INKLETTE The Club Inkers’ Newsletter V O L U M E
TODAY’S INKER Join Club Ink for a ‘Read-Aloud Session’ of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s works on May 18, 2014 at Swami Vivekanand Library from 1 2 . 30 p m. R ea d aloud your favourite among Gabo’s works and share your views.
SPIN- AYARN Club Ink organized an innovative storyt elling s ess io n called ‘Spin- AYarn’ on April 25, 2014 at Swami Vivekanand Library, Bhopal. Club Ink conveys heartfelt thanks to Ms. Eakta Sareen for being the perfect host and managing the show absolutely well and to all the creative storytellers who made the event enormously enjoyable!
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REMEMBERING MARQUEZ (1927-2014) The colonel took the top off the coffee can and saw that there was only one little spoonful left– that’s how No One Writes To The Colonel begins. Surprisingly enough, it ends with the word– ‘Shit’. Everything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez brings a sigh accompanied by a slight smile that stretches softly over one’s face.
the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned. Those lines are irresistible. They gently brush one’s skin and make one embrace an invisible dawn. There were traces of Colombia, there were traces of an unknown culture that hasn’t been explored by a writer so exemplary and if I could ask for more, I would only wish for more of Gabo– the man with the eyes of a blue dog, the man who could love in the time of cholera, the man bound to live a hundred years in solitude, the man who’ll write to the colonel and will find the general in his labyrinth.
Marquez wove an alternative universe which was characteristically pragmatic and yet magically intangible. I remember how I was silenced after reading The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World. I hadn’t read anything like it before. And when I was swimming through the words– so subtly and simply put– I felt as if the story was a house of cards. It possessed a certain fragility that hovered over Marquez’s prose. It was a story so delicately crafted that it started to break itself into shards and turn into a parallel reality– unique and inconspicuous. Although the story in its entirety was akin to a beautiful orchard, there was a flickering element which reminded me of asphalt.
INSIDE THIS ISSUE
Whenever I read his works, I notice a strange force summoning the grey silhouette of a mild supernatural– a myth, a superstition– I am deeply connected to yet so far from.
Page 4 Photograph by Maria Fleury The Silver Monocle by The Paperback Sisters
Why did Gabo draw my attention? Because he made me sink into reverie and somnambulate. Reading the first line of The General In His Labyrinth was one of those instances: Jose Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in
Devanshi Khetarpal
Page 2 Words to a Boy by Dom Moraes The Editor’s Bottle Of Ink Page 3 Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Page 5 Dreamers by Sakshi Jain Page 6 Bestsellers @ NY Times Submission Guidelines
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Words To A Boy by Dom Moraes I cannot speak to you. Our chances Lessen each day, I think but you must still Follow the lonely dancer when he dances Over the shoulder of the farthest hill Where boulders lie. Which king advances Through the tumultuous plains, or what retreat Is made through marshes, you know nothing of. Only the scuffed grass and the dancer’s feet Can your eyes understand, for too much love Affects the eyes, makes vision incomplete. So you one day will lose the dancer. He will cry out and fall, he will have passed Beyond your questions to the place of answer, The final solitude, to find at last Stillness of rocks and tumult of the past. Return, with lifted hands and prophet’s tongue Your people will not see your vision, For they sleep under the dark angel’s wing. When you cry out to them they will not listen Because you are ugly and no longer young.
DOMINIC FRANCIS MORAES (19382004) was an Indian poet and a foundational figure of Anglophone poetry in India. He was educated at Jesus College, University of Oxford and published nearly thirty books during his lifetime.
