects a chance to display their own expressions of light; light with a ranged variance of hues, shapes and luminescence. 'The sun isn't enough for them.', he thought to himself.

Ishtiaq wanted to see this diversity. He wanted to wear the beige overalls of a cab-driver, stained by the rigours of confined and tedious driving along with a few drops of cardamom tea. The man was a drifter in essence; he had a pronounced inability to drop anchors if the lightest waves crunched his hull. There existed restrictions on transferring employment, perhaps to discourage 'free spirits' like these from flashing into different jobs. Becoming a ghost was an option but an ill-advised one. The circuitry of the society Ishtiaq resided had been demarcated and distinguished to extinguish anybody who wished to exist on the fringes of its sections. Everyone had to be accounted for, greys ceased to be and everyone was to be on one side of the line.

Ishtiaq tossed away the burnt remnants of his cigarette and rose to bid his interlocutor farewell. ‘In a few days, another pack?’, Ishtiaq asked. ‘What else remains common between us?’, replied Kazi.

His day began before dawn, woken up not by his own volition but by an alarm clock on the other end of his quarters. The alarm seemed to ignore his bedfellows and he felt it was beamed straight at him. Perhaps his sleep was so fragile that the slightest jolt could knock it off. Each day was like cold, slow and ridden with anxiety.

He felt himself sinking into the abyss generated by his loath and inaction, felt himself sinking into his bed, he was awake, but, he was drowning. In an instant, his half-awake body jerked out of bed, as if in shock. He could sense the rusted mesh bulging against him but he couldn't do much. Someone overhead turned over the side undisturbed. Ishtiaq planted his foot on the grime tiptoed around his companions to trickles of muffled abuse, and made his way towards the shared bathroom stalls. The sanitation of these facilities do not concern this story and evidently, our protagonists.

As he uses whatever remains of the lavatory, let us discuss something that is widespread across this part of the city like the

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plague: the business of visiting cards ─ exchange or distribution.

An arguably murky endeavour in this part of the city, where the stature of its occupants precludes the possession of these cards.

The Harvard Business Review insists these visiting cards are a means to promote oneself in the corporate world, a pamphlet of sorts. This advice is not lost on prospective business owners of the area who treat these cards as mini-posters; it beats paying for advertisement spaces.

The message can be made specific too, usually in the form of 2x4 inched card fitted in the slit between the window and its rubber seal. Its prime attraction however, is the visiting card's ability to hover over the purview of the law.

An unaccounted man, nothing is seen of him except his unremarkable moustache drifts between cars. He places these cards on each one of these sedans like a bird placating her famished chicks.

His movements were methodical as he ghosted from one car to another. Experienced as he was, he couldn't help but admire the subtle curves of a car, single-digit number-plated and Italian. ‘huuuh.'

The shadow passed away in silence while the footsteps still lingered. The profession of this 'advertiser' is quite different to the morally ambiguous jobs you and I have, he is, however, beyond the line of civil, respectable livelihoods and he knows it.

'Tak' and a 'tuk', maybe another 'thak'. The steps were measured and consistent with someone of relative inexperience creeping up to his car. A baby-beard sprouts off his face. It appears that the his naivety extends to the location of his vehicle. He unsuccessfully tugs at the curved door-handles of a few cars. We, for the purpose of continuing this story cannot let this ignoramus transport passengers on foot now, can we? After a few frantic attempts and an anti-theft alarm, our man in beige does find his car.

He steps in the car and spends a minute or two adjusting himself to the contours of his seat. He has to, of course, as he would spend the rest of the day with the synthetic leather skins stuck to those

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beige overalls that have already begun their journey to a more brownish hue. There was something, the little jarring anomaly in the foreground that would make anyone question something amiss ─ or perhaps something surplus.

A card had caused the visual discord, sticking its head out of one of the corners of the windshield.

The 'taxi-driver' left the car and picked up the card. As unremarkable and staid it was, its typeface had an undue dosage of vibrant fuchsia. It was written in English and was littered with large, flashy numbers; always in the hundreds. Ishtiaq squinted at the letters; the discordant train of words and letters always seemed to elude him, despite his attempts to gain an intuitive fluency in the language.

The Bengali language had a sense of continuity about it, letters would diffuse into words and words would coalesce into sentences.

'Extella Moon Massage Center'.

His internal monologue salvaged the remains of the contents of the visiting card. His back had been troubling him. The undue stress on the basal sections of his spine, an unfortunate peculiarity of a cashier's body had conferred on him a sense of inevitable helplessness, it was there, not visible, but it was there. He couldn't call it pain. Pain, he thought, was a that sharp prick on the epidermises or a small sludge of heat or discomfort somewhere on his body. This just stuck out like stepping on a smooth, curved stone ─ the one that would not look out of place in the bottom of a household aquarium.

'This is costly, but not out of my reach. Perhaps, I would have to cut down by pack to even out.' His wallet was not wide, neither were his savings deep. There was hesitation, he acknowledged, but that was a hesitation that accompanied his every purchase ─ a feeling familiar to a person of his finances.

Perhaps, squeezing out the back pain outweighed a forced abstinence from maybe a dozen packs of cigarettes; Ishtiaq decided to get rid of his pain.

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'Good Afternoon, this is Extella Moon Massage Services. How may I help you sir?'

'Hello madam, back pain madam.' Ishtiaq was a little nervy. He was in conversation with someone on the same footing, a position where he had no prior experience. His days as a checker and a daylong career in a taxi always left him on an unequal stance in any conversation, for he was rendering a service to his customers.

'Madam', 'Please', 'Thank You', were words he exhausted in his vocabulary in the opening few minutes of any conversation.

'Yes, sir.' She said that with an undue stress on the last letter. There was hesitation, like the drops that trickled through a thatched rooftop. Both sensed it. The woman too was not at ease dealing with someone of a subcontinental descent using tattered sentences. In this city, one would be wise to keep away from such people.

The lure of another customer outweighed her apprehensions. 'We have varieties of massages sir, Indian massage, Sri Lankan massage, Philipino massage, Thai massage.'

Ishtiaq was impressed. He had only heard of the cosmopolitanism of this city, now he would get to experience it.

'Madam', he asked. 'What about American back massage?'

'British massage?’ 'Sorry sir, we only have Asian massages.'

'Okay', he conceded, 'I will have the Indian massage' '200 sir.'

'For a massage?'

'Sir, she is one of our best.'

'Your price too high, I can only pay 150.'

'Sir, we can only offer that for repeat customers'.

Ishtiaq felt a pang in his back. His faltering concentration could not balance a negotiation and scouting a potential fare. He was in pain, not the pain that pierces through your every thought and

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action, this is its sedentary and dormant cousin, but every bit as meddlesome.

'I shall complain.'

She sensed a fallout she was not prepared to handle, 'Sir, 40 is a price we can give. Not more.'

For someone wanted a whiff of the multi-culture, it seemed strange that he would find solace in the familiar.

They agreed on a time-slot and exchanged numbers. She inquired whether he was in need of something extra, for she declared her parlour accomplished in 'forcing out knots' in the lower body. 'You are going to charge extra, right?' She hummed a yes. 'No, this price is fine by me. Not more.'

The day was long and the heat made the day bloat, not unlike the rail-tracks that cut through the homelands of these workers. The shifts of many are undefined, this 'many' shifts would ripple across a neighbourhood, painting a picture of red-eyed despair tinged with hope and an occasional glimmer of relief when the salary was received, part of which was promptly sent to their families back home.

The cabbie-cartel had, to our novice driver's relief, a very accommodating 10-hour shift. The relief was premeditated by a lengthy period of meandering through the concocted veins of the city. He had to refuse fares whose destination he did not have the slightest inkling about. Those which he did accept, the journey was dotted with apologies and extended explanations of his ignorance.

He returned to a spot not so different from whence he had met Kazi Mohammed, a landscape corroded by the wind.

'Assalaam-u-alaikum brother' , Kazi chirped. Ishtiaq had reckoned the first the exchange would have dulled his spirits. He offered a cigarette which he thought would establish a semblance of parity between their experiences.

'No thank you, you know what they say about cigarettes. Harms the lungs.'

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'They keep saying and I shall continue smoking.' Ishtiaq tittered.

Both gazed into each other's dun overalls and the invitation lay open on both sides.

'How was the day?'

Ishtiaq nodded. His day, he said was a flash of cars and horns and tricoloured lights that caught him in some sort of a daze. The passengers were few and the ones he baited preferred to be driven to locations that either did not exist or were eaten up by the developing city. The intercom blared his ineptitude by incessantly suggesting passengers in his proximity waiting to be picked. Kazi was a little perturbed.

'You did not pick any of the passengers the computer suggested?', his eyes widened.

'I was getting close to picking one up when that computer started blabbering.'

Kazi was reddish, his mind regurgitated a few choice words in Urdu, stopping a moment before they transmuted into words.' The fallacy of cabbing in this city is your assumption that every 'stranded' passenger waving his hand will be sitting behind you in a minute or so. That never happens.'

The crimsons complemented his irises in a strange manner. 'You can cross three lanes in a tenth of a kilometer and by God's grace, you survive that; there will be another cab who would pick up that customer.'

Ishtiaq remained mum.

'These companies flood the streets with cars. These days, it is like leaving a cleaned-up carcass to a pack of wild dogs.' He rambled on. 'That bloody screen keeps tracking my performance.' He gesticulated the last word with disdain. ‘And it will track yours. ‘Kazi’s eyebrows approached a syncline.

'Pass me that cigarette.'

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The cigarette still had a long way to go and its filter was dry.

Ishtiaq was still for a moment. Kazi's gaze was unshaken. His lips let go and the nicotine tube fell in place between Kazi's fingers.

He was of the belief that Ishtiaq was a transient; his day in the hypermarket made him reconsider this, he said in his typically altered tobacco inflection. The smoke dithered about between them. The entire day was a sedentary trance to Kazi: multitudes of barcodes, the endless glares of white light, an unrelenting procession of people with faces undistinguishable. 'I could feel my body calcify as I scanned each item.'

'A day in the car would have made your back ache?' Ishtiaq asked.

'It does on occasion.'

'How do you work with that?'

'What do you mean. How I work? I work. That's it. That's all that can be done.'

There was an inkling that something was wrong, an itch.

Something was amiss. It was an altered state brought upon by relentless exhaustion that brought upon him this perception that something was not what it seemed. Against his better judgement, Kazi decided to keep these pervasive thoughts to himself.

His languid curiosity nudged him on, ‘What is the name of this wo, sorry, place?’

‘Extella Moon Massage Services.’

‘And how many cigarettes would you give up for this massage?’

Ishtiaq smirked. He suckled on to the bud of the dying cigarette, only letting go when the last whiff of tobacco was replaced by ash.

The two returned to their usual avatars of members of a faceless fraternity that maintain the city, imported from beyond the sea. A staple in any city, the lower section of the pyramid that props the upper parts. They take up any activity that the privileged wouldn’t bother dirtying their hands on.

The commandments that govern this city operate in a crude system of binaries. The establishment is many things to different people;

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but it has overarching commitment towards a notion of omnipresence, like that overbearing parent that has not yet found out that full extent of his or her transgressions. It is bearish at most and Orwellian at its worst. Everyone noticed these cameras enclosed in zaffre, translucent bulbs that stick to the ceilings and walls like pimples on prepubescent cheeks.

However, the city was not the realisation of the worst (or best) of Orwell. There was an innocuous degree of interconnectedness in the city. One could sense that everything he saw, touched, bought, paid was tethered to an all-encompassing ether. The establishment would sell this as the new advent of technology, though it’s doubtful that they comprehended these unsaid sentiments. Few of the disenchanted would see as it as the gross perversion of privacy.

He latched on to the handle and propelled himself into the vacant backseat of the car, prone and on the verge of collapsing into the recess between the two seats. The car was bathed with the warm light of the lamp, giving its interiors a serene undertone. It was dreamlike for van Zeel, he had blinked from the hyper-saturated strobes to the sepia lightening inside the car. A robust man in black observed him, studied him almost, as van Zeel grappled the seats.

The man had not uttered a word.

He stood there, eyes hinged at the man.

‘Verdant Meadows, tell you the villa from there.’

The taxi gathered speed and veered out the street and the man’s transfixed gaze. He returned to the bar.

Van Zeel took control of his discordance and shot a few furtive queries at Ishtiaq. The cab had entered the highway. Ishtiaq would gently coddle the accelerator and the machine, in buzzed tranquility would nudge itself ahead. Ishtiaq talked about himself, his home and how he had ended up there.

Van Zeel couldn’t comprehend the tone of his words or the construction of his sentences, all he could ascertain were his fondness for fish and ‘bhav’. He called him ‘Ish’ now. He blathered about leasing out his villa in solidarity. A sentiment grew in Ishtiaq that there was a certain irreverence shown towards

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his circumstances. van Zeel continued. He always had a firm interest in the workers, he had imagined that perhaps an interest in these lives would liberate himself from the insular, indulged life he had lead.

They were mere quantum in the circuitry of the city. Vehicles could cover hundreds of kilometres in an hour. They zipped past an unmoved eye. Crossing these highways was a death wish. The management knew this; they had erected grilled barriers, taller than the tallest being, its summits heated to incandescence.

Inside the car, there were whiffs of that familiar scent of the cooling system. The old air-conditioning units in the city gave off, along with a regulated airflow, a similar, wafting scent. It was not apparent, but its absence would be felt somewhere at the back of the mind. With forceful compression and expansion, the air chilled van Zeel’s chest. He felt like menthol had enveloped his lungs.

‘So where are you from again?’

‘Bengal.’

‘So you are an Indian?’

‘Yes.’ ‘How long you here?’

‘Just 2 months. I have started driving last week.’ Ishtiaq was earnest at the prospect of a welcome ear.

‘And this shift is what, 6 hours long I would guess.’ van Zeel canted towards the vacant seat lateral to the driver, hovered back and returned to a compromise in the unidimensional path his head bobbed. Ultimately, it rested on the adjacent window.

‘10 hours sir. No breaks.’ He spoke in a manner that betrayed the sedentary drudgery of sitting almost motionless in the car.

Technology has not yet advanced enough to counteract the creeping disorders of forced static inertia.

‘10 bloody hours? That’s a crime, shame. How’s that possible?

Your back must be stiff like a breadstick.’

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He uttered a litany of expletives, not directed at our protagonist but at the general scheme of affairs. It was a throwback of his days in university, where abstract notions like the universality of human rights were championed with all the vigour and pragmatism a fresh-faced undergraduate student could conjure.

There was a unique juxtaposition in the city, a forced marriage of the postmodern and the archaic past. His words began to melt with one another, forming an incongruent, variegated mash of words which were slurred at a gentle pace. Ishtiaq was marginally acquainted with the language of his colonial forebears, but could not, for the life of him, comprehend this Afrikaner-coloured strand of English van Zeel spoke. He tried to grasp the few flashes of univocal words that his inebriated passenger uttered. There was a pause long enough to understand that perhaps the interlocutor had invited Ishtiaq to reply.

Ishtiaq’s terse manner of speaking was replaced by an ingenuous release of any reservations. ‘Sir, this won’t be problem any longer.

I’ve got this appointment with this lady, massager, she can removing this pain fast. I hope this will help drive better.’ There was silence. Nothing was said or heard. Neither made any attempt to continue. This inertia would bother Ishtiaq but he battled the urge to have a quick glance back, an untouched car was more important.

The silence continued as the taxi entered the community. After negotiating the meandering streets, it had reached the villa. Ishtiaq tapped the screen and stated the charge. He glanced at his passenger. van Zeel had passed out, his head rested on the window, cheeks holding on its side. His attempts, which ranged from mild exhortation to vigorous jerking could only help van Zeel utter some half eaten words. Ishitaq could only make him stand on his own feet but bereft of any balance. A lamppost in spite of its ridged contours provided adequate cushioning to a drunk head. There was the ever-pertinent question of payment.

Ishtiaq quickly and intuitively learnt that the drunk and the unconscious do not have the physical faculty to pay. He bridged this inability himself and charged van Zeel the entirety of his wallet.

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The trip had enlightened Ishtiaq to a certain division of people in the city, their living quarters and a glimpse of their disposition. Of course, the ramblings of the drunk should not be taken as representative of their disposition but the tendencies of humans in the presence of the ‘other’ cannot be discounted.

His wallet, also, was enlightened.

It was the start of another shift. The sun was on course to make another day hot and miserable. With the windfall of yesterday’s adventure as insurance for today’s treatment, he made his way towards the other end of the city. The wide and cobbled and speckless streets of the Meadows made way to the Euclidean tortuosity of unkempt roads and byways. His back-pocket contained the visiting card whose almost-offensive colour scheme and a compact font rendered the address illegible. He entered an array of blocks housing the parlour. The screen notified him of his inefficiency, he had to pick up a passenger. The pain was not letting up. He felt his back petrified. He tapped on the screen to log in a passenger. Technology, for all its complexity still required an input. His passenger? A sore back. He asked about the residents of these blocks, making sure to avoid the women and well-to-do.

A delivery boy, holding back his curiosity told him the directions.

Soon the parlour was within view, its shop-board sparse, its contents: the name and minimalistic representation of two hands placed on a bulge which Ishtiaq made to be a posterior. There was a woman in a translucid white polo standing near the entrance. Her black satin hair tapering off to a bleached variant of blonde.

Ishtiaq entered the complex. There was nothing remarkable, a faded chrome desk with a woman seated behind, sterile white lights emitted from a false ceiling. He went up to the desk and requested the massage. The woman unhooked from the touchphone and with a hint of discomfiture, responded. He glanced at her and realised the existence of a uniform in the establishment.

He removed two creased notes and placed them on the desk.

Another woman walked into the cramped corridor-like room and invited Ishtiaq in. The sun had kissed the skyscrapers and continued downwards. It would not have been long since that

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woman had passed school, he thought. Her complexion was either dusky or burnt; the glints from the glossy environs didn’t let him determine. Lying prone on the table clothed, he twisted his arm to point out the troublesome regions. The masseuse was disconcerted and laid the lotion bottle down. She ignored his gestures and continued the stipulated routine, her knuckles on his trapezoids which rippled across his back.

The kneading dissolved his pain, or so he thought, his masseuse seemed to now ignite wave upon wave of tingly, tangy agony.

Ishtiaq contained himself by clenching his eyes shut. He shivered.

The woman noticed this and paused.

‘On the sides, at the center!’ He contorted his arms to the site of the soreness.

She duly pressed on them, pressuring it via her palms. The embers in his back died out. He even derived a mild pleasure out of this massage.

10 minutes passed. The woman ceased the activity. Ishtiaq craned and could only see her from a corner. With a hint of indifference, she whispered ‘over’. Ishtiaq sat up, twined his back in a circular manner and made his way.

‘You need extra?’

‘What?’

‘Extra.’

‘What extra?’

She didn’t reply. There was a stillness in the room. The two had nothing to say, nothing left to disturb the stillness. Ishtiaq experienced a reflex that disobeyed the rest of his thoughts. In a coordinated rush of musculature and swift movement, he took leave of the woman.

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Mohammed Wahajuddin Siddiqui is a business consultant by profession. He spent his childhood under the Dubai skyline and fulfilled his higher education under a steady diet of dosas and idlis in South India. He lives in Pune with his cat and a stock of books he has hooked from old bookstores and Amazon deals.

Contemporary Literary Review India The journal that brings articulate writing for articulate readers.

CLRI is published in two editions (1) online quarterly (eISSN 2394-6075) (2) print annually (ISSN 2250-3366). CLRI is one of the leading journals in India and attracts a wide audience each month. CLRI is listed/indexed with many reputed literary directories, repositories, and many universities in India. We promote authors in many ways. We publish, promote and nominate our authors to various literary awards. It is absolutely free to register, submit and get published with CLRI. Register with us at: Subscriber to CLRI

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016

SHOBHA DIWAKAR They Were Two They looked so similar. If you saw them apart, you could mistake one for the other. Rumors galore surrounded them…they were three in a family and by Jove they would never ever look you in the eye. Secrets, secrets, secrets…tucked deep into their hearts, impenetrable, deep, dark and mysterious; what exactly circled around in those heads was like treading on unknown territory…unfathomably as deep as the deep blue sea beneath which lay innumerable oysters and tucked inside…pearls.

Yet, how can anyone forget pearls are bright and shiny like the stars in the sky. Unlike them the secrets buried like those oysters, were densely overshadowed by the goodness they may have shown occasionally, you see not all is well that ends well.

The older and the younger were split beans. Thoughts exchanged and gobbled up were twined rapidly with no considerations. Like one would say herding towards a blind alley with a passport to no return. Fixed, stamped and glued to the skulled brain with fevicol ─a glue to bind─as to a bench cushion.

Time and again I made an attempt to screw up my eyes, look pertinently intelligent and scratch my head with a rough brush to decipher these hidden traits and logically arrive at some conclusion as to how the two could be mismatched in some way …was just like solving a jigsaw puzzle…I gave up. You know how curiosity kills the cat.

Aha, one day I caught the bear. Yes the bear…, I’d call one of them that. Oh no…I think calling the other a man-eater….Not of Malgudi…but of my native place would be better understood. By the way I haven’t given any names so let me call one, King of Hearts and the other, jack-of-all-trades. The third…Little Jack Honor…for he always sat in the corner unless mildly kicked, 6 butted and saddled.

So now, the story begins after this brief introduction.

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Long, long ago all these characters lived together in an ancient dull dwelling, more like a mud hut but cool and somewhat cozy to a…little extent. The house was clustered around with similar houses and orthodox women who peeped constantly at the newly wedded couple, cracking silly indecent jokes they were used to sharing. It was then that Neeta realized what it was to be educated and what it was to get a good upbringing. She was startled at the coarse manner of gossips she overheard and exasperated, wondered whether the marriage had taken her for a ride.

Neeta belonged to a highly well-established and educated family where father’s word was law and all children were disciplined and never crossed borders within which they remained. Suddenly her train of thought was jerked as she heard a roar of voices emerging from the other end of the shadowed room. The deep grunts fumed the air. She realized not all was well. Something was amiss.

“Why?” Neeta said to herself, “What’s cooking?”

She silently slipped out of her room and stood by the door…yes true…walls do have ears. She stood there tense and heard someone say…probably it was Jack of all trades…“you know what there’s no money. You have to collect that gold chain and the rings and whatever Neeta has got…it’s all borrowed stuff and has to be returned.” Neeta stood stunned. She could not believe her ears. The gold she was decked up with, the engagement chain…no question of a ring…and the…whatever she had been given as chadao1 were plain borrowed feathers to offer a bride, without any guilt! Not a day had passed and there was the demand to return everything or forcibly snatch away from the ‘new-found’ bride. Yes ‘found’ because she hailed from a reputed family…while they themselves were mediocre.

True. How come her father (she hopelessly wondered), did not find out anything about the family except that the King of Hearts was well settled, yet little did he know that the termites were gnawing the entrails of his profits. There was nothing to do but to eavesdrop and listen to the entire uproar. Harsh noises still

1

Gifts given to the bride from the groom’s family.

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emerged in the still of the night even as she felt ashamed that neighbors might be listening to this racket.

Soon she realized that this was not anything new. The far and near were quite accustomed to this trio’s squabbling. For them, it was an everyday affair so no one paid heed….But…, what a bridal night for the bride who was soon to be divested of not only her borrowed feathers but also all that she had got as her dowry from her own family. There was still more to come. The expenses that had incurred. The King of Hearts was cheekily handed over some pending bills; Jack smacking his lips passed the sheaf to the King while little Jack Honor, sat glum and pinned to his seat. He was a dummy…although the prop…or better still the supposed prop that had been manhandled, demoted, and uprooted by jack-of-allTrades. He sat silent. He knew the moment he opened his mouth a barrage of bullet words would be thrust down his throat for better or worse.

Neeta’s dream world crashed like thousand pieces of shattered glass. She retreated into her room wondering what her life was going to be. Even as she pretended to smile behind her tears as the King tiptoed in, she brushed aside a solitary tear that hung by. “So, why are you crying? Missing your parents?” Neeta simply nodded her head waiting for the crash moment when she would be politely asked to hand over the decked feathers. So now, she was going to become a dressed chicken bereft of her plumes.

Neeta had been taught neither to question, nor to demand nor to argue. There was nothing she could do. The fatal moment arrived as the King softly whispered (so no one could hear), “Neeta, can you remove that jewelry and let me have it? You see it is not ours; it was borrowed and must be returned. Everything was arranged so fast…I mean the marriage that there was no time to get your ornaments made.” Neeta said nothing. This was her first day at her in-laws and she had already received a taste of her new life. She wondered what else would be demanded of her to give up, but simply kept her temper and tongue locked down, and removed the borrowed feathers. The sly jack-of-all-trades had stood shamelessly behind the door all this while. As soon as the King

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unlocked he grabbed the booty hungrily like a starved lion and disappeared into his cave.

A year or two later Jack decided to marry. The year had passed with the king parting with his earnings to support the two Jacks.

Now this marriage was to become another ordeal. Jacks were bereft of money, as were the girl’s parents. So finally it was decided and planned that all arrangements were to be made by the King including the bridal feathers, dowry, (the girl’s parents had nothing, gave nothing, did nothing). The only expenses that could be saved were by giving away Neeta’s dowry and displaying it for the public to see how much the girl’s parents had showered upon their daughter. Neeta’s jewelry was gone, her dowry was gone… everything her father had lovingly given her had vanished shamelessly. The king of hearts rejoiced his loyalty was confirmed while the jacks rejoiced how cunningly they had befooled and fleeced the king.

The story did not end here. Year after year, the king struggled to keep up his standard and his kids well and year after year, the two jacks plucked all his plumes. Their business never grew, never flourished, and they never had enough to keep body and soul together. The king felt vainly proud he was supporting his own family and the two jacks and jack-of-all-trade’s wife. God, Neeta felt had not done poetic justice. This jack and his wife were thoroughbred cunning rascals. You could never understand their ifs and buts or their cunning schemes to loot and fill their coffers.

They grew, they flourished; like Julius Caesar they conquered, but at heart, they were Brutus and Cassius. They cheated, they looted, they dug into the king of hearts…heart by shedding crocodile tears to grab and confiscate the little pleasures of life he himself could have scraped for his own family.

