Reading Hour May-Jun 2012 -- Preview

May-Jun 2012

short fiction The Courtyard of Memory Ghazal: An Eastern Inheritance Musicians of the King’s Court Beloved Rebel: OP Nayyar Interview: Bhai Baldeep Singh

Vol 2 Issue 3

essays

60 Pages

verse

`50/-

reviews

arka mukhopadhyay vivek sharma jim wungramyao kasom subhash m nargolkar rasagya kabra

Stories / Poetry amitava dasgupta • ananya s guha • astha gupta • chandrashekhar sastry • gauri barlingay kaustav kashyap • mihir chitre • nandita bose • nidhin shobhana • rumjhum biswas shruti rao • smitha sehgal • snehith kumbla • sriramana muliya

Contents Fiction Call of Blood

Poetry 3

nandita bose

Wax Crayons

10

nidhin shobhana

Post Script

17 19 27

Animal Testing Breathprints Wipe the Tears

42

Auria

58

It Rained Woman gauri barlingay

Essays

Interview 14

39 47

Bhai Baldeep Singh

57

22

rasagya kabra

arka mukhopadhyay

Discovering Anthony Gonsalves

33

snehith kumbla

chandrashekhar sastry

The Courtyard of Memory

26

ananya s guha

mihir chitre

Kristos

21

astha gupta

rumjhum biswas

An Evening’s Promise

The Same Song

shruti rao

kaustav kashyap

Feral

13

amitava dasgupta

sriramana muliya

Space

Transience smitha sehgal

40

vandana v k

Ghazal: An Eastern Inheritance

54

Light Stuff

34

Are you reading this?

51

the last page

60

vivek sharma

First Person Musicians of the King’s Court

36

jim wungramyao kasom

Beloved Rebel: OP Nayyar

48

dr subhash m nargolkar

2

Reading Hour

Fiction Call of Blood nandita bose

B

hinny Babu! Years since we’ve been graced.” Catechued over maroon teeth beamed recognition in response to my gruff, “One packet Gold Flake.”

Not that I am gruff by nature. This ‘early morning walk in the mist’ had turned out to be another of those idiotic holiday ideas and I’d just huffed past the rural splendour dying for a respite from all the oxygen, namely, a familiar puff of tobacco smoke.

I was born in Baba’s romance-with-theImpressionists’ phase and so moved had he been by that anguished slicing-off of the earlobe that he had at various points named me Gogh, Van, Vincent and finally its diminutive, Vinny. Bhinny stuck. It felt incongruous to have that derivative living on in environs I hadn’t stepped into for over a decade now.

The shopkeeper Gorai-da’s reunion-like delight at meeting me demanded an answer and I was dredging one up as I lit my reprieve at the end of the rope kindle. The shop front was miniscule. Her shawl huddled shoulder brushed, like a cobweb.

“Ha, money you don’t mind taking in advance. But coughing up the goods is an issue, is it? What am I supposed to cook in if the mustard oil is not sent, may I ask?”

She was gone before I made the association between her clear unaccented diction, rare in these rural parts, and the little girl I’d once known. I almost fell into the tiny ditch over May-Jun 2012 Vol 2 Issue 3

Nandita focuses on relationships and romance in the poems, short stories and novels she writes. Her first novel Tread Softly has just been released. A second, Shadow and Soul is soon to be out.

which balanced the stone slab I was perched on, as I stumbled forward unmindfully, calling out, “Katyayani, didn’t you recognise me?”

Luckily Baba had overcome his infatuation with the 70's rock chicks when her father had honoured him with the task of naming his new-born daughter, and passed into his Sanskrit mythology phase. Otherwise he’d probably have insisted on Janis or Joan.

She turned now with eyes much older than the twenty-six years I knew them to be, and evasive even as they looked my way.

“Good morning, Dada Babu.”

Gorai piped up, “How can she not recognize you? Who do you think makes all the meals up at the big house? Of course Bhattacharjee Babu would have told her you were expected. That is why she is giving me such grief over the mustard oil. What can I do if the supplier...?”

