Reading Hour Jul-Aug 2014 Preview

Altar of bones: Sedlec Chapel, Kutna Hora

Photo: G Karunakar

Jul-Aug 2014 Vol 4 Issue 4 64 pages

short fiction essays verse reviews

Published, owned, and printed by Vaishali Khandekar, and printed at National Printing Press, 580, KR Garden, Koramangala, Bangalore-560095 Published at 177-B Classic Orchards, Bannerghatta Rd, Bangalore-560076 Editor: Vaishali Khandekar Editing Support: Arun Kumar, Manjushree Hegde Subscriptions, business enquiries, feedback: readinghour@differsense.com Ph: +91 80 26595745 Subscription Details: Print (within India only) or Electronic (PDF): Annual subscription Rs. 300/- (6 issues) 2 years subscription Rs. 600/- (12 issues) Payment via cheque / DD in favour of ‘Differsense Ventures LLP’ payable at Bangalore. Subscription form elsewhere in this issue.

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Editorial If there’s one thing that is peculiarly human, it is creativity.

The creative instinct can, at an individual level, elevate a person from whatever be his or her situation; at a wider level, it can bring about advancement and fundamental changes in the way we live.

Where does this instinct spring from? Why is it stronger in some and not so in others? Does it fuel only artistic output, or does it also drive new answers to old, every day questions?

Faced with ever-growing heaps of skeletal remains, the Schwarzenberg family dispatched woodcarver F. Rint, to restore some order to the Sedlec Chapel. What resulted was a macabre, but creative result, and it is described by the much-travelled G Karunakar in his essay Kutna Hora.

A comparison of music and mathematics generally centres around beat, but Ramesh Gangolli delves deeper, exploring the creative thrill that underlies the pursuit of both in his essay Music and Mathematics.

For a writer to abandon his muse, albeit temporarily, and take up translation of another writer’s work there needs to be strong enough motivation; M Nazir Ali was indeed so motivated and describes the rewards of his endeavour in The Pleasures Of Translation. In Upstream, Jyoti Kanetkar tries to look inward for that ‘good place’ the writing sometimes originates from.

Artist-cartoonist Keshav combines the creativity-on-demand challenge of political cartooning, with that of portraying traditional Indian epics in a fresh way, and shares his insights.

Bharatnatyam dancer Rukmini Vijayakumar who, while involved in several creative pursuits, remains incredibly sincere about dance chats about her journey.

To the stories! A world-weary missionary, a slit-eyed school boy, a Bikaneri woman awakened to revenge, a day-dreaming adolescent, a caregiver at the end of her tether and a housewife who finds an unexpected moment of freedom… we hope you enjoy all their stories, as also the selection of poetry within.

Happy reading.

~Editors

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CONTENTS ESSAYS 15 27 50

FIRST PERSON

The Ossuary Of Kutna Hora g karunakar

13

The Pleasures Of Translation

Waking Up

paul mcGranaghan

m nazir ali

Music And Mathematics

LAST PAGE

ramesh gangolli

59

Upstream

jyoti kanetkar

INTERVIEWS

37

LIGHT STUFF

38

REVIEWS

FICTION 3

A Tired Butterfly

22

Rukmini

41

padma prasad

7

China Eye’s Heavy Eyelid

19

The Fantastic Adventures Of DJ Amal AJ

30

The Heart That Wears The Crown

46

Tulsi, Pepper And Something Else

54

The Crow’s Call

shashank tripathi

POETRY 6

Breakfast Love

14

Haiku

26

Theatre Of The Absurd

49

Personae

53

Lost Garden

aravind jayan b v saranyan

vidya panicker priya anand

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2

Keshav Venkataraghavan

Vijayakumar

pritha mondal

r v eswaran a p govindankutty rakhee pant mohankumar

Cover illustration: Keshav Reading Hour

FICTION A Tired Butterfly padma prasad Shashank is a farmer and is professionally trained in the art of film-making. He is an independent film-maker.

…

One day, one December, when she went to the bakery, she did not see Velu. At first, she thought that maybe he was sick. When more than a month passed by, she asked the owner what had happened.

“Velu’s gone off to get married, Miss Winson. This is the good month for marriages and his

mother

a good bride for

him back home.

In fact,” the man

consulted

calendar

wall which had

on

the

found the

a picture of several

grinning

Sri

Lankan fishermen

displaying

an

immense haul of a

fish that looked

like tuna, “he must

be married by

now. They are waiting for the girl’s papers. He’ll be coming soon.”