While jack-of-all-trades was a farsighted eagle, little jack honor a mere rubber stamp, king of hearts lived in some pages of ancient history that made sense only to himself…not to his family. This game of beg, borrow and steal rapidly increased as years rolled by. By additions to the family Neeta noticed that demands bloated up like a tireless football, all ready to kick and bounce on the other side of the net. Of course, the king of hearts was always a

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recharged ever-ready battery full of spunky power, energetic, hyper and a spinning yarn yearning to wrap around the fibers of genteel love for the jacks…who never stopped swindling him.

Neeta racked her brains after so many years of patient endurance as to how long was this plucking still to be endured. Neeta’s father, king’s friends and well-wishers warned the mighty king that he was being grossly cheated over all these years and it was time he stopped making a bigger fool of himself now. King answered ……“but you see jack is my own kith and kin the only one I have, how can I see him in distress?”

“Well”, some other well-wisher chimed in…“your jack is taking you for a ride. Do you know the number of trades he has under his belt? Have you ever cared for your own children, your wife, in short, your family? Do you have a house of your own so that when you retire you have a place to shelter yourself and your family?”

King of hearts swooned to realization. House hunting began with a bang with none other than his foxy jack. No sooner did king of hearts strike a bargain when, jack’s house was robbed of all the cash and stuff. What now? There was no money to buy food for the family so jack was rescued out of this mess by a gift check….

The dream house collapsed before it was built or bought …thanks to the eagle-eyed fox. The tales of woe continued even as Neeta’s heart burst with agony. It was now time for her to stand up and fight her battle.

It was a bright sunny day when the blubbering jack-of-all-trades happened to walk in slyly with a big cheesy, buttery grin spread across his face. Although surprised, king of hearts welcomed him with a similar grin. “Aha,” Neeta mumbled to herself, “Now starts the cat and mouse game with a catch me if you can stuff. The trap is ready let’s see how craftily king gets cornered like a fly in a spider’s web.” With these churning thoughts grinding her within, she sat down with a thump on the couch.

The tale began. There was a brand idea of a new biz jack that had pounced upon the problem was who was going to finance the deal?

The loan could be availed on the condition that the king become a partner in the enterprise and partly finance the project. Since Jack

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himself had pledged his property, king must pledge his and sign the mortgage. “What a thrilling idea it was that the king’s family would now also roll in money, and be on the same scale as a sound businessman,” so thought the less far-sighted king. Dropping this…drop in the ocean risk jack disappeared like the polluted storm that leaves behind a stench you are forced to bear a while.

Neeta stared at the king who was deep in thought wondering how to support this enterprise. “What are you thinking?” She rudely asked. The king looked up with a frown. “Don’t talk to me in that tone. He is my split bean. I have to help him.” The decision was final.

Neeta stamped out of the room in a rage hastily realizing that now they were doomed. Jack would twist and twirl him round his little finger as always supported by jack honor and the two together would emotionally blackmail him.

The next morning, the king disappeared early without a word. He returned triumphantly in the afternoon with a broad, broad sunny smile. I halted wondering what the surprise was. “Let me sit down right now. I am tired. I will shortly tell you everything.” Neeta’s heart raced and beat like a drum in panic. Then she relaxed thinking she was just dreaming something foul. Perhaps the king might have won a lottery against the ticket he had recently bought.

Then came the bombshell. “You know Neeta jack is into a prosperous project and you will be an equal partner. I have mortgaged the house for a loan…” Neeta collapsed before she heard the entire story….

Without a word, she walked out, cuddled the children lovingly and wept for the king’s brutal folly. Who knew what the future held for her and her children and the king’s fate? He had locked it himself...but enough was enough. Neeta brushed aside her tears and the mild, quiet Neeta now became a wildcat in the interest of her family. She fought like never before until finally the king realized his folly and cancelled the deed….The project failed. The king was saved.

Split beans, Neeta realized were now gradually drifting apart like the two shores of the ocean, albeit the trickster did not stop fleecing the sheepish king of hearts for he always struck the iron

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while it was hot. If it was not him, it was little Jack honor who did the twisting and the warping.

Finally, the beaches become dry, the sand fly across the threshold and get into the eyes…but the eyes are dry and cold…the drifting wind is drawing the beans apart the ocean of life, as the sheep can no longer be fleeced. His coat has withered.

Dr. Mrs. Shobha Diwakar, was Head, English, C.P. Mahila Mahavidhyalaya, Jabalpur, M.P is retired now.

She was appointed in the guest faculty, Dept of PG Studies & Research in English, Rani Durgavati Vishvavidhyalaya, and supervised M Phil theses. She was also Honorary Prof. of English, St. Aloysius’s College, Jabalpur, MP, India.

She has published many research papers, stories, poems and essays in national, international and online journals. She contributes regularly to writerslifeline.ca and Indian Periodical.

Contemporary Literary Review India The journal that brings articulate writing for articulate readers.

CLRI is published in two editions (1) online quarterly (eISSN 2394-6075) (2) print annually (ISSN 2250-3366). CLRI is one of the leading journals in India and attracts a wide audience each month. CLRI is listed/indexed with many reputed literary directories, repositories, and many universities in India. We promote authors in many ways. We publish, promote and nominate our authors to various literary awards. It is absolutely free to register, submit and get published with CLRI. Register with us at: Subscriber to CLRI

Get your book reviewed by us.

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Donate to Us We seek donation.

Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016

SRISHTI WALIA Thriving Loss by It is night again. The time when my eyes are swimming once more in the almond-shaped pool of my discoidal thoughts, always coming back to where I started. I don’t know why I often see this pool as white with red fragile waves all-around, and I always reflected as black, squeezing myself in the centre like a globule.

Actually, creating an image of the eye. The best part being, I don’t make any exiguous noise while swimming in this white water, neither the paddling sound nor the resonance produced while treading water.

“Hey, Honey! You asleep?”

“No, Ma”. I reply in my head.

“Is everything alright, Sweetie?”

I don’t know how she hears my cerebellum-replies every time.

But, I am still not in a position to answer her back. After what felt like fifteen minutes, she comes towards my side of the bed. I hastily dry the water my eyes so eagerly generate every night. I guess there is some hydro-electric plant installed deep in my eyes.

My thoughts working as a turbine to generate electricity (energy, radiance, strength, and contentment) but unfortunately there’s a leakage and what the poor machine engenders is only water. A seamless flow of emotions.

Ma comes near my bed table, has a glass of water, asks me if I am thirsty, and advances back to her side. She slept, maybe. The best thing about Ma—she never pushes any subject more than two questions, that too when she is in a FBI mood. Conceivably, she knows I don’t feel like retorting. This being the worst thing about her too.

My Ma and Papa had a divorce when I was four, since then I lived with Ma. After eighteen long years of separation, I still cannot fathom what exactly led to the hamartia of my parents’ marriage, as Ma is not vocal about this subject. What little she did tell me

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(upon pressurisation) is that, they were married young and weren’t compatible with each other. “Not always the reason of divorce is someone’s fault”, she said. I always wonder why she didn't marry again. Probably, her love for Papa hasn't died in these years and marrying again when you have a child from the previous marriage is difficult here.

I too am a revenge seeker – a firm believer in V for vendetta – hence, I don’t share everything with her, just the diurnal issues every girl faces and shares with her mother. Whatsoever, I meet my Papa once in a month and we enjoy each other’s camaraderie a lot. Maybe, not that much. Nevertheless, he is a great father; I wonder why he wasn’t merely a fine husband? We would’ve been one robust happy family. Wait a second, but this is not the cause of my tears! NO. WAY. In fact, I don’t remember crying over this.

My Ma never let anyone hurt or upset me, according to her thought. She doesn’t know the whole things of my life, so can’t blame her. She does everything she can to satisfy all my desires, wants, and aspirations, according to her thought.

But, it’s time for me to leave her. I don’t have much time left; don’t know what will happen to her, when I’ll be gone. I applied for a scholarship in UK for further studies and fortunately got an admission, however when I told Ma, she was too damn hysterical and paranoid about it. I still cannot forget that Sunday evening, the first time I was so infuriated, exasperated, and angry at her. *** “What do you mean?” She asked in that unique way of hers which implied so much more than that four little words really meant.

“I just told you, I am selected in one of the best universities of UK, that too with full scholarship. You don’t have to pay any expenses.” I said the last line nastily.

“I thought you would be happy about it.” I sighed.

“I certainly am!” She snapped. I couldn’t perceive whether it was sarcastic or genuine, saying this she walked into the kitchen to prepare dinner. I followed her. Full five minutes passed. Not. A. Single. Word. Uttered.

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“Can you pass that bowl?” She pointed. I gave her the utensil, suppressing the anger that was threatening to emerge, if she didn’t say anything after that rhetorical “I certainly am!”

“Do you want to abandon me for TWO years?” She smoothly converted the span of two years into eternity. “What will I do alone in Delhi? Wait for you endlessly? Think about you all day?

I CANNOT be some patient, docile, decision-abiding single mother in this hypocrite Indian society.” She shouted over her voice.

If, anyhow, she was saying she cannot be a typical Indian mother, then she was absolutely behaving like one right there! Emotionally blackmailing me. I shook my head.

“Ma, you know, Every damn thing is fucking crazy.” Along with you, I said in my head. She gave me a sneering look as if she heard me. Did she? I sat down and put my hands on my forehead, looked up and continued.

“You are a hurdle in my success path, Ma. Why did I graduate in Anthropology? To just terminate my education? You know it very well, there is not much scope for this subject in India, yet you are creating a nuisance about something so small.” I said this, hating myself more with every passing second and letter. That day, certainly, some maniac hormones were injected into my metabolism.

“STOP behaving like a child Ma. You can perfectly live without me for a few years. COME ON, it’s just two years. If I can do that, so can you!” Okay, it will be difficult for me as well to live away from her. Very strenuous, indeed! Nonetheless, I can sacrifice this peculiar feeling to achieve my goals. CERTAINLY. “Yes, I can live without you honey! But, I won’t be alive. This society kills me every day with its opinions, ridiculous obscenities, cruelty, because I am a single mother, will burn me alive each day I’ll go to work. I confide in you when I return home.

I don’t care what the world says about me when I am with you. I forget everything outside these walls when I am inside our home.”

She took a breath and recommenced. “They say women are caged in the four walls of the house which seize them to rise higher. I,

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on the contrary, want to forever remain in the stomach of our home, safe with my daughter.” She was now crying a mournful sob. Her tears always weakened me, so did her words this time.

But, my Rationale! I have to rise higher in the stature if she isn’t willing to. I want to attain everything for Her. For myself.

“Stop CRYING.” I said harshly and stormed out of the door that Sunday evening exactly one year from this night. I thought a lot while walking in the central park and she would’ve been doing the same at home. Yet, I wasn’t able to accept what she said. Then suddenly from nowhere a voice called “you will realise when you’ll become a mother.” I was appalled, thought it was Ma, looked around but couldn’t see her anywhere. I exhaled a long breath, it was my conscience. Whatsoever. I don’t even want to marry. Not because my Ma/Papa’s betrothal didn’t work out but ’cause this whole institution of marriage never appealed to me, especially the procedures undertaken by us, Indians (North Indians to be specific). So much bragging, so much dowry (no matter how much advance we say we are), so much noise, so much SHOW-OFF. We are just too much! Anyway, my plan is to carry off my dreams. Hence, it was decided, I will go to UK and pursue my ambition. I was resolute in my arbitrament, when I went back home at nine. But, there—THAT SCENE; my voice caught in my throat. Ma lied on bed, STILL. For a moment, I thought she passed out; well I certainly did for a second! No, Ma didn’t do anything to herself. She was beneath the duvet, pretending to sleep. She was trying to not even breath properly, so I believe that she is in cavernous sleep. That, made my lips curve a little. I was sure she couldn’t sleep after my obnoxious manoeuvre. But, her sleep invoked a terrible idea in my mind – the thought of her death.

What if she died before I came back from London? I seriously think psychotic neurons were flowing freely through my brainstem. Why did I suddenly think of her demise? Whatsoever.

It was decided in that moment I cannot go. I WONT GO. She was at cloud nine when I told her this next morning, I smiled when she grinned.

She took my silence for acquiescence. ***

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Tonight, thinking about all this, I remember I didn’t tell her, I was leaving in two weeks. “Abandoning her” in her language. I applied for a scholarship again this year and got selected in another college this time, although it isn’t better than the previous one. They have arranged everything from my flight tickets to the hostel accommodation.

After my graduation, both of us worked for our livelihood and I despised my job to an extent I cannot explain, since it wasn’t related to anthropology at all.

It was a doltish bank job whose entrance exam I repent clearing.

Finally, I submitted my resignation letter and the bank people are also happy to bid me farewell. “The bitch is finally going”, I could read their minds while offering my termination letter. It was obvious through my tantrums, displeasing looks, and behaviour with so-called co-fellows that the ass-holes thought of me like that. Never mind, I was getting rid of it or maybe the other way round.

Ma doesn’t know I’ve quit the job, because I am expected to clear all my dues and pending work until next Monday, so technically I’ve one week and my flight is at the weekend. This one year was a consummate megillah of torture—I got into a job, I certainly didn’t adore and kept on thinking what my life would’ve been if I was in UK. I cannot comprehend what will happen to Ma, once I’ll leave. Actually, I know. SHE WILL FREAK OUT. She will be crestfallen, perhaps she may think of dying but, NO she won’t do anything like that, ’cause when I felt miserable in a few situations and denounced it’s better to die than live in this woebegone world, she gave me long lectures on why suicide is disgraceful and you shall offend God by not accepting the life offered to you by him. But, I always pondered, doesn’t God—the Almighty, the controller of the universe, undertake every damn thing happening in this world and knows what the future holds?

Certainly, then it’s his campaign that carries out suicidal missions too. Thinking about God and his proceedings exhausts every single cell of my body. Anyway, Ma will get adapted to me being absent in almost two years, I believe.

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I’ll surprise her by coming back with the opulence we always wanted. *** The time passes so swiftly; it feels like yesterday I was twenty two packing the luggage for my sudden departure, thinking of studying further the evolution of human existence, culture, metamorphosis of human life, and to make new college memories. Now, twenty seven years later, sitting in a rocking chair inside the same room, with all sorts of bodily pains, I contemplate each and every turn my life took and realise the worst one is and always will be the queer death of my Ma. I DESERTED her, “ABANDONED” her! Just like my father. She died, did not commit suicide, suffered from tuberculosis—not a life threatening disease, nevertheless; doctors said they couldn’t save her. Anyhow, I know it was I who killed her, not the lunatic bacteria and I am sure she didn’t even fight to live. This happened when I was preparing for my departure from London after my post-graduation. Unfortunately, I was obliged to enrol into a twomonth internship after completing my course due to which I got late, very late. It wasn’t that Ma didn’t stay in touch but she always dissimulated to sound cheerful when I could sense a morose tone.

(I don’t know why I’ve always felt, Ma saw me abandoning her that day; but, she didn’t stop me.) It saddened me to hear her trodden voice but I over-looked the idea thinking I’ll go back and perfuse all the missing veins that went into both of our hearts. The enormity of her sacrifice in my life cannot be moulded into words, and even if I try it will never terminate. And can a child ever balance all the things her mother has done for her?

I have come back to the same house, didn’t marry – in the fear that karma will take vengeance through my child (yeah, the previous reason definitely holds a rigid position too) – and will stay inside these walls until death captivates me. Every night has been similar to my earlier planning-to-leave-India nights (NO, not India, my Ma). The salty water seamlessly flow through my eyes even today.

Life’s kinetics is in a perpetual motion.

My reminiscences of what I thought the day I saw Ma pretending to sleep, flunks to surface; again!

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Srishti Walia is currently pursuing her major in English Literature from Gargi College, Delhi University.

Contemporary Literary Review India The journal that brings articulate writing for articulate readers.

CLRI is published in two editions (1) online quarterly (eISSN 2394-6075) (2) print annually (ISSN 2250-3366). CLRI is one of the leading journals in India and attracts a wide audience each month. CLRI is listed/indexed with many reputed literary directories, repositories, and many universities in India. We promote authors in many ways. We publish, promote and nominate our authors to various literary awards. It is absolutely free to register, submit and get published with CLRI. Register with us at: Subscriber to CLRI

Get your book reviewed by us.

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016

VEERINDER PATWARI And Confessions Created Confusions!!

VAMAN the Vedic Scholar had predicted disastrous culmination of the exhibition and Satya, his revolutionary father, had cautioned him about the repercussions! He had ignored both as reflections of their perceptions. But when both proved right it was more a surprise than a shock!

Vaman’s instant confession which justified his arrest, created a confusion in Kranti Bharti’s mind. He was unable to understand whether a Sage has projected himself as Nostradamus, the man who knew all about future, or a visionary has followed the path of Greek scholar Socrates to gulp poison with a purpose?

KRANTI is used to getting involved in an intellectual father’s convictions with interest and enjoys his wise mother’s narrations about Mythology with curiosity! Thus he strikes useful materialistic conclusion in between two extremes! But this time their confessions about Vaman and his driver Gopala, conveyed on Media’s global transmissions with religious angles, have added confusions to his own ‘Ifs & Buts’ from his administrative angles!

Thus the situation has created a vacuum which has blocked the confession of a humiliated Deputy Commissioner!

SATYA has appreciated free, frank and fearless confession of Vaman. But instead of blaming himself for his son’s official debacle, he has elaborated Gopala’s mission to canvass his popularity as charismatic effect of Kranti Prakash’s ancestral background instead of Kranti Bharti’s administrative capabilities.

And thus he spotted him with a mark of identification by birth.

Justified his apprehensions for being spotted and punished for his high caste surname which nipped his desires to get admission in professional colleges! He mentioned about consecutive rejections and dejections during his education and profession which had dragged him to conclude that ‘Prakash’ was like a bag filled with mercury tied with an ace swimmer‘s arm for locking his capabilities and blocking opportunities for competitions.

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Satya confessed his bitter demonstration against the religion which justifies events of sorrows/joys as unwritten, unheard, unchallenged dictates of destiny according to deeds done in previous lives! And his blitz with logical explanations that neither allegories verify nor materialistic evidences certify birth with option for choosing ‘Place & Parents’, why are they punished for their birth which is neither a sin nor a crime committed by them!

He admitted that when his genuine grievances were not redressed

by Government, Judiciary and even Law makers in both houses of Parliaments he chose a new path. He legally removed his surname ‘Prakash’ and groomed his son as ‘Bharti’ a traveler who paved his own road to reach to the desired destination.

Kranti Bharti with his genetic brilliance in academics, his voracious reading in school, college, public libraries and sharing his father’s voracious reading for sufficient global general knowledge helped him getting selected in Indian Administrative Service!

Satya claimed Kranti’s success as an ecstatic victory for a clerk’s materialistic planning! He conveyed his pleasure about his son’s first posting as a Deputy Commissioner of a city known globally for linking ‘Once upon a Time’ to ‘Times Now’. He revealed his desire to convert synthetic fragrance of well-maintained ancestral Vedic culture into the aroma of modernization! And get involved in socio-economic growth of the city with his guidance to the budding reformer. But he blamed Gopala for a tsunami effect and confirmed his strategical victory in blocking the dynamic confidence of a progressive administrator with static faith in Vedic scriptures particularly transmigration of souls and the charismatic importance of immersion of ‘Ashes’ of cremated mortal human bodies! He dared to define all Vedic rituals as illogical, psychological and camouflaging processes for benumbing fertile minds with tranquilized blind faith!

An emotionally shattered father has sought global media’s attention to Gopala’s confessional sarcastic smile which is mocking at his defeat without fighting a war! But the logically convinced revolutionary has expressed his regrets for reformer’s suicidal deliberation!

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SHRADHA’s interview has contradicted her husband’s conclusions. Her detailed descriptions have glorified Divine City with reverence to her faith in invisible ‘Param-Eshvar’ the Trinity of Brahma, Vishnu & Shiva, the supreme power controlling universe! She is convinced with ancestral belief that when millions of centuries before Shiva left heaven with poisonous serpent Vasuk, he met Shakti on snow clad mountains on earth!

And they started a continuous process for invisible immortal souls changing visible mortal bodies either in the form of immovable short lived bushes to centuries old massive trees! Or movable crawling, walking, swimming and flying creatures. All of them living life which is a time-bound, predestined journey which starts with ‘Birth’ & culminates with death.

She is fully conversant with the importance of immersion of Ashes of cremated mortal human bodies in the sacred river! That not only culminates a time-bound, predestined journey but also brings the soul along with the deeds done during just culminated life in the notice of invisible Chitragupta who disassociates souls with all materialistic objects and subjects and then on his perusals of up to dated ‘Karamas’ (or deeds) that keeps on monitoring either their blissful reception in ‘Heaven’ or torturous dragging to ‘Hell’!

Either ‘Salvation’ from Transmigration for a few who can opt for human form just to bail out their devotees from deep waters! Or another life as insects – reptiles, beasts-birds and humans any form anywhere on the globe! Only ‘Humans’ are blessed with five senses and even the sixth sense, though in rare cases.

Shradha is capable of doing some deeds with positive (or negative) intentions during the current life. Therefore she is convinced that her current life in human form is a reward for her good deeds in previous life.

Shradha confessed that she accepts her revolutionary turned reactionary husband’s physical as well as mental tortures as a punishment for her bad deeds done in previous life! She accepts the significance of devotional performance of rituals which penetrates opaque walls of invisible Trinity who provides umbrellas to reduce the intensities of destined scorching sun, nonstop snowfalls! When cross-questioned about the validity of

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the event as predestined, instead of replying she asked a question “How do palmists, face readers and astrologers predict future?”

With reference to her own experience, Shradha has expressed her excitement about her son’s destined life graph exactly as predicted by her father who was well known for making horoscopes with reference to place, parents, exact time of birth and position of Sun, Moon and Planets in the orbit! She specifically mentioned that her husband and son have almost identical birth-charts! But the little difference has made Satya Prakash an unnoticed person and his son a shining star! And his specific mention that all those born as ‘Paupers’ and destined to be ‘Princes’ get banquets for their good deeds done without expectations of reciprocations!

She even faces unpredictable situation with courage and thus gets ecstatic results for litmus tests of God in human form! Gopala’s ‘Mystic Smile’ boosts her hopes in unexpected but destined meeting of two strangers Kranti and Vaman for either settling credits and debits of previous life or creating an eye opening event with either surprises or shocks! She hopes for the best but she is prepared to face even the worst!

For the first time Vaman also preferred to follow his mother and instead of responding to either media’s highlighted probing or the confidential official questionnaire he has preferred to confess!

And his confession before Inquiry Commission revealed that he has been enjoying his posting in the Divine City right from the moment his jeep driver Gopala received him on railway station.

Then with his briefing during his official and private sorties it was a bliss to watch crowded river bank, markets, public places and share feelings with masses & classes, sages & scholars, preachers, Indian & Global Pilgrims! All of them performing identical rituals without discussions & arguments, explanations & interrogation; descriptions & derivations with deletions & modification! Thus living a peaceful global society without conflicts on caste creed & color!

Devoid of knowledge about rituals Vaman had to depend on Gopala’s help to enjoy strategical alignment with religious masses and classes! But he admitted that Gopala’s knowledge about invisible Trinity─air─immortal souls and visible water-soil on

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Earth, Sun-Moon-Planets-stars in sky, all linked to life, created a curiosity about his ancestral religion. Particularly when his materialistic doubts about destined life were explained by Gopala with reference to Late Vidya Sagar, a dissident of Rajarshi, known for his amazing predictions on the links between current life with previous life. A preacher of Vedic Philosophy, he used to worship an ancient book with allegoric collages on every page. He would ask the devotees to open a page with closed eyes. And then with his interpretation highlight ‘Past’ & its carried over effects on ‘Present ’ & ‘Future’!

He used to accept both good and bad events as the unwritten unchallenged dictates of destiny! He advised his followers to face both agony and ecstasy with devotional faith! When the country was celebrating its first Republic Day celebration he found a newborn baby abandoned for having a normal head but abnormally short legs and arms! Without raising hue and cry he adopted the infant as a destined event! Named him in the name of Vaman Autar, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu!

Kranti has put it on record that Vaman, the dwarf Vedic Scholar, is following his father’s ancestral traditions but instead of worshiping religious books he keeps on reading already read ancient books again and again. Neither for discovery of nectar in deserts and snow clad mountains nor attaining spiritual bliss to conquer death. But for exploring clues to the energy which helped Savitri to stall her husband Satyavan’s destined death. The same energy which helped Bhishma to remain mentally alive with his dead body on arrows during Mahabharata. Instead of elaborating their idol worshiping for devotional strength he insists on ideal concentration for exploring energy to counter natural calamities and human catastrophes which he keeps on predicting with his computerized materialistic feedback! Thus he rejects algebraic perceptions on assumption and presumptions and prefers arithmetic results with his conclusions on materialistic interpretation of allegoric, philosophic or symbolic knowledge hidden in ancient scriptures.

That is the reason for his not being popular in masses! But he has confessed his admiration for the visionary’s approach more like a

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teacher than a preacher! And applauded him for his conversion of a Museum on ancient books into an art gallery with exhibits conveying logical interpretations of allegoric scriptures! Defining Shiva Shakti as Matter; Energy, Trinity as a Tree—its roots depicting ‘Brahma’ trunk depicting Vishnu & branches with timebound leaves and fruits depicting Shiva! Quoting flying chariots as jet fighters! defensive or offensive powers of Savior ‘Devtas’ & destructive ‘Rakhshas’ like Yudhushtra Pandav the peace lover and Dayudhan Korva stubborn war monger as present day nuclear powers! International Organizations for peace as messengers of ‘Vishva Kutamb’—the global art of living a peaceful life!

Thus his aim is to establish logical links of all discoveries, innovations and inventions with allegoric treasures of knowledge!

He admitted that their frequent meetings revived his curiosity about mother’s religion and garlanded pictures she worshiped! His father used to wipe his impressive conclusions with rejection of unrealistic glamorized pictures as interpretations of allegoric scriptures and biased imaginations of artists. Then tarnish pleasant impressions with his expressions in caricatured illustrations to ridicule Gods and Goddesses! But when he kept on illustrating his imagination about his gathered knowledge he discovered the oldest religion of the world as an art of living without offensive or defensive reference for caste, color and creed discrimination!

With a desire to share his expression with likeminded masses and classes he had organized a conceptive exhibition!

