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The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
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VOLUME: 3 - ISSUE: 3 - AUGUST 15 - 2018
Columns: Letter from London: John Looker 19 The Wanderer - Andrew Fleck 07 Shane’s Stack ‘ n Stock - Shane Joseph 21 Critique The Tempest and its afterlives by T. Sriraman 99 Ripples & Reflections: Wordswork / Literary meet- Sri Lanka by Santhan 118 Review / Theatre - a play by Gary Beck Clown Show by Debbie Broadhead Brandt 49 Poetry: Pablo Cuzco 27 Keith Moul 34 Martin Pedersen 37 Manisha Manhas 73 Ananya S Guha 61 Namrata Pathak 79 Moinak Dutta 83 Koshy AV 120 Prathap Kamath 133 Poetry-Translation- Malayalam/English Sunil Jose / Betsy Paul. C / Ravi Shanker (Ra Sh) 126 Fiction: Ayathurai Santhan 45 Duane L. Herrmann 57 Parineeta Singh 88
THE WAGON MAGAZINE
4/4, FIRST FLOOR, R.R.FLATS, FIRST STREET, VEDHACHALA NAGAR, KODAMBAKKAM, CHENNAI - 600 024 Phone: +91-9382708030 e-mail: thewagonmagazine@gmail.com www.thewagonmagazine.com The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
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Water water everywhere… The flood water came to the inner rooms of small houses Their total fitness and safety suspected to be in peril The people made sounds and cries for help from mainland Seemed to be people were not seeing or hearing the plight
- From FLOOD, a poem by Gangadharan Nair Pulingat https://www.poemhunter.com/poems/flood/page-1/39159273/
Lake Titicaca’s Pre-Incan Ruins, Bolivia / Peru Atlit-Yam, Israel Baiae, an Ancient Roman Underwater City, Italy, Olous, Crete, Greece The Mulifanua Site, Samoa Dwaraka, Underwater City in the Gulf of Cambay, India Phanagoria, Russia / Greece Cleopatra’s Lost Underwater Palace, Egypt The Lost Underwater City of Shicheng, China Underwater Cities in Egypt Thonis-Heracleion, Pavlopetri, Greece Port Royal, Jamaica, The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
4 Prentiss, Mississippi Yonaguni, Japan The Lost City of Havana, Cuba Doggerland, North Sea, Dunwich, England Willow Grove, Tennessee Tyno Helig, Wales Canudos, Brazil Ravenser Odd, Yorkshire, England Dolichiste, Kekova Lake Atitlan, Sambaj & Chiutinamit, Southwestern Guatemala Neapolis, scattered across the coastal Tunisian town of Nabeul. The linking part of all these places from different parts of the world listed above is that they are all submerged. They are all under water. There are hundreds more from around the world, from various tribes and cultures, and so this is just a handful. What could have caused these geographically separate civilizations to go under? It is a paradox. When mankind ascends, cities go under. Throughout the history of the progress of mankind, we see this paradoxical occurance. Civilizations reach their pinnacle and then the disastrous calamity destroys and sinks the whole civilization. During de-glaciations, or meltdowns, the ice-water returned to the oceans, causing the sea-level to rise by as much as 110-120 meters!! Throughout our history, the busiest cities have been located either on the banks of mighty rivers or near busy coastlines. All the melted ice lead to a rise in sea-levels, inundating huge chunks of land. And, of course, monsoons play their role escalating the destruction. Fastforward to now. In India, we have witnessed the catastrophic aftermath of heavy rains and floods in the recent years. We faced devastating floods - Bihar (1987), Assam (1998), Odisha (1999), Andaman and Nicobar islands (2004), Gujarat (2005), Maharashtra (2005), Bihar (2007), Himalayan States ( 2012), Assam (2012), Uttarakhand ( 2013), Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, particularly Chennai (2015), Bihar (2017) and now Kerala (August 2018). In other parts of the world, New York, Miami and Jakarta are The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
5 predicted to go under while New Orleans is already sinking. I wish man will be wise enough to ponder over and act before it is too late. He went like one that hath been stunned, And is of sense forlorn: A sadder and a wiser man, He rose the morrow morn. -The Rime of the Ancyent Mariner *
Emerging Translator Mentorships 2018-19
Applications for the National Centre for Writing Emerging Translator Mentorship Programme 2018-19 are now open! The mentorship supports translators translating into the English language. This year's languages are: Bengali – Mentored by Arunava Sinha – Harvill Secker Young Translators Prize supported by Reimagine India. (Please see the Harvill Secker website for details on how to apply) Indonesian – Mentored by Pamela Allen Korean – Mentored by Deborah Smith – supported by LTI Korea Lithuanian – Mentored by Daniel Hahn – supported by the Lithuanian Culture Institute Norwegian – Mentored by Don Bartlett – supported by the Royal Norwegian Embassy Polish – Mentored by Antonia Lloyd-Jones – supported by the Polish Cultural Institute Swedish – Mentored by Sarah Death – supported by the Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation Find more information on the National Centre for the Writing website. * TWM is in its third year. I am really grateful to all those connected to me and to the magazine. From August 2018 edition, Shane Joseph writes a new book review column.