Velu returned at the end of February. Miss Winson congratulated him. He smiled his thanks and brought her loaf and cutlets and packed them with his usual deft, clean strokes. He told her that his wife was still back home; her papers would take another six months to be processed.

FICTION China Eye’s Heavy Eyelid shashank tripathi Shashank is a farmer and is professionally trained in the art of film-making. He is an independent film-maker.

“God is great. He has a beautiful wife,” he thought. The most beautiful girl in the class played the Goddess-Queen. Standing alongside the good-looking God-King, she commanded reverence. She blessed Koya; her palms facing him. She was kind and friendly on stage and played her character with benevolent

affection. She smiled at Koya. Seduced, Koya bowed with greater reverence. Her smile widened.

He did not fail her. He widened his eyes the best he could and smiled back at her. His bow of reverence now looked like the hunched back of an old wicked woman.

He had widened his eyes and smiled so much that the thick eye makeup smudged and his mouth salivated. His watering eyes bulged forth and reddened, burning with

the strain of staying open wide. They resembled smouldering embers.

“Shabash! Well done!” Koya was patted and congratulated by everybody for his outstanding portrayal of the benevolent demon. The curtain was down.

FIRST PERSON Waking Up paul mcgranahan Paul is a Dublin based writer interested in nature and travel writing.

…Climbing over that gate was to go out into the beckoning world, exchanging clipped hedges for hedgerows, and pampas grass by bird-baths for rusted sprays of dock plants that pinned puddles to the low meadows.

My steps splashed through a slush of sodden clover and lady’s-thumb-print, all the way to that tumbling cascade of trees and briars, and nettles knotted with dodder. That’s where I heard it rustling. It was a dusty crackle of splitcoal and celluloid, fluttering and sooty beneath the stem of a briar. How it had managed to trap itself, I had no idea. But there it was: a crow, pinions splayed and, for want of a better word, panicking.

Crows were one of those common, everyday things. They were mundane; as mundane as the galvanized streetlights they perched on, or the rubbish bins they stole from. They were part of the wall-paper of the world, as familiar and as overlooked as pigeons are in cities. But this one wasn’t distant, nor was it familiar. Crows usually assumed a role, but this one wasn’t acting to type. It wasn’t crafty, wasn’t jeering from steeples, or heckling from telegraph poles. This one wasn’t eyeing a quick opportunity for dropped food. It wasn’t confident, wasn’t clever.

ESSAY The Ossuary Of Kutna Hora g karunakar G Karunakar served the Govt of Karnataka as Law Officer for three decades. He enjoys travel and has visited a 100 countries.

Last summer, I was church-bagging in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. Having visited all its major attractions, I decided on a day’s trip out of the buzzing city. My hotel manager suggested that I visit a medieval town called Kutna Hora, sixty-five kilometers east of Prague and said that I would be rewarded with a glimpse of something rare and unusual. He disclosed the fact that the said town, besides its popular silver mines, boasted a Bohemian period church decorated with human bones. Human bones?

I needed no further enticement. Following his suggestion, I boarded a suburban train the next morning from Prague Central… In an hour I was in Kutna Hora, the 13th century silver mining town. In the square outside the station is an elegant ornamental church dedicated to patron saint Barbara with eight radial chapels and trapezoidal interiors. I spent about an hour going around this magnificent edifice and then had a coffee break. Though a local bus was in sight, I decided, rather perversely, to take a walk in the sweltering heat to the western suburb of the town, where I would find the Sedlec Graveyard Chapel aka Ossuary Chapel or ‘Bone Church’.

It stands majestically, and appropriately, in the middle of a cemetery.

FICTION The Fantastic Adventures Of DJ Amal AJ aravind jayan Aravind is a student of journalism at the Symbiosis International University. His work has appeared in Tehelka, Pune Diaries, Young World and Betweenthelines.

…

The DJ machine was much costlier than a gas stove, however, and his dependence on his parents in every sense of the word put him in a tough position. He introduced the topic during a moment of musical euphoria and synergy in the house, when, after a special round of Idea Star Singer, the judges and his parents were all praise for the girl who had just sung her heart out about the inevitability of death and defeat. Though jubilant about the girl making it to the next round, his parents were not a bit supportive of his idea, even when he said he would sacrifice the possibility of a new bike.

This rejection, he took to his heart.