THE EDITOR’S BOTTLE OF INK Dear Club Inkers, Club Ink presents the fourth issue of its international e-newsletter, Inklette. Today, Club Ink celebrates the life and works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. We have included one of Gabo’s short stories entitled Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers from his celebrated collection, Eyes Of A Blue Dog. Gabo’s legacy stands for more than just his magical realism or his bestselling works. His prose will continue to enchant readers and he is bound to be immortal in our mind and hearts and inspire us in every way possible. We would like to thank Swami Vivekanand Library, Ms. Eakta Sareen and all the fantastic, young storytellers who made our event– ‘Spin-A-Yarn’ on April 25, 2014 a huge success. INK LETT E
We would sincerely like to thank our contributors: Sakshi Jain, Maria Fleury and The Paperback Sisters for their wonderful pieces that help us to make Inklette a success each time. We have been encountered with a number of queries from all over regarding prospective events and submissions. We thank you for taking interest in Inklette. To submit to Inklette, kindly go through our submission guidelines and stay connected on Facebook. For more information, please contact us at club.ink13@gmail.com. Happy reading!
DEVANSHI KHETARPAL Editor-‘Ink’-Chief Inklette
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Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Now we had her there, abandoned in a corner of the house. Someone told us, before we got her things– her clothes which smelled of newly cut wood, her weightless shoes for the mud– that she would be unable to get used to that slow life, with no sweet tastes, no attraction except that harsh, wattled solitude, always pressing on her back. Someone told us– and a lot of time had passed before we remembered it– that she had also had a childhood. Maybe we didn’t believe it then. But now, seeing her sitting in the corner with her frightened eyes and a finger placed on her lips, maybe we accepted the fact that she’d had a childhood once, that once she’d had a touch that was sensitive to the anticipatory coolness of the rain, and that she always carried an unexpected shadow in profile to her body. All this– and much more– we believed that afternoon when we realized that above her fearsome subworld she was completely human. We found it out suddenly, as if a glass had broken inside, when she began to give off anguished shouts; she began to give off anguished shouts; she began to call each one of us by name, speaking amidst tears until we sat down beside her; we began to sing and clap hands as if our shouting could put the scattered pieces of glass back together. Only then were we able to believe that at one time she had had a childhood. It was as if her shouts were like a revelation somehow; as if they had a lot of remembered tree and deep river about them. When she got up, she leaned over a little and, still without covering her face with her apron, still without blowing her nose, and still with tears, she told us: ‘I’ll never smile again.’ We went out into the courtyard, the three of us, not talking: maybe we thought we carried common thoughts. Maybe we thought it would be best not to turn on the lights in the house. She wanted to be alone– maybe– sitting in the dark corner, weaving the final braid which seemed to be the only thing that would survive her passage toward the beast. Outside, in the courtyard, sunk in the deep vapor of the insects, we sat down to think about her. We’d done it so many times before. We might have said that we were doing what we’d been doing every day of our lives. Yet it was different that night: she’d said that she would never smile again, and we, who knew her so well, were certain that the nightmare had become the truth. Sitting in a triangle, we imagined her there inside, abstract, incapacitated, unable even to hear the innumerable clocks that measured the marked and minute rhythm with which she was changing into dust. ‘If we only had the courage at least to wish for her death’, we thought in a chorus. But we wanted her like that: ugly and glacial, like a mean contribution to our hidden defects. We’d been adults before, since a long time back. She, however, was the oldest in the house. That same night she had been able to be there, sitting with us, feeling the measured throbbing of the stars, surrounded by healthy sons. She would have been the respectable lady of the house if she had been the wife of a solid citizen or the concubine of a punctual man. But she became accustomed to living in only one dimension, like a straight line, perhaps because her vices or her virtues could not be seen in profile. We’d known that for many years now. We weren’t even surprised one morning after getting up, when we found her face down in the courtyard, biting the earth in a hard, ecstatic way. That she smiled, looked at us again; she had fallen out of the second story window onto the hard clay of the courtyard and had remained there, stiff and concrete, face down on the damp clay. But later we learned that the only thing she had kept intact was her fear of distances, a natural fright upon facing space. We lifted her up by the shoulders. She wasn’t as hard as she had seemed to us at first. On the contrary, her organs were loose, detached from her will, like a lukewarm corpse that hadn’t begun to stiffen. Her eyes were open, her mouth was dirty with that earth that already must