Shane's Stack ' n Stock
The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
6 Shane Joseph is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers in Toronto, Canada. Self-taught, with four degrees under his belt obtained through distance education, Shane is an avid traveller and has visited one country for every year of his life and lived in four of them. He fondly recalls incidents during his travels as real lessons he could never have learned in school: husky riding in Finland with no training, trekking the Inca Trail in Peru through an unending rainstorm, hitch-hiking in Australia without a map, escaping a wild elephant in Zambia, and being stranded without money in Denmark, are some of his memories. ( for more, visit his website: https://shanejoseph.com/about/) The first episode, in light of V.S. Naipaul's death, starts off with a doubleheader of two books, based on this enigmatic author, one non-fiction (Sir Vidia's Shadow by Paul Theroux) and the other fiction (The Last Word by Hanif Kureishi)
(If any of you would like to view, here is the link: https://www.c-span. org/video/?115502-1/sir-vidias-shadow where Paul Theroux talks about his book, Sir Vidia’s Shadow, published by Houghton Mifflin Company)
* This edition’s wrapper art is by Michal (Mitak) Mahgerefteh. She is an award-winning poet and a multi-media artist from Israel, living in Virginia since 1986. She is the author of four poetry collections and editor-in-chief of the international literary magazine Poetica. In July 2017, Mitak received a second-place award for her pastel painting from PrimePlus Exhibition (VA), an honourable mention for her pastel painting from Chesapeake Bay Art Association (VA) member show, an honourable mention from Blank The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
7 Art Space's Color Art Contest, and has been accepted for publication by Sonder Review. Starting in late 2017, She is now concentrating on creating paintings using three digital apps on her iPad Pro. Most of the paintings are inspired by world travel. If you are interested in purchasing any of these award-winning pieces, or to see more of Michal's work, please visit her website: www.michal-mahgerefteh.com/ or contact: MitakArt@aol.com. * I have already mentioned that TWM is in its third year. No doubt the graph is upwards. Having said all that, I have to go for a minimum subscription fee for the digital platform. I wish the magazine be alive even after me. I expect all friends to cooperate and subscribe and I extend my gratitude in advance. More details on the website and other social platforms. Krishna Prasad
a. k. a
Chithan
Hard copy SubscriptionINR 750 per annum (within India) Shipping charges outside India as per the location of country Website membership and log in access 10$ per annum For further details contact: info@thewagonmagazine.com thewagonmagazine@gmail.com www.thewagonmagazine.com The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
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The Wanderer Andrew Fleck
Nut-Brown Maids
Behold her, single in the field, Yon solitary Highland Lass! Reaping and singing by herself; Stop here, or gently pass! Alone she cuts and binds the grain, And sings a melancholy strain; O listen! for the Vale profound Is overflowing with the sound. So wrote the young Wordsworth about the sight of a Gaelic reaper he saw on a visit to the Scottish Highlands. To us this seems a perfectly natural choice of subject, but to many poets before him, and indeed to many of his contemporaries, the choice of a peasant girl– a real The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
9 one, not a figure from Greek mythology – as a source of inspiration would have been quite puzzling. Though as British as Wordsworth, the reaper still has an air of the foreign or exotic about her: although the Scottish Highlands were a day’s boat trip from Wordsworth’s native Cumberland, a wholly different language was (and, in parts, still is) spoken there – and it is the fact that he cannot understand what she is saying that allows him to project his own ideas onto her. Part of the appeal of the scene to Wordsworth was in the girl’s innocence, in her absolute removal from the fast-industrialising parts of the British Isles: there is something that seems timeless about the scene, which would have been much the same even a thousand years earlier. And the reaper is an un-self-conscious part of the landscape as the poet cannot quite be. Wordsworth is describing a real figure in a real landscape in a way that had been fairly uncommon in England, albeit with some degree of idealisation and some sense of distance between poet and subject. Wordsworth’s poem came to mind recently, when I was reading some poems of a place and era far removed from eighteenth century Britain: the Korea of the Joseon Dynasty. I believe the poetry
of the Far East surpassed European poetry in its appreciation of and evocation of nature, at least until the nineteenth century, and perhaps beyond, but in Japanese and Chinese poetry the farmers and servants of the courtesans and scholars who wrote the poems are The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
10 largely invisible, less important aesthetically than falling leaves or blossoms. Korean poetry, less courtly, though no less pastoral is more interested in the people in the landscapes it describes. In his book Hanshi Majung, Lee Jong Mok notes a recurring figure in several different poems across different eras: a country girl, maybe a humble kitchen servant, heading home carrying a bamboo basket full of picked vegetables. Often, like Wordsworth’s reaper, she is singing, sometimes she must chase away pesky village youths; one puts a flower in her hair. In all, she seems full of joy – “having gleaned the wealth of the spring,” one poet says, “she returns home merrily.” (p188) The girl is sometimes the central subject of the poem; at other times she is just one element in a broader pastoral description: A cock crows mountain noontime A horse rests in shade of willow branches The valley echoes with the woodcutter’s song Downstream, a girl brings in the greens. (190) In just one poem, she becomes aware of the poet’s attentions, and “seeing me still smiling runs / and hides herself by a magnolia tree.”In that line there is just a hint of an interest in the girl that is not merely aesthetic – it is, to my eye at least, more than a little sensual. In a Freudian reading, attraction to a young girl is, of course, quite natural, but expressing desire for her might not be socially acceptable in Joseon Korea, so the poet sublimates The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