I cut him short.

“Make meals? Why should Katy of all people make meals?”

In my bewilderment I let drop the nickname I’d only ever used in private.

“Didn’t you know? She cooks up at the big house ever since your dear Baba came back.”

This I hadn’t known even though I’d been here over a couple of days. Katy herself had found dissolution in the mists. Gorai-da’s eyes were both innocent and prying.

“Married to Nibaran Babu she is now.”

“Nibaran? Who is Nibaran?”

“Your Aunt Tuli’s husband, Bhinny Babu.”

3

The Courtyard of Memory

khusrao dariya prem ka, ulti wa ki dhaar jo utra so doob gaya, jo dooba so paar khusrao, the river of love, flows in a contrary way one who wades in drowns, one who drowns willingly, gets across ~ Amir Khusrao

with the saint himself. The Khwaja’s disciples, and indeed the Khwaja himself, tried to dissuade him, but the more they tried, the stronger became his resolve. At length, he sat down to eat with the saint, and having said their prayers, he eagerly awaited the once-ina-lifetime meal that would surely arrive. And indeed, it was an astounding meal, for the great master, in whose Khanqah beggars were served a king’s spread, himself ate only dried chapatis and bitter vegetables! Such was his utter detachment from all material comforts.

The traveller went away humbled.

What is this place, you marvel, amidst the urban sprawl of present day Delhi, with its shops selling cheap pirated VCDs of early Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, its illegal money changers and travel agents? Its rosaries, basket upon basket of roses, rose-coloured slabs of meat, skull caps, ittar? Its impossibly narrow by-lanes with their dark, angular corners and sudden turns, with offal strewn about and the crumbling multi-storeyd tenements on either side almost leaning into each other overhead?

The little shops at every conceivable corner selling sickly-sweet tumblers of tea at all hours May-Jun 2012 Vol 2 Issue 3

of the day and night?

More than anything else, this place is a marketplace. Here you won’t find any of the verticality, the clinical coldness of that modern day temple, the shopping mall, where everything has a fixed, labelled price tag that brooks no argument. In this horizontal marketplace, stories and insults are exchanged, it’s still possible to bargain, to hear the other person breathe, and things are bought and sold according to an ancient ledger book of commerce, kept in a dialect of camel trains and trade winds. In this marketplace you remember that even before the days of the Prophet (PBUH), Mecca was a caravan town with the Ka’bah as its warm stone heart, where the haggling over silk and salt under the midday sun gave way to evening-song, the lashing of glances and the ululating voices of storytellers which drew the desert djinns closer to the human circle around the fires.

On one side of the courtyard lies the tomb of the Sheikh, and on the other, that of his murid, Hazrat Amir Khusrao, poet, musician, diplomat, warrior, linguist, saint, and somewhere in the crowd of all those epithets, 15

Fiction Feral rumjhum biswas

A

forty five degree slope led the way to Maya Kaikobad’s quarters. Moushumi climbed slowly; she wasn’t used to hilly places.

Ahead, Satwaki walked briskly up, holding Mimi by the hand. Mimi, in turn, held Rishi’s hand, forming a frisky, curly haired link between father and son. The breeze had begun to turn chilly as the sun cooled to a burnt brick shade, growing duller by the minute.

Everything looked painted in poetic colours...

Moushumi thought of the poems she’d read in school. Lines from “Daffodils” fluttered in her mind like the petals of those flowers in a meadow. Funny, she mused, how Indian grass grew in fields, but those in England were always in meadows! The school they had come to in the Nilgiris reminded her of these things, English things. Its old Victorian buildings, orderly flower beds, large pedigree dogs, and teachers’ cottages tucked behind sudden copses of eucalyptus and other tall trees, took Moushumi away to a land she was familiar with, through books.