DJ Amal AJ, struck down in all earnestness, his dreams crushed, his soul rebuked by caregivers who gave no care, lay upon his bed, and thought of how the magazines would carry this excerpt of a tough life. He thought it deserved to be italicized; perhaps it would appear under a picture of his house. “DJ Amal Aj was a talent almost lost to the world when at the age of 18, his parents refused him a DJ machine. Despite him having saved some money on his own, it wasn’t enough.” There would also be mention of the gas stove once again, where they would describe how he stayed up by the gas stove all night listening to music, imagining and reimagining the songs as they would sound after he’d worked on them. He went off to sleep early that night though, while listening to music on his phone.

Chatting With Rukmini

Dancer, choreographer, teacher, model, Pilates instructor, actress... definitely not just an arresting face, Rukmini Vijayakumar is a vibrant bundle of talent and energy. Trained under Bharatnatyam gurus Narmada, Padmini Rao and Sundari Santhanam, Rukmini also holds a BFA degree in Ballet and Modern Dance from The Boston Conservatory. She has performed solo at several prestigious festivals - Khajuraho, Ujjain, Chidambaram, Mysore, and others. She has acted in Tamil and Kannada movies, and has appeared in television and print advertisements for a number of brands.

Despite these varied facets to her personality, what comes through in her conversation with Reading Hour, is that she is, at her core, a dancer, and very serious about her art.

ESSAY The Pleasures Of Translation m nazir ali Nazir is Associate Professor of English at a Puducherry college. He is a poet and has recently published a translation of Tamil poetry.

…When I was a student ‘doing’ English literature, I had a Tamil professor called M L Thangappa. He was ideologically left-leaning, something of a purist in Tamil usage, and someone who insisted on the primacy of the mother tongue in education. I didn’t know then that among his varied skills, translation was one. Years later when he brought out an English translation of a selection of Sangam poems, I was surprised by the felicity he displayed in the use of the English language because I knew him only as Tamil scholar extraordinaire. The volume, published by Penguin-Viking under the title Love Stands Alone packed enough of an impact to make me look at translation with new interest. And it had an extraordinary tale to tell about the race of people to which I belonged, a tale which had remained hitherto unknown to me. And Thangappa told these tales of love, war, ethics and the generosity of kings in a voice which I knew to be his own – sober, unimpassioned and conversational. Selective though this translation was, the glimpses it offered into Tamil culture persuaded me to probe into Sangam literature which had got a new lease of life thanks to the efforts of Dr U V Swaminatha Aiyar and many other literary luminaries. My translation of Ainkurunuru, under the title Classical Tamil Love Poetry is a direct result of these activities.

It is difficult to describe the supreme satisfaction this effort gave me because what it recreates is a lost world, a world of pristine rivers, abundant wild life and the ecologically conflict-free existence that man led, all narrated in verses of such artistry, as I never thought an ancient civilization would display.

FICTION The Heart That Wears the Crown b v saranyan Saranyan wandered into the realm of literature by mistake, but loves to dwell here.

I do not know any other place but Bikaner. I love beautiful clothes, I like bright pink or even yellow, I wish I could afford new dresses; it is always old ones that are doled out to me. My husband, Bhika, he works for the hotel run by the king in his palace. White Sahibs stay there with their Memsahibs.

He is not a king anymore, there are no kings in our country. He can’t maintain such a big house without an income.

I am going to vote in the coming elections.

This will be my first time. Bhika got my name entered in the register since I came of age. I don’t like Bhika telling me whom to vote for.

My house is small, it is in the basement of an old building. The tailor’s shop above us faces the street, and above the shops reside families whose men are merchants. The women never talk to me.

Bhika is a darwaan in the Hotel. His job is to stand at the entrance dressed like a commander soldier from the king’s army. The king had a Camel regiment once, it is disbanded now. Bhika opens and shuts the door when guests pass through.

Chatting With Keshav

Long time political cartoonist for The Hindu daily, Keshav Venkataraghavan says, ‘Cartooning is my profession.

Painting is my passion.’ Curiously, he received no formal training in either, being a post-graduate in commerce and an ex-banker! Having abandoned banking in the 1980s, he is, today, a prolific painter and one of his most interesting projects is the Krishnaa-day series where he attempts to create a fresh portrayal of Krishna every day using a variety of depictions across mediums, styles, stories, even nationalities. In this chat with Reading Hour, Keshav shares his insights into creativity and the element of the divine in art.