Everything was going well as planned and participation of social & cultural activists in their patent getups, writers and artists with mannerism depicting creative urge, media icons with their cameras and lovers of art had glamoured the event! While all of them were acknowledging each other’s importance for dominance in a routine get-together some young and old viewers kept on enjoying his free, frank and fearless freedom of expression with curiosity! Some of them, trying to find their own reflections in abstract exhibits and the rest, were amazed for not finding Mythological characters in human forms with ‘Vishnu’ in bluish complexion, Lakshmi in pink, Sarasvati in white, and Ganesha in saffron robes.

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But curious to understand the pictures drawn on white paper with pestles and charcoal, a jubilant gathering instantly caught attention of loud arguments of few youngsters demanding action against the Government officer for presentation of ‘Ram, Lakhshman, Bharat and Shatrugan’ as four temperaments in all human beings—elaborating Ram as cool tolerant supreme savior with a warning to those who oppose him! Provoked youngsters removed and burnt all exhibits! They were followed by their supporters with their storm like intrusion inside the open air exhibition! He confirmed that both offenders and defenders were mute spectators till Vaman’s confession was followed by his hand cuffing. Thus he was shattered to watch discussions with their own perceptions instead of eye witnessed realty—projecting a transparent progressive venture as a communal intrigue!

Vaman’s confessional statement was released by Inquiry Commission a day after the bye-election! And subsequent actions taken by Government telecast insets in Global media’s hyped exit poll result have turned his transparent speculations in translucent confusions!

Vaman’s participation in the exhibition in support of voice of people was appreciated but his confession as a suicidal sacrifice to save an instigator was rejected! Sage was released with honor and Kranti Prakash transferred for misusing official position to escalate the horror of a very sensitive dispute on religious faith!

He is thus convinced that confidence without experience is similar to a robot devoid of five senses. He admits he should have understood his father’s apprehensions about his spotted victimization! Confesses without confusions that he too has been punished for sins and crimes he did not commit!

Satya’s pain in hallucinations has ended abruptly as if awakened to realize that though he has no logic to reject Shardha’s claims for getting rewarded for devotion yet he has no evidence for being an atheist! He regrets for not realizing it then when his volatile demonstrations against his own religion used to get wide angled global media coverage but his demand for ‘One Life’ with efforts, merit and worth though never throttled yet always ignored censored thus nipped! Thus his humble and furious disgruntled

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voice for social injustice against the caste-based reservation on vote bank considerations was never heard! He was convinced that his son’s victimization has been scripted by those who exploit religious feelings for implementation of their hidden plans. And for the first time he was optimistic about his son’s escape from devil’s trap with a miracle from his wife’s devotional energy!

Gopala’s mystic smile is boosting Shradha’s expectations in Vaman’s miracle as an incarnation of Vishnu!

Kranti has been targeted for polarization of caste votes in election!

Vaman is shocked but not surprised about Kranti's victimization!

Tight lipped visionary's logical speculations were ignored by the revolutionary as a fortune teller's illogical sermon! Thus feels shattered!!

Veerindar Patwari is a Civil Engineer currently enjoying a retired life in Egypt. He is a well-known Urdu short story writer besides a playwright and an acknowledged scriptwriter for TV and films. He has so far published 14 compilations of short stories and dramas in Urdu. Delhi, Jammu & Kashmir and Bihar Urdu academies have awarded him for his literary contribution.

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Contemporary Literary Review India The journal that brings articulate writing for articulate readers.

CLRI is published in two editions (1) online quarterly (eISSN 2394-6075) (2) print annually (ISSN 2250-3366). CLRI is one of the leading journals in India and attracts a wide audience each month. CLRI is listed/indexed with many reputed literary directories, repositories, and many universities in India. We promote authors in many ways. We publish, promote and nominate our authors to various literary awards. It is absolutely free to register, submit and get published with CLRI. Register with us at: Subscriber to CLRI

Get your book reviewed by us.

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Research Papers

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ANANDA DAS GUPTA Byomkesh Bakshi of Kolkata and the Sleuth on the Baker Street Abstract For 80 years, Byomkesh has been Bengal’s favourite literary character, his only competition coming from Satyajit Ray’s Feluda who made his debut in 1965. However, there is a crucial difference between the two. The Feluda stories were written for teenagers; whereas Saradindu Bandopadhyay wrote for adults.

The mysteries that confront Byomkesh quite often hinge around lust, adultery, promiscuity, even incest.

This paper analyses the annals of Byomkesh in the context of the works of the international masters of mature detective fiction, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler.

Keywords: Byomkesh Bakshi, detective stories, Feluda stories, Satyajit Ray, Saradindu Bandopadhyay, Bengali literature, Indian English literature.

Byomkesh Bakshi of Kolkata and the Sleuth on the Baker Street by Ananda Das Gupta I For 80 years, Byomkesh has been Bengal’s favourite literary character, his only competition coming from Satyajit Ray’s Feluda who made his debut in 1965. However, there is a crucial difference between the two. The Feluda stories were written for teenagers; so Ray had to work within a set bandwidth—no crime could have a sexual angle to it (Ray even complained that this significantly restricted his freedom to plot the stories). Saradindu Bandopadhyay wrote for adults. The mysteries that confront Byomkesh quite often hinge around lust, adultery, promiscuity, even incest.

So, the annals of Byomkesh should be viewed in the context of the works of the international masters of mature detective fiction,

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such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler. Having read all of Byomkesh, all of Sherlock Holmes and all Philip Marlowe novels by Chandler (and all of them several times), I can confidently assert that at his best, Saradindu Bandopadhyay was as good as anyone in the world working in this genre. Now, sorry, and aside I’m unable to avoid—like Conan Doyle, Saradindu Bandopadhyay also wrote historical novels. I do not know how many of them are available in translation for a broader nonBengali audience, but they are truly stunning achievements in storytelling, and certainly much better than Doyle’s tomes. Like Conan Doyle, he wanted at some point of time to retire his sleuth.

Doyle tried it the nasty way—by killing off Sherlock Holmes in the story The Final Problem. Public outrage forced him to bring Holmes back to life. Saradindu Bandopadhyay, as he revealed in a 1969 interview, was a much kinder man. He married Byomkesh off (an almost unheard-of thing for detectives across the world) in only his tenth outing, and thought that was the end of it. He did not write another Byomkesh story for 16 years, and settled in Bombay as a writer for Himanshu Roy’s Bombay Talkies. But on a visit to Calcutta, he discovered that Bengalis still hankered for his hero; graciously, he returned to Byomkesh and stayed with him till the end of his life.

In the same interview, he worried about Byomkesh—he was now 60 years old (10 years younger than his creator); and though still mentally and physically fit, he would like to retire, but was helpless as long as a vast number of Bengali readers kept wanting more of him. And Saradindu Bandopadhyay could not let them down. This is the other interesting aspect of the Byomkesh stories.

Unlike many other fictional detectives—Hercule Poirot, for example, would have been at least 110 years old by the time he handled his last case in Curtain—Byomkesh ages, marries, has a son, starts a publishing firm with his assistant and chronicler Ajit (he makes a more stable income from this than from his seeking of the truth), buys a house in South Calcutta, and ponders buying a car for his wife Satyabati (note that ‘satya’ occurs here again).

He is very clearly situated historically. For instance, Adim Ripu (a loose—and not very accurate—translation would be The Primal Lust), certainly one of the best detective novels I have ever read—

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irrespective of the country of origin, is set in the days just before and after India’s Independence and records the situation in Calcutta at that time. Other than Basu Chatterjee’s endearing TV serial—which was extremely loyal to the source material, several Byomkesh stories have been made into films in Bengali, though most seem to have disappointed the audience (including Satyanweshi the last film the highly talented Rituparno Ghosh directed before his untimely death). Exceptions are two films made by the multi-faceted Anjan Dutta, and the third one is releasing in two weeks-time (I have seen only the first one, based on Adim Ripu, but both films were big hits).

It was the great Ray who first brought Byomkesh to the screen, in Chiriakhana (The Zoo, 1967). However, it was a film Ray made reluctantly. His assistants had bought the rights to the Byomkesh novella, but lost their confidence at the last minute, and pleaded with Ray to take charge. Ray was at a bit of a loose end at that time, trying to raise funds for Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, so he agreed with what now seems to be an ‘all right, what the hell’ attitude. To his biographer Andrew Robinson, he said: “I accepted willy-nilly.”

Chiriakhana has its moments—there are two murder sequences which are master classes in editing and suspense-building, but it is certainly Ray’s worst film. He knew it, and refused to put it on the international circuit. He told Robinson: “Whodunits don’t make very good films, because of the very long explanation at the end, where the film becomes very static.” He said he does not regard Chiriakhana as a “true Ray film”. He also may not have been well-acquainted with the Byomkesh stories, since in the film, it is Ajit who is married, and Byomkesh is a bachelor (In the very second paragraph of the first Byomkesh story, Ajit tells the reader that he has determined to stay a lifelong bachelor—which he does, and as we know, Byomkesh was a family man). Saradindu-babu was apparently outraged when he watched Chiriakhana.

II During his literary career, Saradindu himself drifted from his original style. His earliest Byomkesh stories are written in a formal first-person style with Ajit narrating, while his later works

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are more literary, free-flowing in third-person narrative. During the course of his detective career, Byomkesh gets married to Satyabati and has a son. On the other hand, Sherlock Holmes and his chronicler Dr. John Watson are essentially unchanged during the decades they work together (even though we know that Watson was married).

Still, if we want to search for similarities between the two great detectives we should start at the very beginning. The earliest Byomkesh Bakshi stories have some superficial resemblances to the Sherlock Holmes stories. In fact, Pother Kanta, the first story featuring Byomkesh was written close to twenty years after Holmes’ final case.

Similarities between Byomkesh Bakshi and Sherlock Holmes: 1. Both have featured in adventures that are written up for the public by their less observant colleagues (either Ajit or Dr. Watson). Both detectives show extreme loyalty to their friends, but also scold them when they make errors (Reference: Chorabali and The Solitary Cyclist).

2. Both detectives have faced bumbling, arrogant, but ultimately inefficient police officers from the force in the form of Bidhubabu at Lalbazar or Inspector Lestrade at Scotland Yard (Reference: Arthamanartham and The Norwood Builder).

3. Both find that the personal classified advertisements are the most informative section of the newspaper. (Reference: Pother Kanta, Holmes referred to it as the Agony Column in The Engineer’s Thumb).

4. Both realize that following the law isn’t always the moral thing to do. Both Byomkesh Bakshi and Sherlock Holmes are willing to give extrajudicial justice after conferring with Ajit and Watson, respectively. (Example: Chorabali and The Abbey Grange).

5. Both have had to take on cases of national importance to avert war or prevent information leaking to enemies. (Example: Upasanghar and The Second Stain).

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6. Both have been involved in murder cases in which a strongwilled female character has lied in order to protect someone that they loved dearly. (Example: Satyabati in Arthamanartham and Lady Braceknstall in The Abbey Grange).

7. Both have had to lay a trap so that an enemy tried to kill them.

Ultimately this enemy got caught after assassinating a dummy. (Example: Anukulbabu stabs a pillow in Satyanveshi and Colonel Moran shoots a dummy of Holmes in The Empty House).

8. Both have had to show exceptional sleight-of-hand to replace or swap an item in plain view of others. (Example: the statue in Seemanto-heera and the confidential papers in The Second Stain).

9. Both the detectives have had to use psychology to the information that they need. (Example: In Upasanghar, Byomkesh fakes his death and advertises it to get Anukulbabu to reveal himself. Similarly, in A Scandal in Bohemia, Holmes fakes a fire-hazard to get Irene Adler to reveal the whereabouts of an incriminating photograph. Subsequently, suspicions are aroused in both and they flee).

10. Both the detectives have solved a case in which a valuable gem was hidden inside a plaster statue. Both had to break the statue in the final act to recover the gem. (Example: the Nataraja statue in Seemanto-heera and the sixth and final statue of Napoleon in The Six Napoleon.

11. Notwithstanding similarities in the cases mentioned above, unlike Holmes, Byomkesh did not don outlandish disguises.

The needless addition of two such disguises in Ray’s The Menagerie left me spluttering. It must have broken the author’s heart.

Byomkesh wore a dhoti in the days when dhotis were the chinos of the urban middle class professional Bengali. No, he didn’t wear it in the decorative style of the dandified Bengali bhadralok of celluloid. He wore it tied simply, with socks and

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shoes, and he owned it. Any Byomkesh holding his dhuti tentatively like a dangerous weapon has failed in this crucial aspect.

III

Genesis and the “construct� of Byomkesh Bakshi The advocate-turned author Saradindu Bandyopadhyay was deeply influenced by Sherlock Holmes[1] of Arthur Conan Doyle, Hercule Poirot of Agatha Christie and Father Brown of G.K. Chesterton as well as the "tales of ratiocination" involving C. Auguste Dupin produced by Edgar Allan Poe. He was, however, concerned with how the Indian and Bengali fictional detectives created between 1890 and 1930 failed to exist as anything other than mere copies of the Western detectives. The stories of Dinendra Kumar Ray's Robert Blake, Panchkari Dey's Debendra Bijoy Mitra or Swapan Kumar's Deepak Chatterjee were almost always set in London or in Kolkata which was identifiably the British metropolis.

Initially serialized in the literary magazine Basumati, the stories and novels were all eventually published in hardcover editions, the first being Byomkesher Diary. In all, Sharadindu wrote 33 stories featuring Byomkesh, one of which remained incomplete due to his death. At first, he wrote in Sadhu Bhasha, but later he preferred Chalit Bhasha while writing Byomkesh. Byomkesh is one of the most popular characters in Bengali literature.

Although the story Satyanweshi, in which Byomkesh and Ajit meet for the first time, is often the first story in most Byomkesh anthologies, the first Byomkesh story written was Pother Kanta in 1932, followed by Seemanto-Heera in the same year. Sharadindu started writing the stories regularly. By 1936, he had written ten stories, all of which were published by the Calcutta publishers Gurudas Chatterjee and Sons in three collections. Sharadindu stopped writing Byomkesh stories for 15 years, during which time he lived and worked in Mumbai, writing screenplays for Bollywood films, including Durga, Kangan and Navjeevan (all 1939).

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Upon returning to Calcutta in 1951, Sharadindu began writing Byomkesh stories again after friends asked why he had stopped and published Chitrochor in the same year. He further wrote 21 stories, including Bishupal Bodh, which was left because of his death in 1970.

Byomkesh meets Ajit for the first time in a mess in central Calcutta in the story Satyanweshi. He initially introduces himself as Atulchandra Mitra to prevent others from knowing his actual motives there. Through a series of complicated events, one of which resulted in him being arrested by the police on charge of murder, he ultimately unmasks the criminal. As a result, the mess members are forced to vacate the mess, while Byomkesh takes Ajit to his own mess at Harrison Road, where he entreats him to stay there with him, saying that after living with him for the last two weeks he would find it difficult to live alone. Ajit consents, and since then they live there along with their devoted servant Puntiram, until in Arthonamortham Byomkesh marries to Satyaboti who henceforth lives there too.

Ajit narrates all but five of the thirty-three cases which feature Byomkesh. In all these stories, he assists and accompanies Byomkesh in his escapades. Most of the stories are centered on Calcutta, except a few like in Byomkesh O Baroda, where they go to Munger in Bihar, or Amriter Mrityu, where they go to Baghmari. Byomkesh's opinion about Ajit's intelligence and acumen is somewhat underwhelming, in Durgo Rohosyo, when Ajit throws some intelligent light on the mystery, he is very surprised, which prompts him to concede "Can it be that at last you have really developed your faculties!" However, he lets Ajit try to solve the case in his lieu in Makorsar Ros, though admittedly it was more due to circumstances precluding him from engaging himself in the case than due to his trust in Ajit's abilities; he was busy solving another case concerning some large scale forgery of notes. Ajit however is unable to solve the case.

Occasionally, Byomkesh assigns Ajit some role in solving the mystery: in Pother Kanta he lets Ajit go to New Market incognito to procure a letter from an unknown person, though later we find

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that he followed Ajit all the time. In Amriter Mrityu, he asks Ajit to interrogate a suspect while he busied himself in some other affairs. In Shaila Rahasya, Byomkesh urges Ajit to follow-up a case till he himself arrives at the hideout of the criminals.

In Pother Kanta, Ajit writes that Byomkesh, for all his astuteness and intelligence, is a bit queer. For example, he opines that the most spectacular pieces of news in a newspaper lay hidden not under the headlines, but in the advertisements. Though Ajit refuses to buy this, and can't control an urge to chaff him too, it later turns out that what Byomkesh had told was true, at least for that story. Ajit also writes that the outer appearance of Byomkesh won't do much to suggest anything out of the ordinary, but if he is cornered, he comes out of his shell and then his words and actions become something to be reckoned with. He calls himself a “Satyanweshi’’ (or the truth-seeker), and dislikes it when people call him a detective, perhaps to avoid the negative connotations of professionalism likely to be associated with the term private detective. However, Ajit insists that even though Byomkesh dislikes the moniker, he knows very well that he is indeed one.

He often quotes Tagore to explain a certain situation to Ajit; in the later stories we find that the nonsense poems of Abol Tabol by Sukumar Ray too had attracted his interest. He is an avid reader of Mahabharata which we discover in The Will That Vanished.

He never discloses the actual specifics of an ongoing case to Ajit until the very end (Amriter Mrityu being one exception), but occasionally drops subtle hints, which however fails to satisfy the curiosity of the latter in most cases. Since Byomkesh isn't interested in cases involving petty thefts or murders as they don't provide much space to exercise his intelligence, most of the times he remains at home idling away his time in newspapers and his personal library. He ascribes this to brilliant criminals being few and far between. He often paces his room relentlessly while cogitating on a mystery, consuming endless number of cigarettes.

He knows that sound contribution from the police is essential to solving any case, and hence maintains a cordial relation with most police officers. When this doesn't work out, for example in

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Arthonamortham, finding that the officer in charge is adverse to him, Byomkesh blandishes him to elicit a thorough description of the entire event.

Although he is supposed to determine the culprit and hand him (or her) to the police, Byomkesh refrains from doing so on more than one occasion. In Adim Ripu, he lets the murderer go scot-free, stating that even criminals have a right to freedom on the auspicious day of their nation's freedom (the timeline of the said story coincides with the last phase of Indian independence movement) and concluding that the knowledge of his parentage obviates having him to go through any further punishment. In Rokter Dag, he lets the murderer off on moral grounds, arguing that the act, while not acceptable in the eyes of the law, works for the greater good and hence he is worthy of pardon. He repeats this act in Hneyalir Chhondo and Achin Pakhi.

Written long before Satyajit Ray's Feluda series, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay's Byomkesh Bakshi mysteries heralded a new era in Bengali popular fiction. Set in the old-world Calcutta of the Raj, these stories featuring the astute investigator and his chronicler friend Ajit has one major difference: unlike other detectives (Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple in Agatha Christie’s detective fiction), Byomkesh was a family man - in the course of his stories, Byomkesh, the Satyanashi fell in love with and finally married his beloved Satyaboti. On another register, we have those crime thrillers in Bengali which do not have the same recognition as Satyajit Ray's 'Feluda' or Sharadindu Bandyapadhyay's 'Byomkesh' series. These crime thrillers were published in plentiful numbers with their grotesquely illustrated covers, cheap quality printing, cheap paper and lowly priced too. They were a huge hit, especially amongst the adolescent age group even a decade ago. The books no longer exist in significant proportions, but they have left a series of questions relevant for cultural study: what made them successful in their good old days; how were the images of the crime, chase, violence and so on portrayed; how did they relate to the tradition of pulp fiction in the west; what were the local inventions of technique in terms of narrating a crime thriller, if any; and how did they imbibe the pulse of their time.

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In most of the stories, Byomkesh depends more on instinct and intuition when concrete proof is unavailable. Sharadindu never expresses it explicitly through Ajit; however in Seemanto-heera Sir Digindranarayan Roy mentions it while he pretends to make an analysis of Byomkesh's faculties from his appearance only. Ajit visibly is unable to agree with the fact that intuition can supplant material proof, though he acquiesces after Byomkesh does solve the case. In Bahnni-Patanga, we see that Byomkesh is somewhat perplexed by the seemingly trivial fact that in a painting depicting Dushmanta stealing a glance at Shakuntala, the artist had chosen to paint the iris of the latter in blue. Based on this fact alone, he constructs the entire case, which we later we find to be accurate.

IV

“Construct” and Detection Methodology of the Sleuth on the Baker Street Between Edgar Allan Poe’s invention of the detective story with The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841 and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet in 1887, chance and coincidence played a large part in crime fiction.

Nevertheless, Conan Doyle resolved that his detective would solve his cases using reason. He modeled Holmes on Poe’s Dupin and made Sherlock Holmes a man of science and an innovator of forensic methods. Holmes is so much at the forefront of detection that he has authored several monographs on crime-solving techniques. In most cases, the well-read Conan Doyle has Holmes use methods years before the official police forces in both Britain and America get around to them. The result was 60 stories in which logic, deduction, and science dominate the scene.

Sherlock Holmes was quick to realize the value of fingerprint evidence. The first case in which fingerprints are mentioned is The Sign of Four, published in 1890, and he’s still using them 36 years later in the 55th story The Three Gables (1926). Scotland Yard did not begin to use fingerprints until 1901. It is interesting to note that Conan Doyle chose to have Holmes use fingerprints but not bertillonage (also called anthropometry), the system of identification by measuring twelve characteristics of the body.

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That system was originated by Alphonse Bertillon in Paris. The two methods competed for forensic ascendancy for many years.

The astute Conan Doyle picked the eventual winner.

As the author of a monograph entitled “The Typewriter and its Relation to Crime,” Holmes was of course an innovator in the analysis of typewritten documents. In one case involving a typewriter, A Case of Identity (1891), only Holmes realized the importance of the fact that all the letters received by Mary Sutherland from Hosmer Angel were typewritten—even his name is typed and no signature is applied. This observation leads Holmes to the culprit. By obtaining a typewritten note from his suspect, Holmes brilliantly analyses the idiosyncrasies of the man’s typewriter. In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) started a Document Section soon after its crime lab opened in 1932. Holmes’s work preceded this by forty years.

Conan Doyle, a true believer in handwriting analysis, exaggerates Holmes’s abilities to interpret documents. Holmes is able to tell gender, make deductions about the character of the writer, and even compare two samples of writing and deduce whether the persons are related. This is another area where Holmes has written a monograph (on the dating of documents). Handwritten documents figure in nine stories. In The Reigate Squires, Holmes observes that two related people wrote the incriminating note jointly. This allows him to quickly deduce that the Cunninghams, father and son, are the guilty parties. In The Norwood Builder, Holmes can tell that Jonas Oldacre has written his will while riding on a train. Reasoning that no one would write such an important document on a train, Holmes is persuaded that the will is fraudulent. So immediately at the beginning of the case he is hot on the trail of the culprit. Holmes also uses footprint analysis to identify culprits throughout his fictional career, from the very first story to the 57th story (The Lion’s Mane published in 1926). About 29 of the 60 stories include footprint evidence. The Boscombe Valley Mystery is solved almost entirely by footprint analysis.

Holmes analyses footprints on quite a variety of surfaces: clay soil, snow, carpet, dust, mud, blood, ashes, and even a curtain. Yet

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another one of Sherlock Holmes’s monographs is on the topic (“The tracing of footsteps, with some remarks upon the uses of Plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses”).

Sherlock Holmes solves a variety of ciphers. In The “Gloria Scott” he deduces that in the message that frightens Old Trevor every third word is to be read. A similar system was used in the American Civil War. It was also how young listeners of the Captain Midnight radio show in the 1940s used their decoder rings to get information about upcoming programs. In The Valley of Fear, Holmes has a man planted inside Professor Moriarty’s organization. When he receives an encoded message Holmes must first realize that the cipher uses a book. After deducing which book he is able to retrieve the message. This is exactly how Benedict Arnold sent information to the British about General George Washington’s troop movements. Holmes’s most successful use of cryptology occurs in The Dancing Men. His analysis of the stick figure men left as messages is done by frequency analysis, starting with “e” as the most common letter.

Conan Doyle is again following Poe who earlier used the same idea in The Gold Bug (1843). Holmes’s monograph on cryptology analyses 160 separate ciphers.

Conan Doyle provides us with an interesting array of dog stories and analyses. The most famous line in all the sixty stories, spoken

by Inspector Gregory in Silver Blaze, is “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” When Holmes directs Gregory’s attention to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” Gregory is puzzled by this enigmatic clue. Only Holmes seems to realize that the dog should have done something. Why did the dog make no noise when the horse, Silver Blaze, was led out of the stable in the dead of night? Inspector Gregory may be slow to catch on, but Sherlock Holmes is immediately suspicious of the horse’s trainer, John Straker. In Shoscombe Old Place, we find exactly the opposite behavior by a dog. Lady Beatrice Falder’s dog snarled when he should not have. This time the dog doing something was the key to the solution. When Holmes took the dog near his mistress’s carriage, the dog knew that someone was impersonating his mistress. In two other cases Holmes employs dogs to follow the

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movements of people. In The Sign of Four, Toby initially fails to follow the odor of creosote to find Tonga, the pygmy from the Andaman Islands. In The Missing Three Quarter, the dog Pompey successfully tracks Godfrey Staunton by the smell of aniseed. And of course, Holmes mentions yet another monograph on the use of dogs in detective work.

The Sherlock Holmes stories have presented a phenomenon of universal appeal. The master detective employing observation, deductive reasoning, and scientific knowledge has fascinated the young and the old, the rich and the poor. Somerset Maugham has written of the great admiration of Doyle and Holmes by the intelligentsia. Sherlock Holmes has appeared in 60 narratives (56 short stories and 4 full length novels) published between1887 and 1927. The stories have enjoyed enormous international popularity down through the years. Scores of articles, essays, and books have been written analyzing the stories, their origin and the characters of both Holmes and Dr. Watson. A number of "Holmesian" clubs are in existence of which the 'Baker Street Irregulars" is the most famous. President Franklin Roosevelt, a Holmes fan, is reported to have christened the Intelligence Department "Baker Street" during the Second World War. Even in the present space age there is little indication that the public affection for the "Holmesian" lore is about to die out. This current interest is evidenced by literature to be found in a diverse array of publications. The literature can be found in university publications, professional journals, newspaper feature articles, and even as full page color cartoons in the Playboy magazine.