They were here to get Rishi admitted. The school was old and prestigious, and both Satwaki and Moushumi had heaved a collective sigh of relief when they received the confirmation letter. They had arrived three days ahead of Rishi’s admission date, and like any other tourist family, went sight seeing and picnicking in and around Coonoor and Ooty.

Moushumi had already shopped for extra warm clothes and thermal underwear for May-Jun 2012 Vol 2 Issue 3

Rumjhum’s fiction and poetry has been published and won accolades in India and abroad (journals like South, Words-Myth, Everyday Fiction, Muse India, Eclectica, Nth Position, The King’s English, The Little Magazine, etc.)

Rishi in Singapore, but she still wanted to check out Ooty’s markets, even though the school provided uniforms and sundry warm clothes and blankets.

They had arrived earlier in the day, nervous and ahead of schedule. They had met most of the teachers and the head master during a tea organised by the school. This was a more than a century old school ritual for all new students.

There were other parents with their children there, apart from them. Some of the new students had older siblings already in the school and many of the parents were old students of the school. Both Satwaki and Moushumi noticed the difference between the parents who were old students and those who were not, straightaway. There was an invisible barrier between them, which came through in the way the parents carried themselves and how they were treated. The old students were on sure ground, familiar territory; they spoke with confidence with the teachers, their acquaintances and friends; they ignored the other parents, not out of rudeness, but because they didn’t notice them at all.

Putting Rishi in a boarding school, one with a history had been a dream for Satwaki and Moushumi, neither of whom had had that experience. Whereas, Satwaki had gone to various central schools, where army children went, and finished off at St. Xavier’s school when his father was posted in Kolkata, Moushumi had been to a typical old Kolkata 27

Poetry Breathprints astha gupta

Astha graduated from a management school in India but has now concluded that it is poetic meters and rhythms that she strategizes best. She lives in Bangalore and her poems have been published in international literary journals like Asian Cha, Madswirl, Danse Macabre and Asia Writes.

We open the windows wide to let the air run in, hurried that it was, loaded with news.

We let it stretch out into all corners – of all rooms that were musty with anticipation.

The leathery leaves of our crotons had curled together: we let them whisper messages to each other.

The restless rain that had been pacing all night, up and down the road, like an expectant father to be, was splashing reminders at us from the windowsill.

We do not switch on the evening lamps: this was not a day of rituals.

It was also easier to avoid each other under the blinkers of darkness.

We jerk forward to see the signs.

The hands are not on the belly: they rest lifeless on the knees about to slide off into the infinite suction of her life.

The light on the face is replaced by silent surrender.

We look skywards at the clouds rolling up their sleeves and wonder how angry they are.

So the tiny fingers to roll around her chin would not be of a dainty angel.

Her biggest worries would not be about explaining menstruation; or safe distance.

The loud hum of the Fiat is now beating close.

We see the old tyres flapping against the tar, As if repeating unanswered questions of a faithful old servant.

She sits there between all those dead faces.

There will still be time before she wipes dribbles off the back of her blouse – but we are sure – what stabs her insides is that her womb will never experience the breathprints of a baby girl.

Is that a story languishing in your closet? Dust it off and send it in!

If you love writing or would like to be associated with Reading Hour in any way, email us at editors@differsense.com. We welcome translations as well. So pick up your pens, pencils or 2-finger typing skills and get started! Take a look at our submission guidelines on http://readinghour.in May-Jun 2012 Vol 2 Issue 3

33

Musicians of the King's Court

were Koreans sitting in the cafes, Spanish people in the coffee shop, Americans in the souvenir shop… sitting on a nice piece of rock and watching people passing by, my heart felt nostalgic even though this was my first visit. Vehicles plied on roads once built for horses and wagons. Later we found a small rooftop restaurant for dinner.

There was a cool breeze and one could watch the whole city twinkling under the bluish moonlit sky. It became our favorite spot.

