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INDIA
Critical Re ective Journalism
it stops” “The meaning of life is that-Franz Kafka
Special issue Fact Graphic Fiction
Kafkaesque tales from here and there
1st June 2011
KINDLE
KINDLE Critical Reflective Journalism
INDIA
Editor in Chief: Pritha Kejriwal Managing Editor: Maitreyi Kandoi Senior Editor: Sayantan Neogi Assistant Editor: Sayan Bhattacharya Roving Editor: Mukherjee P Feature Writers: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Novy Kapadia, Raza Ahmad Rumi, Abhishek Chatterjee, Nitasha Kaul, Shubham Nag, Ritu Kedia Columnists: Teresa Rehman, Abhijit Gupta, Aditya Bidikar, Mainak Bhaumik, Gautam Bhimani, Rohit Roy, Shabbir Akhtar, Vilzaar Kashmiri, Aishwarya Subramanian, Agniva Chowdhury Art Director: Sagnik Gangopadhyay Art Executive: Soumik Lahiri Marketing Manager: Priyanka Khandelia Marketing Executive: Souvik Sen Finance Manager: Binoy Kr. Jana Finance Executives: Dibyendu Chakraborty, Vishal Thakur Head - Logistics: Arindam Sarkar Printed at: CDC Printers Pvt Ltd, Tangra Industrial Estate - II (Bengal Pottery), 45 Radhanath Chowdhury Road, Kolkata - 700 015. Distribution: Kolkata: Vishal Book Centre Jamshedpur: Prasad Magazine Centre Pune, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Delhi, Jaipur, Chennai, Lucknow, Vadodara, Hyderabad: Outlook Publishing Pvt Ltd North East: M P Book Stall, Durga News Agency Vol 2 Issue 3 June 2011 For subscription queries: SMS kindle (space) sub to 575756 or visit www.kindlemag.in or write to info@kindlemag.in For advertising, write to us at: advertising@kindlemag.in For marketing alliances, write to us at: alliances@kindlemag.in Owned, printed and published by Pritha Kejriwal on behalf of Ink Publications Pvt Ltd. Printed at CDC Printers Pvt Ltd and published from Kolkata. Ink Publications Pvt Ltd is not responsible for the statements and opinions expressed by authors in their articles/writeups published in ‘Kindle’. ‘Kindle’ does not take any responsibility for returning unsolicited publishing material. All pictures, if not mentioned otherwise, are from Reuters. Visit: www.kindlemag.in RNI NO. WBENG/2010/36111
Editor’s Note The good guy Franz and his ugly ghost Kafka: I knew Franz. I was aware of his antagonistic relationship with his father which consequently led to a complete lack of confidence, his timid nature, his urge to find an escape within himself, his mental trauma and yet a complete clarity of the realities that existed . From this was born Kafka. The offspring of a tormented mind. And Kafka the ghost took over. Into literature, into politics, into society, into relationships, into institutions, into sanctity. You don’t have to read Franz to understand the term ‘Kafkaesque’. We opened the editorial content of this issue to our readers and invited contributions from their own ‘Kafkaesque’ experiences. What we received in our inbox was a slew of poems, stories, essays, graphic stories - which, if we printed all, would run into many issues. The common thread in almost all of it, is a deep understanding and acceptance of the world as it exists. Without any lament, pretentions of idealism or remorse. Surreal yet real. Nightmarish in broad daylight. Simply complex. In our mix of stories, the old gravedigger of Kashmir carries on his usual task of burying the country’s youth as matter- of- factly as the Child, Poet and Politician lose their innate identities as they struggle to perform their sacred roles in society. Yes, the ghost has taken over. And killed all the exorcists.
Maitreyi Kandoi, Managing Editor, mk@kindlemag.in
Write to us at: Kindle, Ink Publications Pvt Ltd, DN 37, Sector V, Salt Lake City, Kolkata - 700 091 or email your response to us at feedback@kindlemag.in or, post on our facebook group wall: Kindle Magazine (group)
Dear Kindle, The same people who’ve supported Anna Hazare in his “revolution” have appeared on MTV’s youth poll, with 47% claiming they would actually give or accept bribes. Hypocrites, wannabes. Regards, Dimitiar Berbatov (name changed)
Dear Editor, Media hype brings out the brains/lack thereof in people. We see something which sparks halfformed desire to “change the world” and support it without fully understanding it. Sad state of affairs, this. My best, Pranaadhika Sinha Devburman, via facebook
Dear Kindle, Thanks a ton for recognizing Debate.fm as the Website of the Month in your May edition ... We are obliged... Regards, Kamanashish Roy.
Dear Kindle, While I must congratulate Kindle for the interesting choice of cover stories and features but with Mamata Banerjee at the helm of West Bengal and talks of returning farm land to the unwilling agriculturalists in Singur and the whole Bhatta Parsaul controversy, the Pandora’s Box of agriculture versus industry has once again opened. While it is dangerous to debate this whole issue in binaries, neither the plight of farmers nor the importance of industry can be ignored. So it is my earnest request to Kindle to do an extensive cover story on this issue. Regards, Priyodarshini Gupta 04 kindle india
June 2011
12 Solitude
An interview with S. Someetharan
By Sayan Bhattacharya
21
Katha Kafka ya Paanch Chinar ki Kahaani: Fragments from between 2005 & 2011
By Mukherjee P
28
Staring at a box and scratching clay feet Kafka wakes up in present day Kolkata and w a t c h e s T V t h r o u g h t h e d a y. . .
By Sayantan Neogi
Contents
Fact
Fiction 52
56
Night as it was
The Gravediggers of Kashmir By Jasvinder Sharma
By Nitasha Kaul
66
60
Pastiche
A Tale of Desparate Fledglings By Rohit Roy
By Rachaita Hore
62
49
The Unkindest Stroke
Trial and Error
Metamorphosis...
48
68
By Priyasha Hoare
By Suvagata Roy Chowdhury
47
Migraine
By Arjun Mukerji
47
By Mainak Bhaumik
Nubile
By Shreya Chatterjee
46
The Burned Alive Medicine Man
By Rimi B Chatterjee
The Spammer By Joy Bhattacherjee
Illustrations by Sagnik Gangopadhyay
Graphic
34 Chains
By Aditya Bidikar & Nitin Veturkar
38
The Prey By Appupen
41
The Department By Kailash Iyer
Fact Reportage Current Affairs
Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening by Salvador Dali - 1944
Solitude
An interview with S. Someetharan
A lone sand grain woke up one morning and found itself trampled by stampeding Tamil feet. The next day, a 10 ft by 20 ft stupa was to be built on the site where he lay. This wasn’t Gaza but it could well have been. This island nation had two smaller islands in it and they were tectonically drifting apart. A little boy’s tear drop had a lineage, a language and an ethnicity; he was never a little boy crying for his lost toys. We found this little boy, now a man, talking about his existence and that lost road back to his childhood. This man spoke of a neo-fascist regime from which he was seeking refuge. This man is a journalist-turned film maker. His name is Sritharan Someetharan and he’s still looking for his solitude. By Sayan Bhattacharya. 12 kindle india
June 2011
FACT
What does childhood mean in a war torn region? I was born during the war. The Jaffna library was burnt during the 80s. Just 19 days before it was burnt, I was born in the same place. The war became our life. Not just the bombings and attacks but also economic problems. We didn’t have electricity, no proper food; rice was the only food for us. And the education system was in shambles, we didn’t have proper facilities; they even banned the chemicals for our school’s science experiments. There were economic blockades in the LTTE controlled area by the government, the other half of the land was controlled by the government. One day, I wished my friend on his birthday, and then the next evening we got the news that he had died in a bomb attack. This was common. So we all emotionally supported the LTTE. What else do you if you lose your parents in front of your eyes? When I was in the 4th standard, we delivered speeches on the LTTE stage and my mother thought that her son had also joined LTTE. So we moved out of the LTTE controlled area when I was in the 5th standard because once you were 14, you would require passes to leave that area. So when I was 10 year old, we settled in the city which was controlled by the government. There also, it was full of soldiers; soldiers with guns. I studied in a big school but half of my school was occupied by soldiers. We could only see the school ground but not play because the soldiers either trained or played there. So our only form of entertainment was Tamil films. We could only be out between 6 o’clock in the morning and 6 o’clock in the evening. The rest of the day was curfew. Sometimes at 5 - 5:30 in the morning, someone would knock at the door and rounded us up, brought us to the temple ground or some other common place. Only old people could stay back. They took our identity cards. Sometimes, there would be people in black masks
who would direct us where to go. If he would nod his head horizontally, we could leave, if he nodded vertically, we would have to go the other way. This was life. After every kilometre we had checkpoints. If we travelled by bicycle or car, we would have to get down and walk up to the checkpoint, show our bags and then go. I lived in East Sri Lanka, if I were to go to Colombo which is 50kms away by train, then normally we faced at least 13 to 14 checkpoints. During my school days in the early 90s, I saw so many dead bodies on the roads. People
book. It says that all Tamilians came from India and so Sri Lanka is the land of the Sinhalese. This created a lot of difference. Sinhalese students think that it is their land, so why are Tamils fighting for their rights? They think Tamils are migrants. This is the mindset even though Sri Lankan Tamils are originally from Sri Lanka. In Tamil areas, the Sri Lankan army is a symbol of the Sinhalese. Similarly, my Sinhalese friends felt that Tamils are like the LTTE. I have read somewhere that you have lost two houses in bomb attacks….
You see, development victims are same as war victims. In 2005, I made a film on the victims of hazardous wastes from 20 chemical factories in 30 villages in the Cuddalore district, close to Puducherry. These people can’t breathe properly would be burnt; they put tyres on fire and burnt people. Yet school day romances, pranks also happened under the war. A friend, once, liked a girl but did not have the courage to face her. So another friend told him to say the LTTE slogan, ‘Our dream is freedom’, whenever he felt afraid in front of the girl. So, as a child, did you have any Sinhalese friends? Were you aware of the discrimination right from childhood?
But it’s normal. More than 90% Sri Lankan Tamils lost their houses, most of them lost their relations during the war. It’s natural. Personally, I lost my house in 1990 in East Sri Lanka. I loved that house, but lost my first day photographs, my birthday photographs….all my memories. When I was in the 2nd standard, my mother said that I was an adult so I should sleep separately. She brought me a bed; small wooden bed. Everyday after school, I went and watched the carpenter making my bed, I was very happy. It was beautifully carved. But, for only 4 months, I slept on that bed, and then my house was fully destroyed. Then later in 2000, we lost another house. It was partly destroyed. It was a big traditional house with a big garden around with several palmyra trees, coconut trees and some mango trees. So, when they attacked from multiple sides, these trees protected our house. The trees lost their heads; headless Palmyra trees, headless coconut trees….. From journalism to films, how did it happen? Was it purely a creative decision or was it out of all the experiences that you have assimilated over the years?
My childhood ambition was to be a computer engineer because an We didn’t have any Sinhalese friends astrologer had said that I would be an during our school days because we were engineer. So, then I made my mind to totally divided. The Sinhala area, the be an engineer. But after school my Tamil area…. We could not understand ambition changed. I became a radio each others’ problems. The government jockey to become popular and also produced a book; a government history the money was good. I won the school June 2011 kindle india 13
topper’s award for scouting. My people asked me not to take it as President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga would give it. But I took it. After radio, I joined a daily newspaper. I met some great journalists and they changed my outlook completely. While working for the Northeastern Herald, I wrote an article on the missing people of Sri Lanka. At that time, the BBC wanted to make a documentary on Sri Lanka. Their correspondent Francis Harrison talked to me about my article. So I started working with them. It was a great learning experience. Then I started working independently and moved to Chennai to study more about visual media in Loyola College. What does it mean to be an independent media activist or journalist in post LTTE Sri Lanka, considering the fact that so many journalists have been killed and so many are living abroad today ? The situation is certainly undemocratic. In the past 3 years, nearly 42 media workers have been killed, including journalists, editors, media activists, even the circulation and advertising people. So many have been attacked in Jaffna, in Colombo. The government says that they were killed by unidentified gunmen, now what does that mean? Will they remain unidentified forever? Journalists used to say that Sri Lanka has 3 parts, one the Government, next the LTTE and third the unidentified gunmen! One of my fellow colleagues, Tissainayagam got 20 years imprisonment, then in January 2009 the outspoken journalist Lasantha Wikramatunga was killed. Independent journalists, human rights activists or filmmakers can’t live and work in Sri Lanka, because you can’t disagree with the government, can’t talk about the
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war. You have to be with Rajapakse. Not only the Tamils, nearly 40 Sinhalese reporters, activists, film-makers are outside now, they have left the country.
international news agencies. And, you know, some of the Sinhalese journalists only, I don’t know who, gave the horrible visuals of war to Channel 4.