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References Sen, Jayeeta. Sherlock Holmes of India: Byomkesh Bakshi. Northwestern State University of Louisiana. 2004. (Retrieved from http://www.worldcat.org/title/sherlock-holmes-of-india-byomkeshbakshi/oclc/57599858).

Retrieved from www.byomkesh.com.

Sen, Jash. Byomkesh Bakshi from books to movies: five things to remember. Scroll. Web. 24 Jan 2015. (Retrieved from http://scroll.in/article/701691/byomkesh-bakshi-from-books-to-moviesfive-things-to-remember) Ray, Pinaki. The Manichean Investigators: A Postcolonial And Cultural Rereading Of The Sherlock Holmes And Byomkesh Bakshi Stories. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2008.

Retrieved from http://www.worldlibrary.org/articles/byomkesh_bakshi Srivastav, Prem Kumari. British Popular Fiction in an Indian ClassroomA View from the ‘Other’: Literary Paritantra (Systems), Vo1 Nos 1 & 2 Basant (Spring) 2009: 65-76.

O’ Brien, James. Six Methods of Detection in Sherlock Holmes. 2013.

(Retrieved from http://blog.oup.com/2013/09/six-methods-forensicdetection-sherlock-holmes/#sthash.7Wl3JyLM.dpuf) O. Berg, Stanton. Sherlock Holmes: Father of Scientific Crime Detection: Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Vol.61; Issue 3. 1970.

Dr. Ananda Das Gupta is the Head (HRM-Area) and Chairperson-FPM with Indian Institute of Plantation Management, Jnana Bharathi Campus, P.O. Malathalli, Bangalore - 560056.

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JEN WALLS A Critical Analysis on Prof Pashupati Jha’s Taking on Tough Times Abstract Within a sincere depth of symbiotic alacrity; moving toward growth into straight-forward humanism, Professor Pashupati Jha bursts us through within holy sunlight sparkling all inside his captivating soul-seedling collection – nurturing us so well too – in life’s garden and boosting from the stymied growth found wanting inside these dark times. Jha lights his unflickering flame within; flashing the divine spark upon his poetic renderings – flowing devout realism that uplifts as grace within this recent collection, Taking on Tough Times. He offers such a broad and far-reaching pen that flows evermore clear; utilizing strength through compassionate care, charisma and sheer grit of tenacity to inspire all in such a noble effort too.

Keywords: Professor Pashupati Jha, Jen Walls, Taking on Tough Times, Indian English literature.

A Critical Analysis on Prof Pashupati Jha’s Taking on Tough Times by Jen Walls Within a sincere depth of symbiotic alacrity; moving toward growth into straight-forward humanism, Professor Pashupati Jha bursts us through within holy sunlight sparkling all inside his captivating soul-seedling collection – nurturing us so well too – in life’s garden and boosting from the stymied growth found wanting inside these dark times. Jha lights his unflickering flame within; flashing the divine spark upon his poetic renderings – flowing devout realism that uplifts as grace within this recent collection, Taking on Tough Times. He offers such a broad and far-reaching pen that flows evermore clear; utilizing strength through compassionate care, charisma and sheer grit of tenacity to inspire all in such a noble effort too.

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The collection often enlightens an awakening for readers within its genuine warmth of spirit-touches for the important selfexamination of our human values. Jha openly sounds an appropriate alarm upon perception that garners more truth; becoming ever pertinent and timely for the re-birthing onto visionary leadership—upliftment that is required for the sustenance of the life-enterprise through unshakable hope and endurance. He carries us across such rough and tumble times within this collection’s raw and graceful words of candor. Giving more within a spirit of courageous care; enhancing heart and mind to heighten impulses toward developing inner feelings—Jha uplifts the importance of the common welfare of humanity for really living strength and resilience within these “Tough Times”. "from womb of the mother...a priceless product...looks more beautiful than even the brightest gem on earth...the most beautiful and matchless thing on this planet...Let innocent beauty remain intact amid a world full of cunning foxes." (Birth of a Baby (24) and Cheapened All (19)) Jha's spirit of care breathes for the sanctity of life and duty flows most naturally within his parental-pithy-soul; intuitively knowing this world is full of joys and painful pitfalls and within these intrinsic rounds rise real consciousness of hope amidst humanity’s suffering. Within life-breath he shows the celebration and anguish to which our living must be lived through within fullest insight of equipoise. Where myriad linkages flow beyond the physical earthly surface there can only be inherent metaphysical advancement undertaken through conscious understanding and heightened nurturing. The poet, Jha assists through his poesy words; opening to find way ahead within life’s all.

The very life-root still struggles on even just to live out its truth in a cyclic nature that strives ever forward within freedom; growing up stronger, all the while moving care so symbiotically through such a living dream; holding ever lovingly onto love and truth all the while. Jha gives much throughout this collection that often parallels strongly within his Gandhi-like conceptions; holding life up within truth ─ moving as consciousness ─ ever higher as it often sags and nearly breaks within. “In this age of rising prices,

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the poor me can’t offer you colorful clothes, sweet boxes, or fruits; even flowers are beyond my pocket…wouldn’t only my words of prayer…spoken from my guts be enough, my Lord? You are my last resort; don’t allow me to lose that last hope…Otherwise, the canopy that you have erected so carefully, would be wailing with million cries…amid the victorious cacophony of marauders.”

Jha’s painstaking poem, ‘Prayer’ (65) assuages spirit so deeply to encourage faith as the most powerful weapon yielded within hope; finding way through life’s difficulties and challenges. Really touching through such soul, we must become metaphysicalspiritual-sunlight—as the divine God Force never abandons through the impossible! Jha emits words like sparkling stars inside this collection and one feels inclined to hopelessly caress his hope as a canopy of stars and erect more strength within a prevalent need to find a parallel universe of truths found within contemporary views and even previously immortalized and invoked for humanity's soul inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi, nearly 100 years ago prior to this current caress within time and timelessness. “…For I can see, that in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persists. Hence I gather that God is Life, Truth, Light. He is Love.

He is the Supreme Good. I confess… that I have no argument to convince…through reason. Faith transcends reason. All I can advise… is not to attempt the impossible.

– Mahatma Gandhi, Young India, 11-10-1928.

Jha further gives subtle husbandry inside his valiant moodiness to alight upon life’s dark tones – often soulfully taking the reader inside and outside a most mysterious world (30)—“From dawn to dusk, I labor in darkness of my room… Even when there is total darkness, after black-outs, they keep my company…keep me mentally alive and agile…I too look up from the debris of my devastations…The world today is out of synch…this futile exercise… I have to repeatedly bang at His door; but what would happen, if He too shows a face mysteriously mute?”

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In his poem ‘Needling’ (53) he pricks and mends into lifestruggles with such soulful compassion that gives faith more fluidity and finds divine perseverance through such indomitable faith; healing value strained from the deadly “danger and disaster all around.” The poet, Jha ever smoothly animates inside his words full of devout similes; evoking reminiscent influences from renowned poet and author Sylvia Plath. Jha takes on his lively animations and aims to garner well inside light of his devotion of dreamy heavenly bliss. Plath’s The Other Two gives imitable demonstration of life’s strained relationship likened to furniture in the shadowy chambers—enlivening between the physical world inside the dreamed of heavenly metaphysical poet’s world.

“All summer we moved in a villa brimful of echoes, Cool as the pearled interior of a conch.

Bells, hooves, of the high-stepping black goats woke us.

Around our bed the baronial furniture Foundered through levels of light seagreen and strange.

Not one leaf wrinkled in the clearing air.

We dreamed how we were perfect, and we were.

Against bare, whitewashed walls, the furniture Anchored itself, griffin-legged and darkly grained.

Two of us in a place meant for ten more— Our footsteps multiplied in the shadowy chambers, Our voices fathomed a profounder sound: The walnut banquet table, the twelve chairs Mirrored the intricate gestures of two others.

Heavy as statuary, shapes not ours Performed a dumbshow in the polished wood, That cabinet without windows or doors: He lifts an arm to bring her close, but she Shies from his touch: his is an iron mood.

Seeing her freeze, he turns his face away.

They poise and grieve as in some old tragedy.

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Moon-blanched and implacable, he and she Would not be eased, released. Our each example Of tenderness dove through their purgatory Like a planet, a stone, swallowed in a great darkness, Leaving no sparky track, setting up no ripple.

Nightly we left them in their desert place.

Lights out, they dogged us, sleepless and envious: We dreamed their arguments, their stricken voices.

We might embrace, but those two never did, Come, so unlike us, to a stiff impasse, Burdened in such a way we seemed the lighter— Ourselves the haunters, and they, flesh and blood; As if, above love's ruinage, we were The heaven those two dreamed of, in despair.”

—The Other Two Sylvia Plath Jha makes a profound loving grasp and hugs us ever closely throughout into a real embrace with his affectionate heart-truths; soothing to comfort and inspire. Though shaking us to the very core, we are never to be fully destroyed or abandoned. "Feeling merely a word found in old dictionary alone. Human touch - a much talked about topic with hardly any taker. Poet - a prisoner of his world and words...And through it all I have to live and die."

What a profound depth the poet, Jha dives deeply within to only emerge and then readily traverse life’s ignorant oceanic pathway—lending the shore of solace inside. We caringly cross the delicate and divine bridge he builds within for our lifeblossoming into full bloom. Though we are nearly laying out dead inside the dark and barren breathless fields - on the crackling dry ground – we find new breath of inner courage inside soul – that is ever willing to expand into vastness—flowering full into mystical enigmas. The poet challenges his readers throughout Taking on Tough Times by requiring to make a greater bond within courage; sprouting care of truth within life’s soul-searching for a celestial vision.

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Jha brings each word near within. This embodied-spirit fires us through the well-tuned simplistic nature that boldly enlists innerleadership to rise up from vulnerability to maintain and grow our humanistic worth. Such divine worth is often more than likely becoming cheapened by humanity’s lack of spiritual nourishment in these times of modernity's choking within a burning consumption of blind materialism. "Value - an obsolete item languishing in one corner of the antique shop, waiting eternally for a buyer. Facts - all falsified to suit your needs..." Here Jha readily takes on the soul-care of life's precious seedlings; growing truth through soul-infinity and challenging us to make a personal unmasking for understanding how the world's lack of truth runs rampant inside an insatiable need to continually suckle upon the materialist tit of corruption. ‘Cheapened All’ (19).

‘Wait of the Mother and Son’ (14) "She never asked for anything... fed choicest food, oiled my unmanaged hair, her fingers on my neck...forehead...to relax...remove my tedium...lulled to sleep by sweet song...during sickness...she did everything, without demur... but never asked anything in return...Now, it is my turn to wait for her...my wait would continue tirelessly...till she allows me again to burst from her warm womb...kicking for new life."

Where Jha excels as a well-grounded witness into life’s ups and downs, he invincibly shows how life’s frailties and strengths have to become riveted and tending to find realized Self; provoking ever so lovingly through each glance, his bold cynicism invokes more light to flow freely and courageously too onto worldly darkness. His sparkling words become pure sunlight; glittering to grow life-seeds strong against the odd wind of the tumultuous times displayed prolifically throughout this anthology.

The poet presents a divinely raw-continuity of realism throughout these poems; offering deepened reflection—moving toward embracement of caring within spirit inside of soul. Challenging all to really traverse life’s sunlit path to go much further beyond time and timelessness within our lifetime's cyclic journeys...ever waiting... patiently—"I fed her only once—the burning flame in her mouth…

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—Now it is my turn to wait… for the time she allows me again… to burst out… through her warm womb...kicking for new life."

‘Wait of Mother and Son’ (15).

Professor Pashupat Jha emblazons care where it is really needed— maintaining soul-sustenance within; aiding life as the struggling roots of humanity - growing toward truth; valuing the life’s health and sanctity, while boldly meeting inside such a meaningful living—given through faithfully as pure sunlight's care for all.

Jen Walls is an award-winning author, literary reviewer, and critic. She brings soulful love inside joyful heart’s radiance; pulsating us deeply inside a personality of rare positivity. Her first poetry collection, The Tender Petals was released November 2014, through Inner Child Press, USA. Her second book of co-authored poems OM Santih Santih Santih combined to offer divine nature was released November 2015, through The Poetry Society of India.

Her peace-filled poems come alive inside renowned print and electronic world peace anthologies from the USA, UK, Africa, and India. She recently received a 2016 Distinguished Poet Award, from Writers International Network (WIN, Canada) in Burnaby, British Columbia (May 27, 2016).

Jen currently resides in Saint Paul, Minnesota, U.S.A. with her loving family.

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Contemporary Literary Review India The journal that brings articulate writing for articulate readers.

CLRI is published in two editions (1) online quarterly (eISSN 2394-6075) (2) print annually (ISSN 2250-3366). CLRI is one of the leading journals in India and attracts a wide audience each month. CLRI is listed/indexed with many reputed literary directories, repositories, and many universities in India. We promote authors in many ways. We publish, promote and nominate our authors to various literary awards. It is absolutely free to register, submit and get published with CLRI. Register with us at: Subscriber to CLRI

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NEHA YADAV A Moveable Feast? Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight and Paris Abstract In the 20th century modernist literature, the expatriate experience of the metropolis ─ particularly Paris ─ is usually associated with the towering figures of Hemingway, Crane, Pound, and later, Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Amidst post-war desolation, Paris retained its reputation as a bohemian paradise, a liberal, permissive, fashionable world where all that was avant-garde could thrive. Raymond Williams, in The Politics of Modernism, described this milieu as the “modernist universals” and attempted to dismantle their ideological hegemony by emphasising that their work actually accounted for only a small portion of all contemporary artistic production. Though Williams pointed towards “deprived hinterlands” and “the poor world” as the site where variations within the movement might be found, this paper attempts to recuperate them from Jean Rhys’s 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight which chronicles the twilight years of Sasha Jensen, an English woman adrift in Paris. By studying the text through the prism of gender and class, I attempt to show how despite superficial similarities with the canonical figures, Rhys’ own marginal position, as a Creole woman of uncertain means, necessarily complicates her engagement with, and subsequent representation of, the dominant modernist ethos.

Keywords: Politics of modernism, Raymond Williams, Paris, Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, modernist literature.

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A Moveable Feast? Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight and Paris by Neha Yadav Good Morning—Midnight— I'm coming Home— Day—got tired of Me— How could I—of Him? Sunshine was a sweet place— I liked to stay— But Morn—didn't want me—now— So—Goodnight—Day! —Good Morning, Midnight Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) In 1958, Selma vaz Diaz was preparing a radio play of Jean Rhys’ 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight for BBC. An advertisement was sent out seeking information about the ‘late Jean Rhys’ that, in a sad but fortuitous twist, was answered by Rhys herself; sad because her almost two-decade long descent into oblivion was a literary injustice and fortuitous because Rhys’ public resurrection led to the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), the importance of which to the field of postcolonial literature remains hard to overstate.

Jean Rhys (1890-1979), born Ella Gwendolyn Reese Williams in Dominica, an island of the British West Indies, straddled complex, overlapping terrains when it comes to the usual markers of identity—race, class, religion etc. While she belonged to the elite in colonial Caribbean, her father a Welsh doctor and mother a third-generation Dominican Creole, she was an outsider in England where she moved when she was sixteen. Rhys’ adult life was characterised by financial and romantic/marital instability.

Though her literary output was co-terminal with the giants of modernist literature, like Hemingway, Pound, Joyce, Ford, Woolf etc., and it engaged with the classically modernist themes of postindustrial urbanisation, cosmopolitanism, world war and alienation, Rhys’ position in the canon is still peripheral. This

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paper intends to analyse Good Morning, Midnight an extremely poignant fictional account of a middle-aged, impoverished woman’s experience of contemporary Paris, through the lens of race, class and gender and link Rhys’ own canonical marginalisation with the subversive tendencies in the text.

Raymond Williams, in The Politics of Modernism, discussing the intimately, inextricably intertwined nature of modernist art and the phenomenon of the metropolis says, “…the social form of the metropolis, for the facts of increasing mobility and social diversity, passing through a continuous dominance of certain metropolitan centres2 and a related unevenness of all other social and cultural development, led to a major expansion of metropolitan forms of perception, both internal and imposed.”3 Williams systematically dismantles the ideological hegemony of the “modernist universals”4 , emphasising that their work actually accounts for only a small portion of all contemporary artistic production and deems it necessary to explore “…the many variations in this decisive phase of modern practice and theory.”5 Though Williams located these variations in “deprived hinterlands” and “the poor world”, this paper attempts to recuperate them from Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight; the argument being that, despite superficial similarities with the canonical figures in terms of life and work, Rhys’ own marginal position, as a Creole woman of uncertain means, necessarily complicates her engagement with, and subsequent representation of, the dominant modernist ethos.

Good Morning, Midnight derives its title from the eponymous Emily Dickinson poem. The poem, sparse and largely unrhymed (yet curiously melodious), features a female voice asking cover of

2 By which he means Paris, London, Berlin and New York.

3 Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism, 1996.

4 That is, the consecrated Modernist canon, comprising of largely well-off artists whose work was shaped by and thrived within the aforementioned metropolises, and who, according to Williams, interpreted their own processes as universals.

5 Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism, 1996.

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“Midnight” after being turned away by an anthropomorphised, masculine “Day.” Titles, to use a phrase from Hans Robert Hauss’ Reception Theory, create “horizons of expectation”, thereby providing an entry point into the text and a frame of reference for interpretation and analysis. The title and its literary allusiveness, therefore, introduce the theme of feminine vulnerability, sexual rejection and rootlessness that permeate the novel.

In 1938, Sasha Jensen, after a failed suicide attempt in London, finds herself adrift in Paris on a friend’s charity. She tries to impose a rigid schedule on her days, filling each slot of free time with eating, shopping or cinema to create a mental bulwark against the devastating memories of her previous five year residence in Paris—an ill-fated disadvantageous marriage and the death of her baby. However, hard drinking and acute loneliness wear down her defences, and she ends up on a miserable prowl through seedy Parisian bars. Sasha’s encounters with a wide variety of strangerstwo Russian men, a Jewish painter, an American gigolo are characteristically urban in their mayfly brevity and do little to assuage her loneliness, despair or disgust with the general human condition. Compounding her sadness is anxiety brought on by the physical ravages of age.

Sasha’s Paris in Rhys’s novel is undoubtedly Williams’ cosmopolitan metropolis. The streets bustle with strangers hurrying by, or strolling along, looking at bright shop window displays; there are exhibitions, theatres, tourists, cafes, restaurants, bars and taxis. In the course of the narrative’s stream of consciousness monologue, we encounter Russian men, American visitors, Chinese patrons, a German hairdresser and his English wife, an Arab, a “Hindu” assistant at a bookstore and a gigolo of uncertain nationality. Sasha’s own national origins are intriguingly elusive. However, Amy Clukey reminds us that “…cosmopolitanism is less an accomplished fact than an evolving ethic and perhaps an unattainable ideal.”6 In Good Morning,

Clukey, Amy. ”No country really now”. Modernist Cosmopolitanism and Jean Rhys’s Quartet. 2010.

6

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Midnight, Rhys, “…grappling with the contradictions and failures of a transnational sociability…interrogates the privileges of the very kind of Parisian expatriatism that has come to be seen as the quintessential modernist experience and testifies to the restrictions imposed on cosmopolitan mobility for women and ethnic minorities.”7 The issue of Sasha’s nationality is introduced explicitly when the xenophobic receptionist at her depressingly run-down hotel asks for her passport to check for discrepancy in her form. Evading the question, Sasha thinks to herself, “Nationality - that's what has puzzled him. I ought to have put nationality by marriage.” (Rhys, 4) There are similarly vague hints throughout the text that compel the reader to question the initial assumption that Sasha is English.

For example, “I have no pride - no pride, no name, no face, no country. I don't belong anywhere. Too sad, too sad....It doesn't matter, there I am, like one of those straws which floats round the edge of a whirlpool and is gradually sucked into the centre, the dead centre, where everything is stagnant, everything is calm.”

(Rhys, 17) Meditating upon the revealing spatial metaphor Sasha employs to describe her bone-deep feeling of alienation, Erica Johnson argues that Sasha confirms her ethnic Otherness, since the “…centreperiphery metaphor…is a model of mapping the relationship of the colonies to the métropole.”8 Johnson further observes that by portraying Sasha’s ultimately futile search for “…a home-like dwelling within the rooms and streets of Paris…Rhys interrogates geographical and nationalist narratives of home.”9 Textual evidence in support of this theory range from its “…consciousness of heat, colour and tropical imagery,”10 to Sasha’s pained identification with the painter Serge’s story of a mistreated Martinique woman in London.

7

Ibis.

Johnson, Erica. “Creole Errance in”. Good Morning, Midnight. 2003.

9 Ibis.

10 Ibis.

8

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Sasha’s reference to “…no name, no face, no country” (Rhys, 17) is also irresistibly reminiscent of her much better-known contemporary, Virginia Woolf, who writes in ‘Three Guineas’ (1938), “…as a woman, I have no country.” The almost-palpable, claustrophobic sense of powerlessness and alienation that haunts Sasha is best understood not through abstract references to postWar, post-Nietzschean disillusionment but the concrete categories of race, class and gender that together serve to ensure her subjection to colonial, patriarchal, capitalist powers. Sasha, in the novel, is doomed to fail because she is attempting to navigate an increasingly market-driven world with absolutely no currencymoney, youth or beauty. She makes this explicit in her characteristically understated way when she says, “Money for my hair, money for my teeth, money for shoes that won't deform my feet (it's not so easy now to walk around in cheap shoes with very high heels), money for good clothes, money, money. The night is coming. That's always when there isn't any. Just when you need it there's no money. No money. It gets you down.” (Rhys, 55) Through a series of almost involuntary flashbacks, Sasha’s financial dependency on callous, predatory men is adequately established. Her disadvantageous marriage to Enno, which results in a permanent estrangement from her family, is haunted by economic uncertainty and ends in her abandonment post the death of her new-born child. Forced to borrow money from the patronising Mr Lawson, she has to passively accept his kiss: “I am hating him more than I have ever hated anyone in my life, yet I feel my mouth go soft under his, and my arms go limp. ‘Good bye,' he says in imitation American, and grins.” (Rhys, 45) Her last remembered job as a receptionist in a shop ends in ignominy when the condescending, sexist English manager dismisses her, calling her a “helpless little fool.” (Rhys, 10) Silent in the face of this injustice, Sasha’s internal tirade, however, is a positively magnificent critique of patriarchy and capitalism: “You, who represent Society, have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month. That's my market value, for I am an inefficient member of Society, slow in the uptake, uncertain, slightly damaged in the fray, there's no denying it. So you have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month, to lodge me in a small, dark room, to

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clothe me shabbily, to harass me with worry and monotony and unsatisfied longings till you get me to the point when I blush at a look, cry at a word. We can't all be happy, we can't all be rich, we can't all be lucky - and it would be so much less fun if we were…

Sacrifices are necessary....Let's say that you have this mystical right to cut my legs off. But the right to ridicule me afterwards because I am a cripple - no, that I think you haven't got. And that's the right you hold most dearly, isn't it? You must be able to despise the people you exploit.” (Rhys, 11) While it is true that Rhys and Woolf present a shared belief in the utmost importance of financial independence and security for women if they are to have dignified, productive lives, their treatment of it in their fiction is very interestingly informed by their own class positions. As Judith Kegan Gardiner insightfully points out, “Rhys implies that Woolf's view of money is that of its un-troubled possessor, for whom money has always been a means, never itself an object of desire…Woolf's money seems clean, productive, and hygienic, as Sasha claims the English view of sex is. For Rhys, money is always more complicated, more ambivalent in its libidinal investment. Money is always mixed up with love.

Being refused money or being fired is being hated, rejected, and mutilated…Woolf's [vision] of independent female authorship are blurred by privileges of class and national tradition that she does not share.”11 The libidinal investment that Gardiner points out achieves its climax, as it were, in the final scene where Sasha, in a truly vulnerable moment of hope of a fulfilling human connection, acquiesces to the lonely and similarly disadvantaged male prostitute Rene’s sexual overtures. However, once inside her room, Rene reacts horrifically to Sasha’s ambivalence and insecurity with violent hostility, accusing her of being a tease and trying to force himself on her. When Sasha tries to offer him money to save herself, he leaves affecting disgust. The episode brutally drains Sasha of her last vestiges of resistance against a

11

Gardiner, Judith. Good Morning Midnight; Good Night, Modernism. 1983.

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rapacious world and she opens her arms to the distasteful traveling salesman who occupies the room next door and has spent the entire duration of the text harassing her.

Sasha’s extremely disturbing “Yes-yes-yes…” (Rhys, 71), the last phrase of the novel in fact, is, as Gardiner points out, undoubtedly an allusion (another classical ‘Modernist’ conceit) to James Joyce’s Molly Bloom: “…and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. ” However, while Molly’s “…sexuality is coextensive with her female identity…her final and powerful yeses…her creator’s fantasy of total female responsiveness,”12 Sasha’s “Yes-yes-yes” is a disgusted, selfdestructive admittance of a final defeat against an unjust, exploitative social order, a farewell to arms in the face of power structures that make life for those without it miserable and demeaning and make nigh impossible the chance of true communion.

The prejudices that shape Sasha’s tragic trajectory in the novel have much in common with the ones that have informed critical reception of Rhys’s work. Irene Johnson, in her comparative study of the careers of Ernest Hemingway and Jean Rhys, notes that either critics have completely overlooked Rhys13 or focused obsessively only on the work’s “…autobiographical and confessional elements.”14 The latter type of critical work has birthed the archetype of ‘the Rhys woman’, a perennially distressed, helpless female figure who is ultimately unsympathetic in her passivity. Addressing the sexism that underlies this

12

Gardiner, Judith. Good Morning Midnight; Good Night, Modernism. 1983.

Thompson mentions that Edmund Wilson, Leslie Fiedler, Malcolm Cowley and others who wrote about expatriate writers in Paris completely ignore Rhys.