11 his desire into aesthetic appreciation of her. If that sounds a little reductive, well, we might at least say that some element of desire plays some part in the interest of the poet. And the very same thing could be said, naturally, of William Wordsworth and his Highland lass. In a less conservative era of English history, and one less interested in realistic pastoral description, poets sang the praises of common women, not as images of authenticity, but as lovers dear and loyal: in an early 16th century ballad, a man and a women debating the fidelity and honesty of women, take the story of a ‘nut-brown maid’ as proof that women, despite that era’s suspicion of them, can indeed be loyal and loving (phew!). The nut-brown maid follows her love, apparently a poorer man, to the green woods, at the risk of her reputation and her comfortable life. She is rewarded when he finally reveals that he is not poor at all, but in fact an earl. The original nut-brown maid is hardly poor, but the name eventually became an epithet applied to poorer women: nutbrown does indeed refer to skin tone, as well as alluding to her connection to nature: women who worked outdoors naturally had darker skin tone than the cloistered daughters of the gentry and the nobility. 16th century courtship could be an exasperating business – if suitors were not great soldiers or men of consequence, they were at least expected to be versed in poetry and music, and of course able to buy the best and most fashionable gifts. One can understand the appeal of a woman lower down the social scale, who may not ask so much of a man. Thomas Campion, who certainly was versed in poetry and music– and was in fact one of the best poets and best songwriters of the Elizabethan age, though probably not rich, explains the appeal as so: The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
12 If I love Amaryllis, She gives me fruit and flowers: But if we love these ladies, We must give golden showers. Give them gold, that sell love, Give me the nut-brown lass, Who, when we court and kiss, She cries, “Forsooth, let go!” But when we come where comfort is, She never will say no. Amarylis– don’t be fooled by the Greek name, she is an English lass, for sure – puts up a little resistance towards her suitor’s advances, but when –ahem – push comes to shove, she relents. The country girl is a lot less hard work than the noblewoman all hung up on chivalric posing and social advancement – and that, as much as any rustic charms, is the key to her appeal. -----------------------------------------Credits
The Korean poems are all from Hanshi Majung, Lee Jong Mok, TaeHakSa Press, Seoul 2012. The two short quotes are by Seo Geo Jeong (14201488) and Yun Gi (1441-1826), respectively, and the quotations are my own translations of the author Lee Jong Mok’s Korean (Hangul) renditions. The longer extract is by the poet Lee Ha Gon (born 1677), which I translated directly from the Korean Chinese characters (Hanja). Wordsworth and Campion’s poems are in the public domain.
Andrew Fleck, who has been a secondary school teacher, proofreader and EFL teacher, among other things, writes on poetry and history at https://thepeeltower.wordpress.com The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
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Letter from London - 19 from John Looker
The Tormented Muse
Asked to explain the secrets of his craft, the alchemist would wrap his cloak more tightly and withdraw to his tower in silence. The mountebank, however, holding his phial of coloured water high, might become loquacious about herbs gathered by moonlight on the shores of Arabia. I feel uncomfortable talking about how I write my poems. I would prefer to say nothing. Saying anything at all incurs the risk of becoming a charlatan. However, I was recently persuaded to contribute an article on this to launch a new series of 'confessions' for an online poetry journal Underfoot – at https://underfootpoetry.wordpress.com/ - who also wanted to publish four poems from my book The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
14 The Human Hive. In seven parts, The Human Hive looks at life through work: looking at people down the ages and around the globe as they go about their daily lives, drawing parallels in time and place, finding contrasts, worrying away at what it means to be human. Of these four poems, two are ‘bookends’. Lying outside the main sections, they are complementary sonnets: Work (a Noun) and To Dream (a Verb). [Poems featured below this commentary] The first of these has had a couple of outings at poetry readings. It was read on local radio shortly after the book was published, but not by me: the late Bart Wolffe, a writer from Africa but living in London, chose to read this during a half-hour slot on Croydon Radio and I felt deeply honoured. Much later I read it myself at Café Writers in Norwich – the first time I had ever read at an open mic session. I suppose I’m fond of it. While Work (a Noun) looks into the deep past, To Dream (a Verb) is forward-looking, but both I believe touch on essential human qualities: imagination and endeavour perhaps. The other two poems come from the heart of the book. Part 1 has ten poems celebrating archetypal forms of work: hunting, planting vegetables, building a home, waiting at table, making tools and so on. Fishing is practically universal and timeless and so Raiding the Deep had to be written. As I have never been a fisherman it required a combination of research and imagination. The central picture, however, of the sardine fleet drawing upon Portugal’s shore – well, that’s a memory, it’s something my wife and I witnessed on holiday years ago. Like other poems in the book, I don’t see it as merely a description of people at work. I hoped that this one would capture something of the exhilaration, the romance and daring of certain kinds of human activity, the spirit of being alive. You will be able to decide whether I have come close enough to that. The fourth poem, The Breakfast Meeting is Heartily Loathed, comes from a later Part of the book about international travel – that cosmopolitan set of business people, academics and diplomats. Their lives are far from the daily round for most readers and yet their wary interaction with foreign contacts has been a part of human society The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