Were they supporting the Tamil movement?
You don’t see a situation when these journalists can finally come back to Sri Lanka?
No, not supporting the Tamil Movement, they do not support a separate Tamil homeland. They want a unified Sri Lanka. They were criticizing government atrocities, the war crimes, the way the government runs because Sri Lanka is totally under the control of the Mahinda Rajapakse family. Moreover the influence of China and India are very high on Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is just selling itself. The north east is for India, south for China. So the Sinhals criticized this also. You are making a film about the atrocities of the state but cannot show it to the people on whom you have made it. How do you address this whole irony? My first film, ‘Burning Memory’, about the burning of the Jaffna Library, was cleared because at that time, the UNP (United National Party) was in the government, which now, is in the opposition. It is available in Sri Lanka now; you can freely show it because the present government was not attacked in that film. The period covered is 1981 to 2003, and that is not Rajapakse’s period. But my recent film, ‘Mullaitivu Saga’ is a problem because it’s about the final days of the war. So, is there no way by which media activists can work independently in Sri Lanka without their security being jeopardized? Most of the journalists are silent now. Tamil journalists who have left the country to settle abroad are now working in petrol pumps and super markets; they have settled there along with their families. And they don’t have any plan to come to Sri Lanka. The Sinhalese journalists…..some of them are very silent; hide themselves because they have families in Sri Lanka. Others are working…working with some other
You know it’s very difficult. After the UN war crime report came out, the situation has worsened. If you write an article criticising the government, then you have a problem. So, if you want to work in Sri Lanka, you have to be with Mahinda Rajapakse. What about the Constitution, the rights of freedom of expression in Sri Lanka? There’s a good Constitution for the freedom of expression… So, how does Rajapakse subvert the rights? Some months back, he also spoke about the freedom of speech and expression. He called up the media and said that they could freely write their views and opinions, but the final touch came when he said, “You should be with us, and you should work for our country.” So what does that mean? Yes, we all love our country and that is why we criticise it. What are your views on the UN war crime report? The Tamils have been fighting for their rights for more than 60 years but they haven’t received any justice. The Sri Lankan government has set a bad example for the world. They say, ‘One nation, one people.’ But all problems cannot be settled with the gun. The government needs to be exposed. The UN should be allowed to enter Sri Lanka. It’s a matter of death of more than one lakh people. I think we must have a people’s opinion poll because people, who are the oldest victims should decide their future- separate states or a federal structure. We already have such examples in Sudan, East Timor and Kosovo.
FACT
The Visage of War by Salvador Dali 1940
reports, all of it was
Do you agree that Sri Lanka is functioning like a dictatorial regime now with the entire Rajapakse family at the helm? Yes absolutely. They are everywhere from government to business. So, how do you view the elections that were held? Elections happened, Mahinda Rajapakse won. But the opposition groups said this was not the right way to conduct elections. The Election Commissioner who is a very senior man… for more than 15 years, he is the Election Commissioner of Sri Lanka, said, “In my experience, this was a bad election. I would like to resign from my job.” It’s like that… Sarath Fonseka was a General under Rajapakse and then he fought and lost the elections. He was arrested. Recently, there were reports that he was involved in the murder of the renowned editor, Wickramatunga. So, what is your take on Fonseka, visà-vis Rajapakse? Okay, Rajapakse’s ministers have alleged this. But, when Lasantha Wickramatunga was killed, at that time, Sarath Fonseka was the General of the Army under Rajapakse’s government. So, this is my answer. They blamed him but at that time, he was the General.
It is not Sarath Fonseka but the Sri Lankan General who is involved in Lasantha Wickramatunga’s killing. Also what about Sivaram’s killing? The genius senior journalist Sivaram was killed in 2005. What about that? Who were the ones who killed him? What about the other journalists killed? Tissainayagam was freed on bail and now he is in America. How do you view this new ‘progressive’ face of Rajapakse? Basically, the Sri Lankan government plans to cover up its past. That is why they gave bail to Tissainayagam and it was announced by the President on 3rd May, 2010 which was World Press Freedom Day. So that was the symbolism. It’s all because of pressure; world pressure. The pressure from the West, the war crime
mounting . So, they had to cover themselves up. That is why they can free anyone. But tell me something. After getting bail has Tissainayagam written anything? That’s the thing. If you are silent, you are safe. In Sri Lanka also, there are some people, I cannot mention, some activists are there, who are silent. Some of the old activists; the old human rights activists who were against other governments in the 90s, are all with Mahinda Rajapakse. There is this person called Vasudeva Nanayakkra, he’s a very prominent Leftist, he protested against Chandrika Bandaranaike’s war, he supported Tamil people also. Now, he is a minister in Mahinda Rajapakse’s cabinet. There are such other journalists also. Going beyond politics, how do you see the rehabilitation of the ones displaced by the war? True…all that we discuss is politics. But the people who have faced the war for the past 30 years, lots of them are in camps, so they should be resettled and this is a very sad thing. Their situation is terrible. No education, no medical help. How will they reorganize their lives? But the thing is development should be aimed for the people. The airport
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FACT
Do not get disturbed by these images. June 2011
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reconstruction, factories, the highways are not the only and the most immediate development we need. The people should be resettled. The situation during the monsoons becomes worse. These people live in small huts, water floats all around them. They should get back their lives. So the process hasn’t started as yet? The process is going on but it’s not directly helping these people. The first thing is to give them proper shelter and you need certain basic things to develop their lives… fishermen… farmers… so they have to start their farming, fishing… but now the problem is, the fishing areas are under government control, the farming areas are high security zones. So now what? These people do not have their basic necessities and you are building airports! We have seen in papers that Rajapakse is going around seeking investment for infrastructure projects. So how necessary they are? Sri Lanka is going through an economic crisis. So they need money. So money for building airports? Yes that is because lots of multinational companies have entered Sri Lanka. So they need airports, they need harbours. So does this mean that international funds have not been channeled for rehabilitation but they are being spent on infrastructure projects? They spent some money on war victims also but it is not enough. The people’s resettlement is an emergency need. That should be the first. I met some people; it’s really a terrible situation. For the past one and a half year they are living in huts, they don’t have proper food. One friend of mine went there, they were asking him, “Please buy bread for us.” That’s how it is. I have read in newspaper reports that even drinking water ponds were poisoned by the army...
Coming from rehabilitation, do you think Sri Lanka is also witnessing the forces of globalization? Yes. Sri Lanka is already sold out. Please elaborate. Why is the fight against Tamils so important when the country has been sold to companies? There are Indian companies, Chinese companies, their big projects. You will find a lot of Chinese flags in Sri Lanka. The government said, “We want the war,” but it is not the real victory for the Sinhalese people because it is a victory for multi-national companies. They can now easily move into Sri Lanka, they can easily establish their companies in Sri Lanka and can use Sri Lanka as a good market.
the Indo-Sri Lanka ties right from the 80s when Rajiv Gandhi sent his so called ‘peace keeping forces’ to today when our government supports Rajapakse? Tamils were a good friend of India, but India lost their good friends and Tamils also lost India’s friendship. After Indo-Sri Lankan pact, the
So, in which sectors are they more active? After the war, now more than 7 or 8 cell phone companies are there. You can see cell phone towers everywhere. Even in the war torn areas, you get cell phone towers. No houses for people, even the existing ones have been destroyed but cell phone towers are there everywhere. Everyone has a cell phone. Television is so popular. Earlier, we didn’t have access to basic technology; we couldn’t access cell phones, internet. Before the war, the literacy ratio of the Tamils was very high. The last time I went to my school, which was after the war, my Principal, he said, “Our education system is gone now.” You see, all the students now have psychological problems. This social setup has to be reworked because post war, psychological symptoms have become very common.
I also read the news but I cannot confirm Coming to relations between Sri Lanka and India, how do you view it. I don’t know. 18 kindle india June 2011
Premonition of Civil War by Salvador Dali - 1936
FACT
central focus of the LTTE was armed struggle. At that time when J.R. Jayawardena wanted to destroy IndoTamil relations, he had done well and that’s why he invited the Indian Army to Sri Lanka. Whenever someone asked him, “Why did you get Indian Army to Sri Lanka? It’s a big army, you cannot tell them to go back.” Then, J.R. Jayawardena
said, “Rajiv Gandhi’s age is my political experience.” J.R. Jayawardena was the first finance minister of independent Sri Lanka. At the time of the Indo-Sri Lanka pact, he was the President. Rajiv assumed power in 1984 and IndoSri Lankan talks began in 1985. So how would the new government understand Sri Lankan problems? The diplomats were new. At the Saarc summit in Bangalore, Jayawardena told Rajiv that there was a lot of crisis in Srilanka due to the left movement called the JVP. So, the pact was made and Sri Lankan army was trained in India. Earlier it was the Tamil militants who were trained in Dehradun. At the end Sri Lanka did not lose much but you lost your Prime Minister. J.R. Jayawardena made the platform for Mahinda Rajapakse to create this war. So, you can understand what I am saying about the Indo-Sri Lanka pact. Even today, they never accept the Indo-Sri Lanka pact even after 13 amendments; the Sri Lankan government never accepts that. India has no nuanced foreign policy on Sri Lanka or even China for that matter. Your thoughts on the LTTE and their role in the Tamil struggle.
LTTE did a rethink and after 1995 they did not conduct any suicide attacks. Their attacks became planned. In 2000, they attacked the airport at a time when there was no arrival or departure at the Colombo airport. They spoke to Norway and were ready to come down from their demand for a separate land to a federal system. In December 2000, the LTTE announced a 4 month ceasefire but the day it ended, the Government attacked them. They had used this period to strengthen their military power. Do you think that the LTTE can restructure itself and come back? If the Sri Lankan government continues with the Sinhalisation of the country, there is bound to be some form of armed struggle. Look at the new administrative capital of Sri Jayawardenapura Kotte. All Tamil symbols are being wiped out. We don’t want another war. We have already suffered a lot. This is the right time for the Government to step in. How do you analyse the way the Indian media has covered Sri Lanka? The Indian media has always focused on the LTTE, the refrain being ‘Where is Prabhakaran?’ They are not concerned about the ordinary Tamil people. You can’t label all Tamil activists as LTTE. May 18th, 2009 was officially the last day of the war. Newspapers, here, wrote about Prabhakaran’s death but more than 20000 people were killed in those 2 days. His family was wiped out. Even ‘The Hindu’ was no different. Its editor N. Ram wrote that the Sri Lankan camps are the world’s best refugee camps. In fact he is very close to the Sri Lankan leadership. When the Sri Lankan media boycotted the Sri Lanka Ratna awards, he received it. ‘The Hindu’ talks so much about Arundhati Roy’s freedom of speech. What about us?
You have to understand that the LTTE was politically illiterate. They were just a part of the Tamil Movement, an armed one. Many Tamils support them, many And what about support from Indian don’t. The death of Rajiv Gandhi Tamil politicians? has affected Tamils across Sri Lanka. We all feel accused in India for that What about them? May 18th, 2009, the death. One of the authors of ‘Broken last day of the war was also the day when Palmyra’, Rajini Thiranagama was killed your DMK was lobbying for the telecom by the LTTE for criticizing them. Even ministry in the UPA government. President Premadasa was killed. But the What more do I say? Look at the state June 2011 kindle india 19
elections. The vote was not so much for Jayalalitha as it was against Karunanidhi and Congress. I don’t think the 2G scam was that important an issue in rural Tamil Nadu. Corruption at the grassroots was more important. The panchayat level leaders from DMK thought they were kings, forcibly buying lands. The killing of fishermen by the Sri Lankan navy also became an important issue. Jayalalitha went to their families, gave them two lakh rupees each. Karunanidhi went after her. Jayalalitha also said that Rajapakse should be tried in the international court and India should impose an economic blockade on Sri Lanka. This after the UN report. The Tamil extremist parties supported her. Earlier Jayalalitha had made statements like Prabhakaran should be tried in India but this time she read the people’s mind and reacted accordingly. So amidst all this, where is hope for the cause of Tamils? If India thinks that the Sri Lankan situation will not affect it, it is mistaken.