14 Konzett, Delia. Ethnic Modernism in Jean Rhys’s “Good Morning, Midnight”. 2003.

13

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approach, Gardiner15 writes, “When a writer like Joyce or Eliot writes about an alienated man estranged from himself, he is read as a portrait of the diminished possibilities of human existence in modern society. When Rhys writes about an alienated woman estranged from herself, critics applaud her perceptive but narrow depiction of female experience and tend to narrow her vision even further by labelling it both pathological and autobiographical.”16 To read Good Morning, Midnight, therefore, as a narrow account of one woman’s miserable years in late 1930s Paris is to share in the patriarchal bias that has kept Rhys’s literary output in the shadows for so long. The novel is a bleak but extremely powerful indictment of the exploitative nexus of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. While Rhys does employ the technical paraphernalia that came to be associated with ‘Modernism,’ her treatment of the aforementioned themes sets her apart from her more illustrious contemporaries who were more comfortably situated in the machine they raged against.

15

It is also worth noting that every single critic whose work was relevant to this paper about the marginalization of a female author is female.

16 Gardiner, K. Judith. Good Morning Midnight; Good Night, Modernism.

1983.

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References Clukey, Amy. “No country really now”: Modernist cosmopolitanisms and Jean Rhys’s Quartet.” Twentieth Century Literature. Vol. 56, No. 4. 2010: 437-461. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41413711.

Gardiner, Kegan Judith. “Good Morning, Midnight; Good Night, Modernism.” Engagements: Postmodernism, Marxism and Politics. Vol. 11, No. ½, Autumn 1982-Winter. 1983: 233-251. http://www.jstor.org/stable/303027.

Johnson, Erica. “Creole Errance in ‘Good Morning, Midnight.’” Journal of Caribbean Literatures. Vol. 3, No. 3. 2003: 37-46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40986142.

Konzett, Delia. “Ethnic Modernism in Jean Rhys’s ‘Good Morning, Midnight.’” Journal of Caribbean Literatures. Vol. 3, No. 3. 2003: 63-76. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40986144.

Rhys, Jean. Good Morning, Midnight. http://en.bookfi.org/book/1928526.

Thompson, Irene. “The Left Bank Aperitifs of Jean Rhys and Ernest Hemingway.” The Georgia Review. Vol. 35, No. 1. 1981: 94-106. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41398365.

Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism. UK: Verso. 1996.

Neha Yadav completed her M.A. in English Literature from Delhi University and after a yearlong stint in new media, she is wondering if academia will have her back.

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Contemporary Literary Review India The journal that brings articulate writing for articulate readers.

CLRI is published in two editions (1) online quarterly (eISSN 2394-6075) (2) print annually (ISSN 2250-3366). CLRI is one of the leading journals in India and attracts a wide audience each month. CLRI is listed/indexed with many reputed literary directories, repositories, and many universities in India. We promote authors in many ways. We publish, promote and nominate our authors to various literary awards. It is absolutely free to register, submit and get published with CLRI. Register with us at: Subscriber to CLRI

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N. MANIKHO The Different Facets of Nationalism through Time: A Literary Review Abstract India’s feeling of nationalism arose mainly during the struggle for freedom from the British rule. The term nationalism when we look at it from the Indian perspective does not have a close resemblance to that of the other European countries. India is a land of diversity and we often say it with pride but, underneath all this pride, there are conflicts which arise due to caste, gender, colour, race, religion, and region.

Keywords: Facets of nationalism, India’s diversities, Eugene Kamenka, Dalit Literature, Postcolonial Literature.

The Different Facets of Nationalism through Time: A Literary Review by N. Manikho Introduction The term nationalism was coined by Johann Gottfried Herder in his work which was published in 1774. This word later gained currency during the nineteenth century.17 Nationalism is the feeling of the citizens of a nation to feel connected, love and feel a sense of belonging with their nation. According to Eugene Kamenka, “Nations arise by historical accident, that is as the result of various factors”.18 Likewise, the Indians began to realize

17 Savich, Carl. “The Development of Modern European Nationalism: Social Darwinism and Scientific Racism”. 2008. http://www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/073.shtml (Accessed August 10, 2016).

18 Kamenka, Eugene. “Political Nationalism – The Evolution of the Ideas”.

Nationalism: The nature and Evolution of an Idea. Ed. Eugene Kamenka. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976. https://archive.org/stream/nationalismnatur00kame#page/n7/mode/2up (Accessed August 10, 2016).

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that the only way to drive out the foreign rulers was to unite all the states if we were to achieve freedom. The first seed of nationalism was planted into the Indians psyche during the Revolt of 1857. With the advent of education, people began to realize the importance of nationhood and the need to unite the states as a nation. The feeling of nationalism and patriotism gained momentum when Mahatma Gandhi was leading the Indians in the freedom fighting. However, it was a difficult time as the caste system was very strong during those days and this made the freedom fighters more difficult to unite the people who were from different castes and different religions. In Rabindranath Tagore’s view on Indian nationalism, he said that the reason it was harder for nationalism to be effective in India was not due to the political reasons but because of social circumstances.19 The social set up of our country is such that there is such a big gap between the rich and the poor, between the high and the low class, between the upper caste and the lower caste, etc. which makes it hard for the people to be collectively called as equals. Without equality in the society, there is lack of common interest and common goals; the society gets divided as a result of conflict of interest. But despite all these shortcomings, the freedom fighters were able to unite the country and bring out the country from the grasp of foreign rule.

Nationalism in pre-independence India The scenario in pre-independence India was bleak and dark. The states were divided into kingdoms and there were constant wars among the kings in India before the British came. The foreign oppression opened the eyes of the Indians and the feeling of nationalism started to arise in the hearts of the people. Caste system had a firm hold on the psyche of the Indians which hindered the unity of the people.

19

Tagore, Rabindranath. Nationalism, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917. https://archive.org/stream/cihm_65826#page/n9/mode/2up (Accessed August 15, 2016).

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In Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, we see that Moorthy, a brahmin tries to unite the people but the people from his own caste shunned him for mingling with the pariahs. Even Moorthy’s own mother refused to talk to him after he started going to the pariahs houses regularly. Moorthy tried to break the very shackles which divided the people from uniting as one but, the majority of the people were not willing to come out from their shell of ignorance. Moorthy being a follower of Mahatma Gandhi, took the initiative to bring unity among the different caste in his village, Kanthapura but, the high castes were not willing to step down from their pedestal. Moorthy became an untouchable in his very home, “And Moorthy sits in the kitchen threshold and eats like a servant, in mouthfuls, slowly and without a word. And when he has eaten his meal, he goes and washes himself at the well, and Narsamma munches her food alone in the kitchen, while tears run down her cheeks. ‘Oh this Gandhi!

Would he were destroyed!’”20

Caste system had a firm grip on the Indians, Hindus in particular.

This led a mother and her son to become strangers that they don’t even eat their meal together because the mother being a high caste thought that she would also be polluted like her son, Moorthy as her son had been mingling with the pariahs. When Moorthy and all his future generations were ex-communicated by the Swami, the mother could not bear being ex-communicated that she allowed herself to be frozen to death. It was not just the excommunication which hastened the death of Narsamma, it was also the surrounding and people around her who had been constantly hurling insults at her. Narsamma being an old woman of sixty-five had no one with whom she could share her problems, the anxiety and sadness took a toll on her health before her death.

The main theme in Kanthapura deals with the fights of the Indians for freedom but underneath all that, it also deals with the conflict of caste system in India. It is ironic that even though Moorthy had

20 Rao, Raja. Kanthapura, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1989: 45.

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been helping the pariahs, he still felt confused when he first entered a pariah’s house and he imagined that the gods were angry at him. However, we can take this as the first step taken by Moorthy towards his liberation from the shackles of social evils.

Later on in the novel, we see that Moorthy had a firm belief in the words of Mahatma Gandhi which made him to suppress his anger even when he was drenched when a high caste woman squeezed her wet clothes on his head and called him a pariah. He just said to himself that he should love even his enemies; which were taught to him by Mahatma Gandhi.

The issue of caste always arises in India when we discuss about almost any topic as this social hierarchy is ever prevalent. In Kanthapura, even when the people had begun to unite and think that they belong to one nation, there still exist some sort of differentiation between the higher caste and the lower caste.

When the Panchayat was formed in the Kanthapura village, the people had gathered at the temple in the village to make their vow.

We see that the higher caste went into the temple whereas, the pariahs (the lower caste) stood outside in the courtyard even when they were making their vows.21 When the country was filled with the feeling of nationalism, the high castes were reluctant to let the country be free of the British rule as they feared that their status which they enjoy would be taken away from them.

“But, what I fear for tomorrow is not the disorder in the material world, but the corruption of castes and of the great traditions our ancestors have bequeathed us. When the British rule disappears there will be neither Brahmin nor pariah, vaisya nor sudra – nay, neither Mohomedan nor Christian, and our eternal dharma will be squashed like a louse in a child’s hair.”22 (93)

21 22

Rao, Raja. Kanthapura, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1989: 79.

Ibis.

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There is also another incident where we see that the upper caste were reluctant to let go of their status even in the height of nationalistic feeling.

“Moorthy, in-lit and bright, says softly, ‘You are all with us?’ and we cry out, ‘All! All!’ and ‘You shall harm no one?’ – ‘None! None!’ – ‘You shall go to the end fearlessly? – ‘All! All!’ – ‘And there shall be neither Brahmin nor pariah?’ and the pariahs shout out, ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!’”23 (131)

This also throws light on the hypocrisy of the people. All the people agreed and replied positively to whatever Moorthy asked them but when he asked if there would be neither brahmin nor pariah, the Brahmins were silent and only the pariahs’ voices were heard while answering to this question. They called themselves as the followers of Mahatma Gandhi but they were not willing to do away with the very barrier that was dividing the nation apart. The conflict between nationalism and caste can be seen very clearly from this incident. Everyone wants to bring a positive change to the society but when the propose change is going to negatively affect the privileges which the higher caste or class enjoys, those in the higher hierarchy begins to reject the very idea which they themselves had proposed. This is one of the very reasons which are hindering the nation from moving forward to become a developed nation.

Joginder Paul’s, Beyond Black Waters is another novel which deals with the theme of nationalism in pre-independence India as well as the present age. This book is written in the perspective of the Muslims who were also inmates of the prison Kala Pani in the Andamans. The protagonist, Baba Lalu witnessed a lot of the freedom fighters being sent to Kala Pani for going against the British rules. They were sent here so that they would be excluded from the rest of the people in the mainland India. The

23

Ibis.

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protagonist, Baba Lalu was sent to this prison for a crime which he had not committed. The British had maximum authority over the colonized countries and the misuse of power by them was rampant those days. People were falsely accused of crimes they had not committed and were sent to prison without proper investigation. Those people who praised the freedom fighters were also sent to the prison, Kalapani, “All he had done was lavish praise on Bhagat Singh and his companions in one of his books.”24 Baba Lalu had been at Kalapani Prison for many years and he had begun to feel comfortable but, he admits, “‘No matter how comfortable the in-laws’ home is, bibi, one feels confined and tied down.’” 25 (27) We can compare this to the freedom fight movement which was gaining momentum during this time. People will never experience the true sense of freedom and there will always be a thought that they are under constant watch by a higher authority as long as India is under the British rule. The writer had cunningly spoken his heart out through the use of metaphors.

What nationalism means today The independence of India brought about a lot of chaos in the country because of the partition of India into Muslim and Hindu states. There was a lot of division within the country based on religion in post-independence India. There was constant strife between the different religions soon after the partition.

According to Popati Hiranandani, in her short story, “When I Experienced the Simultaneity of Life and Death…”, she compared the other communities who were from Sindh other than the Muslims as thieves fleeing their own nation in the night for fear of being killed.26 Those who remained were killed mercilessly,

24

Paul, Joginder. Beyond Black Waters, Translated by Vibha S. Chauhan, New Delhi: Penguin Group. 2007: 17.

25 Ibis.

26 Hiranandani, Popati. “When I Experienced the Simultaneity of Life and Death…” Unbordered Memories: Sindhi Stories of Partition. Ed. Rita Kothari.

New Delhi: Penguin Group. 2009: 10.

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016 “Sindhi Sikhs were made to assemble in a temple.

Muslims doused the entire area around the temple with kerosene and set it ablaze. About a hundred and sixty Sikhs were burned inside the temple!” 27

The Sindhis, the Bengalis and the Punjabis and all those who people who experienced partition feels that they were uprooted from their motherland and this creates a void in their hearts.

The other people who had never experienced this would feel some sympathy and pain for them but, it cannot be compared to these people who have lost their birthplace and their motherland forever as the countries are now divided by “borders”. Even after escaping to India from being killed in Pakistan, the people were required to bring legal papers which had to prove how much property they had lost in Pakistan. Those people who had no papers were denied the right to claim for compensation from the Indian Government.28 Before the partition, Kale Khan, who lived in the borders of Afghanistan would “walk in and out of Afghanistan as if there existed no boundaries between the two countries.” 29 Man-made boundaries have begun to affect the people’s mentality and we have begun to make boundaries even in our psyche. There is lack of love and the oneness that people once felt longer exist as people in the present generation thinks only for oneself.

“People live miles away from each other, enclosed in their own cages. Since they meet only over the phone, they tend to forget what the other person looks like.”30 (68)

The feeling that we all belong to the same nation has begun to fade into oblivion. Brotherhood and sisterhood has lost its

Hiranandani, Popati. “When I Experienced the Simultaneity of Life and Death…” Unbordered Memories: Sindhi Stories of Partition. Ed. Rita Kothari.

New Delhi: Penguin Group. 2009: 11-12.

28 Bharti, Narayan. “The Claim”. Unbordered Memories: Sindhi Stories of Partition. Ed . Rita Kothari. New Delhi: Penguin Group. 2009: 107-111.

29 Paul, Joginder. Beyond Black Waters, Translated by Vibha S. Chauhan, New Delhi: Penguin Group. 2007: 58.

30 Ibis.

27

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meaning in the modern world as everyone is engrossed with their own lives. Socialization in the traditional sense has begun to fade as technology has taken over and society has lost its touch even when we talk about love and sympathy. Mahatma Gandhi “laid so much stress on brotherhood between the Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Christian.” But, “the Hindus, Muslims and Christians out there have no hesitation in slitting each other’s throats”31 for the tiniest misunderstanding or issue. Whenever any misunderstanding arises, the past atrocities committed by this community or that community are dug up and more hatred is thrown into it.

In Beyond Black Waters, we see that the justice system in India is easily manipulated and there is no true sense of justice as Mohammad Ali, the second son of Baba Lalu sadly confesses the truth about Indian justice system to Mr.Pittson. Ali goes on to say that when a person speak out the truth about anything, those people in authority misinterpret that truth as a confession for the crimes the speaker had committed and uses against him or her. The innocents and the poor are helpless when it comes to legal system according to the views of Ali. There is a sad truth to our reality and present age as well when Mohammad Ali said, “Truth is what he will suffer punishment for, throughout his life.”32 (51). The very words which Mohammad Ali said befell on him as he was blamed for instigating the shooting resulting in the death of Seth Girdhar’s man. The truth was that the police fired shots blindly and had killed the man but, the police turned the whole incident around and blamed the helpless and innocent people. This is what we call as justice in our nation.

Mahatma Gandhi stressed on ahimsa or non-violence and it helped in freeing the nation from the British rule. But, when we look at the situation in Manipur and when we look at how Irom Sharmila have fasted all these years, it does not seem to have much effect on the government and the government gives a blind

31

Paul, Joginder. Beyond Black Waters, Translated by Vibha S. Chauhan, New Delhi: Penguin Group. 2007: 76-77.

32 Ibis.

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eye to it. The AFSPA (Armed Forces (Special Power) Act), 1958 have done a lot of harm to the people in the north-east India instead of bringing about peace. The people in authority (police and army) would kill any people that they suspect of being a militant without any proof and gives an excuse that those people who had been killed were a part of a militant group.33 The atrocities committed by the army in north-east India are countless. In Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone, we see that the army or those in authority raped the women and killed the innocent people for no reason. This can be seen in “The Last Song”, “the young Captain was raping Apenyo while a few other soldiers were watching the act and seemed to be waiting for their turn.” 34 The mother came rushing to her daughter’s aid but, she too was seized by another soldier and was gang raped to death. Civilians were shot dead by the armed soldiers and those people who had died were reported as underground rebels.35 (34) The mainland Indians are ignorant about the people of northeast, they think that we are from another country. According to Louis Althusser, the State controls the administration and as result, the administration (schools) imparts knowledge on a child. The educational system in India focus only on the mainland India and the tribal areas such as the north-east Indians are not included into the syllabus and this is partly to be blamed for the ignorance faced by the people of the Mainland Indians.

The people from the north-east face discrimination and alienation when they go to the mainland India to study and are treated differently by the mainland Indians. This was a personal experience when I was studying in Hyderabad, one day an auto driver tried to take extra money from me and my sisters while we were travelling from Necklace Road to Gachibowli. We had

Karnad, Raghu and Grace Jajo. “Confesssions of a Killer Policeman”. 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/21/confessions-of-a-killerpoliceman-india-manipur (Accessed July 22, 2016) 34 Ao, Temsula. These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone, New Delhi: Zubaan. 2007: 28.

35 Ibis.

33

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agreed on the fare beforeh and and when we reached our destination and paid the said amount, he asked for more money, but we refused. Then, he shouted, “Yeh Hindustan Hai!” to which I retorted back, “Hum lok bhi Hindustan hai.” We were treated as outsiders and we were not considered as part of the nation just because our looks are different when compared to the people from the mainland India.

We call our nation as our motherland but, do we really respect our mothers? We should ponder over this question as there is so much inequality based on gender. In Premchand’s The Co-wife and Other Stories, we see that the four sons in “A Widow with Sons” cheated their own mother and did not show any respect or regard for their mother soon after the death of their father. This is very much prevalent in our society today; children have very less respect or no respect at all for their mothers. Our mothers carried us in their womb for nine months and nursed us till we could fend for ourselves but, we see in our society today is ungrateful attitude shown by the children towards their mothers.

In “The Child”, a widow who had gotten married more than once is compared to a piece of bread which is half-eaten, “Gangu had seen a piece of bread and was rushing towards it. He didn’t care that the bread was half-eaten, dry, and unfit to eat.”36 In the “Two Graves”, Dr. Ramendra who is an educated man and considered himself as a liberal person had so much restraints on his wife, Sulochana. He refused to let her even meet her own cousin sister whom he considered as a morally tainted woman because of her profession out of fear of what other people may think of their family.

Our nation will never progress unless we step out from our narrow-mindedness and accept the society as it is. We celebrate th Independence Day every year on 15 August but, it is ironic that there are a lot of restrains that still bounds us especially when we look at the conditions of women in India. No matter

36

Premchand, Munshi. The Co-wife and Other Stories, Ed. & transl. by Ruth Vanita, New Delhi: Penguin Group. 2008: 209.

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how educated we are, we will never progress as one nation until and unless come to a full realization that all men are born equal and until we truly accept this fact. As Rabindranath Tagore says, “Each individual has his self-love. Therefore his brute instinct leads him to fight with others in the sole pursuit of his selfinterest. But man has also his higher instincts of sympathy and mutual help.”37 Therefore, let us act like human beings and let us allow our higher instincts guide us in our journey which we call, life and contribute in helping our nation move forward.

Mahatma “Gandhi tried to develop an Indian nationalism based on plurality and synthesis which not only tolerated and respected but positively cherished diversity and differences.” 38 Therefore, let’s not these ideals of our Father of the Nation become a mere ideology but, we should practice his ideology and make our country a developed, a civilized and a better nation.

Tagore, Rabindranath. “Nationalism in India”. Modern Indian Thought: An Introduction. Anand Prakash (Ed.), Delhi: Worldview Publications. 2006: 9.

38 Yadav, S. R. “Nationalism”. Reading Gandhi. Ed. Surjit Kaur Jolly, New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company. 2006: 223.

37

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References Althusser, Louis. 1970. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, Translated by Ben Brewster, La Pensée. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm (Accessed February 17, 2014) Ao, Temsula. These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone, New Delhi: Zubaan. Print. 2007.

Bharti, Narayan. “The Claim”. Unbordered Memories: Sindhi Stories of Partition. Ed. Rita Kothari. New Delhi: Penguin Group. Print. 2009.

Hiranandani, Popati. “When I Experienced the Simultaneity of Life and Death…” Unbordered Memories: Sindhi Stories of Partition. Ed. Rita Kothari. New Delhi: Penguin Group. Print. 2009.

Kamenka, Eugene. Ed. “Political Nationalism – The Evolution of the Ideas”. Nationalism: The nature and Evolution of an Idea. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 1976. https://archive.org/stream/nationalismnatur00kame#page/n7/mode/2up (Accessed August 10, 2016) Karnad, Raghu and Grace Jajo. “Confessions of a Killer Policeman”.

2016. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/21/confessions-of-akiller-policeman-india- manipur (Accessed July 22, 2016) Paul, Joginder. Beyond Black Waters, Translated by Vibha S. Chauhan, New Delhi: Penguin Group. Print. 2007.

Premchand, Munshi. The Co-wife and Other Stories, Ed. & transl. by Ruth Vanita, New Delhi: Penguin Group. Print. 2008.

Rao, Raja. Kanthapura, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Print. 1989.

Tagore, Rabindranath. Nationalism, New York: The Macmillan Company. 1917. https://archive.org/stream/cihm_65826#page/n9/mode/2up (Accessed August 15, 2016) Tagore, Rabindranath. “Nationalism in India”. Modern Indian Thought: An Introdduction. Ed. Anand Prakash, Delhi: Worldview Publications.

Print. 2006.

Savich, Carl. “The Development of Modern European Nationalism: Social Darwinism and Scientific Racism”. 2008. http://www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/073.shtml (Accessed August 10, 2016) Yadav, S. R. “Nationalism”. Reading Gandhi. Ed. Surjit Kaur Jolly. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company. Print. 2006.

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N. Manikho has recently completed his M. Phil from the Department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies, Delhi University. He is an independent researcher based in Kohima, Nagaland. His fields of interest includes Folktales, Short stories, Dalit Literature, Postcolonial Literature etc.

Contemporary Literary Review India The journal that brings articulate writing for articulate readers.

CLRI is published in two editions (1) online quarterly (eISSN 2394-6075) (2) print annually (ISSN 2250-3366). CLRI is one of the leading journals in India and attracts a wide audience each month. CLRI is listed/indexed with many reputed literary directories, repositories, and many universities in India. We promote authors in many ways. We publish, promote and nominate our authors to various literary awards. It is absolutely free to register, submit and get published with CLRI. Register with us at: Subscriber to CLRI

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P C K PREM An Analytical Journey into in Dr Dalip Khetarpal’s Refraction Abstract Poems of Dr Dalip Khetarpal are unique in perception. He explores areas of human life hitherto unattended and makes a lasting imprint. If one looks at his earlier poetry, one notices obvious continuity of the perception and management with indistinctly detectable variation in new poems. In his poems Dr Dalip attempts psycho-philosophical interpretation of life.

Psychiatric therapy, he indirectly argues, helps man lead a better and consequential life, for if one is at peace with self, one attains the real objective. Heroes, saints, wise men and intellectuals live in shadowed glory, for they enjoy life in non-existence and nonentity.

In this paper, Dr Dalip Khetarpal’s three poetry anthologies such as Fathoming Infinity, Ripping into Consciousness, and Refractions have been analyzed with a special focus on Refractions.

Keywords: Dr Dalip Khetarpal, PCK Prem, Fathoming Infinity, Ripping into Consciousness, Refractions, literary criticism.

An Analytical Journey into in Dr Dalip Khetarpal’s Refraction Poems of Dr Dalip Khetarpal are unique in perception. He explores areas of human life hitherto unattended and makes a lasting imprint. If one looks at his earlier poetry, one notices obvious continuity of the perception and management with indistinctly detectable variation in new poems. In Fathoming Infinity, Dr Dalip attempts psycho-philosophical interpretation of life. Psychiatric therapy, he indirectly argues, helps man lead a better and consequential life, for if one is at peace with self, one attains the real objective. Heroes, saints, wise men and intellectuals live in shadowed glory, for they enjoy life in non-

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existence and non-entity. If Fathoming Infinity analyzes and cuts up man’s psyche, it is also distinct and fresh, and drives man to unknown areas he never cares to probe deep and so, wordless guilt and feelings apparently stay quiescent and yet daringly vigorous to give vicious pleasure even as it evaluates truth. Ripping into Consciousness is a journey to the unmeasured and infinite region of conscious and subconscious where awakening and barren unawareness crowd with a typical susceptibility. Inner anguish of a writer does not provide joy but it suffocates, and believes that writing is a compulsive act verging on insufferable fixation. Study of man’s inner world in lyrics reveals real face of truth, lies and veiled living as impetuous outbursts open up man’s true intents and interestingly continuity in intellectual inquisitiveness surprises again in Refractions.

Striking verses of Refractions provoke and irritate intellect, coerce man to think, analyze and arrive at a logical conclusion about objective, identity and existence of life. Dalip’s efforts to look deep into the psychosomatic framework of man in various situations are realistic as he interprets incidents and men at the experiential and cerebral levels. Truth emerges fast, and tells man he lives nearly an illusory life and he is unreal now, when he wants to relive past glory, and therefore, incessant anxieties of visiting past’s aching joys become collected traditions.

According to Dr Dalip, man is often impulsive and doubtful and often keeps shifting operational apparatus so that it appears authentic. A man visits pristine glory and adjusts life’s contours promptly, hurts self and individuality, feels he is real and earthly and so, stays away from truth. Teasing dilemmas disturb, but he refuses to accept despite immense defilement. Man is susceptible to alien influences, negotiates to survive and in the process, lost identity is the eventual providence and he claims roots unwittingly. ‘Smashed in-between-ness’, speaks of the hinges that keep creaking whenever foreign element intercedes and then, efforts continue to absorb indistinctly liquefying components of culture, language and heritage. Poet’s anxieties concentrate on the real and truthful identity of man, and if varied influences whether

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visible or hidden affect, unrealistic and lost life emerges, despite hesitant averment.

Man cannot eliminate the effect of ‘hybridized culture’ as original heritage, Dr Dalip argues, and subsequent implanting disfigures real man and so leads to multifaceted problems proving distressful to psyche, little by little weakening nationalistic thoughts because man never lives a harmonious life in conflicting or substituted cultural regions. Ultimately, he drives to unknown territories to invent new gods while earlier cultural gods get spiky recognition and indentation. Finally, a spurious life raises head when man nurses diseased values and philosophy. Left with no religion and no Gods, a baffled man comes to settle for something that is noble and virtuous and that avoids issues which are: … abstrusive and inconclusive, For the way we live, think and act, The character we evolve, Are far more important, meaningful, Productive, beneficial and impactful Than The sanitized religious values, The atrophied conventional norms The calcified social forms, The ideology and philosophy We nurture and conform, What we believe in and worship, And all that we imagine, think, feel and see.