15 since the earliest days, as I hope the poem shows. I was able to draw on many years in the British civil service during which I made trips to Brussels, Paris and other EU capitals as well as to Washington, Tokyo and places in between. The breakfast meeting (horrible invention!) was well known to me, but I hope that the poem offers the reader rather more than that. Other Parts of The Human Hive mine our emotions: there are poems about hope and disappointment, comradeship and betrayal, exhilaration and tedium, and so on. There’s a long poem about workers who keep the city going throughout the night. We can experience many emotions through work, and work helps to establish who we are in society. That then introduces my four poems and, because I am delaying having to open up on how I wrote them, next a quick word about an easier subject: how they came to be published. This was wholly unexpected. Almost a godsend. In 2014 I received an email from someone who introduced herself as the founder of an independent press: Deborah Bennison, of Bennison Books. She had been reading poems I had posted on my blog (Poetry from John Looker at www.johnstevensjs.wordpress.com) and offered to publish a collection for me. I was delighted, and also relieved because I had been slowly putting together a collection of poems which followed the same theme and belonged together. The blog wasn’t adequate; they needed a book. Deborah Bennison was a skilled and tactful editor, gently questioning my intentions here and there. The Human Hive was finally published in January 2015 and Bennison Books, who is a most supportive publisher, went on to promote the book through their website, Facebook page, Twitter account and newsletter, eventually submitting copies to the Poetry Library whose editorial committee accepted it into the national collection. The book has sold modestly but more than I had expected, and has reached ten different countries – a testament to the internet age. The publication has also led to other opportunities. The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
16 I see that I can no longer put off giving an account of how the poems were written. The key point I suppose is: very slowly. I usually take months over a poem and generally have a dozen or so in the draft.
This reminds me of Howard Hodgkin, the British artist. There was a television programme some years ago which showed him at work in his studio. He was celebrated for his abstract paintings in which colour and tone were all-important. Stacks of his canvasses were propped on the floor leaning against the walls with only their backs showing. There might be one underway on an easel. From day to day he would turn a canvass around and study it, reconsider the colour and composition, and from time to time would take one up and work on it some more, prior to placing it back on the floor, facing the wall. In this manner, his collection grew and each painting went through a long slow evolution. That is how it is with me, and how it was with each of these four poems. You might be surprised to learn that it was the two sonnets – the shorter poems – that underwent the greatest revision. However, I see that as natural because the sonnet form, still popular after six The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
17 hundred years, succeeds because of its immense compression, plus the ‘turn’ or trigger point. Work (a Noun) for example was written and rewritten over three years. It began as a totally different poem in free verse based partly on memories of working as a student on a market garden and partly on some flints which emerged in my own vegetable patch (which I believe to be ancient tools, although my wife laughs at that!). I wasn’t happy with the poem. It remained on my computer for months and was amended from time to time before finally being trashed. It simply wasn’t convincing. Then I had an entirely fresh idea and rewrote the poem, as a sonnet, more or less as you see it now, a totally different time and place and a wholly new scenario. But still, it needed revision. It stayed stashed, as it were, with its face to the wall and was looked at from time to time. One day I felt sure that the closing couplet had to be jettisoned and reworked from scratch – after which I had a radically different ending and in consequence, the whole poem took on a new purpose. It was almost as if it had been waiting for me to unearth it while I wasted time on false starts and dead ends. Even that newly discovered couplet changed a bit over the coming weeks as I tried out various images of human inventions, aiming for a suitable sequence, the right rhythm, the best metaphors. I could say more but already I feel awkward at having attempted so much. Perhaps I’ll simply add that since the publication of The Human Hive in early 2015 I have been working on a second book with a different theme. The poems have all been drafted and some have already been published in journals and anthologies in the UK, the USA, India and Australia, but most of the poems remain stacked against the wall, taken out and reviewed in turn, the revisions becoming progressively slighter. The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
18 If you don’t mind, I’d like my cloak back now please and the key to my tower. _______________________________________
Work (A Noun)
Old English: weorc, werc, wurc, wirc, worc, work: that which distinguishes the human from other primates
Let us start at the beginning. Come closer and we’ll focus on a detail: two hands, rough with bitten-down nails but agile, strong, striking one stone against another; knapping. Step back and see the whole man, in skins, squatting, a ring of small children, thin dogs and beyond – on the brow of this hill – earthworks and huts and barefooted people carrying, sifting. He stands. He weighs one flint in his hand, frowning, then swinging his arm high he sends that stone arching through the air to the trees below. And it’s spinning still. Changing shape. Becoming a knife, a pot, the wheel, the printing press, railways, nuclear fission and the rule of law. ________________________________________
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Raiding the Deep Let’s spin the globe, spin it towards the sun – slowly now – we’re looking for a likely place, a place where the sea or the ocean touch the land and men have always put to sea in boats, have moored their boats or dragged them on the shore with heavy limbs after the homeward run. Here will do, here where the wild Atlantic batters the coast and the heaving tide has carried a fragile fleet up on to Portugal’s sand. The boats are beached and the sardine catch laid out in boxes for the buyers, and men with wide-brimmed metal hats will carry the fish on their heads, salt water dripping, up to the trucks and out of view. Soon the men will hear how much they’ve earned. A decent trip? Not bad. The catch? So so. Not as much as in the glory days but the weather held, the fish were there, the gear behaved and (although this isn’t said) they all returned. Spin the world, and find the trawlers active in early morning off Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New England. Spin it and in the darkness look for vessels ranged around the Pacific ring of fish, tuned to their weather warnings, studying sonar, watching the stars in shoals expiring slowly and the depths putting on new colour, as the day – a day of promise – is unfurled. ________________________________________ The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