Today China is spending 3000 crores on a harbour in Sri Lanka. India has good relations with the West. India should mobilize that support and play a proactive role in Sri Lanka. Countries like Switzerland and Belgium which have a federal structure can be models for future. For example Switzerland has both French and Dutch as major languages. In India, the Maoists are waging a struggle against the State. Can you draw any parallels between them and the LTTE? You see, development victims are same as war victims. In 2005, I made a film on the victims of hazardous wastes from 20 chemical factories in 30 villages in the Cuddalore district, close to Puducherry. These people can’t breathe properly. What terrible smell! Chemicals are dumped in their rivers. Yet after Bhopal, there was a law that you can’t have such factories in residential regions. For the film, I asked some children about
their ambition. Most of them wanted to become policemen or doctors which meant they could either heal people affected by such wastes or they could close the factories and arrest their owners. This is child psychology. They want power, arms. So they can join the Maoists to get that power. The story of suppression by governments, upper castes, upper class is the same everywhere. The Jindals wanted to mine the Salem mountains. It had 27 waterfalls. They submitted a report saying most of the people were below poverty line and that the land was dry! But I saw some of them even had bikes! Mining would steal their livelihood. 4 lakh people would be displaced. But thankfully the project was stalled. Whether you are displaced by war or by development, the feeling is the same. You lose your land, you lose everything. Finally, what are your future projects? Where is the future?
Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion by Salvador Dali - 1930
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FACT
Katha Kafka ya Paanch Chinar ki Kahaani: Fragments from between 2005 & 2011
These are chronicles of a journey into Kashmir... chronicles of a journey into a lost paradise... chronicles of a journey into Kafka land... chronicles of a death foretold... by Mukherjee P.
Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (Franz Kafka) by Andy Warhol - 1980
“S
omeone must have slandered Joseph K, for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” - From ‘The Trial’ by Franz Kafka.
Chinar Ek: 2011 and some of them suffering from insomnia, depression, sleep disorder, anger outbursts, retreating into a shell, blank look… and trying to find solution in codine phosphate, spasmoproxyvon, cannabis, alcohol and very occasionally the more expensive cocaine.
This time around…the day before I landed… May 6, 2011…Saturday… Syed Ali Shah Geelani - the chairman of Hurriyat Conference (G) participated in Gaibana Nimaz-e-Jinaza (funeral prayers in absentia) at Batamaloo. For whom? Osama Bin Laden. He followed it up with his now-goingnowhere-fiery speech. Meanwhile, the government officials, apart from tackling Geelani and his now predictable rabble rousing, was busy shifting the Darbar to Srinagar. What does this mean? This is a 139-year-nowshould-be-defunct-but-isn’t-defuncttradition of keeping the civil secretariat in Jammu for six months during the winter and then shift it lock-stock-and-barrel of course to Srinagar. This is a huge exercise of moving about 40 offices of more than 3400 employees and a load of paper work at the cost of about Rs 5.5 crores annually.
Evening: I am in Café Robusta… Lal Chowk with brothers Faheem (photographer) and Nadeem(lawyer) Qadri discussing what next. Really, what next? Kashmir isn’t some titillating crap like ‘Ragini MMS’ or waiting for a gladiatorial solution either Russel Crowe or Amitabh Bachchan (the 70s Bachchan not ‘Jhoom Barabar Jhoom’) style…
There you are Kafka. Seize the moment. Darbar was to open on Monday, May 9, 2011. Meanwhile in Europe(read Brussels), chairman of Hurriyat (M), Mirwaiz Umar Farooq was meeting all and sundry discussing everything from stone pelting to water treaties in Kashmir. Kashmir University had a quieter day, today, May 8. There was a painting competition, symposium and a musical concert dedicated to the 150th birth celebration of Rabindranath Tagore. Monday-May 9, 2011. Rasm-e-chahrum of Naseem Akhtar is happening at her ancestral graveyard in Magarmal Bagh from 10am. Born: 1931 at Mirpur (now a part of Pakistan occupied/administered Kashmir), Naseem was a magical voice that mesmerized countless listeners with her Kashmiri songs especially in the 22 kindle india June 2011
heydays of All India Radio. Cut to May 7, 2011. Afternoon. Kafka as the boatman. Maggi in my hand and Pritha pondering over the last few pages of an Arundhati Roy book… the book of course belongs to those days when we had sedition laws, but seriously never took them so seriously… or we did…but we pretended that we did not… Airtel works in Dal lake… and Vodafone too… both of us get a phone call... Pritha for an appointment near the lake and I near the clocktower, which once saw the flag of the wrong country and many stones littered across many streets… and many others who disappeared, maimed
What next? Roganjosh, roti, salt tea, sleep. Wake up to an early morning ride near Pampore at the Khadi centre which was visited by Mahatma Gandhi on July 1947. And then, my theatre performance in the afternoon at this wonderful book festival.
Chinar Do: Pin Code 193213 - lost letters of Uri Aslam Mir is like a rock He has this huge bag the Khaki bag 34 years His colleagues Nand Lal Sudan and Abdul Majeed - the postmaster still perform their chores Aslam Mir is like a rock
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He has this huge bag the Khaki bag from 1971 34 years Between September to October, 2005 Uri has received 6,791 letters including 57 money orders Many don’t have recipients any more The earthquake consumed them From Kamalkote to Dullanja From Dachi to Sultan Deki many dead 150 homes, 40 homes, 60 homes numbers don’t add up bodies do Ask those tin-shed inhabitants of Baday Sarai Aslam Mir is like a rock His son Afzal was trapped under the debris Afzal was killed by the quake He was studying in Class VIII His elder son who is physically challenged was not in the house He survived Afzal died He wipes his glasses He still carries this huge bag the Khaki Bag for 34 years Some send cassettes with voices inside the envelope that contain the material. Some re-live the irony, that distances that are 15-minutes away need to be reconnected with letters that get re-routed through Delhi Whose Line and whose Control Unclaimed insurance disappearing homes villages razed to dust a new moon across a new mountain new cracks new ridge new fault-lines across the mountains piles piled up further piles further piling up
Everything is becoming extinct in Kashmir. From the vision of peace to the Bakarwali dogs.
Aslam Mir is like a rock He has his huge Khaki Bag 34 million years of carrying the load of the living and of the dead Aslam Mir is like a rock His tears get merged with Jhelum and at some corner of the world a Paul Simon croons sound of silence Reading out letters calligraphic patterns blue LoC envelopes with Jinnah photograph from Gujjarbandi in Hatiyan at the PoK to the arid trenches of Baramulla life goes families divided by 1947 families divided by AK-47 divided all along the watchtower
development. Slabs and slabs of snow almost like stones, bricks and more stones and more bricks at Uri and Tangdhar 90 families staring at a homeless expanse as white flashes gnaw into your flesh The canvas tents are flooded with snow Pace of development finds no locomotion From the azure blue sky as more and more flakes fall
Aslam Mir is like a rock He has this huge Khaki bag he has been carrying for 34 years 34 long years Aslam Mir is like a rock
Chinar Teen: Curfew Amongst Blocks Of Ice February 19, 2005: The Waltango Nar, a sleepy Gujjar village erupted into a tragedy. 128 houses were destroyed. The Gujjar and Bakerwal Advisory Board have complained about the pace of
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Again... do not get disturbed by these images.
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Bashir Ahmed Deedah looks helplessly all around The blizzard consumed six of his family members And now the long wait for further blizzard Transfixed gazes at nothingness In life we move on from hurt to another from one hurt to another hurt… some hurt are national and others are transnational… or shall we say some hurt are bordered… some are cross-bordered… some are across-bordered and even some more luckily are borderless
Chinar Chaar: 2008 More than a half million of Indian security forces versus almost 9.5 million of residents. Under that equation, any human rights would come under attack and they did. From meetings in Pratap Park and Sher-e-Kashmir Park to an office in
Hyderpora in Jammu and Kashmir. Yes, 15 years is not a long time…not a landmark like a 25 or a 50. But the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons’ (APDP) 15th year of existence is more significant than many other initiatives in the country, especially in the light of the nationwide celebrations of the 60th year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As they wage resistance across tricky domains of a battlefield called Jammu and Kashmir, unanswered questions like unidentified bodies keep popping up. Yet, they fight a battle which needs to be fought. Whose battle? Ask 67-year old Atta Mohammed. Since 2003, he has buried more than 235 dead bodies in a graveyard beside his house in Tchhal village of Jammu and Kashmir’s Uri district which is about 100 kms away from Srinagar. Who are these people? According to human rights groups, more than 10,000 people have disappeared in the state. The cases have increased since Armed Forces Special Power Act (AFSPA) was invoked in 1990. At the Atta Mohammed run graveyard, almost all of them who are buried are blessed with words like “unidentified militants”, “encountered militants”, “Pakistani terrorists”… words trail off. An investigation by the J&K police on the case of Abdul Rehman Pedroo, a missing carpenter reveals the deepening rot in the system…of fake encounters by army and police personnel, picking up and killing innocent citizens; declaring them as “foreign militant” to gain promotions, medals and rewards. Very recently in 2008, Atta Mohammed had to o p e n up a
grave of an unidentified militant after court orders. It was found to be the graveyard of Bashir Ahmed Dar from Jalshiri village, 10 kms away f r o m Tc h a h a l . Dar had left home to bring back his wife from his in-laws’ place but never came back. Many never come back. Some dead bodies are lucky to be identified and later have a plaque announcing their death. Others lie in unnamed mounds consigned to history. Everything is becoming extinct in Kashmir. From the vision of peace to the Bakarwali dogs. Next time you are in Bimyar, 20 kms away from the Baramulla town, don’t forget to meet Atta Mohammed. Navigate Kashmir. Walk through its landscape and many graveyards and unnamed graves emerge…Baramulla, Kupwara, Shopian, Pattan, Sumbal, Kunzer, Pulwama, Ganderbal. Ask APDP, which, since 1994 has been consistently demanding information on many of these unmarked graves and publishing some of its findings. The APDP is largely a campaign driven group and is fiercely independent about its role to bring justice in this region. As a founder member of the Asian Federation against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD) which was launched in May 1998 in Manila, it now tries to link the larger cause of the disappeared. AFAD is playing a larger role in trying to enforce international instruments like the United Nations Declarations on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (UNDPAPFEID) and the Draft Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. The story of Kashmir can be told as a story of nameless graves; a story of parents’ meeting on the 10th of each
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FACT
month in various public parks, carrying a photograph of the “disappeared”; a story of excesses perpetrated by the Anti-Militancy Special Operations Group; the dilemma of people like Abdul Rehman Gujjari (caretaker of the Regipora graveyard) as he has to raise resources to buy shrouds for the deceased; and, the long unending wait of the near and the dear ones for the ‘’near d isapp eare d’’ and the ‘’dear disappeared’’ to turn up some day. Next time in Kashmir, walk into one of these graveyards. Just for solidarity.
Chinar Paanch: I am back at the same boat. Myself, Pritha and Kafka as a boatman. Kahwa. Heated discussion. I am loudly reciting my favourite Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali’s poem on Satyajit Ray’s ‘Pather Panchali’: Listen, Durga dies in the rains, her tongue bitter with stolen fruit. Beyond the field, trains escape a boy’s dreams, run into the air. A necklace chains him to the water’s bones, turns his reflection sour. Wherever Apu goes, to the temple or the river, he carries Durga’s smile to the depths of the air.
Paanch Chinar: 2011 A few days later… later to which date... earlier to which date... The shikara by now is mid-lake... Pritha’s destination is Crown of India… but this was an aimless ride across corridors of noiseless ripples… the air seems to carry the message of the loss of 118 lives in the summer unrest of 2010, for example the case of Wamiq Farooq of Ramawari; killed in January
2010; by this teargas shell fired by the police near the Ghani Memorial Stadium, Rajouri Kadal in old Srinagar. The police report dub him as “miscreant” but fails to explain how a teargas shell fired in air hits the head. Now there you are Kafka. Don’t worry your moments are also Kashmiri moments. Even a few days later, I would be in the newly created transit camp for the Kashmiri Pandits at Vessu Qazigund, in south Kashmir’s Islamabad district nearly 100kms away from Srinagar. No, there isn’t celebration. Not that the numbers who came back are huge. How many times will you emigrate and immigrate in a land where you are the half-of-the-secular-sky. And what do you do with rows of charred houses that you left behind….which are either further charred or have become outposts or are awaiting buyers who want it cheap. You are in this Kafka land. Kashmir that is staring at the crossroad of the crossroads. Jammu grappling with its brand new socalled saffron conscience keepers and Ladakh which is recovering from an earthquake and is a little tired of yuppie Enfield-headbangers, nature-lovers with a tripod and this unending list of volunteers who need a sexy summer placement for their curriculum vitals(vitae).
times. Don’t believe me... Ask Kafka. (Aakhri chinar or the Necessary postscript: This is a tribute to the memory of the deceased photo journalist Pradip Bhatia. The resilient pen of Muzamil Jaleel and his tale of Aslam Mir. And of course Iftikar Geelani-who never stopped dreaming both outside-inside-outside confinment. The name Paanch Chinar is taken from the Chaar Chinar site which stands in the middle of the Dal Lake and makes for a lovely shikara ride especially that time of the evening when the sunset is over and the pitch black darkness illuminates the lake and the lights of the houseboats and those of the shore are a little far away… far enough to give a low visibility and not near enough to take away the expanse of an all-enveloping darkness.)