Hybridized living does not grant real identity, satisfaction and meaning. Man, if maintains distinctive character and survives onslaughts of external intrusion, can justify existence. If sentiments of love genuinely instill confidence, these also overwhelm everyone and straighten rough edges of odd attitude and it not only cleanse psyche of sickening frame but also, creates an aura of identity impeccable where thoughts of god, eternity and

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divine assail, and if man turns away from the material world, a difficult proposition, he can fly to heaven.

Growth is possible if one eschews vacillation, apathy, smugness, conceit and inanity, buries ‘frog syndrome’ and then if infuses vitality and grit, objective of life appears near. Negativity not only stifles but also kills and so, if one wishes to live life, one must face fact and truth. Dr Dalip is direct and straight when questions regarding reconciling unusual and distinct constituents of ‘spirituality and sensuality’ arise. In devastating analytical scrutiny, he exhibits a candid, elucidating and refined strike.

Gods and animals, Separately or together, Live in the core Of our psyche, As sex and religion do.

Man’s demeanor often show that If one is awake, The other is asleep.

But when both are awake, Ambivalence or inner conflict is born, But, only in a morally conscientious person leading often, To confusion.

If one goes back to legends and myths, unique justification emerges and current obtainable life is not an exception but only if he brings a harmonious mélange in deviating life’s ingredients.

Life attains inimitable identity for which a man struggles but faces ignominious end and then, poet stuns when he tells of a lecherous priest looking at a curvaceous beauty in a temple as he counts beads. Sex, sexuality and thoughts of gods and goddesses co-exist, a man ought to understand and so, each one creates terrific war precincts within but still lives and that is life. At the experiential level, he experiments, shares and ingeniously reveals truth that

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everyone knows but ignores or perhaps, permits intellect to sleep for long.

In search of false glory, Go not astray The path to seek false self Is by a labyrinthine path, While the path to true self, Is straight and clear.

Dr Dalip’s poetry stays away from sermonizing and if he does, self-application and experiences provide solidity and agility to steadfast thoughts. Amidst cataclysmic and anarchic times, he wants man to bequeath at least legacy of hope if nothing else, for then, he surely contributes to the survival of humankind.

For the survival of humanity, Dr Dalip never indulges in longwinded intellectual reflections but promotes pragmatic principles of life. He asks ‘Disturb not, Nature’ for man’s perennial contentment, and counsels not to relegate life to the background with inanely structured bland prescriptions on assorted wings of life. He wants rational growth of man, for sinking to regimented thinking would be suicidal because, ‘Human nature, as life or God is, / Can never be defined in any terms, / Being so complex and mysterious.’

‘Human Consciousness, a seemingly fixed Abode for Satan,’ requires healthy expansion towards self-fulfillment and if it is not, sacred purpose of life stands defeated. Synthetic creation of encrustations obstructs man’s journey to self-actualization because he sadly impedes enlargement and surprisingly, ‘The Divine Provider has not also / Unfortunately provided most men / With the ability to create / Prerequisite elements for selfactualization.’

Contemporary culture may look urbane and suave but it scarcely understands human psyche and the truth damages man irreparably and so, he is prone to unexpected traumas of calamitous flare-ups.

Wayward and haphazard living and intellectuality sans genuine feelings drives man to cogitate seriously on life and death and

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‘After Death, What!’ and such eternal questions defy logical answer. He thinks on life deeply, dissects each wing callously and tries to reach a conclusion where he urges man to penetrate and find out truth of life, evidently full of joy and pleasure, but even then, sufferings and agonies haunt without reprieve. The poet often hints at the restricted and regimental life man lives that refuses freedom and therefore, enjoys in bondages but still never reaches the ultimate destination causing worry.

Creative beings are creation of gods but to aspire for immortality is idiotic, yet man nurses a secret wish to live forever. Man must devise mechanism to orient self into a meaningful entity or else haywire living would perish as greed, corruption, hatred and jealousy push man to lifestyles bereft of sanity and balance and therefore, hysterical living if offers moments of joy, it also tortures. He tells, yes - treading unfamiliar intellectual regions lying dormant also offers moments of poetic joy.

P C K Prem is a poet, novelist, short story writer and a critic in English from Himachal Pradesh, India. A former academician, civil servant and member of Himachal Public Service Commission, Shimla), Prem authored more than fifty books both in English and Hindi. A postgraduate in English literature from Punjab University, Chandigarh, he taught in various colleges before joining civil services. He has brought out nine volumes of poetry, five books on criticism, two books on ancient literature, six novels and two collections of short fiction. Creative works in Hindi include twenty novels, nine books on short fiction and a collection of poems. He is a recipient of many literary awards including HP State Guleri & Academy awards and Bharat Hindi Rattan award.

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Contemporary Literary Review India The journal that brings articulate writing for articulate readers.

CLRI is published in two editions (1) online quarterly (eISSN 2394-6075) (2) print annually (ISSN 2250-3366). CLRI is one of the leading journals in India and attracts a wide audience each month. CLRI is listed/indexed with many reputed literary directories, repositories, and many universities in India. We promote authors in many ways. We publish, promote and nominate our authors to various literary awards. It is absolutely free to register, submit and get published with CLRI. Register with us at: Subscriber to CLRI

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DR. SARADA BALAJI THALLAM From Darkness To Light: Shakespeare's King Lear and the Indian Gunas Abstract This paper analyses Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear in the light of the Indian Guna theory to depict the process of inner maturity that takes place within the hero's mind. Shakespeare's focus in this play (as with his other tragedies) is on the soul of the hero where the real action takes place. In probing into the core of the king, the ace dramatist delineates the process of a gradual evolution of Lear's consciousness from a dark state of Tamas, through the active Rajas , and its final state of Sattva and beyond. The soul of this powerful tragedy lies in Lear's transcendence even beyond the Sattva, which alone proves that "ripeness is all."

Keywords: Shakespeare's King Lear, Indian Gunas, Guna theoryIndian philosphy-ignorance-darkness-realization-transformationconsciousness, Shakespearean tragedies, Alfred Harbage, Conceptions of Shakespeare, Kabuki Shakespeare, Russian Shakespeare, African Shakespeare, Indian Shakespeare.

From Darkness To Light: Shakespeare's King Lear and the Indian Gunas by Sarada Balaji Alfred Harbage's Conceptions of Shakespeare (1966) is an important starting point for any contemporary re-reading of the eternal bard: It may well be that Shakespeare's idolatory is drawing strength from something other than in its roots. Having lost their anchorage in the faith of their fathers, many are seeking a substitute in secular literature, and perhaps , in a materialistic age . . . on Shakespeare(s).

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016 Besides, faith should begin when we reach the limits of knowledge. (38)

Harbage's quasi-theological stance is hardly different from Keats who stated that "Shakespeare's significant life transcends the world of specific personal experience", thus paying rich encomiums to the bard who is an "abstract of that which makes men, men." Divested of historical specificity and cultural particularity, Shakespeare is an "Everyman" whose plays reflect the highest engagement with human life, that delineate the labyrinthine human experience in a mode of signification that transcends the bounds of human thought, even after six centuries of his demise.

The semiotics of a Shakespearean theatre establishes a direct communication across the globe in all ages, thus donning him in numerous avatars. Hence we have a Kabuki Shakespeare, Russian Shakespeare, African Shakespeare and an Indian Shakespeare.

India witnesses a splendid panorama of Shakespearean performances which include an endless array such as the Elizabethan-like performances by numerous theatrical groups largely concentrated in the Indian metros, the adaptations by numerous classical dance groups like Kathakali and Yakshagana which have made Shakespeare their own, and more recently the Bollywood adaptations of the Shakespearean plays as seen in Omkar and Haider.

The bard's roots in India can be traced to the Empire's cultural enterprise in the year 1775, the age of the American war of independence and, and the age of Johnson and Garrick in England.

Despite the current age's tendency to view all aspects of the colonial enterprise as being rooted in the twin malaises of Orientalism and Postcolonial epistemic violence, Shakespeare's introduction in India is undoubtedly perceived as a boon to a nation that abounds in a plethora of philosophical schools and creative writings in numerous languages. Moreover, Shakespeare's imperishable empire transcends spatial and cultural boundaries, thereby establishing his works across nations.

The bard's presence has been a continuous one in India since his inception. The English-educated Indian intelligentsia have

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remained enticed by the poet's inexorable genius partly due to its variety, and largely because his esemplastic philosophy permits numerous interpretations from Indian perspectives too. It is widely believed that Gandhiji penned an essay on Hamlet, (Naiker 2) and one of the greatest Indian tributes to Shakespeare is to be found in Aurobindo's The Future Poetry. Aurobindo perceives the bard's literary accomplishments as being on par with the "legendary feat of the impervious sage Viswamitra," since Shakespeare's all-encompassing vision has created a heterocosmic universe into which one can delve into as long as humanity ever exists on this globe. Aurobindo discerned in Shakespeare a "hiranyagarba" the primordial source of creation, that had an apriori existence before Creation itself: "This is not Virat, the seer and creator of gross forms, but Hiranyagarbha, the luminous wind of dreams . . ." (8).

The Indian philosophical and literary firmament devoured Shakespeare with a ravenous appetite since his inception. His popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth Bengal (the cradle of Indian renaissance), the performances of Shakespearean plays by Chowringee Theatre, Metropolitan Academy and David Hare Academy in Bengal, which later spread to the other parts of the nation, can hardly be underestimated. Apart from the compulsory inclusion of the bard in Indian academics, India has also witnessed a multitudinous splendour of Shakespearean adaptations in its Indian languages such as Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada languages, to name a few. Moreover, the seer's deep philosophical vision that touches the soul of eternal human dilemmas and ponderings provide a facile ground for an interpretation of his works from numerous schools of Indian philosophies. This paper is one such attempt at viewing Shakespeare's King Lear as a play of progression from darkness to light. Basically all Shakespearean tragedies delve deep into the recesses of the hero's inner self, through which the dramatist aims at unravelling the highest truths of human existence. Aurobindos' Future Poetry pays a rich tribute to this power of the Shakespearean drama: His development of the human character has a sovereign

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016 force within its bounds, but it is the soul of the human being as seen through outward character, passion, action - the life soul and not either the thought-soul or the deeper psychic still less the profounder truths of the human spirit.

(79)

The bard's focus on the fruition of human life in the play offers an apt ground for the application of the Indian guna theory. Had the play's focus been on the biological or temporal maturity of Lear, it would have long perished into dust. But the dramatist's oceanic mind focuses on the inner ripening of Lear as a contrast to the temporal maturity of the ageing Lear, as he is in the twilight of his life since the beginning of the play. Despite his age, Lear continues to inhabit a world of metaphoric darkness, until a greater light draws him to a state of nirvanic illumination thus rendering this masterpiece the possibility of interpreting the work in terms of the Indian guna theory.

A brief survey of the theory would not be out of space. According to the Gita, the gunas or the primary qualities of Nature are three in number: the Tamas, Rajas and Sattva. They are born from Prakriti and hence exist in all living creatures including human beings in varying degrees. The fourteenth chapter of the Gita presents a detailed picture of the gunas. The Tamas or the lowest state symbolises the darker and cruder human nature, having its origins in ajnanam (ignorance). It is imbued with the qualities of lulling our souls to a state of comatose existence and indolence.

(14.8) The Rajas (or the intermediary state) teems with passion that emanates from thrishna (thirst or intense desire) and sanga (attachment) or action wherein the human soul remains inextricably and deeply bound with attachment and action (14.7).

Sattva, the highest state on the other hand remains imbued with a pure illumination that binds the human souls with joy and realization. (14.6). As a part of prakriti, the gunas determine our actions. The Gita aims at unfettering human life from these templated actions since even Sattva is not an end in itself; but an

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instrument for self-realization, since one's soul needs to transcend all the three gunas to attain unfettered freedom. (14.20) Shakespeare's King Lear offers an appropriate ground to trace the evolution of an old man's consciousness from the state of ignorance to realization through the guna framework.

Lear's unripe and indolent mental state, that is oblivious of the higher truths of human existence is evident even in the opening scene of the play. As Lear enters the stage with his three daughters and attendants, his opening lines state his "darker purpose" (I, l37). The term "dark" though meaning "hidden" intentions in the play's context, is a significant term in the guna theory connoting "darkness" with an inertia-filled unilluminated state of mind. Akin to a child distributing toys to his friends, Lear rashly divides his kingdom between his two elder daughters. Lear's tamasic mind fails to apprehend the silent love of Cordelia since her "love's more ponderous than [her] tongue." (I, ii, 85). Her metaphoric declaration of "nothing" fails to appeal to the ignorant Lear, and hence he utters his vindictive statement that "nothing will come out of nothing." While Cordelia's "nothing" is loaded with a deeper significance of unfathomable love, Lear's literal understanding of the same is an ample proof of his unawareness that fails to perceive Cordelia's mental ripeness which transcends her tender frame: Lear: So young and so untender?

Cordelia: So young my lord, and true.

(I, i, 118-119) In the supposed damning of Cordelia, Lear's agnana fails to perceive his own doom. Raging with anger and prey to obvious flattery, his judgement is blurred so much so that he fails to innately perceive the obnoxious realities behind glib talk. Kent s comments on Lear's lack of judgement thus: KENT: ... when Lear is mad . . . what woulds't thou do? . . . . duty shall have dread to speak When power to flattery bows....

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(I, i, 163-167) Kent's deeper understanding of the silence of the sincere Cordelia forms a stark contrast to the "empty hearted" glib speeches of Goneril and Regan, which are laden with cunning and deceit. As a stark contrast to Lear's initial abandonment of Cordelia is Kent's perception of Cordelia's moral fibre. In fact Kent's paternal benediction on Cordelia which says: "The gods to their dear shelter take thee, maid." (I, i, 206) is a stark contrast to the impulsive destitution of Lear.

Shakespeare's prime focus in the first act of this tragedy is Lear's inner darkness and a tamasic ignorance that renders him incapacitated to perceive virtue. Lear's unevolved dark state of mind in an old frame is contrasted with an evolved awareness in younger frames like Cordelia and Duke of France. Cordelia's plain talk that lacks the sheen of "glib and oily art." (I, i, 258) appeals not to the ignorant Lear but also to the Duke of France who pays rich accolades to her inner attributes thus: Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor; Most choice forsaken; and most loved, despised, Thee and thy virtues have I seized upon.

(I, ii, 290-292) From the first to the fifth act, the play is a constant progression of Lear's state of mind from an abysmal pit of servile passionate bondage, to a state of nirvanic freedom.

Lear's inner sojourn which begins in the first act, culminates in the final one. From a tamasic darkness in the first act, he goes through a Rajasic activeness in the subsequent acts. It is with an eagerness that Lear seeks shelter and paternal hospitality in the homes of Goneril and Regan, only to be rejected by them. The Fool's wise counsel aids in Lear's quicker recognition of the filial impiety of the two elder daughters: All thy other titles thou hast given away That thou was born with.

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(I, iv, 153.)

Not only does the "Fool" perceive the innate deceits of Goneril and Regan, but he also recognizes true merit of Cordelia. Thus, the inner ripeness of Cordelia, Kent and the Fool are juxtaposed to the lack of mellowness and faulty judgement in Lear. Lear's evolution towards a Rajasic activeness, is initiated by the dramatist even towards the end of the first act when Goneril's diabolic nature unfolds itself to him. It is the beginning of his inner journey from a state of ignorance, passion and impulsiveness towards a state of higher realization. It dawns on Lear the difference between Cordelia's genuine "nothingness" and the empty platitudes of the earlier daughters: O most small fault How ugly didst thou in Cordelia show

(I, iv, 278-79) But his realization is never complete since he remains ignorant of the fact of a similar fate awaiting him in Regan's place too. But the wise Shakespearean fool clearly predicts that "She will taste as like this as a crab does to a crab." (I, v, 18).

When Regan orders Lear to return to his eldest daughter, Lear kneels to her: Dear daughter, I confess that I am old . . . . . . . . . .on my knees I beg That you'll vouchsafe me raiment, bed and food.

(II, iv, 173-75) His unevolved consciousness is clearly evident when he childishly comments to Regan thus: . . .Her eyes are fierce, but thine Do comfort and not burn

(II, iv, 194-95)

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But Goneril's unmoving attitude only aids in Lear grasping her true nature which is described in a retinue of diseased imagery like "plague", "boil", " embossed carbuncle" and "corrupted blood."

Branding his two elder daughters as "unnatural hags", Lear's continually evolving consciousness realizes that "man's life is cheap as beasts." (II, iv, 307).

King Lear stands unique in the enigmatic canvas of Shakespearean tragedies since it is the only tragedy with two parallel plots that reinforce the theme of human "ripeness" and the evolution of human consciousness to the highest plane. If the main plot concerns Lear and his three daughters, the sub-plot of the play concerns the life of Lear's bosom pal Gloucester and his relationship with his sons Edgar and Edmund. Gloucester's past life of lustful passions is emblematized in Edmund, his bastard son. Edmund remains the parallel of Goneril and Regan in the subplot. While the two daughters of Lear drench the gullible father with phony statements of love, Edmund misguides Gloucester against Edgar through a forged letter. Parallel to Lear's castigation of the flawless Cordelia in a moment of thoughtless rage, Gloucester abandons Edgar. While Lear's tamasic mind fails to recognize a "soul in bliss" like Cordelia, Gloucester also falls short in his judgement of Edmund. Shakespearean tragedies are a complex world of contrasts juxtaposing extreme evil with extreme virtue. Othello, for instance, presents one of the world's most obnoxious villainy in Iago, (only next to Milton's Satan), contrasted with the peerless Desdemona. Similarly, the world of Lear presents the acme of evil as epitomised in Goneril, Regan and Edmund as against the blemishless Cordelia. The realization of the irredeemable evil against unfathomable virtue aids in the spiritual mellowness of the two old men. If Lear's Tamas and Rajas are to be epitomized in Goneril and Regan, Gloucester's is found in Edmund.

When deceived by the two elder daughters and banished into the wild, Lear's unabated grief and dignified self-esteem averts his act of weeping, but creates a fury within. Lear's highly charged emotional state finds a semiotic parallel on the stage in the form

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of a raging tempest. The sturdy and proud Lear now "break(s) into a hundred thousand flaws."

The third act forms the soul of the tragedy since it graphically depicts Lear's turbulent state of mind. Rejected by his trusted daughters and having abandoned the truly virtuous Cordelia, Lear is mercilessly thrown to the primal elements of Nature, red in tooth and claw. The once proud Lear, surrounded by royal splendour now stands divested of power, strength, royalty, pomp, retinue and even basic human contact. No other Shakespearean tragedy effectively deploys Nature as an objective correlative of human nature as this tragedy does. The storm forms a symbolic medium to purge the errant soul of its hero. Shakespeare's deft handling of the ecological forces as a primal transformative tool that propels the hero to a higher plane of consciousness as in this play is unparalleled. If Arjuna had received the Gitopadesa in the battlefield and Karaikkal Ammai had composed her lofty devotional hymns for Siva in a cremation ground, Lear attains summits of realization in the bare heath and the raging storm.

Lear's mind is put to a state of continuous purgative turbulence— a prerequisite for his forthcoming elevated consciousness. His heightened self-awareness on a bare and desolate heath is a logical corollary of his moments of realization in the earlier acts. Betrayed

by Goneril towards the end of the first act, Lear significantly utters thus: How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child.

(I, iv, 43).

Regan's ingratitude in the second act further heightens his awareness of the ways of the world when he infers to her "sharptoothed unkindness like a vulture." (II, iv, 44).

A terror-filled nature with its "fretful elements" , that "blow(s) the earth into the sea:, "the curled waters", the "impetuous blasts with eyeless rage," the "conflicting wind and rain" tear not merely Lear's "white hair", but also his psyche. Rightly does he utter in the second act that

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016 . . . we are not ourselves When nature, being oppressed commands the mind

(II, iv, 60) In the gamut of Shakespeare's dramatic creations, two storms clearly remain artistically etched out: the storm in The Tempest and the storm in King Lear. In The Tempest, the storm unites the members of a family, a technical necessity that sets the entire play to action and aids in the dramatist's adherence to the classical unities. But the storm in King Lear is far from being designed as an ecological phenomenon or a technical embellishment, but it is a primordial natural element and a philosophical force that purges the conscience of a juvenile old king while powerfully catapulting him to a higher plane of consciousness. The storm's "thoughtexecuting fires," "oak-cleaving thunderbolts," the "all shaking thunder" together ravage Lear's mind with a powerful simultaneity. Lear's frail, human, mortal frame is no match for Mother Nature. As Kent comments: Man's nature cannot carry Th' affliction nor the fear.

(III, ii, 49-50) Much later does Cordelia blurt out in anguish thus: . . . . . . was this a face To be opposed against the jarring winds?

(IV, vii, 37-38) She further agonises thus: My enemy's dog Though he had bit me, should have stood that night Against my fire

(IV, vii, 42-43) Lear's existence on the bare heath in a naked unaccommodated state, ravaged by the "foul weather" outside and psychological

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turmoil inside transforms the play into one of the greatest tragedies of human suffering and the soul's elevation. Lear's internal tempest is matched with his turbulent vocabulary that continues in the second scene also wherein he beckons the furious Nature to assault him, all such devastating facets of Nature are no equal to the ingratitude of his daughters: Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!

You cataracts and hurricanes

(III, i, 1-2) The storm's "raging thunderbolts", "sulphurous fire", and the "germens spill(ed) at once", the "fire", "rain" and other such primal elements of Nature in a state of raw destructiveness, fail to inflict any pain on the poor old man traumatized by filial impiety: Here I stand your slave A poor, infirm, weak, despised old man.

Lear's utterance summarises not merely his individual infirmity, but a powerful picture of the larger human incapacitatedness against the primordial Life Forces and against Nature.

L.C. Knights comments on the "two-fold process of discovery that the scene presents: nature "without" and "within". These two natures incessantly churn Lear's troubled consciousness with a powerful simultaneity, which creates an emotional blitzkrieg that in turn paradoxically elevates his mind to a higher plane of realization. The deepest workings of a Shakespearean tragic hero's mind is best revealed in his soliloquies. As with Hamlet and Othello, Lear's soliloquies aptly describe the aged king's heartrending wisdom. The once crowned head of Lear is now bare and shelterless, vulnerable to the raging forces of Nature. Abandoned, shunned and untenanted, the desolate Lear now perfectly empathises with the poor, humble and destitute. Agony strangely enhances his discriminatory powers so much so that he now clearly sieves truth from falsehood. Like Lear being thrown open to the winds, the blind Gloucester is deceived to a cliff. The act of Gloucester being blinded by Regan and Cornwall catapults the play to greater tragic heights. The supreme realization of Lear's

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comment that "man is a worm" is matched by the blind Gloucester's famous remark: As flies to wanton boys, are we to the Gods, They kill us for their sport.

(IV, i, 41-42) It is of no mean significance that the blind Gloucester now clearly perceives eternal truths, as the abandoned Lear's consciousness also attains a higher plane of realization as revealed in their timeless words of wisdom.

It is Cordelia who significantly perceives the inner mellowness of Lear, despite his bare exterior. Shakespeare's artistic use of costumes and embellishments as corresponding signifiers of human nature stand out uniquely in this play. While the crowned head of Lear is divested of all maturity, his seemingly bare head, adorned with "furrow weeds", "hardocks", "hemlock", "nettles" and "cuckoo flowers" is ripe with knowledge and the perception of human life as an ocean of incessant sorrows. It is closer to the Buddhist conception of life as dukkha (or sorrow). The new avatar of Lear is far from insanity, as his words reveal a clear understanding of human life. Utterances like We came crying hither

(IV, i, 196) Or When we are born, we cry that w come To this great stage of fools

(IV, vi, 200-201) reverberate with significant echoes from the Buddhist perception of life which apprehends human existence as a series of sorrows.

Sorrow bestows on Lear and Gloucester an intuitive wisdom to perceive the grain of the eternal truths of human nature. The Chandogya Upanishad for instance throws a unique light on the vision of human life:

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016 When a man rightly sees (his soul), he sees no death, no sickness or distress. When a man rightly sees, he sees all, he wins all, completely.

(7.26.2) Hence, when Albany brings news of Cordelia's death, Lear agonizingly questions the forces above thus: Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life And thou no breath at all?

(V, iii, 370-71) The inexorable question remains rhetorically unanswered, and Lear's death is almost instantaneous. Edgar's description of the moment as "The oldest hath borne the most" (V, iii, 394) Shakespeare does not transform life ".... into the romantic pyrotechnics, for life itself has taken hold of him in order to recreate itself in his image." (Aurobindo, Future Poetry 78). The deeper cause for human suffering in Lear does not originate in external factors as in Greek tragedies, where Fate or a Delphian oracle determine the course or human life as against individual free will and choice. But a Shakespearean tragedy like Lear has human choice as the rationale behind the human drama that the play unfolds. As mentioned above, it is a world of contrasts. While Lear's choice of extreme evil triggers the Tamas and Rajas energies, the bliss of Sattva dawns on his battered soul only on his choice of the benevolent Cordelia. As Lear's tempestuous consciousness is relentlessly churned with guilt, his mind moves towards a Cordelia consciousness (Sattva). With a mind untutored to the lofty lesson of human detachment, he needs the sane advice of the "wise" Fool: Let go thy hold when a great wheel, Down a hill, lest it break thy neck . . .

But the great one that goes up the hill, let him

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(II, iv, 66-69) In fact Lear's quest for a loftier consciousness and his readiness for a spiritual self-exploration that may reveal his true nature to himself is clearly evident in the following lines: Doth any here know me? Why, this is not Lear: Doth Lear walk this? Where are his eyes?

Either his notion weakens or his discernings Are lethargied . . . . .

Who is it that can tell me who I am?

( I, iv, 13-16) The play's soul remains embedded in the tragic hero's quest for the core of his "self" and the realization of the loftier aims of human life. Both Lear's and Gloucester's regeneration lies in their recognition of the quintessential purpose of human life. Lear attains ripeness or "Sattva" on witnessing Cordelia's death and himself embraces an enlightened, Sattvik death that transcends all.