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The Breakfast Meeting is Heartily Loathed The breakfast meeting, we know, is heartily loathed except of course when it’s loved. Having eaten already, and early, he comes to the table focused and fresh and with radar scanning for trouble. He ensures that the table’s well-covered, and slightly too small, but, we don’t need our papers! he tells his guests with a smile and since we are friends – good friends, he likes to opine – let’s begin with a toast and a generous glass of champagne! This man could sell pants to a mermaid. But now he must face (and he knows it) commensurate force: before him is the CEO who has seen it all, who comes with a smile … … this is the Merchant from Samarkand whose life is the market for silks of every kind … this is no youth fresh from his rites of passage but rather the Tribal Chief whose very pulse is trade along the river … ________________________________________
The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
21 To Dream (A Verb)
Middle English of Germanic origin, probably related to Old English drēam – “joy, music”.
And we’ll close with a big picture, the widest. Looking at the night sky with modern eyes we find, beyond the haze of urban lighting, a handful of the brighter planets and stars, fragments of half-remembered constellations. Now, staring down at a screen in our hands we’re shown what we seek: the lost Milky Way, myriads of densely packed moments of light. Plus, something startling but taken for granted: the presence up there above our bowed heads of man-made satellites in their mapped orbits, all software and shiny exoskeletons – and a probe flung out into deeper space on course to intercept a falling star. ________________________________________
John Looker lives in England with his wife. He is currently completing a second collection of poetry, entitled Shimmering Horizons. His first collection, The Human Hive (Bennison Books, 2015) was selected by the Poetry Library for the UK’s national collection. His work has been published by Magma (UK), Artemis (USA), The Wagon Magazine (India) and other journals, in online journals including Poetry Breakfast, and Ink Sweat & Tears and has appeared in two anthologies: Indra’s Net (UK) and the Austin International Poetry Festival’s 25th anniversary anthology.His blog, Poetry from John Looker, is at https://johnstevensjs.wordpress.com The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
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Shane’s Stack ‘n’ Stock
Episode 1 Nobel prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul passed away last month. In memory of his valuable contribution to literature, I am featuring two of my reviews of books that offer different perspectives on him. The first, Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents by Paul Theroux, is a work of non-fiction, and the second, The Last Word by Hanif Kureishi, is a work of fiction.
Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents - by Paul Theroux The record of a friendship that lasted over 30 years is the next best thing to a biography that Paul Theroux comes close to chronicling on V.S Naipaul. Theroux couldn’t have come up with a more difficult subject. In his The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
23 words, Naipaul is “one of the strangest and most difficult men I have met. He was contradictory, he challenged everything, he demanded attention, he could be petty, he uttered heresies about Africa (a land Theroux had a strong connection with), he made his innocent wife cry, he had impossible standards, he was self-important, he hated children, music and dogs. He was also brilliant and passionate in his convictions.” And yet there is a warmth between these two men, Naipaul the mentor and Theroux the willing acolyte, and their lessons on writing that span continents in shared conversations, letters, and essays are invaluable even today. They were totally dedicated to their craft, suffering the vicissitudes of the career writer who has no other outlet for self-actualization. Money was always a lack and a need, for they alternated between selling critically acclaimed but financially lean books while dabbling in journalism and taking teaching assignments to keep the bills paid while roaming the world, often alone, in constant search of material for their pens. Some of Master Naipaul’s lessons to his student Theroux are worth noting: a) Don’t get rich on writing before the age of 40. b) Tell the truth. c) Create original turns of phrase and words. d) The Man (writer) must never precede the work (yet Naipaul was pleased with the literary honours heaped upon him, including the Nobel that came after this book was written). e) Story is not important, narrative is better. Style is not important, structure and form are better. f) Literary agents are “idlers” and publishers are “crummy.” g) Writers steadily cancel each other out; the new (generation) replacing the old. h) There is no middle way, a writer must be a free man. Anyone with a salary and a boss isn’t a free man. i) On English courses in university: “It’s a silly parroting of political tripe. Close down the English departments.” (and yet Theroux and Naipaul accepted teaching jobs when times were tough). The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