When your final flight takes from one such J and K airport, you are grappled with bizarre dreams… a dream in which you want to set up a hospital… only for retired machine guns… where the guns will turn into flowers in the hand of trained nurses or that Camusesque dream of some Khaki clad gunholder pointing to a motionless dead body (no this isn’t an ox ymoron) and grinning on a handycam, pointing his figure and saying: If this is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this. Even death dies. If you kill death too many June 2011
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STARING AT A BOX AND SCRATCHING CLAY FEET By Sayantan Neogi
Franz Kafka wakes up one May morning in 2011 in a room in the city of Kolkata and watches TV through the day. He recalls.
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t’s Friday the 13th. I woke up this morning to an anxious reality. The room, however, was a lacy pastel quiet. This topography was decaying; it had changed into a monstrous verminous bug. I wasn’t a travelling salesman but I have been told that I wasn’t any different. I sat in a room amidst the remains of an asphyxiating heart of cultured mutiny. The romance of an impending death was keeping this city alive. The romance of a re-revolution fed the bug’s shriveled guts. The romance of a political answer to mankind’s existence sustained the people like an absinthe-laced smile. Like Prague, this city never lets you go, this dear little mother with sharp claws. I poured myself the remains of last evening’s teapot and pressed the big red button on a box that had changed the world I had known. I had seen all this before in the musty halls of Assicurazioni Generali, where I had tallied the insurance premiums to the compensation for personal injury to industrial workers; green for what comes in and red for what goes out and almost random numbers set against these in an attempt to ease human understanding. No red carnation, this, but a motley tri-petal that apparently stood by the guiltless guilty of this landscape, who closely resembled the Jew of my modern world. What I didn’t understand of these pictures was a black and yellow wasp-like portion that flashed the words ‘breaking news’, but then again this was the brave new world. She was strong and high on compulsion. Her numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of her circumference, flickered
helplessly before her eyes. These legs were, however, strong enough to scoop out a hollow in the sand and crumble the great walls of this mighty castle. I had thought once that believing in progress did not mean believing that any progress has yet been made. I sipped the cold tea. He babbled from the top of the hill,
They said he now resembled a sieve; a sieve in a house in the town of abbots. Enchanted creatures, these jackals; they got this Arab and they didn’t even need a camel as bait. echoing failed dreams from the past, churning out lines from pamphlets I had read in the back alleys of Prague. Whether it was denial or a simple lack of comprehension, I did not know, but he was quite convinced he was right. His white robes were stained brown from old cultivations; Cash crops; fertile fields; Butchered farmers; Board-room deals; Fascist Splatters; A mother’s tears; Plastic dentures; legacies. I couldn’t see it all. I couldn’t drink the tea anymore. It was too tinny. The tolling of the iron bell rang through every pore of this town. I flung at the cup; dropped it; stained the sheets. I didn’t have to reach out to the box. All I had to do was sit. Next to me was another box; a smaller box. I pressed the button that pointed upwards.
These pictures moved differently. A smiling silver-bearded man woke up one morning and found his corpse next to his bed. He was a prophet, a martyr, a murderer, a father and a nemesis. They said he now resembled a sieve; a sieve in a house in the town of abbots. Enchanted creatures, these jackals; they got this Arab and they didn’t even need a camel as bait. Grains of sand would eventually cover his submarine grave. I poured myself another cup of the then tinnier tea and pressed the button again. It was in the afternoon. The room by then was a clammy Turkish bath. Sweat dripped over my nose into the cup, giving the tea a butter-like aftertaste. I had been staring at the box for about an hour after I had pressed the button last. Silver, grey, white, black. Lines, scratches, streaks, flashes. I had never seen anything of such beauty before. But when you stare at such beauty for a long time, your eyes hurt. The button pointing upwards. I had reached the end of the day and the end of the box. What I learned from the silver streaks of the pictures I saw before of the battle and the Arab that there lay an axe, not only in books but, in everything that can break the icy sea within. I looked at myself. I had wings, mandibles and a proboscis. I fell asleep. I was once told of an enchanted forest, where the mighty golem of clay feet rested. It was a place where no one owned, no one preached, no one followed, no one bought and no one sold. It was a place impossible to reach at the farthest corner of the world. The room that I sat in that day is on the other side.
Protanopia is a congenital disease where the affected cannot differentiate between red and green.
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Graphic Comics Graphic Essays
Contributors
George Mathen, a.k.a Appupen, is a comics creator and artist. His first graphic novel, ‘Moonward’, published in 2009, was selected for the Angouleme graphic novel festival, 2011, in France. George is now based in Bangalore, working on more comics, art and commissioned murals archived at www.georgemathen. com. He also plays drums for the band Lounge Piranha.
Nitin Veturkar is an animation, storyboard and comicbook artist based in Mumbai. Aditya Bidikar is a writer and letterer based in Kolkata. They have been making comics together for the last three years. Their comics section ‘Unlettered’ appears regularly in Kindle Magazine.
Kailash Iyer hates paperwork and standing in lines. He designs stuff. He doesn’t really have a bottle for a head.
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Fiction Poetry Short Stories
Rohit Roy writes the environmental column for Kindle Magazine, with desperate intentions to help make a greener world. Currently he is pursuing a PhD in World Trade and Environmental Law. His interests include theology, philosophy, good food,Rabindranath and an amateur take on the natural sciences. His drive to write for the environment stems from an innate love for the world around him and a hope to preserve its wonders.
A day job as an accounts officer does not come in the way of Jasvinder Sharma’s passion for literature. One of India’s most prolific writers, he contributes to leading dailies and magazines and has come out with several anthologies of short stories. This Sahitya Akademi recipient mainly writes on contemporary sociopolitical themes.
Nitasha Kaul is a Kashmiri novelist, academic, artist who inhabits many lives in the UK, Bhutan and India. Her debut novel ‘Residue’, about Kashmiris outside of Kashmir, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2009.
Rimi B. Chatterjee is the author of ‘Black Light’, ‘The City of Love’ and ‘Signal Red’. She teaches English at Jadavpur University, and runs a blog at http:// rimibchatterjee.net/
Joy Bhattacherjee counts Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay and Paulo Coelho as his greatest literary inspirations but if he were to pinpoint one incident that triggered him to start writing, then it would have to be the sudden discovery of his father’s old handwritten manuscript, ‘The English Revolutionary’.
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Born and brought up between two cities, Kolkata and New York, Mainak Bhaumik is still trying to find a sense of home. He is also a self professed writer and director of Bengali films like ‘Aamra’ and ‘Aami vs Tumi’ and is about to direct his 3rd feature. He has also edited films like ‘Bong Connection’ and ‘Just another love story’.
Rachaita Hore, the youngest contributor to this collection is a twelfth grader studying Humanities. She is an avid blogger, having started at the age of 12. Her literary inspirations are Charles Dickens, Anne Rice, and undoubtedly Franz Kafka!
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Arjun Mukerji has trained and practised as an urban planner, architect and interior designer. He dabbles in visual arts, performing arts and poetry, to indulge his whims. Arjun is presently pursuing research in postmodern architecture. His favourite number is 42.
Shreya Chatterjee is a writer and poet by profession. She is associated with various blogs and writes at “a journey called…”, “A Vagabond and A wizard”, and “Jidhu’s Reflection”. Back in January, she published her debut collection of poems called “Musings of a Wanderer”. Apart from poetry, Shreya also reviews books and dabbles in photography.
Contributors Caught between Keatsian sensuality and the modern bleakness of Eliot-Joyce-Mansfield, myriad thoughts crowd Priyasha Hoare’s reflections. The uncertainty of security, attempts to live beyond survival, yet wearing the mask of sanity are thoughts she grapples with besides, of course, the hurdle of English Honours Part Two Examinations!
Suvagata Roy Chowdhury is somewhat of an elusive sociopath who engorges on literature, clicks weird pictures, sketches and spends his days figuring out the secrets of the rodent heart at the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology. And yes he can’t keep his hands off Poe.
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The burned alive Medicine Man By Shreya Chatterjee
Limbs gaping out His lips kiss maggots… Forgotten, but burned in vengeance, Buried in a hurry The child within a man. Hair matted, Seasoned with gory water. Rejected heart Removed and smashed ribs… Local lores said He practised witchcraft. His woman And mistress Called him Medicine man. A man with a jutting little head, Tipsy after a drink or too. His blood shot eyes Forgot to recognize his killers, Thirty knife marks Never got registered. His grave lay shunned 46 kindle india
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In a sleeping forest… A cactus growing on his grave. A skull on a pole to Ward off chanced travellers Wild animals keep off the land. The fingers confused, Nothing to grab, No hair, no skin, no bone dust to prepare Flesh washed off Bored skeleton Revealed, No coffee mug about To stir the black Fate. Limbs squeal Each time The trees blow over The grave gathers more dust. “He still breathes, After the many winters Nurtured with Stewed spiders, grasshoppers and creepers.”
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Nubile
By Arjun Mukerji “Ah my mucus past compare These dewdrops bright I wear Am I not Prima Insectum?” Behold how my scales glisten With hues of the burnished sun My down so white and fluff y Like a fruit of the dandelion, Ripened by the caress of autumn. Where have you seen A Proboscis more elegant: Curved like an Ionic volute, Or a thorax more gracefully formed: Ribbed as English smocking? Gaze in to my luminous ommatidia Graze my tarsus-tibia Feel me, feed me, fuck me But first, admit you love me.
Migraine By Suvagata Roy Chowdhury This is a migraine in the making Without it the lights are… Well, just lights. I smoke naked on the roof top burning my gut with lye; Lubricated with butter, my fingers probe the swamps of solitude. The fetid breath purifies my vision but the headache just won’t come. Freakish, coulrophobic patterns appear, rhyming with my chores… washing, cleaning, touching; polychromatic visual aids, photo-shopped and powdered, I would own them all. suave and ravishing, I love my self… paper-mindedly, narcissistically, incestuously; however, the hormonal horns heckled. This is now a migraine, unsubtly made and done with. June 2011
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Metamorphosis and Other Stories By Priyasha Hoare
Umm.... On our first date He gave me a lollypop Big round hazy Wild coloured and delirious Lolly pop The rest of the night…….. We switched on our inboxes full of…. Unthinking, we did what all animals often do Alone I admired the kiddish Lollypop And it was All round and round Like a maze in any cavity And moving it became like him Like picture cards in great psycho labs And ink-blot like was all black That the lollypop was, I say I say 48 kindle india
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Black, incy-wincy spider Yes all its eight legs or hands Had a web spinning Our jammed boxes, hacked ids And all that Entangled Old sage like blabbering truthies But he lost his balls And nightmarishly the lollypop coloured Octopus and all its stingy hands or feet Gulped Down the slimy gutter Darkness scratching armpits of death odour Lightdrops All towers cut And since then I Alone lay stuck That rainbow hued sun sparkling web.
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Trialerror and By Mainak Bhaumik
O
rson Welles sits cross-legged like a giant Buddha on the floor of his luxurious Paris apartment (or of Soderbergh’s Manhattan studio). Beside him, sipping on endless cups of coffee is the bespectacled, bald and baseball-capped Steven Soderbergh, looking handsome in a goofy, lovable-geek sort of way. Through the whole long evening, they laugh and discuss their films relating to Kafka while Welles puffs on his sequoiasized cigars downing endless jiggers of vodka.
SS: Have you noticed, that in some thematic, and coincidental way, Kafka draws a parallel in our film careers. As both our Kafka-related films were the most noted follow-ups to our freakishly successful debuts that put us on the map.
assured that, that is another thing we have in common. But just like your film has now achieved cult status, for me, over the years, I think my star power has ascended and everything I created is now viewed as a work of a genius.
OW: …as in?
SS: You scripted the story of a man victimized by the impersonal hostility of a bureaucratic world. To what extent did you base your script on Kafka’s novel?