have had a taste of sepulchral sediment for her when we turned her face up to the sun, and it was as if we had placed her in front of a mirror. She looked at us all with a dull, sexless expression that gave us– holding her in my arms now– the measure of her absence. Someone told us she was dead; and afterward she remained smiling with that cold and quiet smile that she wore at night when she moved about the house awake. She said she didn’t know how she got to the courtyard. She said that she’d felt quite warm, that she’d been listening to a cricket, penetrating, sharp, which seemed– so she said– about to knock down the wall of her room, and that she had set herself to remembering Sunday’s prayers, with her cheek tight against the cement floor. We knew, however, that she couldn’t remember any prayer, for we discovered later that she’d lost the notion of time when she said she’d fallen asleep holding up the inside of the wall that the cricket was pushing on from outside and that she was fast asleep when someone, taking her by the shoulders, moved the wall aside and laid her down with her face to the sun. That night we knew, sitting in the courtyard, that she would never smile again. Perhaps her inexpressive seriousness pained us in anticipation, her dark and willful living in a corner. It pained us deeply, as we were pained by the day we saw her sit down in the corner where she was now; and we heard her say that she wasn’t going to wander through the house any more. At first we couldn’t believe her. We’d seen her for months on end going through the rooms at all hours, her head hard and her shoulder’s drooping, never stopping, never growing tired. At night we would hear her thick body noise moving between two darknesses, and we would lie awake in bed many times hearing her stealthy walking, following her all through the house with our ears. Once she told us that she had seen the cricket inside the mirror glass, sunken, submerged in the solid transparency, and that it had crossed through the glass surface to reach her. We really didn’t know what she was trying to tell us, but we could all see that her clothes were wet, sticking to her body, as if she had just come out of a cistern. Without trying to explain the phenomenon, we decided to do away with the insects in the house: destroy the objects that obsessed her. We had the walls cleaned: we ordered them to chop down the plants in the courtyard and it was as if we had cleansed the silence of the night of bits of trash. But we no longer heard her walking, nor did we hear her talking about crickets any more, until the day when, after the last meal, she remained looking at us, she sat down on the cement floor, still looking at us, and said: ‘I’m going to stay here, sitting down,’ and we shuddered, because we could see that she had begun to look like something already almost completely like death. That had been a long time ago and we had grown used to seeing her there, sitting, her braid always half wound, as if she had become dissolved in her solitude and, even though she was there to be seen, had lost her natural faculty of being present. That’s why we now knew that she would never smile again; because she had said so in the same convinced and certain way in which she had told us once that she would never walk again. It was as if we were certain that she would tell us later: ‘I’ll never see again,’ or maybe ‘I’ll never hear again,’ and we knew that she was sufficiently human to go along willing the elimination of her vital functions and that spontaneously she would go about ending herself, sense by sense, until one day we would find her leaning against the wall, as if she had fallen asleep for the first time in her life. Perhaps there was still a lot of time left for that, but the three of us, sitting in the courtyard, would have liked to hear her sharp and sudden broken-glass weeping that night, at least to give us the illusion that a baby...a girl baby had been born in the house. In order to believe that she had been born renewed.
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PHOTOGRAPH BY: Maria Fleury Maria Fleury is a fourteenyear old photographer who currently resides in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She is an attendee of the Oxford Prep Experience 2013 at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford where her subjects were Photography (Major) and Philosophy (Minor). She is a passionate globetrotter who captures each bewildering scene through the lens of her camera and her interminable imagination.
CATCH THE PROMO OF THE SILVER MONOCLE AT https:// www.youtube.com/
The Silver Monocle by The Paperback Sisters Sedulously he carved a neighbourhood in the mirror. Finding the ersatz reflection strangely demure, he resolved never to fix his eyes on the Janus-faced, conniving reflector ever again. Underneath the pedestal, his physiognomy slipped into the hebetude like the disjointed craters of the argentite moon. The flocullent glass– besmeared with the vacuousness of the tribe, shut its aviary to abort the childless womb. The glint of the moon stigmatised, gave way to a sterile light, the most strident of its kind, belittling the monarch of the night to a moping ovoid. The shrills of impotence, and the pleas of arbitrary compunction did not penetrate the walls of the frigid hearts. The ovoid had asserted its firmness. Had left a blot on the escutcheon. When the maculated samizdat, breathes its last murky sigh to affirm the Guy Fawkes night, let us ascend the throne of the bawling broken rock tears of the moon that will espouse us, in the times we don’t gather our amours to caress it.