24 j) On Literature: “Literature is for the old, the experienced, the damaged, who find echoes of their own experience and is balm of a sort.” k) On Titles : “They should be purchased for stamps at the post office.” (yet Naipaul was a willing recipient of the title of Knight - i.e. “Sir,” from the Queen). l) On literary prizes: “A dreadful corrupting of publishing.” m) “All great writing has its own new form.” Those who live in Sir Vidia’s shadow quickly become visible: Theroux himself, who remains the eternal mentee; Naipaul’s long suffering first wife, Pat, who slept in a separate bedroom and had to keep the home fires burning while her husband hogged the limelight and was often seen in the company of a long-standing mistress; his brother, Shiva, who was an accomplished writer in his own right but who could never escape from under Big Brother’s fame in the literary establishment. Through countries, books, publishers, mistresses and wives, the two writers keep a strong bond of friendship that waxes and wanes but never dies, until Pat herself passes away and Naipaul immediately marries a younger Pakistani divorcee with teenage daughters. Ironically, this same woman had crossed their paths when she was a child and when the two writers had been debating the merits of having children, using her as an example. Theroux and the new wife do not hit it off from the inception and that spills into damaging his relationship with Naipaul. The final meeting between the two writers prompts the writing of this book, when Theroux realizes the wisdom in Naipaul’s words, “To all relations, there is a time to call them off.” Looking after the master scuttle up the road to Hyde Park, Theroux discovers that his giant literary friend is indeed a small man with no shadow. “Take it on the chin and move on,” are the final words from the great author that keep ringing in his ears, and with that, Theroux heads home to settle down and write this book as his form of preservation and purgation of a relationship that greatly informed his career as a writer. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
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The Last Word - by Hanif Kureishi “The madness of writing is the antidote to true madness”- one of the myriad of insights into writing and publishing that pepper this book, suggests just that: this is a writer’s novel, a novel about writers and their hangers-on, and one that discards pretensions of plot, character, pacing and all those other elements of craft that readers come to expect in a novel, but which writers consider necessary evils to accommodate when delivering a novel. It is also rumoured to be a thinly veiled fictionalized account of the interaction between V.S. Naipaul and his biographer, Patrick French. The story covers a month in the life of a biographer, Harry, who spends it with his subject: a renowned but fading Nobel-prize winning, Indian-born, colonial writer, Mamoon, and his gatekeeper Italian wife, Liana, in a crumbling country manor. Mamoon is a despicable man and so is his biographer; both are libidinous, adulterous and self-absorbed. The wives, partners and lovers of these men crave love and attention from them, which they are unable to provide because they are absorbed only in themselves and their work. As Harry plumbs into Mamoon’s life, pulling out as much salacious detail as he can, the Nobel winner in turn is getting his own back on the biographer by writing a novel about him, exposing Harry’s own peccadilloes. As for the women, Liana has a “see-but-don’t-touch” flirtation with Harry, while the aging Mamoon has a “see-but-we-are-not-sure-whether-he-has-touched” relationship with Harry’s pregnant partner, Alice. And Harry has a The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
26 sexual relationship with the maid, Julia, while proclaiming his undying love to Alice. No one feels guilt, they just get on with it. The modus operandi of the publishing industry is laid bare: write a saucy biography of this fading literary star and rekindle interest in him; issue reprints of his many books in their many translations to catch this wave of renewed interest; sell the salacious bits unearthed during the research for the biography to the tabloids; spin off into a TV show; republish the biography in five years as a second edition with a new chapter detailing the writer’s death (which is surely to have occurred by then) and start the circus rolling all over again. The story line is haphazard, the characters are one-dimensional; all that matters is what spews from their mouths in terms of their insights into the “madness of writing.” Quotes are abundant: “Literature was a killing field—no decent person had picked up a pen” “Words were the bridge between chaos and reality.” “Art is seduction. Indiscretion is the essence of biography.” “Marriage domesticates sex but frees love.” “All sex must include a poisonous drop of perversion to be worth getting into bed for.” “A writer is loved by strangers and hated by his family.” “In London, you never see white people working.” “Frustration makes creativity possible.” “All religions are concerned with weaning their adherents off desire.” Why am I regurgitating these quotes? Because they are all that is merit-worthy in this book. The story line spirals into a cartoon and the scenes jump around with a lack of continuity and fluidity. Character information is strewn all over the book, some at the very end, resulting in us not quite knowing these people even by the time the novel concludes. One thing is obvious: biographies can lead to fractured relationships and ill health, and there is no guarantee of the planned outcome. A lot of emotion gets released, many secrets are revealed, The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
27 and new and tangled relationships are formed. As for the work itself, the fictional publisher pores through the biographer’s manuscript at one stage and says, “This is shit. Improve a million times,” and I wondered whether this was a true quote hurled at Kureishi himself while he was wrestling with this book, a criticism that he didn’t quite take to heart, or if he did resulted only in a half improved version. I suppose he set himself up with a tough challenge when, given its premise, this story is derived primarily from encounters between the biographer, his subject, and the supporting cast, and when all there is to work with is dialogue between the players about events that had occurred in the past. The only way I could reconcile myself to reading this book was to say, “It’s a book about a writer and a touchy subject called “the writers’ biography.” How would you feel if people went poking into your personal life trying to find skeletons in the closet?” The last word left with me was more a question: can one separate the life of an artist from his work, and appreciate or depreciate each side separately and distinctly? This is a question for our times as many artists are falling off their pedestals today for lives improperly lived. As for Naipaul, if indeed this was a book about him, he should be flattered that like other larger-than-life authors such as Hemingway and Poe, people continue to immortalize him on the page.