It was by chance that we met the most important persons for our film. On the second day of the three day event, we went for dinner to a small open window restaurant popular with tourists. While we were waiting for our food two musicians started singing popular folk songs so we took out our camera and started recording. We spoke to them later. The two brothers were Ghewar Khan, who played the Kamaicha and Ramjan Khan, who sang and played the harmonium. They invited us for performances at the Kalakar colony where they lived.

The Kalakar colony has become synonymous with folk music. The Colony makes up one face of a hill facing the Fort. Descendants of the king’s musicians still live in colonies gifted by the king.

Generations have continued as musicians at the king’s court. They still sing for the Royal families on all important occasions and weddings and they still depend solely on music for their livelihood.

Technically they still serve the May-Jun 2012 Vol 2 Issue 3

Camel Tattoo Show by BSF

Folk Dancers: Opening Day of Desert Festival

Playing the Bhapang 37

An Evening's Promise

the past and the present. A few things looked the same from the outside, but there were others that pricked me with changes. At moments, I looked at myself as the biggest anachronism; at others like an incongruity, as if I just didn’t belong there at that time and place. Aging was getting cryptic and the ineffectiveness of retrospection becoming more evident than ever before. There were no answers.

Six years. My emotions were a mixture of a stretched-thin excitement that had dampened but never vanished, and an indecipherable form of anguish. I had heard that the afterglow of a relationship dims with time until one day it vanishes. I had taken that at face value, and had always refrained from questioning it. But then I’d never called it a ‘break up’. That is too common a phrase to describe the end of one of the happiest phases of my life. Usually, I refrained from talking about it but I remember once I burst out to a friend, we just faded away.

We were college sweethearts, Riya and I, for three years. Our relationship was nearly perfect. Riya was gorgeous, charming, and smart. I, on the other hand, looked strictly okay, my academic results were bizarre, and I did not show any promise of a successful

future. Yet, Riya loved me! The fact compensated for all my weaknesses.  I was sitting, almost lying, on the embankment between the sea and the road.

The sun was moving steadily, progressively dissolving into the vastness of the ocean. The wavering reflections of the lights of various buildings on Marine Drive were collectively making the water resplendent. The horizon was wide and clear.

My phone played Din dhal jaye, haaye, raat na jaaye, that perfect song of twilight despair. I had a packet of cigarettes beside me. The evening was sucking me into an abyss of memories. By now, the evening was almost submerged in the night. There was something about the surroundings that I had already seen and felt, long ago. The air carried snatches of sound from a distant land. It was like an old record being played after a sabbatical, one of the records from the backroom that nobody listens to anymore. The floodlights of the Wankhede Stadium seemed to enclose a secret. They looked like four towers built around a small town, protecting it. Right behind me was the Air India building. On our first date, Riya had asked me a strange

Well, there is something special about being with the girl you want to be with on a day like that. It evokes oblique emotions. On that day, it seemed to me that the entire Marine Drive was embellished just for me.

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Reading Hour

Beloved Rebel: O P Nayyar

issue with the august panel. To my dismay, my own seniors didn’t support me. I was young and headstrong; I excused myself and left in a huff.

Outside Sea Lounge, my attention was attracted by a person dressed in white, sitting alone. He appeared frail but alert. A long ago image of a dashing young composer at a piano flashed before my eyes and I exclaimed, “OP Nayyar!” upon which my friend commented, “Your imagination was always wild!”

But OP Nayyar it was and he said, “Please join me.”

We had a four hour long first meeting.

“What have you done to your hand?” he wanted to know. I had fractured it and it hadn’t set after three surgeries; I was worried I would have to forsake surgery and sell sweets for a living. He prescribed homeopathic medicines for me and autographed my plaster.

He spoke of loneliness, after having enjoyed all the trappings of success. Even after critically reviewing his life, he had no regrets.

He believed compassion to be the greatest virtue, but insisted one had to hold to one’s

principles. He cautioned me gravely against women, with whom I was primarily concerned, being a gynaecologist! I was disarmed by this spontaneity towards a veritable stranger, so much his junior. When I spoke of his songs and what I liked about them, he remarked, “Bade gaur se sunte ho!”