FICTION Tuslsi, Pepper And Something Else vidya panicker Vidya is a doctoral student at the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode. She is an avid reader and enthusiastic writer. Her poetry has been published in online journals.

…When it had happened the first time, Varalekshmi had gone to apartment 2B (they were new occupants and all the other residents there knew how the machine operated) and knocked. A woman, fair like water apples, with blue eyes and blond hair opened the door. So this was the American woman everyone was talking about, thought Varalekshmi, though she was sure this woman was not American. European, more likely. It was ironical that in spite of having been a British territory for over 400 years, Indians assumed that every fair skinned foreigner was American. It turned out that the woman was German, on a three month study trip to India. The travel and the accommodation were both sponsored by her college and she was there with her partner and her child so that they could cram in a vacation along with her studies. Her name was Victoria. Varalekshmi had to repeat her own name several times. They finally decided that Victoria would call Varalekshmi simply ‘V’, because that was the only thing their names (and themselves) had in common. Varalekshmi however asserted that she was not going to forget Victoria’s name because that was the name of a popular international lingerie brand. “Some secret brand, is it not?” asked Varalekshmi and both the women roared with laughter.

POETRY Lost Garden

Personae

mohankumar

rakhee pant

Mohankumar has written for leading literary journals in India. He has seven volumes of poetry in English to his credit.

Rakhee enjoys writing short stories, poems and short essays.

Breakfast Love

Haiku

pritha mondal

r v eswaran

Pritha studies at Emory University, USA, and hopes to major in English or Art.

Eswaran is a fengshui and life management consultant, who enjoys writing haiku for his own pleasure.

Theatre Of The Absurd a p govindankutty

Govindankutty writes occasionally; in both Malayalam and English.

REVIEWS Are you reading this?

The 40 Rules Of Love Elif shafak Review: Abha Sah

The Postman Always Rings Twice James M Cain Review: Manjushree Hegde

ESSAY Music And Mathematics ramesh gangolli Ramesh Gangolli, a musicologist, philanthropist and mathematician, spent most of his life teaching in universities. He is a living encyclopaedia on Pt. Vishnu Narayan Bhatkande’s works. He lives in Seattle, USA.

‌ In my experience, creative activity in Mathematics as well as in Music seems to proceed along very similar lines: In expounding a particular raga, the performer is confronted, at each moment, with a set of aesthetic choices.

The possibilities, for example as regards phrasing or intonation, do not appear as a systematic list, but are grasped intuitively, and the decision to follow a particular musical idea among the various possible ones is made intuitively. As the elaboration proceeds, the performer may find that the chosen approach needs to be modified or even abandoned in favour of another approach. Again, this perception is intuitive, and there can be no algorithmic description of how it is made. This process is very similar to the situation one encounters in Mathematical work. When faced with a problem to be solved, the mathematician has to choose between several available ideas that may hold the key to the solution. These are generated intuitively, and the choice between them is made on intuitive grounds that cannot be codified ‌

FICTION The Crow’s Call priya anand Priya is a Bangalore based writer who works to empower rural women from disadvantaged and vulnerable communities in India. Her writing has appeared in Spark, Bangalore Mag and Bangalore Review. She belongs to the Bangalore Writers Workshop.

Madhuram looked down at her nonagenarian mother’s body with dispassion. Her mother had shrunk even further in death, her petite frame now almost dwarf like in its appearance. It was raining outside, the thunder claps like frenzied drums at a funeral, the droplets striking the window frame and bouncing off, spraying Madhuram’s face, as if to belie her dry eyes.

But her

eyes had been dry even when her husband, and then her father had died.

“We should never have left her here. She died of a broken heart,” said Madhuram’s daughter Suguna, tears streaming down her face. Madhuram didn’t speak, but continued to look down at her mother. She remembered that humid, overcast day, when she had decided to put her in an old age home.

LAST PAGE Upstream jyoti kanetkar

She knew from experience that if she as much as shifted her gaze or stopped to adjust the pillow at her back, the writing would change.

Sometimes the trouble was different. It was too many thoughts, all vying to be put down on paper. If her pen chased one idea, some others would glide away like silent fish in a clear stream. She would see them but they would be gone before she could catch them.

The times when she was comfortable, when the going was good, when there was continuity in her thoughts, she knew that they originated from that good place. In the process of writing she tried to swim upstream to it.

Sometimes she had to give up within a thought or two or risk losing the entire piece.

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Dancer Rukmini Vijayakumar Photo: Sunder Ramu