Shane Joseph is a novelist, blogger, reviewer, short story writer, and pub-
lisher living in Canada. For details, visit his website at www.shanejoseph.com The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
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POETRY
Pablo Cuzco
...A REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST (A Proustian Rumble)
The sun sets on crystal mountain | peaks, gold and mother of pearl, jagged lace | glycerin, napalm, light cascades and silver linings— mahogany dashboards | a two-seater in flight | dials and control stick, whacked | music from a Victrola spins | crackle, dog barks and city sirens | trucks shift gears, airbrakes hiss | late-nite bustle of the 24/7 day. 4 guys sit in the dark | crooning from the flatbed of a pickup truck— songs of teenage lust and rebel fists—a poet, a singer, an actor and an artist | pass time as life's freight car shuffles by | the sound gets louder The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
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—splinters and cracks | eardrums bleed cacophony | two-toned shoes and the blare of radio AM band —50s doowop, bop | Jesus sandals, love beads and patchouli | the songs of Elvis, Rolling Stones and Black Sabbath | the underbelly of the underground, hallowed by time | made holy by consent. Orly | the geek bites heads off chickens | modern entertainment— an ancient ritual | Big Bang, particle theory—bombast and the impossible—yet true | if you say it, somebody's got to believe—in what? I said—and lied to hide my principles | because it's easier to sing songs of love than tell the truth. Liang Xiu-Fat | Chinese expat—vows never to give a sucker an inch —and don't mind the buzzards | they fly by night and eat carcass by day | "Load the truck! Overnight deliveries take effort—but we'll beat anyone's time!" | a new commerce sets sail on the slow boat, breaking records, smashing quotas | an overall success at the cost of an American Dream. Wally, the Ozymandian Oz—keeper of the flame and borrower of books—exists on verbiage, slowly chewed, digested by bits | insists on a magnum opus but, I've less to give than a complete book of verse —my palette empty, paints dried | orange skins, lemon peels and cloves | breakfast tea in Britain and racist baristas in the USA | have shut down my soul.
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THE MEMORY OF TIMES LAID WASTE (A Haibun) Searching for yesterday along the empty loading docks of a shopping mall in Delaware | wistful nostalgia—the ghosts of comrades | the tinsel and glitter of five-and-dime rhinestones | the sparkle of 50c wine—Ripple and Cold Duck | lonely tears | the shadow of childhood cast—fly fishing the rivers of consciousness | the memory of times laid waste. A lifetime grasped | missed tokens tumble to infinity | handlebar tape and pinwheels—poker cards slapped on spokes—make sounds of motorcycle exhaust and imagination | a childhood dream abandoned —I’m left to cope with the aftermath—the grown man. Nathan's Coney Island mustard covered knishes no longer taste of life
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LAS VEGAS BLUES It doesn't take a lot to lose | your shirt, your pants—your dignity goes through revolving doors | rose pink Cadillacs, black nylons, discotheques and blue blazers | endless nights | rise to death at dawn. It's a wicked hand gets played the suckers, the losers, low riders and gimps. Their heads flush with shame | whales part waves across the floor | to private parlors, where chips denominate in the thousands, and gilded tables hold single-malts | Cuban cigars and caviar. To not reap from the table of Good Luck | but eat of the God who wanders | the desert beyond Paradise and Sunset, hungering for those who still believe | dreams of pockets lined with gold, streets paved with silver | buckles, cowboys who eat of the Sacred Cow | to wake from the cold | hard facts of broken ids and shrunken libidos. To give up want | but still need—park shopping baskets in the halls of the one-armed-bandits | hands out | for their last coin. Bean burritos, soda pop and plastic | put it in the slot | cash registers | ring up grocery bills—money orders, cash and coupons. An endless masquerade | faces | doorways with no exits—the call of freedom taunting through the walls | the blazing of the neon | flashing billboards and cheap breakfasts beckon | stir your souls into the heap. (The gambler stands a mile from winning, one last turn will drop the bucket in his lap.) The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
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ANTHEM Ships sail past barren coasts | to new worlds | hopeful sunrises, forgotten sunsets | spheres of influence, barter and conquest. Left in the wake—the sea-foam of history | flotsam and jetsam scattered on the beach | the detritus of the human race—the leftovers of an indulgent commerce—greed and capital. My city is deserted | littered with the stuff of war | a MercedesBenz sits broken | axles exposed to the sun | its blistered glass an exposé to prosperity—cracked leather seats and a stolen radio | the unwrapped remains of society’s insatiable appetite. Storefront windows maw | cavernous | they participate in the deception to the consumer | the gratification of the itch—impulse items | stripped from shelves by looters, scavengers | mercenaries who prowl for contraband. Carnage becomes the reward of the mighty. Night time finds me behind the woven barrier where I lay my head | read by candlelight. I searched the Inner Harbor. I gaze across the open sea. I find nothing but despair and the wistful thought that perhaps this is all a dream. My Glock at the ready,
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my rucksack full of hope, my sleeping bag connected to the doorpost—an alarm to defend against intrusion of the nomads of the night. We search for canned goods as if for gold | a campfire to smelt the dross from the refined—paté of liver, or salmon—pork and beans, minestrone. To catch the last beams of the crooked sun as it glows red through the cracks of boarded up windows, I send a last farewell. I'll sleep fat and dream of sheep tonight, pastures of plenty, and blue beaches far away. My bed of styrofoam and polyester, shredded paper, birds' nests and rat droppings. The wind will cut my sails as it drags anchor across deserted streets | it forwards love letters from Annapolis, hate mail from the Capitol | a glimpse of a future I will never see. Taunting me with mystery—Peace and Love and destiny. Brinksmanship, saber-rattling, and death | complicit in the violence of the ape man—the chimpanzee who learned to walk | I am caught in the savanna of a globalized deception | war was inevitable they said —monkey-see monkey-do.