As a contrast to the passionate, emotional, impulsive and "dark" Lear whom we witness in the beginning of the play is the serene Lear, who breathes his last with serenity, dignity, poise and realization. Purged of his rawness, Lear's ripe mind attains a state of Sattva, which alone transports him to a blissful state of liberation. The Mundakopanishad mentions thus: In the innermost golden sheath, there is the Brahman without stains and without parts. That is pure, that is Light of lights. that is what the knowers of the Atman realise.

(II, ii, ix, Sivananda 258) The highest sheath is "golden" since the Atman is located there. It is the innermost core of human life. It is free from stains and all the Gunas of Prakriti. Free from ignorance, it is Nishkalam, and pure. (see Sivananda 258)

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Is a fitting spiritual mellowness that the old king has attained through the thickets and thorns of earthly agony. As in other Shakespearean tragedies, death aids in transcendence for Lear. As his passing away occurs in the moment of his intense spiritual consciousness, (Sattva), it erodes his earlier judgemental erroneousness. Breathing his last in a state of mind when all passion is spent, the process is imbued with a mystic grandeur, which aids his eternal consciousness to transcend beyond even the state of Sattva, elevating him beyond the plane of life consciousness to move into a state of Ultimate consciousness.

Verse 72 of the second chapter of the Gita entitled Sankya Yoga: The Eternal Reality of the Soul's Immortality significantly infers to the sublime philosophy implied in the process of dying thus: O Arjuna, having gained the realization of the Ultimate Truth, one is never again deluded and even at the moment of death, being situated in this state, liberation from the material existence and attainment of the Ultimate Consciousness is assured.

Lear's transcendence of the gunas aids in his transcendence through death. The Gita assures that a mind which surpasses gunas, attains a stoicism that is unmoved by pains or pleasures alike. Neither does he detest them nor does he desire them (14.22).

The sublime transcendence imbues a Shakespearean tragedy its ultimate ananda. Thus, "Ripeness is all" for Lear.

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References Aurobindo, Sri. The Future Poetry. Pondicherry: The Aurobindo Ashram.

1996.

Drakakis, John. Alternative Shakespeares. Routledge:2002.

Knights, L.C. Hamlet and Other Shakespearean Tragedies. CUP: 1979.

Naiker, Basavaraj. Indian Response to Shakespeare. New Delhi: Atlantic.

2002.

Shakesperae, William. King Lear. http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org.

Sivananda, Swami. The Principal Upanishads. The Divine Life Society.

Garhwal, U.P. 1983.

Dr. Sarada Thallam is a Professor at the Dept. of English with S.V.University, Tirupati 517502.

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Contemporary Literary Review India The journal that brings articulate writing for articulate readers.

CLRI is published in two editions (1) online quarterly (eISSN 2394-6075) (2) print annually (ISSN 2250-3366). CLRI is one of the leading journals in India and attracts a wide audience each month. CLRI is listed/indexed with many reputed literary directories, repositories, and many universities in India. We promote authors in many ways. We publish, promote and nominate our authors to various literary awards. It is absolutely free to register, submit and get published with CLRI. Register with us at: Subscriber to CLRI

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AFAF (EFFAT) JAMIL KHOGEER REVIEWS SHEKHER SRIVASTAVA’S YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL O' WOMAN: 7 VIRTUES OF A WOMAN Shekher Srivastava praises women and extols their attributes in his latest novel, You are Beautiful O'Woman: 7 Virtues of a Woman.Through the narrator, Arvind, readers can actively follow him in his journey towards discovering women’s seven virtues.

Although Srivastava is not identified as a feminist writer, his novel has feminist literary characteristics. What unites feminists is the overarching assertion that most cultures are basically patriarchal existing in male-dominated societies. They reveal that most work of men authors contains stereotypical images of women who are portrayed as being passive, unintelligent, and physically and emotionally weak. Feminist authors have countered this practice by writing about strong female characters who are empowered and are intellectually, emotionally, and physically strong. Although he is a man, like these female authors, Srivastava extols the positive qualities of women and deconstructs the binary oppositions often found in novels in which men are portrayed as being powerful and the women as being weak and submissive.

Srivastava opens the novel with Arvind sitting in the maternity ward of the hospital in Delhi awaiting the arrival of his first born child. His wife, Jayanti, is his childhood sweetheart who epitomizes the perfect woman. He is so enamored of his wife that he hopes that the baby is a girl, and asks God to “Bless her as your most artful creation. Oh! Unbearingly, I let out my wish to have a baby girl. (Srivastava 10). Srivastava uses the technique of flashbacks to present a story within a story. Arvind has flashbacks that lead him to a discovery of the seven virtues of a woman. The first flashback is a depiction of his childhood crush on Jayanti when they were students at the St. Ignatius Convent Missionary co-ed school. Srivastava showcases his talent for writing poetry and intersperses poems throughout the narrative. He writes a poem with simple words to show Arvind’s love for Jayanti, “She’s so

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simple and so nice/Sweet and softly polite/She’s as fizzy and full of life” (15).

The juxtaposition of poetry and narrative text gives the novel unity. The meaning of each scene and the characters’ significance to the main plot are in unity. In their book, Understanding Poetry, Brooks and Warren, explain how this unity is accomplished: [The poet] cannot assemble [the parts of the poem] in a merely arbitrary fashion; they must bear some relation to each other. So he develops his sense of the whole, the anticipation of the finished poem.…

Then, as the sense of the whole develops, it modifies the process by which the poet selects and relates the parts, the words, images, rhythms.… [I]t is an infinitely complicated process of establishing interrelations. (526–7)

During the flashback about his love for Jayanti, Arvind extols the virtues of his mother who is compassionate and self-serving. She is compared to Eve who is the mother of all humans. In his depiction of women, and mothers in particular, Srivastava shows them having complementary responsibilities with men and not competing ones. They are different but not unequal. His message is that childcare, and maintenance of the home is an equal obligation.

The major portion of the novel is told in a flashback that takes Arvind into the metaphysical world. He started on this journey after graduating from the school of Architecture. He was travelling on a plane to London for a job when he went into a trance. During the trance, he attends the Inter-Universe Creators Conference conducted by God who engages him and other attendees in a discourse on the Seven Vices and Seven Virtues.

Srivastava uses images and references to nature to describe the qualities of women and their virtues. He writes that humans are composed of five elements: fire, earth, air, water, and sky, and asserts that women balance nature: “woman balances the forces and brings equilibrium.” Her wisdom will create an environment that transfers the five elements into a “positive rhythm” (46). The revelations from the discourse are an ode to what Srivastava calls

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Wumanity—which is a thinking, a realization, a connect to the conscience, an internal awakening, an appreciation and a thanksgiving to every woman” (75). Srivastava uses metaphors and similes as he unfolds the seven virtues and describes women: “Her love is like the morning dew” (76); “She is like the lotus that signifies faith in its own self to adapt to its natural surroundings” (77); “A woman is the sun and moon in her house” (138); She is the canvas who makes every man an artist” (168). Srivastava’s skillful use of metaphors and similes enhances the novel and adds depth and powerful imagery that draws readers into the storyline and keeps them entertained.

Srivastava uses the Socratic method as a technique to tell the story of how God revealed the seven virtues of women to Arvind. He has God ask Arvind and the others who are attending the conference conceptual clarification questions, that cause them to think about what things, mean and give examples of concepts. He probes their assumptions and has them consider their presuppositions and unquestioned beliefs about women. In addition, when they provide rationales for their answers, Srivastava has God make them delve into their reasoning and provide support for their assertions. This is done as God reveals and explains women’s seven virtues, beginning with Innocence.

God explains that Innocence is what women carry with them when they marry and leave their parents’ home to make a new one of their own. Forbearance is the second virtue, which is exemplified by her “doing her daily bit for others in the family to prosper” (86).

Godliness, the third virtue, gives women their strength that is greater than a man because of her selfless sacrifices. The fourth virtue, Orderliness, causes her to inculcate in man, a harmoniously civilized behavior, which “ensures the continuity of earth” (120).

Radiance, the fifth virtue, is the compassion that emanates from her concern for and care of others. The sixth, Vibrance, is the “halo of happiness” that the woman creates every day. The seventh is Yonder, through which women are able to be the barometer that senses a new horizon and change that others will go through.

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Srivastava brings readers back to the real world after Arvind has learned the seven virtues and promises to extol them throughout his life. Arvind is reunited with his first love, after not seeing her for eight years. They marry and we are brought back to the beginning of the novel when she is in labor. Srivastava provides us with a happy ever after ending that is really a beginning with the birth of Arvind’s daughter. He names her Vanita, which means the innocent in every home.

Srivastava’s novel is an ode to women that gives them the recognition they have historically yearned for. Although it is not an ode that is not written in the standard, traditional way with many lyrical verses, it still has the elements of praise, honor, and exaltation. His novel contains the literary strategies used in novels that glorify women, and places them in a spiritual context explained in Hall’s work, The Exalted Heroine and the Triumph of Order: Class, Women, and Religion in the English Novel. The characteristics of novels that exalt women, which Hall explains, are found in Srivastava’s work. He promotes the idealized archetype of the good woman, and attributes to them the qualities, such as loyalty, unselfishness, kindness, and prowess. They have a moral force that is superior to men’s and a prominent status in society. The moral strength that women possess converts the men in their lives from being chauvinistic. As a consequence, she is viewed “meritocratically” and rewarded by being exalted (Hall 139). Indeed, Srivastava has given honor to women and shown their power to replace the seven vices, Intolerance, Betrayal, Greed, Yelling (Anger), Outrageousness, Violence, and Revenge with her seven virtues, Forbearance, Vibrance, Innocence, Godliness, Yonder, Orderliness, and Radiance. In doing this, Srivastava has rejected the stereotypical images of women in literature, and provided a realistic view of them, confirming that they are truly beautiful.

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References Brooks, Cleanth & Warren, Robert Penn. Understanding Poetry. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960.

Hall, K.G. The Exalted Heroine and the Triumph of Order: Class, Women, and Religion in the English Novel, 1740-1800. Lanham: Barnes & Noble Books, 1994.

Srivastava, Shekher. You are Beautiful O'Woman: 7 Virtues of a Woman.

Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2015.

Title: You Are Beautiful, O Woman!

Author: Shekher Srivastava ISBN-10: 8193186109 ISBN-13: 978-8193186107 Paperback: 248 pages Publisher: Leaf Press Year: Second Edition, 2016 Language: English

You Are Beautiful, O Woman! by Shekher Srivastava is available at Leaf Press.

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Reviewer’s Bio: Afaf (Effat) Jamil Khogeer, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of English Literature with the Department of English, Faculty of Social Sciences, Umm Al-Qura University, Holy Makkah, Saudi Arabia.

Contemporary Literary Review India The journal that brings articulate writing for articulate readers.

CLRI is published in two editions (1) online quarterly (eISSN 2394-6075) (2) print annually (ISSN 2250-3366). CLRI is one of the leading journals in India and attracts a wide audience each month. CLRI is listed/indexed with many reputed literary directories, repositories, and many universities in India. We promote authors in many ways. We publish, promote and nominate our authors to various literary awards. It is absolutely free to register, submit and get published with CLRI. Register with us at: Subscriber to CLRI

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016

DR. DALIP KHETARPAL REVIEWS AJU MUKHOPADHYAY’S TIME WHISPERS IN MY EAR Whenever I go through Contemporary Vibes, I often come across a poem of Aju Mukhopadhyay, distinct in tone and tenor, lucid in expression and weighty in thought and meaning and so has the distinction of being among those few modest poets who are though unique in every sense of the word, excessive humility propels them to keep themselves in low-profile.

It is not for nothing that Aju has won some prestigious awards for his poetry both in India and abroad. He has eight books of poems in English and two in Bengali to his credit. His poems have been published in 24 anthologies that include an anthology of poems from India as well as from Australia titled: ‘Poetic connections and The Dance of the Peacock’, published in Canada. Despite occupying an exalted position in the esteemed Indian and foreign journals, websites and e-zines, in anthologies of contemporary world haiku and also of Modern English Tanka, his poems find a significant place in the ‘Best Poems Encyclopedia’, Poetas Del Mundo (Spanish), World Poetry Yearbook, World poetry Society, World Haiku Anthology, Margutte (Italian), Sketchbook(US), Syndic Literary journal (US) are only some magazines and journals, though more could be mentioned.

It is only after making great strides in the field of poetry that Aju has sent me his latest anthology titled, ‘Time Whispers In My Ear’ for review. After going through the anthology I found that it is thought- provoking and educative as it has enhanced my own knowledge at least of geography and history. Beneath the poet’s simplicity of expression one gets to see ideas and thoughts that are universal and that clinch the wise, the philosopher and the intelligentsia---all alike. It is a style that is transparent like a clear, still or flowing stream through which its bottom could be easily seen.

Some prominent features whereby I’m struck by the anthology are: nature, pictorial quality, lyrical melody, psychological

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perception, highlights of corrupt scenario, moral philosophy and a strong sense of justice. However, almost all poems are shot through and through with the strong element of humanism, compassion, love and hope. As a champion of the underdog, the poet directly and sometimes indirectly conveys his deep concern for the poor, the weak and the downtrodden. Through the anthology the poet has expressed his discontentment, anguish and dissatisfaction, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly with the ailing, corrupt and seemingly irredeemable system. It seems that I would be able to illustrate the poet’s thoughts and feelings effectively, more precisely and clearly only through vital quotations from his anthology.

The highly pictorial nature poem, ‘Time Whispers in my Ear’ (p.11) also assumes a psycho-philosophical form as it progresses.

In this, natural movements in nature are silhouetted against time, presenting exquisite Keatsian pictorial quality and sensuousness that are reflected in the lines like: ‘susurrus over the vast undulating grass/tumbling of water….cracking of billy meandering streams/flowing of molten lava down the ravine/spewing of ash…..spread of forest fire….spreading rapidly with the wind….rains…rolling of water bodies….seeds sprouting, trees growing and dying…..sibilation of nature’s shifting phase;/nature is at work…in every pore and cell…..’Such keen and intense perception of nature quite aptly and naturally seeps into the poet’s sub-conscious mind wherefrom instantly generates psycho-philosophical ideas vented metaphorically: ‘time whispers in my ear/that with nature it flows with all its belonging/to the events forthcoming/while consciousness keeps its progress in everything/constantly rolling towards the future…..that past never sits in its forlorn chair/but leaves its essence for assimilation….that the ethos of the bygone ages, their zeitgeist/can never be recovered by any strategist’. This fluid philosophical perception gets intensified by modifying and upgrading Blake’s highly popular imaginative verse with sharper insight: ‘To see the world in a grain of sand’. For Aju, ‘the world may be seen in the grain of sand/but the flow of sand is constant;/infinity may be guessed in the palm of hand/but it cannot

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be gripped by any standard;/time whispers in my ear/that everything passes on forever.’

‘The Day is Lost In The Shimmering Twilight’(p.50) is a didactic poem replete with various objects of nature and derives its strength from its well-knit, metaphorical and highly picturesque qualities. Its lyrical beauty is further enhanced by a strong sense of natural justice, imparting to the gist of the poem a rather logical and universal meaning: ‘The opaque and dark evening sky/without a particular hue, defy/the reign of the Sun as it goes to set/and pulls the erstwhile bright warm day straight/into its mysterious unfathomable womb. These metaphorical lines have been aptly brought vis-a-vis ‘those who rise up with renewed oomph/at the prospect of devouring the evening young…..sink eventually into its hazy darkness….’ Likewise, ‘….those who never look at the hieroglyphs/of the evening sky in obscure light/pulling the day into its hold aright/and the majority of sheep/who never realize that the day…..is kept at bay/to be lost forever into the unknown fold…live the useless life of ignoramus…..condemned like a Sisyphus. The image of Sisyphus reinforces the effect of the comparison. Sisyphus was a cruel king of Corinth who offended Zeus and so was condemned to roll a huge boulder up a hill in Hades forever only to roll it down on nearing the top again. How a day is born to die in no time is explicated metaphysically by the ‘holocaust of time’ with exquisite poetic dexterity. ‘The day in the shimmering twilight/in its ever hopeful flight/into the mysterious womb of time/never to be reborn after melting of the time.’

The poet also views nature in all its mysteries and complexities.

The unique and mystifying nature of Nature is vindicated through the poem, ‘Bumblebee Bamboozles’ (P.106). With his keen observation the poet discovers how a bumblebee violates the aerodynamic laws and bewilders even scientists by moving swiftly with light wingspan while carrying ‘its heavy body weight’. He finally concludes the poem rather wisely by hinting intelligently at the very abstruse nature of Nature:’ ….there are laws beyond assumption/More wonderment at every step beyond our horizon,/Nature has more in store/To shock the recalcitrant

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science’. Through picture making quality the poet at times, perceives nature from a philosophic angle as ‘At the river bank’ (p. 97) evinces. Through his picture-making quality, the poet presents a vivid picture of stillness and calm that has been silhouetted against the movement and din of life which also marks the philosophy of a chosen area of the poem: ‘And quiet flows the river/without a ripple or shiver/trees stand windless/not even a whiff in space/no leaf shakes, no sound,/fishes are sleeping…halts at the bank of the river….’

The poet’s heart often unconsciously goes out to the suffering, uprooted and agonized humanity, revealing his profound sense of justice, humanity, love, compassion, empathy, sympathy, anxiety and concern for the entire suffering mankind. ’In Reasonable support of the Hazara people’ (p.55), the poet’s sensitive soul could hear the anguished cries of the Hazaras, ‘a distinct ethnic group’ of Central Asian Afghanistan, ‘….relocated in other countries due to persecution and fear/though they’ve every right to live in their land as live the others.’ He first speaks of natural justice, ‘all living beings are born with equal birth rights/to be taken care of by the Mother Earth/none has the right to dwarf or cull others/unless it is Nature’s spontaneous action…..’Finding the helpless Hazaras, hapless with no help conceivable from any corner of the earth, he exhorts his fellow poets and humanity in general to relieve their wretched condition and alleviate their agony: ‘It is the voice of the Poets, voice of Peace, voice of Love /for the Hazara people, appealing to all who have been/so far persecuting them, appealing to all humans throughout/the globe to put a stop to it mainly because we’re humans……Rise up brothers to …..embrace brothers/be humane, not just dogs.’ To reinforce this idea the same theme is however, taken up in ‘The Uncivilized’ (p.61) wherein ‘Uigher, a nomadic pastoral tribe/of Turkish origin in Xinjiang,/ find it difficult to survive/squeezed out by the Han Chinese…to kill theTibetan culture, depopulate, destabilize/the peaceful Tibetan Buddhist race……’Further, ‘Creating tourism and villa in the land of Jarawas/leads to the extinction of the aboriginals’.

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Man’s greed and loot that traverse from sea to earth and thence, to heaven, is all brazenly ceaseless. Natural reserves, like oil, coal, gold, minerals and all woodland treasures are plundered inducing ecological disaster first and its wrath, later. Horrific and unabashed tales of loot and pillage, sometimes even in the name of God and religion, could be witnessed in all ages. Infusing poetic beauties into his bitter satire and irony,the poet explicates his expansive idea satirically thus: ‘Wherever minerals, oil or woodland treasures are found/men run to acquire the wealth profound/extinguishing the pristine flora and fauna/and the indigenous people, Nature bound,/in Amazonian, Peruvian forests, hilly belts in India/in Indonesia, Philippines, Canada and Africa,/Moving into galaxies, to the north and south poles/plundering the reserves of the earth and heaven—feel victorious, but the soil they stand on shifts/for their pollutive role in human lives--- civilized people are the most uncivilized.’

In ‘The Adivasi’(p.62) man’s greed, cruelty, selfishness, deceitfulness and exploitation are graphically elucidated : ‘…greed/ For gold flashing in their eyes, swooped with guns/And swords like human hawks on unknown land... Columbus with Bahama Arawaks/And other tribes of Caribbean islands,/Cortes in Peru with the Incus,/The English settlers in America/With many tribes including the Pequots/And with many others in Australia/Following James Cook’s visit in the year/1770, so savagely/Behaved with all the unarmed innocent Adivasis of the foreign lands who welcomed them,/That made them ride the rough roller coaster/ To embrace certain death and devastation/ Original Americans were pushed/ From eastern Atlantic to the western/Pacific for burial in the ocean. ’Most tragically,’ All such indigenous human beings/Who were so devastated, sold and killed/Were cultured and civilized, lived fulfilled’. Despite the painful and shameful fact that ‘over the corpses of tribes wealth’ was ‘made/In socialist, capitalist countries, it becomes a farce when some misguided terrorists shine...’ even today. And it is deeply pathetic that the Adivasis are not lauded though they displayed unexampled determination and strength of will by not yielding to the callous invaders even after being threatened, converted and brainwashed. Further, advasis being the ‘first born

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on earth’, are the most original inhabitants, it would be totally absurd to ‘ogle at jarawas,/Oldest Andamanese, like the beast in cage’. It is also ridiculous, rather a ‘puffed up farce’ to declare ‘International Day of/World’s indigenous people’ by the highest/World-body…’leading globalization to become a rather permanent ‘stain on human glory’. The long thought-provoking poem finally ends with the externalization of the poet’s deep sense of justice supplemented by a bit of relevant counseling. He affirms that if the aboriginals were to be removed, it should have been done with their consent and they ‘must be compensated/Be aware man, awake; Honor Nature/To be honored by it, to live better’.

‘Fall of a Habitat’(p.107) is another moving poem that explicates how man has shattered the joys and dreams of ‘lion-tailed Macaque’, ’giant Malabar squirrels’, ‘nilgiri langurs’ by usurping their natural habitat. Instead of sharing their habitat, mankind, consisting of ‘adventurous, profit monger and corrupt’, rape and ravish ‘nature they live’ as ‘coffee, tea, rubber and minerals have stolen men’s hearts’. The evil in modern man is thus, sketched tellingly and effectively with certain historical facts and instances by the poet through many poems.

The poet, however, does not remain focused on the darker aspects of life for, for him, every cloud has a silver lining. ‘A Woman Savior of Mankind’ (p.13), is a beautiful, but pathetic poem based on the sacrifice of a 22 year old café-worker who ‘rising to the occasion’ saved ‘…children and half-dead sea farers’ when the South Korean boat drowned. The poet becomes most lyrical while expressing her act of sacrifice: ‘Igniter of the sacrificial fire/With the fire glowing within her;/Inspired by the Divine will and bliss/She lives in man’s heart for her selfless sacrifice.’ Sacrifice, humanity and best human values comprise the essence of the poem, proving how hope is still alive and perceptible in this hopeless world. In ‘Hope’ (p.47) the poet rests his entire poem on hope ‘even amid terrorism and destruction’. He confidently asserts: ‘ a hope growing within/that catastrophe will not happen’.

In ‘Nuclear the Evil Force’ (p.84), after describing the after effects of atom bomb, the poet instills a sense of hopefulness among humans by stressing how ‘Karma may be uplifted by human wisdom/To defeat the evils of life like nuclear fission/To keep

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high the flag of freedom’. In ‘Nelson Mandela…Victory’ (p.14), sublime values, relentless human struggle and all humanitarian traits are displayed most spontaneously by Nelson Mandela, the former president of Africa and the Noble Prize winner for peace.

For a great freedom fighter, an ambassador of social peace, a strong man with iron will, 27 years of ‘jail was nothing to him’ whose ‘patience and perseverance with persistent resolution/were the basis of his lifelong struggle…he was unconquerable….’ His death in 2013 at the age of 95 sparked mourning around the globe.

Again in the midst of rampant corruption and evil, the poet discovers great humanitarian souls like ‘Sri Aurobindo’ (41) who ‘…was a lotus born in mud, away from the mundane scene’, yet ‘the cascading Supramental light…touching the sky kept its foot on earth fixed’. It is the divine perception of the poet itself that enables him to see how God sits in the body of his seer poet whose face reveals ‘the eternity…Out of intense love for men he sat away from eternity’. But, all the same, the poet does not lose sight of ‘Small fries in shallow water and surface gazers/were lost in his fathomless water.’ The poet further illustrated his positive traits in ‘A complete human being’(p.44) to underline how he evolves certain qualities to enable himself to serve the cause of suffering humanity: ‘The inner being pushed him from one to the other theme/He was a poet, revolutionary, yogi, journalist, writer and thinker…’ Likewise, in ‘Buddha Purnima’ (18), the poet delineates Lord Buddha’s ‘sympathetic attitude’, his ‘benevolence’, message of ‘love and peace; desire-less boon’ that touch ‘our soul/is not an enigma’. The poet’s eulogy of all these icons is not only appropriate, but also commendable. He could foresee a beacon of hope even where there is pitch-darkness which also vindicates his bi-focal vision.

A philosophically moralistic poem, ‘Pray that you Play your Part Best’ (p.33) has a lot to teach to mankind. The poet stresses how humans are mortal and how death equalizes all, ‘but blinded by pride’ men ‘do not see the beyond’. Further, ‘the world would not have progressed without death.’ As a deist he wisely goes on to say ‘If you cannot admit God, do not explain it away in Nature’s way’ and like an innocent child ‘pray that you can play the part

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best as you are assigned’. By implication the poet means that one should conduct oneself well without allowing one’s moral certitude to collapse. Corollary to this is ‘United in Camp-fire’ (p.34) that elucidates unity, harmony, peace, love and universal brotherhood. The poet explicates the oneness of humanity lyrically, symbolically and picturesquely: ‘we live in camps, united in camp-fire/for the world is a field of our sojourn divided in camps….’The poet finally advises us to shed ‘pride, domination or diplomacy’ and ‘embrace all with pure love/for that is the only sovereign unity’.

Some poems of Aju are also infused with deep human psychology, he at times, project the inner workings of the sub-conscious mind.

In ‘Invisibly with me’ (p.24) memories of idle days with certain variations—sweet, bitter and sour creep up on the poet’s psyche while taking tea. The poet lyrically expresses his thoughts that meet his heart ‘in various ways/flowing over me, through me/coming out of the doors of the body and behave ‘differently at different times… nature changes seasonally, endearingly, roughly, lovingly…presence constantly….’ ‘Invisible yet perceptible’ (p.23) is infused with subtle psychology covering a wide range of human existence and activities with present, past and future, all merging into one: ‘Age is pushing them with feet/as they try to rise from the subconscious deep/the relationship, physical vital mental/heterosexual or asexual or obscure camaraderie/ passionate quagmire from the oblivious memory….’