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POEM BY: The Paperback Sisters Trivarna Hariharan and Devanshi Khetarpal are kindred spirits who met at the Bookaroo Children’s Literature Festival, New Delhi in 2012. In due course of time, both of them realized that they had read similar stuff, shared a similar passion for literature and creative writing and a heap of similarities simply kept adding to the list. Discovering that their writing style had a resemblance too, they joined hands in their first endearing collaboration and penned The Silver Monocle– a poem which blends their thoughts perfectly.
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Dreamers by Sakshi Jain Incredulous dreams of unwoven fibre, woven into priceless sculptures from the past, urge to commensurate with the future. Things unsurpassed man’s abstractions; this is all the cosmos ventures for. Paroxysm of difference, inexorable attitude of oneself, gives wings to dreams. The world may call you preposterous, but do not lend your ears to those yokels. Surpass the hills of imagination with exuberance all way long. However dark it may appear but few times from now the light will be called yours. Be the renaissance instead of a naïve. Intransigent propensity towards your dream- all you need to have. Unnerve the skeptical and accentuate your being. Dreadfulness will not wedge itself until you possess the audacity of hope. Prove to the world that your dream isn’t like a pipe. Shun! Thwart the chaps. Solitary valor won’t bog you down. Soon, you will wake up to the smiles that caress you, leaving ecstasy forever.
POEM BY: Sakshi Jain Sakshi Jain is a student of St. Joseph’s Convent School, Idgah Hills, Bhopal, India. She is known as a passionate and articulate writer and debater who is equally fond of sports like golf, horse riding and squash. Sakshi endeavors to write a full length novel some day.
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Bestsellers @ New York Times May 18, 2014 Paperback Trade Fiction
Paperback Nonfiction
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (Broadway) Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline (Morrow/Harper Collins) The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (Harper One/Harper Collins) Shadow Spell by Nora Roberts (Berkley) The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith (Mulholland/Little, Brown) Whiskey Beach by Nora Roberts (Berkley) Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Anchor) King and Maxwell by David Baldacci (Grand Central) Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James (Vintage) A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
Heaven is for Real by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent (Thomas Nelson) Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo (Random House) Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander (Simon & Schuster) The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg (Random House) Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (Back Bay/ Little, Brown) Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson (Back Bay/Little, Brown) Quiet by Susan Cain (Broadway) Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan (Simon & Schuster) Wild by Cheryl Strayed (Vintage) Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Submission Guidelines Thank you for showing interest in Inklette. We are currently publishing short stories, poems, essays, book reviews and art work, which includes photographs or paintings. Inklette intends to publish the best examples of art and writing from established and emerging artists from all over. Each piece should be single spaced and typed in Times New Roman Font 10 on either side of the page. Please include your piece and a short bio (about 50 words) separately as .doc or .docx attachment to club.ink13@gmail.com. Photos and artwork should be scanned and sent as .jpg or .gif file to club.ink13@gmail.com The subject of the email should be: First name_Last Name_Type of Submission (For eg: Casey_McCormick_Poetry). Simultaneous submissions are discouraged. Please send us your submission in any one category. Do not send us more than 5 poems, 5 photographs or 5 paintings or 2 short prose pieces at a time. Multiple submissions are not accepted. Inklette accepts submissions on a rolling basis, i.e. all year round. However, we do keep fixed deadlines for each issue. Submissions received after the deadline of a particular issue will be considered for the next issue. We would request you to go through our previous issues to get acquainted with the quality of work that we seek. We have no definite time period for responding to a submission. However, you may send us an email regarding the status of your submission after the termination of a month. Inklette is an e-newsletter which has an extensive circulation through Club Ink’s facebook group as well as through www.issuu.com. For more information, feel free to contact us at club.ink13@gmail.com. We look forward to reading your work! Devanshi Khetarpal Editor-‘Ink’-Chief Inklette
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