He was a face-reader. He had already surmised my turmoil at the conference and the arm injury. I told him about my countercurrent research on forceps deliveries and the related tribulations. He strengthened my resolve so admirably that I ultimately completed ‘Hay’s Forceps – An Atlas M o n o g r a p h’ a n d i n c l u d e d i n t h e acknowledgements ‘O P Nayyar – the famous and loved rebel of Indian film music’.

The euphoria of that first meeting with OP Saab lasted several years. When I lost my younger brother suddenly and could not come to terms with my grief, I wrote to OP Saab. I treasure the reply he sent, full of quotations from the Bible and the Gita. His letter not only soothed me but rekindled all my old feeling for him. I finally renewed contact with him when

Tête à tête with OP Saab!

May-Jun 2012 Vol 2 Issue 3

49

Ghazal: An Eastern Inheritance

American poets is often linked to the Ghalib translation project of Aijaz Ahmed (1960s).

Poets like Adrienne Rich, William Stafford and W. S. Merwin worked with a literal translation of Ghalib’s ghazals to render their own versions in English. The translation project spawned an interest in the form, but early on, American poets wrote ghazals without an awareness of its rich, multicultural, multi-layered history, and paid insufficient attention to the formal constraints.

In fact, before Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001) took the stage to chide poets for calling any string of couplets a ghazal, English (American) poets created verses without constraints, without refrain, without meter, without the unity that is enforced by the rhyme scheme and the lament-like undercurrent.

The ghazals were without allusion or gratitude to the rich Eastern inheritance. Anguished by reading what passed for ghazal in English and acutely aware of the sub-textual richness of the form due to his Indian heritage, Shahid pointed out that “the Americans had got the ghazal quite wrong”. He explained, with examples, how to craft a ghazal in English. He later edited an anthology “Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English” of many contemporary poets he had accepted into the

fold (including some I would still dismiss as unrealized or unsuccessful attempts). The most compelling in the anthology is his own “Call Me Ishmael Tonight” (Fig. 1).

Celebrated ghazals by masters in Arabic, Persian, Urdu or Hindi have all the formal elements woven into an intricate, beautiful tapestry. In these ghazals, even though all constraints (social and literary) are respected, the resulting verses are very lyrical, ready to be recited or sung to diverse audiences who marvel at every turn of phrase and choice of rhyme, and find release and joy in the ageless words. In fact, the performance of a ghazal in the East involves a protocol unmatched by any I know of in Western poetry. The poet recites the first line of a couplet and repeats it, accentuating the effect by changing the tone or by stretching out or stressing a word. The audience repeats a phrase or the line, building an expectation. Now the second line is begun amidst much fanfare. Soon the refrain is on everybody’s lips, but the mystery of what might come before the refrain sustains the excitement. One couplet wins the approval of the audience; now the next is another battle, another journey, another conquest, till the final verse brings the lament to a halt, after which only a silent ache, a memory remains.

The Ghazal is an address by a poetprotagonist to a beloved (who could be imaginary, distant or absent). It is always a Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight? declaration, but hardly ever a monologue. It Whom else from rapture's road will you expel tonight? has a detached sense of a lost cause, yet hints I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates— of a latent hope that it will reach its intended A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight. ears. Sentimentality is abstracted to the Lord, cried out the idols, Don't let us be broken; extent that it becomes a metaphor for any Only we can convert the infidel tonight. unrealizable desire, or any cause worth In the heart's veined temple, all statues have been smashed. pining, fighting or dying for. The sufi poets No priest in saffron's left to toll its knell tonight. of the subcontinent and of Persia compose And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee— verses to the almighty, as the ultimate God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight. beloved. All good ghazals appeal in multiple incarnations; sensuous from the lips of a Fig. 1 Call Me Ishmael Tonight – Agha Shahid Ali courtesan, spiritual in the company of May-Jun 2012 Vol 2 Issue 3

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