SS: In your case your highly acclaimed come-back film ‘The Trial’ based on Kafka’s novel, was your most noted film after ‘Citizen Kane’, that had won you the title of ‘Boy Genius’. OW: …and your film ‘Kafka’ based on the life of Franz Kafka, came right after ‘Sex, Lies, and Videotape’ that was responsible for your crowning as the man who singlehandedly reinvigorated independent cinema in the 1990s…I see what you mean. SS: Except my film opened to mixed reviews... It must have felt good to have viewers of the early rushes, including directors like Anatole Litvak and Jules Dassin, say they witnessed the birth of a classic? OW: To be honest ‘The Trial’ too, initially opened to mixed reviews and middling commercial returns. So you can be rest
OW: Not even based on. It’s a film inspired by the book, in which my collaborator and partner is Kafka. That may sound like a pompous thing to say, but I’m afraid that it does remain a Welles film and although I have tried to be faithful to what I take to be the spirit of Kafka, the novel was written in the early twenties, and we made the film in 1962, and I have tried to make it my film because I think that it would have more validity if it were mine. Kafka’s existentialist novel tells the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor the reader. My adaptation of it is a labyrinthine year-long account of absurdity and a man’s inaccessibility to the legal system. On a thematic note, the novel and film are studies of escalating disillusionment and critiques of societal hierarchies. June 2011
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SS: As a work, ‘The Trial’ actively debates the existence of free will and a corrupt judicial system, both of which propagate a corroding reality. You, in fact, speak directly to the audience following the allegory’s conclusion, stating that the “logic of this story is the logic of a dream.” A sinister environment synonymous with the term: “Kafkaesque”. But most controversially, you changed the ending of ‘The Trial’. Kafka envisioned Joseph K being stabbed to death by police officers, whereas you had him blown up with a stick of dynamite that resulted in a great mushroom shaped cloud. OW: First of all the character of Joseph K. in the film doesn’t really deteriorate, certainly doesn’t surrender at the end. Because I feared that K may be taken to be a sort of everyman by the audience, I had been bold enough to change the end to the extent that he doesn’t surrender. He is murdered as anyone is murdered when they’re executed, but where in the book he screams, “Like a dog, like a dog you’re killing me!”, in my version he laughs in their faces because they’re unable to kill him. K refuses to collaborate in his own death in the novel, it’s left like that and he dies with a sort of whimper. Now in the film, I’ve simply replaced that whimper with a bang. Similarly, in your case, would you ostensibly call your film ‘Kafka’ a biopic, based on the life of Franz Kafka? I see the film as blurring the lines between fact and Kafka’s fiction, most notably ‘The Castle’ and ‘The Trial’, creating a Kafkaesque atmosphere. Wouldn’t you agree that the movie is not so much a biography but rather, a speculative depiction of Kafka’s daily circumstances? While not untrue to the specific facts of Kafka’s life, it focuses more on the environment of 1919 Prague, that so influenced the author. To a great extent, the things at which the movie excels are precisely the things that also make Kafka’s work so enduringly vivid: the absurdity anchored by an exacting realism, the incomprehensibility coupled with utmost lucidity, the looming sense of paradox, futility, labyrinthine logic and impenetrable pressures. What about you? Did Kafka, the writer himself, interest you as the subject for a film? SS: I would have never thought about it before reading the script. I thought a biography of Kafka would be boring. As for Kafka’s books, they have certain faults as cinema material, as is evident in the cinematic adaptations I’ve seen. His works are grounded more on ideas than on events, which do not really work for the screen. As fascinating as your film, ‘The Trial’ is, it shows its limits. No offense meant.
that it’s symbolic of man fighting against implacable evil, and so on. Have you gone along with any such interpretations in your film? OW: I think that a film ought to be, or a good film ought to be as capable of as many interpretations as a good book, and I think that it is for the creative artist to hold his tongue on that sort of question, so you’ll forgive me if I refuse to reply to you. I’d prefer that you make your own interpretation of what you think! SS: I totally agree with that view point. What about your cinematic interpretation of Kafka – in terms of sets and locations? OW: I spent six months on the script, paring it down to what I considered a workable approximation of the novel, and then scoured Europe for possible locations, settled on Yugoslavia for its natural sets, which couldn’t be ‘placed’ by most cinema audiences, the faces in crowds with a Kafka look to them, and the hideous blockhouse, soul-destroying buildings, which are somehow typical of modern Iron Curtain architecture. What about you? Unlike in your first film, here you had to recreate a world that you have not known. What was your shooting experience like? SS: To put it in a word: “Kafkaesque”! When I went to Prague, I realized that Prague would become a character in the film…Every day we were confronted with strange Kafkaesque experiences. If nothing else, because of our dealings with the Barrandov studio. For example, every day we had to ask for electricity on a particular set. One day we had no electricity! We checked that we had in fact filled out the forms, and they told us that we had not requested the guy who turns on the electricity to be there. We were right in our subject matter. But how come you shot so much of the film in Yugoslavia? OW: As in all of Kafka, it’s supposed to be Czechoslovakia. I couldn’t go to Czechoslovakia because his books weren’t even printed there. His writing was still banned there. It seems to me that the story is said to take place “anywhere”. But of course there is no “anywhere.” When people say that this story can happen anywhere, you must know what part of the globe it really began in. Now Kafka is central European and so to find a middle Europe, some place that had inherited something of the Austro-Hungarian empire to which Kafka reacted, I went to Zagreb. The last shot was in Zagreb, which has old streets that look very much like Prague.
OW: None taken! (laughs boisterously) SS: As a reader, of course I feel differently and am very interested in his themes. I thought the connection that Lem Dobbs established between Kafka and expressionism was pertinent, and that Doctor Marnau was a logical development of these ideas. As far as interpretations go, there have been many different readings of ‘The Trial’. Many people say that it’s an allegory of the individual against authority; others say 50 kindle india
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SS: I also read somewhere in the London Sunday Times archives that Director William Chappell had written : “Welles discovered Kafka’s world, with the genuine texture of pity and terror on its damp and scabrous walls, real claustrophobia in its mournful rooms, and intricacies of shape and perspective on a scale that would have taken months and cost fortunes to build.” How did you discover Kafka’s world on your sets?
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OW: In a mammoth exposition hall just outside Zagreb, I set up 850 office desks, 850 secretaries and 850 clattering typewriters among which Kafka’s hero, K, lived out his doom. There was one scene in the film where we needed to fit fifteen hundred desks into a single building space and there was no film studio in France or Britain that could hold fifteen hundred desks. The big industrial fair grounds that we found in Zagreb made that possible. So we had both, that rather sleazy modern, which is a part of the style of the film, and these curious decayed roots that ran right down into the dark heart of the 19th century. Like you, I too had my own “Kafkaesque” shooting experience at the old abandoned railway station, the Gare d’Orsay in Paris whose baroque grotesqueries might well have been designed by Kafka. Within its ruined corridors and dank corners I moved my props: the Advocate’s gigantic gilt bed, hundreds of dripping candles, decaying tables and books. Not only is the Gare d’Orsay a very beautiful location, but it is full of sorrow, the kind of sorrow that only accumulates in a railway station where people wait. I know this sounds terribly mystical, but really a railway station is a haunted place. And the story is all about people waiting, waiting, waiting for their papers to be filled. It is full of the hopelessness of the struggle against bureaucracy. SS: I can see how waiting for a paper to be filled is like waiting for a train. So the location of the Gare d’Orsay infused a lot of “Kafkaesque” realism into your film. OW: In retrospect, after all these years, what do you personally feel about your film ‘Kafka’ and your experience? SS: I wish I were older when I’d made Kafka. I didn’t have the chops yet to pull it off. How did you feel about ‘The Trial’ after it was finished? OW: I felt an immense gratitude for the opportunity to make it, and I can tell you that during the making of it, not with the cutting, because that’s a terrible chore, but with the actual
shooting of it, that was the happiest period of my entire life. At the time, I did feel that ‘The Trial’ was the best film I had ever made. SS: For me, Kafka was just not fun enough; it was never intended to be really serious but that doesn’t come across. OW: I know what you mean. Most of your films have subject matters that seem very serious when you first hear about them, but they always seem to have undercurrents of humour. Even with Kafka, a writer whose work most people find to be completely bleak, one can still find him to be blackly hilarious, you seemed to find that same humour and absurdity in your film. SS: I think Kafka’s work is extremely funny in an absurdist way. With the film, I think a lot of people took it much more seriously than we intended, dealing with that character and all, leaves you open to that. But we really saw it as a carnival ride.
It’s three in the morning, and as Soderbergh begins to make movements to wrap up, Welles’ booming voice bellows with warmth: OW: You’re not leaving already, my friend… The night is young! And Soderbergh sits back down again, smiling, while Welles pours him another cup of coffee, and himself, one last vodka for the road… And someone yelled “Cut.”
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The gravediggers of Kashmir
By Jasvinder Sharma
M
y job is neither rewarding nor thrilling. I, in fact inherited it. I am Kabir. I dig graves for a living. My job doesn't rank among the most covetable ones. After all, a 'good day' at work for me is heart breaking for a lot of other people whose near and dear ones die. In my town, I am not looked upon with much respect or reverence. Meeting me is considered very obnoxious and inauspicious by most of my town's residents. If I am on the way, they always think that I have some dreadful and tragic news to tell. For my town people, I am a necessary evil – one who prepares ground for their last journey towards heaven. My field of work is in the dusty, deserted and forlorn graveyard on the north end road off Regiment Market. This profession of grave digging has kept my kinsmen employed and busy for generations. We had no land to till and neither any trade or job. My father boasted sometimes that grave digging is an evergreen monopolistic job since it is a profession that is not going to 'die' anytime soon.
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When my father took over this job of digging graves from his father, I started out by assisting him. Ten years later, I was full time at my work, after the tough manual labour took its toll on my father's health. He had to do many other odd manual jobs to feed his large family. When someone in or around my town dies, I am informed immediately. If I am out of town, a man is sent out in search of me without delay. I must be around soon since grave digging in the small and messy graveyard where a right place is very hard to find, is solely my concern, duty and skill. No one else can do this peculiar job. Even if I am ill, I must be present in the graveyard to guide the labourer to dig a hole at a proper place and make a grave of right dimension and size. As the news of death reaches me, I set out on my job be it rain, sun or storm. After retrieving my spade and shovel which remain resting in the shed next to the graveyard's entrance on all other normal days, I hunt around the graveyard to locate the oldest grave, owing to the grave’s limited area and space available.
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Selection of the new place for a new burial is done by me based on the date of the body buried previously, assuming that the body buried earlier might have completely decomposed and must have become part of the earth. In some cases, the bones of the buried person are still around, but in other cases horror awaits me underneath the soil – semi-decomposed or non-decomposed bodies, thanks to the embalming or chemicals injected into the body for avoiding decay. This is done to facilitate a last glimpse of the body for the dead person's relatives when the burial is delayed due to some or other reasons.
lives for no fault or misdoing. It is all for capturing the seat of power. Politics has become communalized and criminalized. As militancy raged, deaths came everyday. There are so many bodies to be buried at short notice that a new layer of soil has to be laid, with a new set of graves on top of the old ones. I have lifted a lot of dead bodies. I have buried up to 20 bodies together. The graveyards are overflowing. Militancy related violence has taken the lives of thousands of innocent people in the valley. Who can better feel for the innocent youth of my valley? The number of young and able-bodied boys has come down. Most of them have picked up guns and many others have died in fake encounters with the police. To raise the morale of forces, the police resort to this practice.
If the body is not decomposed, I have to bury it again and dig another grave. If there is present a negligible portion of the dead body, I bury those disintegrating parts within the premises of the graveyard before preparing the grave for the dead person. Since the number of embalmed bodies from Gulf If the body is not decomposed, countries is increasing, chances I have to bury it again and dig of bodies having not decomposed completely are high. Airtight another grave. If there is present a coffins also contribute to this negligible portion of the dead body, occurrence. I bury those disintegrating parts I am accustomed to the dreaded sights and handling filthy earth. I don't prefer to wear gloves during any stage of my digging job. Gloves restrict free movements of my fingers. Since my childhood days, I am used to handle the spade this way.
I know this harsh reality well since I am the unfortunate father of one of the earliest and most famous militant commanders –Hamid, my only son. One day Hamid left home to trek across the border into Pakistan and within the premises of the graveyard by summer next year, the young unemployed Hamid had been before preparing the grave for the transformed into one of the dead person. Since the number of famous militant commanders of embalmed bodies from Gulf countries the time, one of the men who founded the insurgency. is increasing, chances of bodies
having not decomposed completely are high
The remuneration for this not-so-rosy job of digging deep graves is just a few hundred bucks for me. If the relatives of the dead are affluent enough, then I get more than a thousand bucks sometimes. Ironically my income depends on the frequency of deaths in my area. Sometimes I am called from the nearby places too when the gravediggers there are not easily available. On all other days, when I don't dig graves, I do a number of odd jobs. I am employed as a labourer, attendant or watchman temporarily at different Super Market outlets. When I was employed as a guard in the Imperial Shoe Factory, I enjoyed that job better. Digging graves is a bit mind-numbing and a depressingly emotional job. You see wailing people and feel like howling and weeping particularly when a person you know dies untimely. The business of death has run into bad days now. Apart from God, there are other obnoxious agents which kill people these days. Insurgency, extremists, grenade attacks, remote controlled bombing by militants, crossfire and custody deaths have multiplied my work and sometimes I have to engage labourers to dig graves at short notice. Though I am suitably paid for, I also feel for the innocent people losing precious
Here lies his grave. The tears in my eyes have dried up. Yes, my son was a militant. When he didn't get a job, he picked up the gun. After three years, he became a martyr. I have got this engraved on his grave – ‘In the memory of my dear son, Hamid, who ruined his youth and his father's old age’. A small tomb has been erected on his grave by Riphat who does this job for the rich people who can afford to buy precious land in the graveyard and erect tombs and document on stone – words of mourning, love and bereavement. And this tomb maker Riphat's story is unique. He moved to Srinagar a decade ago. His father had died when Riphat was only a teenager. His mother sold vegetables to support the family of seven. In search of a living, Riphat met me when both of us were working as labourers on the Grand Mall construction site. He could cut marble stones like an expert craftsman. Then the construction project was stopped because of public agitation by a local political party which advocated the cause of farmers, whose lands were taken at cheap rates.