‘Inwardness’ is also written in almost the same vein, fusing present, past and future into one, covering a broad spectrum of activities and bringing many layers of consciousness into play ‘…Of time past in bitter-sweet taste/In erotic sense, with pain or pleasure/Fear of the unknown, hope for the future,/Alone yet in company….’

The anthology, hence, is the most explicit manifestation of the psyche of the poet. Doubtless, Aju carries a fertile and vibrant psyche that brims over with ideas, feelings and thoughts that are sometimes weird, sometimes brilliant, sometimes abstruse, sometimes mystical, sometimes deep, sometimes rational, sometimes fanciful, sometimes psychological and sometimes

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philosophical. The anthology also covers almost all gamut of human thoughts and emotions and serves as a sumptuous mental and emotional food for the entire literati all over the world; posterity will also surely remember him as a great poet.

Dr Dalip Khetarpal worked as a Lecturer in English at Manchanda Delhi Public College, Delhi. He worked in various capacities, as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and H .O. D (English) in various academic institutes in Haryana. He was a Dy. Registrar and Joint Director at the Directorate of Technical Education, Haryana, Chandigarh.

Dr Dalip has also started a new genre in the field of poetry, which he would like to call "psycho-psychic flints".

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016

DR O. P. ARORA REVIEWS DR DALIP KHETARPAL’S FATHOMING INFINITY Fathoming Infinity is melody of intellectual Churning Dr Dalip Khetarpal enjoys a pre-eminent position as a poet and critic in today’s Indian English literary world. His poetry is thoughtful, thought-provoking and hard-hitting. Through his forceful and logical arguments he opens your mental eyes to the new ways of looking at the traditional thought-process.

Like T. S. Eliot he is a realist to the core and ruthlessly shatters all your rotten traditional beliefs. Iconoclastic like George Bernard Shaw he declares: No illusions please, nor lusions. He, step by step, line by line, proves logically, giving unrelenting arguments, that what you believed in till now was simply humbug. Dr Khetarpal is a sensitive soul and looks at things afresh with an open mind. He knows you will be shocked initially because you have been trained to perceive everything with a closed mind, windows and doors shut. Not your fault. That suits the vested interests, the socalled guardians of the society. But the poet is a rebel. He demolishes and dismantles your long-held sacred beliefs and mercilessly shakes the moth-eaten foundations on which you had built those illusions. Reality is very bitter. It is difficult to digest. But once you awaken to the reality, it is nigh impossible to stick to those worn-out concepts. Poems in this collection are marvellous, dealing with different themes and ideas. God’s plenty. It is not fanciful imagination here, it is a hard knock at psychology, philosophy, biology, sociology and metaphysics. The poet, in these ‘psycho-psychic poems’, peeps deep into your soul and the clutches which shackle it. He storms your brain and you gradually realize the truth, and with awe whisper to yourself: How true! The 151

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reader of these poems will at the end be an awakened soul, there is no doubt about it. And with the horizons of his mind and consciousness widening to encompass new ideas, he will no doubt affirm that the poet is in fact a prophet.

The title of the collection too is enigmatic. Is it humanly possible to fathom infinity? The poet himself accepts in his poem ‘Speech Cuffs’: While thoughts Ideas and feelings Are infinite, Words are finite.

But can the finite Cope with the infinite? (20)

And yet Dr Khetarpal takes up the cudgels: he attempts at touching almost all the subjects under the sun and goes deepest into the deep sea to explore the truth. Truth is his mission, howsoever difficult and complex the path might be.

‘Individuality’ is a dominant thrust of the poet in many of the prominent poems in this collection. Individual vs society has been the recurrent theme in the works of all great writers. The society likes to have only conformists, servile and obedient nonentities to serve its purpose. Despite the rigid and rugged curtains, since times immemorial, individuals have always risen against the society to break its back, shatter its foundations and enlighten the coming generations. That serves the evolutionary purpose of Nature too. This fight has always gone on, and the victory or defeat of the individual depends on the perception only. It is a seesaw game and ultimately it is the individuals who win even if they face temporary setbacks. In social terms such an individual may be a “ big unique zero” but it is he who becomes the driving force of the coming generations. Great men like Jesus, Gandhi, King, Saint Joan, Mandela and many others like them are never accepted by the society because they pose a threat to the entrenched system.

But such individuals do not care for consequences—they are ready

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to face death too. However they cannot accept to exist as deindividuated men, carrying on like scarecrows, ultimately discovering their own emptiness. (4) In ‘ Loss of Identity’, the poet uses the metaphor of the cloud which sometimes “ breaks, / Losing its form compact, / Its true identity” when driven by “ strong gush / Of winds.” The poet sadly bemoans the loss of the cloud’s identity and wishes: If only the cloud Could protect and withstand Its true identity and retain Its power to resist…(6)

Sad but true. Most of the people in the world become weak and compromise with the powers that be, lose their “ power to resist”, and cease to have any individuality of their own. They just become cogs in the social machine or become ‘His Master’s Voice’.

‘Identification Syndrome’ presents a piquant situation wherein the identity by name or surname relates you to a particular religion and culture, community or race. This immediately brings in all the prejudices and biases identified with such religion or culture and creates a chaotic situation because one … frantically and mindlessly Accepts his brethren, As he rejects those Of distinct brethren. (8)

The myopic selection and rejection is extremely harmful for your proper understanding of the human mind. But the poet says there is no escape because without name or surname One becomes unidentifiable, Making all human affairs And dealings Again chaotic And run amok. (9)

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Human predicament of identity!

Individual pitted against the society. Willy-nilly you are a part of certain social set-up, at its bottom lies the family which, in today’s world, is facing the biggest crisis. ‘Psycho-Social Crises’ raises this very pertinent question in relation to the ‘ identity crisis’. The poet has shown how different phases of life generate different feelings in the individual psyche and how the unanswered doubts and uncertainties add up to the psychological stresses and pressures in the individual. These stressed individuals, what shape they take, how they act and react, all these become psychic disorders which play havoc with the human race and the creative process. The poet sadly asks: In “a dysfunctional / Social and family structure” (12) …should a man Be destined for such calamitous stressors, Sans a fault of his own? (13)

This painful question perturbs every sensitive individual whose aspirations as an individual have been negated by the stupid family and social taboos. Mental disorders or perversions may be the natural outcome. Widespread violence in the world, sadistic and masochistic tendencies so commonly seen in the society and manias of various forms can easily be traced to the psychic disorders caused by these doubts and stresses.

Skepticism keeps the seeker alive while faith or blind faith rings the death-knell of the mind. All your gurus, religious priests or tradition-guardians want you to be dead so that they could rule unhindered over ‘walking corpses’. Man without a thinking mind is nothing but a ‘walking corpse’. In this world … nothing is absolute Nothing unquestionable, Nothing certain, Nothing complete, And nothing perfect, Including perhaps

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There is nothing final in this world. Finality can never be reached by anyone. There is no final truth, even about Nature or God. All the subjects of knowledge too are always in the process of growth.

Nobody, therefore, has a right to make the final judgement about anything. Even the best of the researchers too should leave scope for the future skeptics. ‘The Dynamism of Skepticism’ raises man to the level of an eternal seeker, unbound, unlimited. The poet wants that the chastity of the seeker should be maintained at all costs, and nobody should be allowed to pollute it if the human race is to evolve to a higher level.

‘Implosion / Explosion’ is a very touching poem that warns against the tendency of the society to ignore the anguish and agony of the sensitive individuals. The society lives, unfortunately, at the animal level where we value only the body and everything that happens to the body at the conscious level. We are aware of the bombs that explode outside, but what about the bombs that explode inside the mind and soul of the sensitive individuals? In fact … the inward groan And excruciating pangs Of the writhing humanity must be sympathetically addressed to … save it From its impending Cataclysmic end. (25)

Even those who suffer within because of the unjust social order pose a danger to the human race. You, in your arrogance, cannot ignore the simmering discontent of the helpless people. Who knows they may rise in revolt some day? History is replete with numerous such examples.

Rousseau, one of the greatest champions of individual liberty, stated in no uncertain terms that man is born free but is

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everywhere in chains or that the child is born innocent but is corrupted by the society. ‘ Masked / Unmasked’ is a very profound poem that corroborates Rousseau in every possible way. Dr Khetarpal has very artistically woven pathology, psychology and sociology into this very meaningful poem. It indicts the society for doing everything in turning the innocent individual self into the masked social self. The child, innocently and “unconsciously stumbles into / A tangled social web,” and to “facilitate his survival / And smoothen his existence /He, with some reluctance / Dons a mask.” (83) There begins his despicable journey of wearing masks, different for different occasions or different people. Initially reluctantly, later willingly. Gradually “the mask is fused / With the face” till “ the man becomes the mask / Or the mask, man.” (84) In a society where masked man is a norm, the condition of a maskless man is “pathetically pathological” as he is an alienated person and is only an outsider. Of course, his nonconformity or his individuation leads to a unique individuality which, in many ways, is good for himself and the human race. It is only the non-conformists who, despite their isolation, take the human race ahead. Poets, most of them, fall in this category. Plato had known it long back and therefore had ousted them from his ideal Republic.

‘Man and Milieu’ once again raises the pertinent question of the social forces pitted against the individual’s objectives and aspirations. Of course both individual and the society should work together for the harmonious growth of the social order, progress and evolution. But the society is insensitive to the gifted and unique individuals who want to take the society to new heights.

Most of the social forces are conservative and crush such individuals. The struggle, therefore , is inevitable. The collision becomes a painful curse for the individual’s identity. In such societies Ironically, blessed are those Whose self-effacing drives, Seeking peace

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What should man do? Be a wax statue or a cardboard figure? Men who think independently and reject the worn-out customs and conventions of the traditional society are bound to raise the banner of revolt, whatever be the cost.

‘Beliefs and Faiths’, the opening poem in this anthology, sets out one of the prominent themes in this collection. Most of the people, the poet observes, acquire beliefs and faiths without much thought, in fact most of them are born into them. The poet thinks that man should rationally analyze before acquiring any faith but most of the faiths are based on ‘blind faith’, and hence they cannot survive the “ onslaughts of analysis”. Skeptics too, the poet asserts, feed their children with certain basic tenets to become moral individuals or waver in their skepticism when faced with desperate situations. Man is a very weak vessel. Thus, despite all the advance in scientific thinking and questioning of the illogical beliefs, Faith stands tall Irrevocable and unvanquished That knows no fall. (2)

But the “spirit of science” does shake their faith at times and they are torn between belief and disbelief leading to some sort of “ psychic trauma” which is a very tormenting situation. For living a sane and happy life, man must strike a balance between belief and disbelief by “imbibing the best / From both”. (3) But this is impossible. Ideal remains only in imagination, and is simply unattainable. Man, therefore, mostly vacillates, and is unable to resolve the dilemma.

Conflict is universal, and “a dominant life’s feature”. External conflicts one can withstand to a large extent but internal conflicts

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gnaw at your heart. Conflict born of ambivalence is the real bane.

Whatever choice you make, the other one haunts you and you always dither and vacillate. This eternal problem has always haunted the human race and is very well depicted in ‘ The Pangs of Three Inevitable Mental Conflicts’. Hamlet has become a universal symbol of this dilemma man daily faces in life. Hazlitt rightly observed: We are all Hamlets. In our own culture, Arjuna is undoubtedly a symbol of this vacillation. For more than thirteen years he had been preparing for war with the Kauravas because of injustice and humiliation at their hands, and yet when the time comes he makes all sorts of excuses to get away from it. Had there been no Krishna, he would have run away from the war. That is the weakness of goodness. It is passive and takes refuge in escapism. Well, that is why devils rule the world.

‘The Vision Conundrum’ poses one of the biggest challenges before the modern age : How should children be brought up? The choice lies between the two: morally depraved or compromised but worldly successful and morally upright but social failures. As the poet is a realist, he exposes the dilemma the human race faces today. As we are masked by hypocrisy, we may not apparently accept but the truth can never remain hidden : The unscrupulous floats, While the scrupulous sinks.

Moral principles and comfortable living Are also antithetical, (48)

What should parents do? “Bad feeding and grooming / Is beyond their ken.”

The dilemma makes everybody confused : parents and children both. We live in a confused world with no direction in sight. The poet, therefore asks the big, valid question : “Will this ever remain a vision conundrum?” (49) Only great and true artists have the courage to ask such bold questions.

It is very interesting as well as painful to look at the so-called modern man. Dr khetarpal’s realism may look harsh at times but

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he cannot help it : Truth is mostly bitter and the reality, indeed biting. There is no scope for illusions here which alone can be sweet. ‘Astrology and Sweet Future’ is a hard-hitting poem that ridicules man’s mad desire to “ know the future, especially a rosy one.” (74) Man tries to shun the suffering of the present and imagines a happy future while no one in the world can be certain of the future. It is only the romantic in P. B. Shelley, Dr Khetarpal asserts, who wrote the famous lines : “If winter comes / Can spring be far behind.” Only a realist of the stature of Dr Khetarpal can question the validity of the famous quote of the great Romantic poet, which has been blindly accepted by most of the people.

‘Antics’ too laughs at the so-called modern men who are modern only in name while most of their actions—the poet calls them antics—smack of slave-traditions. When there has been progress in every field, man’s behaviour-patterns have remained the same : Prostrating before authority Reverential feet-touching, Saluting, respecting And displaying all courteous gestures Connoting sanctity of tradition Have become antics That are commonly directed Towards only the status Or powers that be And seldom towards The worth of a person. (75)

The poet reprimands all those who indulge in this kind of reprehensible behaviour: This is how A modern man dupes And is duped,

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016 Psychologically. (75-76)

All this creates certain funny situations too, and the poet heartily laughs at them. But he is in fact pained at this hypocritical or selfserving behaviour in the name of the tradition, and asks : “Does human psyche / Know no maturity?” (77) The poet thus goes deep into the mind of man and raises big psychological questions. But is it psychic immaturity only? Or is it a deliberate attempt at befooling one another, doing things that the other one likes for petty gains? Is it not pure commercial attitude that governs our society?

‘Autistic Mankind’ analyses the subject of loneliness that infests today’s entire humanity. On the face of it the disease of loneliness may not look alarming at present because of the masked behaviour of human beings. But autism, in this case a social disorder, has already terribly affected the human race.

Social isolation And language deficits, -------------Though today Affecting only its rind, Tomorrow, It could seep Into its core And fill it With blood and gore. (26-27)

The poet cries out to “save the world / From becoming / Fully autistic.” (27) ‘Pollyanna’, a very bold poem that goes against the contemporary grain which hammers day in and day out: Think positive, avoid negativity. The poet is pained to realize that everybody is trying to keep people in the dark about the reality. This reminds one of Browning’s famous lines: “God is in His heaven / And all is right

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with the world.” In life both positive and negative aspects are always working and integral to day-to-day living. How can you, ostrich-like, hide your face in the sand? How will you improve your life if you simply think, everything is good? How can everything be good? That is not even Nature’s design. That is running away from the sordid reality of life. Life can never be good if you don’t know how to fight the sorrows and failures, devils and demons. But they all want you to be escapist and thereby enjoy the fruit of your indifference. Don’t dread the negative aspects of life, face them, fight them and come out victorious. Be a real man, the poet wants to tell you.

‘Fatal Anxiety and Fear’ reflects the universal phenomenon of the dichotomy between love for life and fear of death. Death is a corollary of life, certain to happen one day. And that ‘one day’ makes it so uncertain that fear of death is always present in man’s psyche. The metaphor of the ‘ leaking boat’ has been used so artistically here to represent TIME which of course is the most powerful factor in anybody’s life. But the poet is heartened by the “stronger rush of love / Into my life” (100) which alone can ward off the fear of death from his psyche. It is in fact love that sustains man, and can overcome the greatest hurdles, even the fear of death. This celebration of love in this poem raises Dr Khetarpal to a higher level of poetic intensity and adds another dimension to his social and spiritual consciousness.

‘Pyromaniacs’ Diwali’ thoughtfully, painfully, looks at the’ happiest’ festival of India from entirely a new angle. Why does the youth enjoy so much, almost maniacally, the “maddening, deafening / And raping explosions”? the poet asks and sadly concludes that it is primarily the result of The repressed violence That lies hid In the psyche Of thrill and sensation seekers Of pyromaniacs (55)

The poet goes on to observe that the youth’s masochism

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Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016 Lapses into pyromania --------------Into incineration With lunatic mirth. (55)

It is this ‘lunatic mirth’ that explodes on the Diwai night, sanctified by the tradition.

The poet is saddened when he finds the society is simply unconcerned with the problems of the youth, unable to cure its mania or give it a new direction: Why does insular culture show no concern, To discern The suppressed pangs of youths By stealing pyromania From their psyche? (56)

How can the most frivolous and uncultured society, steeped only in money-mania, think of the psyche of the youth? The directionless youth drifts in search of cheap entertainment, frivolously enjoying the moment, as the future is enveloped in darkness.

Every poet, since times immemorial, has craved a utopia, a perfect world of his imagination because the real world with real men never matches his vision of man and the world. ‘Utopia / Dystopia’ is one of the finest poems on the subject. The poet’s longing for the imaginary or fanciful world is similar to the Keatsian urge to fly with the nightingale to escape the world of ‘fret and fever’ in his famous ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Khetarpal is torn between “ dream and reality” because “ reality is bitter, / Fantasy is sweet.” (67) And who wants bitterness when sweetness can give you joy, at least a temporary escape from “intense and immense / Worldly pangs.” But like Keats he too realizes: But since I’m also a real living, breathing Throbbing and pulsating being

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though not completely, as he cannot completely shun his love for fantasy. He has thus become a psychotic, “unable to distinguish / Between reality and fantasy.” (68), shuttling between the two. A very difficult situation indeed. But you have to pay the price of being a poet. You are not an ordinary mortal. Higher life of creativity and imagination tears into your soul.

The music of jingling coins, How heavenly is material gain At a sight; But becomes a bane When death is nigh. (72)

Man knows full well that materialism is no good, in fact it degenerates man, denudes him of all that is good, and yet his fascination for materialism is immense, to the extent of being maniacal. The poet in ‘Fatally Maniacal Riches’ laments that Leading a frantic life material, We’ve lost the life real. (72)

He, therefore, warns the mad seekers of money : Forget not that While feeding our endless Gluttonous senses There is a terribly violent massacre, Of conscience, Of principles, Of morals, Of all That brings humanity laurels. (72-73)

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But the history of man! He has hardly cared for such warnings of the visionaries, and Ironically, the big tough world Has cracked under the strain Of a small coin By overwhelming notes That enshroud the thinking And vision of mankind. (73)

Alas! Man gloats over his material achievements, and ignores all that would make him a MAN. Dr Khetarpal, in his iconoclastic poem, ‘A Dialogue with Pitiable God’, tells God plainly and honestly that His creation is far from perfect. God, according to the poet, has been reduced to a pitiable figure because man, His finest creation, takes Him for a ride and plays all sorts of tricks to befool Him. All his so-called rituals, the poet candidly tells Him, are undertaken by him solely “ to please and reach you / Through fancy deluded.” (78) It is merely a deluded fancy of the devotees when they pretend to offer special prayers to … increase your joys, But sub-consciously their own…

To decrease your sorrows, Again, sub-consciously their own… (78-79)

Man is a very cunning creature and he squanders his money to ingratiate God and bargain with Him For health, wealth, prosperity And future bright, But can man hide His ulterior motive from You When You’re so omniscient? (79)

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But the big question is: Why does God allow man to do all this when He knows his real intentions? Does He really enjoy the stupidity of man or want to see how far can he degrade himself?

Or God too enjoys man’s hypocrisy and pretensions and becomes a shareholder! The “diabolically shameless man” goes still further and He insinuates himself Into Your psyche To unconsciously and ironically Soil Your holy image, Your name and fame By blasphemously attributing Every problem, tension, disturbance, Sorrow, war and peace And all that happens, That man experiences, To the great and kind You (79)

as if man is not accountable for anything, for any of his actions while God is responsible for all the ills that befall him or occur in the universe.. Man is so sinister that just by praying or offering some money to God, he absolves himself of all his misdeeds and puts all the blame on God. How pitiable God is that He becomes a victim of the devilish designs of man! The rational interpretation of the relationship between man and God raises many big questions and involves the entire human race. Man is a big thug and never takes the blame for his wicked deeds. He doesn’t even listen to the sane advice of Krishna in the Gita. That doesn’t suit him. Even God should be bewildered at the immensity of his cleverness and crookedness.

‘Dark Shades of Man and Woman’ attempts at understanding man-woman relationship and perhaps accepts that it has always been a riddle, and should always remain so. The poet delves deep into the minds of both man and woman, analyses their biology and

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psychology as best as any artist-researcher could but fails to draw any firm conclusions. Since the dawn of the universe, man-woman relationship has been found most attractive but equally enigmatic and in many cases terribly repelling. The generations of Adam and Eve have played this game for ever, forever playing hide and seek with their intent and fascination, passion and deception. Man and woman, Nature’s creation is such, they need and seek each other desperately, woman for security and strength, man for her grace and charms, sexual attraction being at the centre. But man is weaker in sex and quite crude in courting her while woman is subtler and makes full use of her reserve to entice and befool him.

Man, in his lust for her Demonstrates All his satanic powers, Incomprehensible even to biology Or for that matter, sexology (88)

He indulges in theatrics to please her, but can never surpass the theatrics of woman who excels in playing this game for “she possesses greater finesse / And subtler deceptive devices.” The poet rightly observes : So gullible is man also That even a semblance Of superficial smile On a woman’s lips Can transmit ecstatic waves (88)

It is this gullibility in man that has been the major cause of the fall of some of the most powerful men in human history. No, it is not man’s fault either. It is the design of Nature. Only then Nature’s purpose of ‘creation’ is served, sex being the most powerful instinct in man : While man is obsessed With sex, Woman, with man’s faithfulness…

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The poet thinks that this blurred vision is essential because “the naked truth” and Spontaneous outpourings of consciousness Like a dynamite, Could explode one To bits (90)

But the greatest irony of man-woman relationship comes at the conclusion of the poem: That even soul-mates, Befool each other Consciously, sub-consciously Or even unconsciously. (90)

Wonderful! This is the naked truth, and the poet has tried to hammer this truth as clearly as artistically possible. Maybe some of you are saved.

‘Magical World of Research’ is a severe indictment of the research-work in the Indian university system where thesis writing is “nothing / But a recycling / Of old worn out / Recycled ideas.”

(103) This kind of trivial, plagiarized research work characterizes not only the ordinary, average universities but also the most prestigious universities of India. It is only because of this contemptible and deplorable attitude that no research work worth the name has been done anywhere in India. Here mediocrity rules, and form governs rather than the content. Everybody is in this demeaning racket. This dismal state of educative-process, even at the highest level, is one of the prime causes of our bankrupt minds and barren souls.

Fathoming Infinity is one of the finest collections of poems that have come out in recent years. It is a ‘ must read’ for every lover of literature. These poems would certainly enrich and enlighten his vision and consciousness.

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Reference Khetarpal, Dr Dalip. Fathoming Infinity. Gurgaon : The Poetry Society of India, 2015. Print.

Dr O.P. Arora is a well-known poet, novelist and short story writer and holds a distinctive place among contemporary Indian writers in English. Arora has a Doctorate in English Literature from Punjab University, Chandigarh and has taught in Delhi University for over three decades.

His poems have been published in many leading literary journals, magazines and dailies and have been generously included in the prominent anthologies. He has four poetry anthologies The Creeping Shadows, Embers in the Ashes, The Edge of the Cliff, and Pebbles on the Shore to his credit.

His last novel The Silken Traps has been critically acclaimed as a true portrayal of contemporary Indian social scene and a great work looking at human relations in a novel way.

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Contemporary Literary Review India The journal that brings articulate writing for articulate readers.

CLRI is published in two editions (1) online quarterly (eISSN 2394-6075) (2) print annually (ISSN 2250-3366). CLRI is one of the leading journals in India and attracts a wide audience each month. CLRI is listed/indexed with many reputed literary directories, repositories, and many universities in India. We promote authors in many ways. We publish, promote and nominate our authors to various literary awards. It is absolutely free to register, submit and get published with CLRI. Register with us at: Subscriber to CLRI

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Book Releases

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GARY BECK Fault Lines – a poetry anthology There are cracks in our foundation. Undeniable fractures that divide society when we should be standing united.

Fault Lines is a poetry collection that examines the disconnect, the unchallenged chaos, and the possible downfall of humanity. Much like his collections Civilized Ways and Perceptions, Fault Lines brings us through the delicate ups and downs of lives that will shape the future, and leads us down whichever path we ultimately allow.

‘Thoughtful, densely rich poems.’ – Archers Crown Magazine ‘Excellent, chilling, sobering. Great work.’ - Six Sentences Magazine One of the poems was a Pushcart Prize nominee by Nazar Look Magazine

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NIDHI DALMIA Harp – a novel Set in the context of the zeitgeist and idealism of the late sixties, Harp is about love, longing and coming of age. The three main protagonists - a young man travelling in a Europe-lesstravelled including the Iron Curtain, a young woman who has a calling to music, and another young woman who has loved and lost once - provide the frame of this narrative about journeys we make across countries, even as we embark on a private quest within to know ourselves better, and to seek what it is we really want from life. Moving through India, Europe and USA, Harp follows the lives of these three young people even as they engage with the cultural, sexual, student revolutions, and the music of the sixties.

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To place ads in this journal, write to clrijournal@gmail.com.

Contemporary Literary Review India The journal that brings articulate writing for articulate readers.

CLRI is published in two editions (1) online quarterly (eISSN 2394-6075) (2) print annually (ISSN 2250-3366). CLRI is one of the leading journals in India and attracts a wide audience each month. CLRI is listed/indexed with many reputed literary directories, repositories, and many universities in India. We promote authors in many ways. We publish, promote and nominate our authors to various literary awards. It is absolutely free to register, submit and get published with CLRI. Register with us at: Subscriber to CLRI

Get your book reviewed by us.

173

Donate to Us We seek donation.

Vol 3, No 4, CLRI November 2016

CLRI Online Edition (Quarterly) Submission to our online edition is open year round. You can submit in the open categories or themed categories any time. See further details at our page of Announcement.

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