After we were laid off, I offered Riphat to accompany me. Riphat came with me to my town. My son, Hamid had finished college and was trying to get a job. But there was anarchy everywhere. He tried hard. The politicians were demanding big money for a government job. For three years, he went from pillar to post but since he had neither recommendation June 2011 kindle india 53
Maqbool had a heart of stone. He even did postmortems climbing up in Police trucks – up to eight bodies at a time. Bodies arrived with no limbs, no face, or in pieces. This played havoc with his state of mind particularly after Maqbool’s son-in-law was butchered mercilessly by the militants
nor money, he was given no job. He was totally frustrated. And then the inevitable happened. His impressionable mind was poisoned by people of extreme ideology. Brainwashed, he ran away from home. Hamid lost his track and he was killed for that. Riphat became my second son. He began to work, etching on marble. He has a good job here. There are many deaths to document on stone. Most of the dead are young people. The scorching days and the frosty nights are very painful. Riphat gets into depression sometimes. I try to give him a religious interpretation to the 20 years old insurgency in our valley, 'What happened in these two decades was because we dropped the veils from our conscience. We stopped obeying Allah's teachings.' Not only Riphat but my brother, Maqbool too is scared and uncomfortable these days. He lost his son-in-law, who was shot dead by militants who mistook him to be a police informer. Maqbool was a helper attached with a reputed doctor in Srinagar. When militancy was at its peak, he ran away to his town here and started practising as a Registered Medical Practitioner. He was lucky here. One day in 1990, across the town he came face to face with the bullet ridden body of a militant. The government doctor was on leave. The police requested Maqbool to do the post-mortem. And that
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post-mortem started a seemingly endless journey. Maqbool had a heart of stone. He even did post-mortems climbing up in Police trucks – up to eight bodies at a time. Bodies arrived with no limbs, no face, or in pieces. This played havoc with his state of mind particularly after Maqbool's sonin-law was butchered mercilessly by the militants. Maqbool became so upset that he could not sleep at night. He acquired a bad temper. He became a chain smoker. He used to go into a strange frenzy before a post-mortem, screaming wildly at his colleagues. He was often pulled away from dinner to perform post-mortem and even at odd hours of the night. Now, there are signs that things are on the mend in Kashmir, Maqbool often gets cases related to Kashmir's new realities – suicides by security men, or by civilians who drown, poison or hang themselves amid rising numbers of suicides in Kashmir. There are hundreds and thousands of mourners like me and Maqbool in every city and town in my beautiful valley for which poets had said that if there is a paradise anywhere, it is here in Kashmir valley. For us, it is a living hell – where each night is a horrid nightmare and everyday is a frightening experience. Riphat is hopeful since he is young and he is getting married to Sakeena, my lovely daughter next week. I am happy that once again celebrations will come at the door of my house. I will no longer mourn for Hamid now.
Night as it was By Nitasha Kaul
I
n the day, the sun. At night, the moon and stars. Clouds can come and go as they please. This had been the cosmic sequence in ImagiNation for as long as its inhabitants could remember. This is what their stories had told them, this is what they had seen every time they had looked up at the skies. Day and Night. Night and Day.
Once upon a time, the sky had been a significant factor in people’s lives. They looked up to find the gold of day in the sun, and closed their eyes to the silver of the moon at night. They found shapes in the clouds and read omens in the stars. There was a kind of reliability in this cosmic theatre for those who understood it; old men chose to sigh at certain times of the day and wayward women secretly smiled at the thought of tomorrow. Some - especially children, poets, and politicians - occasionally challenged the standard view of the skies. The Child sketched landscapes with many suns; the Poet, when drunk or jilted or both, made outrageous claims of being harassed by the moon; and the Politician of ImagiNation, like every nation, wanted to take credit for the bejewelled heavens and its stars near and far. These exceptional people aside, on the whole, the cosmic theatre gave solace to all. That was in the past. Now, things were changing. In what way? Well, to begin with, there had been incredibly swift technological progress in ImagiNation. The idea that the motifs of sky could be a guide for time and place, seemed quaint. Clocks and computers were more than adequate to position and fix every passing moment with a robust timestamp. These were precise upto the millionths of a second and scientists swore by the competence of their digitality. Also, after the big washout caused by manic ocean swells and melted glaciers, there had been successful attempts at georeengineering. The climate had become unpredictable and the inhabitants of ImagiNation decided that the best way to bring seasonality back was to control what happenings in the sky they could. Tall towers were constructed that spewed salt into the upper air and automatic cloud-monitoring stations were set up on the ground below. As a result, the clouds had become whiter and more defined; parameters were set for their drifting range and they could be landlocked in a region if desired. Add to which, most of the population of ImagiNation had moved to live in cities. People worked in shifts and became busier than ever, often in front of flickering screens which bound them to both necessary tedium and unnecessary pleasures. There were so many kinds of electric 56 kindle india
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illumination that the sky above their heads receded further and further away. The combined effect of all this was that hardly anyone looked up at the skies and the cosmic theatre had no audience. Even those who had challenged the order of things - the Child, the Poet, and the Politician - had found other pursuits. The Child had electronic games that consumed it. The Poet was often locked up in the four walls of her room, floating on a drug-induced experimental ecstasy. The Politician was surrounded by stars of an entirely different kind: the celebrities, and it was quite advantageous to gather credits from them. Whether the sun’s light appeared directly on the horizon or in a cloudy haze, the clocks announced the day. Night was when it got dark, at least as dark as it could get with the neon lamps and the flourescent globes everywhere. People went
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about their lives, pausing to think of the sky only in the rare instances when there was an eclipse, a snow storm, or acid rain. Who had time to stare at the heavenly canvas when there was so much to do in front of them? ImagiNation was becoming a super-successful prosperous country where there were so many kinds of profits to be made that wordsmiths had to coin a word a week for each killing. The tempo of this business as usual was rudely jolted one day when an amateur astronomer made a shocking claim in a news sourcing agency, in print and online. And since all newspapers, magazines and websites relied upon the same central newsfeeder, the claim was widely circulated and began generating attention. This young man, who was known to the authorities as an insomniac dilettante with a powerful telescope that he had inherited from his great-grandfather, and who was a renegade when it came to timekeeping (it was whispered in his neighbourhood that he deliberately destroyed every clock he could lay his hands on - no, his clipped accented upper class neighbours in the opulent area would never dare lower themselves by gossip; this was the doing of his disgruntled servants who never knew when they might have to appear in the service of their strange master), had made a daring revelation: the night sky was a blank black. When his report on the night sky above ImagiNation was first published, it prompted an outcry from the community of professional astronomers. ‘What does he know? That young uninitiated novice! The night sky is as it always has been; with its stars and the moon.’ The Association of Expert Astronomers (AEA) even threatened to sue the media conglomerate which owned the newspaper, for propagating what they saw as baseless lies. In actual fact, the AEA was in a tizzy. The best professional astronomers of ImagiNation had come to rely so much on the computer simulation of the skies that they could not remember when was the last time that they had observed the real night sky. They remembered that a couple of generations ago, their forbears used to find elevated places of observation to personally examine the sky at night. But, who did that now? It was time-consuming and irrelevant - they had a perfect simulation of the sky which could be viewed in dark laboratory rooms as per convenience, and there were programmes that could even predict the course of astral bodies and calculate projections hundreds of years away. In any case, where would they find a place for scrutinsing the night sky? Most places were artificially lit non-stop to keep them secure. It was very well for this prodigal lunatic to spend his youth traipsing around far from the ubiquitous cities to find an unlit hill from where to look at the sky; this kind of behaviour could not be expected from professionals who had far more important things to consider - there were clouds to sequester and control, the fine tuning of power systems for the new solar planes, and the direction of missions to other galaxies. In spite of these public efforts to discredit him, the young man did not stop making his assertions. He insisted that people realise - the stars and the moon had been wiped off from the
night sky. Many doubted the truth of his utterances initially, though they had no means of checking for themselves. Whether the stars were pinned in the sky or not, they could not view them above the lit haze of the cities. Then, a few brave souls decided to undertake independent expeditions in the country to try and find a remote corner from where it might still be possible to view the sky as it used to be. This was not an easy task, for the means of transportation only existed between the cities. While there were excellent land routes and air lines that connected one urban area to another, for many decades there had been hardly any traffic out of this grid. This was partly the result of a conscious policy to encourage efficiency in urban networks and deter any new movement into the established cities from outside. When people began investigating the sky for themselves, it became clear that the amateur astronomer was right. The day dawned as it always did, but at night the sky was as blank as it was black. This startling discovery prompted an entire range of responses. The immediate one was a new startup venture which became popular fast. It was called StarCo; the brainchild of a prominent tycoon, this company registered its offices in the capital city of ImagiNation and started trading on the nostalgia for the night sky as it once was. Their diverse portfolio of goods and services included the sale of ‘Night Experiences’ which could be enjoyed in their deluxe or standard versions in the privacy of one’s residence (the deluxe version had extra stars, meteor showers effects, a complimentary full moon and a souvenir star coin), organised ‘New Blank’ trips to a designated remote site from where to see the unstudded black sky, and personalised ‘Sky Makeover’ merchandise in pure silver and cut diamonds. StarCo’s success spawned many spinoffs in the entertainment industry and gradually people came to love the idea of what had happened and invented a term for it, the ‘Spontaneous Sky Makeover’ became an accepted phrase. Having delved into their calculations, the expert astronomers decided that the Spontaneous Sky Makeover was of no
Even those who had challenged the order of things - the Child, the Poet, and the Politician - had found other pursuits. The Child had electronic games that consumed it. The Poet was often locked up in the four walls of her room, floating on a drug-induced experimental ecstasy. The Politician was surrounded by stars of an entirely different kind: the celebrities, and it was quite advantageous to gather credits from them. June 2011
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consequence to them, the AEA issued an official statement to that effect. Their computerised programmes still ran correctly, the galaxy missions proceeded as normal, even the lunar pull on the ocean waves seemed to be unaltered. The cosmic theatre had changed the scene but not the story. The sole difference from before was that the night sky was a blank black devoid of any twinkling stars or the waxing and waning moon. The Politician decided to gain some mileage from the Spontaneous Sky Makeover. In private, alongwith his other star-friends, the celebrities, he bought many shares in StarCo. In public, he set up a special committee to revise the history of day and night and prepare new textbooks. There would be a definitive compilation of how the Day was ever more important and how the Night had been lost. He identified himself with the constancy and the true gold of the victorious sun. In his many speeches, he declared that his detractors were like the inconstant moon and the random scattered stars which had outlived their purpose. ‘What purpose did the moon and stars serve? Nothing. Nothing at all. Neither rational, nor efficient, nor necessary. We must celebrate their demise. The sun is the real thing, the true giver.’ The Poet, who was probably the last person to realise what had happened when she finally unlocked the door and let herself meet other people, refused to believe the news of the Spontaneous Sky Makeover. ‘It can’t be,’ she cried, ‘I must be drunk or jilted or both to be hearing this.’ At the same time, in the core of her heart, gnawed a terrifying thought, ‘The moon is gone, the stars are gone, who will harass me now? What will the focus of my torment be? The sun? No, that can’t be. The sun is too monogamous, too united and coherent. I can’t even meet its stare.’ For a long time, the poet underwent drug-induced hallucinations in which she saw herself gazing at the crescent moon unblinkingly and picking stars gently off the firmament to place them on a sheet of paper where
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they glowed bright before they died and left traces of poems on the page. In time, her depression at the blank black night was replaced by surrogate stars. She decided that she would regard the faraway city lit windows as little square stars. With some practice, she was able to transplant her vision of the stars and it worked briefly. But, the absent shapeshifting moon was nowhere to be found. That grave lack hounded her psyche and gave her a deep sense of guilt for not having communed enough with the moon when it was still around. To compensate and atone for this regret, she gave up all her lovers and surrendered her name. From then on, she would not be a Poet. The Child outgrew the electronic games and its studies left it no time to draw landscapes. When it heard of the Spontaneous Sky Makeover, that instantly made it hungry. It went to the kitchen and gobbled half a cake. That time onwards, the Child developed a tendency to overeat and became more and more obese with age. The amateur young astronomer stamped his feet in frustration, crushing another clock under his shoes (his servant on duty inwardly cursed him for the glass shards that would need clearing from the floor). The loss of the night-as-it-was had robbed him of purpose; he felt uprooted by big swathes of uninterrupted blank blackness that engulfed him in the most flashingly lit of rooms and in the sunny days; it was even seeping into his physical body. There was no solution. The stars and the moon had been his best companions. He killed himself in front of a mirror (his servant on duty loudly cursed him for the bloody mess that would need clearing from the floor). Everyone reconciled to the Spontaneous Sky Makeover and the moon and the stars passed into the legends of ImagiNation.
A tale of desperate fledglings
By Rohit Roy
I
shudder at the thought of deprivation. I loathe loneliness. I came into this world blind and naked and the only possession I was allowed was a mother. Majestic, caring and ruthless in her protectiveness, she was everything we needed and yet everything we feared. Disappearing at length, we were left alone in the company of each other, hungry and unprotected. The fear of death, however, was far from real. We were after all, supreme – all powerful. Although we didn’t know it yet, nothing could touch us, nothing would dare. The surrounding darkness was a cool comfort against the disgrace we now called life. We were yet untouched by death, disease, and hopelessness. Our world was a myriad of curiosities and wonder and absolutely nothing else. We were free and careless. To think otherwise would be to sin. Our world was a paradise of mangroves with tall Sundaris, Gewas and Dhunduls. Sunlight kissed the forest floor wherever it was allowed to, and lonely Chitals cried out in desperation at the loss of another of their own. Crabs wandered around in free rejoice while the occasional kingfisher fought her way through another day of survival. My sister and I were princesses in our realm and unchallenged during our time of childhood impressionability. Many a carefree day were spent in happiness and ignorance. To be a harbinger of death, after all, was invigorating at the least, even if we did not know it yet. Our mother was everything. Like the Hindu goddesses surrounding our being, she was ever present and ever caring. In wilful obedience to the scriptures she doled out death to give us life. Many a night was pierced by the last cry of a wretched end and the promise of satisfaction to follow. Magnificent and all encompassing, her mere presence was ironic in its putrid stench of death – and yet of love. She was our all. She was the light and the dark. She was the joy of comfort and the loneliness of separation. To lie beside her warmth was to know audacity. Her appearance was the end of hunger and her touch was the disappearance of apprehension. She was the feared and the fearless. The invincible and the everlasting. Nothing could take her away from us. Not circumstance, not misfortune, not God herself. We did not think of a time without her. We could not. Yet, this thoughtless invulnerability was not to last...
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It was a night of vigorous moonshine. She had left us to do what she did best. She had left to bloody the innocence of the night so that we may continue our own. Unaware of fate, we slept in our incorruptibility with the knowledge of a better morning. To be apex predators was to be privileged with peaceful sleep. Sleep that dared not be disturbed. The sleep of royalty – continuous and deep. It all ended, however, with that dreadful moment of eternal disgust. Never before had we felt the disrespect that we felt that night. The most unnatural noise – short and disillusioning – shattered our royal prerogative of peace. Awakening us into the cold dawn air, it left us confused and disoriented. We had heard of it, of its association with Men. We now heard it in its extreme effect. Almost disbelieving its occurrence – like a cheap dream that dared enter our subconscious – we would have drifted back into our comfort had it not been for the chaos that followed. Almost on cue, thousands of voices pierced the night like arrows in a battlefield. Birds and beasts cried out in their disturbed state accompanied by the untimely flapping of wings and the running of hooves. And then silence. Ungodly, eerie silence. Undeserved through its precedence and unnatural in its presence, it only helped to heighten our senses. Looking into her shining pupils, I could feel a connection with my sister’s trepidation like only a twin could. The unspoken eventuality of a death we had long known in our primeval subconscious, surfaced into the
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Like the Hindu goddesses surrounding our being, she was ever present and ever caring. In wilful obedience to the scriptures she doled out death to give us life. Many a night was pierced by the last cry of a wretched end and the promise of satisfaction to follow. Magnificent and all encompassing, her mere presence was ironic in its putrid stench of death – and yet of love.
present. We shuffled closer together against the added cold of a loss and drifted back into an uneasy sleep. Days passed without event. Only hunger and loneliness accompanied our desperation. Wherever we looked, pitiful eyes followed us with the knowledge of the unspoken. We were destined to die like our mother before us. The only difference lay in its prolonged suffering. Slowly but surely we were being starved of our right to live. Perhaps it was this hunger. Perhaps a consequence of our loss, but for the first time in our short lives, we were forced to confront the inadequacy of a mother. She dared die on us. She dared leave. And for this we learnt to hate. Our mother had always known me to be the clever of us. And for this she loved me more – ever so slightly but obviously. This now, was the burden of my circumstance. My sister’s passing days resulted in the substitution of memory with that of hunger and frantic survival. I was left with the duty of remembrance and precognition. And it slowly consumed me.
Death was an eventuality. Yet it was in a cruel hurry to meet us. But try as it may, it could not be crueler than or as prominent as our hunger. We were dying surely, but not before we were reduced to the slow torture of orphanhood. We dreamt of food, we thought of food, we slept with hunger gnawing away at our brains. We cried, we wailed, and finally we silenced ourselves with the pointlessness of our actions. It soon became clear – we had to eat or we had to die. After days of starvation and loneliness, death seemed easier even for one so young. But we were never taught to die. We were meant to survive and to flourish. That was the old way. We are princesses of the Sunderbans. Royal beasts of honour and supremacy. And yet we are children. Offspring of a murdered mother, orphaned without cause and unable to reason why. Wailing at the injustice of a situation we do not understand and a claustrophobia we cannot end. No one to turn to and nowhere to hide. We wait. Wait for the darkness to engulf us. For it to all end. And for that we sit here – deprived and lonely. Blinded by hunger and laid bare by fate. Motherless.
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The unkindest stroke
By Rimi B. Chatterjee
The Department of Demographic Parity Adjustment Office Ministry of Population and Reproductive Health New Delhi 1 May 2011 Ref: Adj/MF/DDP/11/AOK/12945803 Dear Sir/Madam, This letter is to inform you that as per our records of May 2011, your gender status has been demoted in conformation with demographic quota requirements in your area. You are directed to update your legal and other documents to reflect this change. If you have any queries about this, you may look up our website given on the letterhead and input the above reference number to access your case details. Alternatively you may present yourself before the Assistant Director in Charge of Adjustment (Office of the Chief Adjuster) on a date not later than one month from the date of this letter, bringing with you all necessary documents...
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I
remain... The rest of the letter was a blur of violet ink. Someone had battered the signature with an official seal like an axe-murderer on amphetamines. They had then sealed the envelope with a blob of glue that had digested the end of the letter, turning it into a grotesque brain-coral in which the identity of the letter-writer lay entombed like an ancient pharaoh in his pyramid. Shreds of envelope still hung from the tortured lump. ‘Beta, what is it?’ his mother called from the living room where his wife Shweta was trying to work out how to change the channel on their new TV. He came back to the living room and put the letter down on the dining table next to his half-eaten breakfast. Shweta picked it up and frowned at it, the remote control forgotten in her other hand. His mother stared at her in pink-faced outrage. ‘There’s no website on the letterhead. What does this mean, Sanjay?’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve never heard of this office. Who knows what it means? Anyway, it’s already June, so I suppose there’s no point going now.’ ‘It could be important.’
He knew that tone. He’d get no peace till he looked into it. ‘Next week,’ he said placatingly, and stuffed the letter in his briefcase. The bus ride to his office was long and tedious, but at least there were always seats when he got on. One of the small consolations of living on the fringes of the city. Today would be a busy day at the garment exporters’ office where he worked. If Patel cancelled the afternoon meeting, he could get off early and see to it on his way home, he thought comfortingly, and turned to the crossword. Patel was waiting for him in his cubicle, sitting negligently on the edge of Sanjay’s desk. ‘Ah, Nevi,’ he barked. Patel was always dressed in the latest Raymond suiting, his collar negligently agape to advertise his coolness. He had a tiny ponytaillette that magically disappeared before board meetings, only to reappear the following morning. Today he was looking extremely annoyed. ‘Gone and got yourself reassigned, maderchod?’ he growled. He had grown up in Chandigarh, and often tried to be more Punjabi than the Punjabis while remaining vegetarian at home. Sanjay stared at him blankly. ‘Have to change all your paperwork, leave rules, loo privileges. You’re lucky it’s a slow month for me.’ ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir?’ Patel always frowned when Sanjay called him ‘sir’. He whipped a letter out of his jacket pocket and waved it at Sanjay. ‘Then what’s this?’ It was an identical letter to the one that had arrived this morning, except that it was addressed to ‘The in-charge, M/s Menz World and Company,’ and signed by ‘L. Lala, Chief Adjuster, Population Distribution Division.’
This letter is to inform you that as per our records of May 2011, your gender status has been demoted in conformation with demographic quota requirements in your area. You are directed to update your legal and other documents to reflect this change. ‘The peon who left this,’ Patel ground out, ‘said you were to report in the forenoon of today, failing which your chance of appeal will be cancelled. Now given that this whole business is going to cost me money, I think I can spare you for half a day. So off you go to this...,’ he squinted at the sender’s address,’... office, and be sure to come back after lunch.’ The office was easy to find: it looked like a birdcage had had a love child with a public phone booth and the result had shacked up with a pair of gantry cranes. It took him several false starts before he found the doorway. This was surprisingly discreet with only a plaque informing him that the design had won prizes in Prague, Athens and Loughborough. Just beyond that were a bank of elevators and a sign saying ‘CAUTION: LIFT ONLY FOR DESCENDING’. The lights were all unblinkingly stuck on the ground floor. He took the stairs. He had to, anyway: he had no idea where he was supposed to be going. The first floor was a featureless wasteland of corridors. On the second floor he was luckier: a couple of turns brought him to a wide room filled with desks. At each desk sat a man peering intently at a computer. The room was spotlessly clean with not a file in sight, and a sign above the door said: PAPERLESS OFFICE: PRIZEWINNER IN PRAGUE, ATHENS AND LOUGHBOROUGH, RUNNER UP IN GDANSK. He tried to say ‘Gdansk’ to himself a couple of times, but his tongue wanted to run away and hide. Timidly he walked up to the nearest man, holding the letter in front of him. The man didn’t move: only his eyes flashed here and there, his mouse-hand crabbed over the instrument like some primal creature of prey. Sanjay leaned in slightly and caught a glimpse of the screen. It was bright green, with many white rectangles flying here and there over it, each marked with little black or red signs. As he watched, the last flight of these unlikely birds was rewarded with the blasting of blobby fireworks, like a child’s drawing of Diwali. Now the man turned. ‘Yes?’ Sanjay held out the letter. ‘I’m looking for Mr L. Lala.’ The man barely glanced at the letter. ‘Go to Room 13/5.’ Sanjay didn’t move. June 2011
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‘Room 13/5!’ The man barked. ‘This is 16/4. Go back to the staircase and walk up a flight, then turn with your back facing the wall. You will see three corridors, one of which has paan stains while the other two are freshly painted. No one goes into the freshly painted ones. Keep to the left, then go down a half step, then look up and see three signs. Two cannot be read. Follow the third till the end of the room, and skirt around the washbasin. Look very carefully over the wall and you will see some stairs on the next building. That building is the Adjustment Office: this is the Parity Office. Go down, out the front door, round the back and up those stairs. Then ask the next person. Peon!’ The little white rectangles all lined up again like soldiers on his screen. The man began despatching them with little vicious darts of his mouse. Sanjay left. He went out and round the back of the building. There all he saw was a featureless wall. He was about to turn and head home when a voice said urgently. ‘Psst! Over here!’ Sanjay frowned. ‘Where are you?’ Then he noticed a tiny grilled window set in the wall. For an awful moment he thought that the man had been walled up in it like some medieval prisoner, but then his mind righted itself and he saw the man was bent over an ancient, wheezy xerox machine. Behind him, far too close for there to be any space between it and the machine, was a door. The man was not a prisoner, or if he was, then it was by choice. ‘Copy?’ he said hopefully, beckoning Sanjay closer. Clearly he wasn’t going to talk unless Sanjay obliged, so he handed the letter over. When it came back he almost dropped it: it was scorching hot. A sad grey piece of paper covered in black shadows landed beside it. ‘Two rupees,’ the man said. ‘Can you tell me where I can find Room 13/5?’ Sanjay asked, handing over the coins. The man jerked a thumb over his shoulder and turned away. Resignedly, Sanjay walked off in the direction shown. He had gone about fifty metres when he saw an opening in the wall. He looked in, and saw a staircase going up, shielded entirely from view by the wall. A plaque at the top of the stairs told him they were modelled on the Zenana Staircase at the Sajpur Fort. Curbing his exasperation, Sanjay went in through the door at the top. Room 13/5 was ridiculously easy to find. The building was hollow at its core, the space ringed with verandas, like a fancy mall, and topped with a skylight, through which pigeons rained down on the floor. All the handrailings were filthy with their droppings. Trying not to lean on anything, Sanjay went inside. The room was packed with people. For a moment all he saw were heads and shoulders, then a dozen arms shot out and smacked into his chest. ‘Please stand in queue!’ a voice hissed in his ear. The queue snaked between desks, through 64 kindle india
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. ‘If you have to ask...the letter said “bringing with you all necessary documents featuring Mahatma Gandhi.” Didn’t you read it to the end? But don’t worry; there is a separate exit door, so you will not have to face the world in your adjusted state doorways, between cubicles, around tea stations. At what did it terminate? None of those around him knew, but they were all clutching letters identical to his. An hour later, he was four feet closer to the first doorway. His cellphone screeched. ‘It’s one o’ clock.’ Patel yammered. ‘Are you coming back or not?’ ‘I’m standing in line,’ Sanjay howled back, causing people to turn and stare. ‘I don’t care,’ Patel said sulkily. ‘I’ll give you another hour, then you cut and run.’ Sanjay took a picture of the human snake ahead of him and sent it to Patel, hoping it would mollify him somewhat. But his luck seemed to be changing, because the imminent lunch hour was causing his fellow sufferers to have second thoughts about their ordeal. A steady trickle of glum-faced men were dropping out of line and heading back over their hard-won territory, defeated and ashamed. Things were moving. In no time at all he had crossed the second doorway. Now he saw the queue doubled back into the room he had left. Then a stentorian voice called, ‘Two lines, please. All those with reference ending in odd number, to the right, all those with even number, to the left.’ Now his line was fairly flying, while the other line was suddenly as becalmed as a bored fisherman’s lures. ‘Who are we going to see?’ he whispered to the man in front. ‘Mr Lala, of course. He’s the Chief Adjuster.’ Sanjay gathered up all his courage. ‘What...what does he adjust?’ ‘Ratios, I think. He says this area is out of balance.’ ‘How does he do that?’ but the man had turned away, clearly not willing to talk. He had reached the doorway of a cabin, in front of which a security man held out his arm, chopping the queue into oneperson bits. The guy in front went in and came out, his hand returning his wallet to his pants pocket. Sanjay wondered if
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he should be reassured at the speed with which the man had done his business. Now it was his turn.
forenoon of today. Is it still the forenoon? I think not. Time is up, Mrs Negi. Meet my assistant Ramshankar.’
The inside of the cabin seemed oddly strange and familiar at the same time. There was a desk and chair, and one part of the room was partitioned off by a curtain. Something made of iron seemed to be standing there. The name plate on the desk said ‘L. Lala, Chief Adjuster’. Lala himself was portly, greying, with half-moon glasses and paan-red lips. He looked bored and unlovely. He was wearing a hairy brown half-sweater, for the air-conditioning wouldn’t have disgraced a morgue.
A white-coated man appeared from behind the curtain. ‘Don’t move, Mrs Negi. This will soon be over.’ ‘No!’ Sanjay tried to get up, but the chair seemed to suck at his body. He couldn’t raise his hands. With a sinking feeling he realised he’d left it too late: he should have gone for his wallet before he sat down. ‘What...what do I have to do so you’ll let me go?’
‘Now then, Mrs Negi,’ the man said, ‘What can I do for you?’ ‘My name is Nevi,’ Sanjay said. He was momentarily disconcerted when he realised what the room reminded him of: a doctor’s chamber. ‘And the letter didn’t say I had to bring my wife.’ ‘Your wife?’ the man stared at him. ‘Why would we want your wife?’ ‘Well, you asked for Mrs Negi, I mean Nevi.’ ‘Ufff ! Don’t you know what gender reassignment is? This part of India, Delhi in particular, has too many men. The UN has made it mandatory that we correct the imbalance before we get any aid. India needs that aid, so we certainly can’t wait for more girls to be born. We have to be proactive and leverage what we have. You were asked to appeal by the
Lala looked at him carefully, head on one side. ‘If you have to ask...the letter said “bringing with you all necessary documents featuring Mahatma Gandhi.” Didn’t you read it to the end? But don’t worry; there is a separate exit door, so you will not have to face the world in your adjusted state. Just yet, anyway. And we will provide you with appropriate clothes and bangles when the procedure is complete.’ The curtain whisked aside to disclose an iron frame with straps on every bar. The chair he was on, rolled smoothly to it, turned 180 degrees and slotted itself into the centre. Ramshankar held something poised in his hand. ‘Just so you know,’ he said, ‘The pen is mightier that the penis.’ Then everything went dark.
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Pastiche
By Rachaita Hore
S
he looked into the mirror. But couldn’t find herself there. The ridiculously decorated walls of her room winked back at her maliciously, from within the mirror. She had disappeared. She blinked. Once.Twice. And squinted her eyes as she stared back into the mirror. No sign of her reflection still. She wondered what she had done to displease the mirror that it had decided to consume her reflection altogether, masticating it with such perfection using its glass teeth that not even a remnant remained. It was swallowed and gone. Into the hidden world of lost reflections. She felt her feet lead her away from the unyielding enemy into another room, infront of another mirror. Meanwhile, her thoughts were preoccupied with weighing the benefits and setbacks of a life without a reflection. But as her mind settled down to take in the shift of scenery, there it was. There she was staring back at herself with a hauntingly melancholic expression on her face. She wasn’t sure this time though, so she had to raise her hands up to trace the contours of her face in order to conclude, that the person who seemed to be aping her every move from within the mirror was indeed her. It astonished her. She called out for her maid who had only just up until then been spying on the mistress secretly from the other room. The maid, a timid old woman, had been concerned ever since she had witnessed the mistress talking to herself, earlier in the day. On closer inspection, it appeared to her, however, that she had been indulging in an act of prayer. ‘Queer,’ the maid had thought. The mistress never prayed. The mirror that shall from so forth be known as the enemy only, was a present from her erstwhile fiancé. He was an air
cadet and his death had been as equally unexpected as it had been unfortunate. But such was life. And she had loved and lost countless times since. She had never managed to forget him. Recently, she had been proposed by a man much younger than herself and they had been carrying on a feisty love affair ever since. This man had smitten her to such magnitudes that now she was having trouble recalling the incidentals of ever coming in possession of the enemy. But come in possession she had, and now, it was proving to be a curse. The maid had tiptoed up to her in all this time and now resembled the picture of somebody who had just had an unearthly encounter with, perhaps, a being of the other world. But what more was she now if she didn’t have a reflection? Had the reaper come and snatched her soul away as she had been preoccupied with dreaming about lace petticoats last night? Somehow she did not trust the maid enough to rule out that possibility. The maid was made to stand in front of both mirrors for a calculated measurement of time before the mistress could draw a conclusion satisfactorily-her enemy was not the maid’s enemy. She still had her reflection intact, impervious to her own predicament. But as she had been peering into the mirror beseechingly in a last attempt to have her reflection rightfully returned, it let out a last moan as if in answer to her constant protests. Forbearance, the mistresses’ Rottweiler was no more.
She wondered what she had done to displease the mirror that it had decided to consume her reflection altogether, masticating it with such perfection using its glass teeth that not even a remnant remained. It was swallowed and gone. 66 kindle india
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The Spammer By Joy Bhattacherjee
Comment [4]: They don’t actually do that anymore in detentioncentres. — Sayantan Chaudhuri
Comment [1]: There is a continuity confusion. Is the first paragraph the present? If so, partially abiding by the doctor’s prescription does not fit since much worse has happened — Sayantan Chaudhuri
Comment [2]: Not that it’s impossible (proven thus in the last Black Hat conference using a bluetooth keyboard) but you are losing credibility here. Though, softsci is still sci-fi — Sayantan Chaudhuri
I
, (am) zelma mooney, I sign my name digitally in all smalls. I don’t have time for capitalizing on hominid nomenclature. My English is bad, I’m a nerd-geek combo, I’m too obsessed with the word “I” and yes, I spam. I spam a lot. So much so that my doctor identified me as an obsessivecompulsive weirdo and forbade me to use computers for a change. The reader of this story would know that I never listened to him. My mummy sold out my machine so I had to hack my neighbour’s (via bluetooth) and use it as my spamming portal. I couldn’t help it. zelma isn’t even my real name, I adopted it when we had this underground hackers’ ball in college. We were drunk and least bothered about clothing. Lying in circles on the grass, smoking weed. Few of us were engrossed in this coding compo, and the moon had risen. It had risen in all its glory (over the pool-water reflection), and it was beautiful. This
was when I thought of the name mooney. I had a friend, we smoked and kissed, me and Surdeep. This guy from India with hairy chest. He had just cleared his sophomore year. We were madly in love. Then the other girls came like other seasons and took him away, and then his father came from India and took him away. I missed him after college, writing to everyone to get his contact address. I missed his tall frame and burly hands. Missed the heavy creaking noise of the bed that we were so keen on hiding before. He never said he would keep in touch. I learned later that men were always a treacherous bunch, promising and not turning up. He was not like that ever, he didn’t promise me anything. He just went away, I couldn’t let go, and it was partly my fault. Like I was saying, I wrote to everyone, any old email ID from the old college circles, hacker-clubs. Nothing turned up. I
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wrote the same letter to everybody, “Dear Mr. such and such, If you could kindly give me the contact information of Mr. Surdeep Singh Bhairo, it will be much appreciated. Regards, My Real Name” At first there were polite replies, then profound annoyance in their letters. My disease had spawned roots by then and I didn’t stop my letters after numerous negative replies. Some received fifty, others seventy. It brought the police to my door steps. They checked my story, my past, they assured me that they were taking me to Surdeep, but I laughed. They took me to a vile asylum for dumping nutcases. I thrived there somehow; date, time and names got mixed up. zelma mooney however was alive and kicking. They did not have serious charges against me, so to avoid the human-rights guys and get rid of a liability on government funds; they threw me out on the streets. No money and no name, I crawled through the streets like an instinctive cat and got back to my old apartment. The building owner was an old friend, I remembered his face. I was rather unrecognizable in my (shaved scalp). I used to have a good job, having passed out of an Ivy League. It used to pay really well, because I saw my bank had a lot of money in it. I bought a new laptop. All my previous contacts were gone, as I had forgotten my own email id. In the huge web, I was a nameless spider crawling and sniffing, salivating desire. I got hold of any email id, whenever I could find the unprotected on net, I mailed them the same old letter. I created chain mails, which assured the user good fortune if they sent it to ten others. I could almost tell my message spreading through the web. In the grey world of spamming I was the spider queen. I knew he was in India, so in next batch of my mails I assured the reader a gift of ten thousand dollars if they could get any news of him. The days were getting monotonous, hours spent spamming people. zelma mooney had become a notorious figure in the dark virtual world. The real me was still an obsessivecompulsive nerd living out of a (dilapidated condo). I had no desires anymore, only an intense urge to spam. The cause had
been forgotten, the roots cut. I was precariously balanced on the immense network of creepers I had spawned across the web. Surdeep was nowhere in my brain’s vicinity, he was gone, expelled by my flatulent life.
They took me to a vile asylum for dumping nutcases. I thrived there somehow; date, time and names got mixed up. zelma mooney however was alive and kicking. They did not have serious charges against me, so to avoid the human-rights guys and get rid of a liability on government funds; they threw me out on the streets. No money and no name, I crawled through the streets like an instinctive cat and got back to my old apartment Then one day I was flossing my teeth when the doorbell rang. I met a middle aged Indian man standing outside. I didn’t know him. He had ginger beard and a lined face, bordering on the old. “Yes, what do you want?” I said. “You made a hell of a noise on the net. I had to come.” His lips parted, he was smiling. He was probably Surdeep, but I didn’t know him, did not need to. I smiled and said to him, “Sorry, I don’t need anything right now.” I closed the door (.)
Comment [6]: ...What, no ‘Python reference’? — Sayantan Chaudhuri
Comment [5]: ADMIT IT! You have ALWAYS wanted to use this phrase! — Sayantan Chaudhuri
Comment [3]: Sentence fragmented — Sayantan Chaudhuri
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RNI NO. WBENG/2010/36111