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TERROR THAT STALKS THE NIGHT The sky over Havana | still reeks of Castro. Years of collaboration with bloc nations, lack of cooperation with its northern neighbor and her allies.* *This is what they want you to think. In fact, it is the blockades that have kept Cuba starving (North Korea | Iran | Russia—equally so). We, once a great power— diminished to the size of a small-handed minority | rule. Our hopes dashed on the shores of the world. These truths we hold self-evident: We, the agitator—We the People. Are the terror that stalks the night. We are the destroyer. We are the enemy.
Pablo Cuzco is an American writer of poetry and short stories. He spent his early years in France and Germany with his family. In his teens, he traveled across America with guitar in hand, writing songs and jotting down memories along the way. Living in the Southwest with his wife, he now has time to reflect and share those stories. His works can be found at Underfoot Poetry, The Big Windows Review, and Pablo Cuzco ...in My Mind's Eye. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
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POETRY
Keith Moul
A CRYSTAL FOUNTAIN Lesser high prairie, Wyoming, wide without dance partners; a Devil's Tower, pronghorns in snow leap but leave no tracks, wind song rustling grass atop abandoned bone depositories; settlers rarely paused, not taken by fly cast or cutthroat hook. Tower Bar & Grill conflates cafe identity with lofty namesake. Anonymous town action is powdered pulverulence: dust settles On shaded, empty windows the full length Main, the only road. A rent of black cloth, a beer can and petunias dishevel sides of The highway, where the speed limit avidly resumes, horizon bent. Don't search here for civilizing unless you know where to look. The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
36 A former short-order cook in the 30's, perhaps a Depression victim, Named the grill Exuberance at the Café Burlesque, without a smile. But inside, serving up joy, you’ll come upon Cadence, an attraction Voicing a pure pitch, high like water flowing from a crystal fountain Over all collective patrons rapt with food, all prone to rotundity, each Plateful announced to recipients as next import to the Crystal stage, The next to be anointed in precious oils with every coin forked over
RAVENOUS CHICKS Along the side of a seldom used county road (Punted, passed and kicked by local politicos) No grain bin, tree, animal, no house sighted, Stands a man more ill at ease at his collar As his minutes pass; his posture is a plea To the sun like a blind, ravenous chick, Ignorant of its next meal, always charged. I hear him ask: “Don’t you still trust me?” He holds his phone high in expectation. When finally his shoulders droop as if His lungs have emptied by law of gases, He gasps as eternity gains occupancy In his soul for rent; phone still at hand As if Providence were lonely here too, He snaps another selfie: a day in isolation.
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SERVICE TO HISTORY Our whole community acknowledges desecration Up top of Indian Rise, our freehold from an era Of doubt and duplicity, but at this time not guilt Or reparations. History will not be excavated, Like an avalanche that picks its spot and falls, The chance of the draw, roulette’s white ball So lightly comprised that gravity has its soul. Ceremonies on the Rise still occur; no buffalo Of course, no witchcraft in the fog, no blood To slake spirits whose secrets favor the bold; But we’ve heard of mysteries, even miracles. Light itself no longer depends on candle breath; In progress, we all concur history is well served
Keith Moul’s poems and photos are published widely. Finishing Line Press released his chap, The Future as a Picnic Lunch, in November, 2015. Aldrich Press has published Naked Among Possibilities in August and No Map at Hand for 2017; Finishing Line published Investment in Idolatry early in 2017. These poems are all from a new work about prairie life through the history. The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
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POETRY
Jumping In and Out of the Mirror Against myself I bump heads while pulling the drifting continents together with rope If I let go they float apart in mirrors staving, pleased with my image of suffering, into my hands … She told me her sister had been murdered, but it was a lie pulling me up like an anchor to believe her suffering could also be mine I just want – like a baserunner in game seven – to get home sprinting at reflective hoops, quicksilver hurdles and a peyote woman of my own choosing like coyote Retracing my steps through the multiplicious crossroads on a round planet in one dimension after another. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
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King Hussein and the Blind Man
We recycled all the alphabet into illiterate soup so I can't go back over Jordan through three feet of stacked news and read the subdued headlines (of a week or so ago) but I do remember King Hussein carrying his dusty nation into the age of Aquarius making peace with his hands, inscrutably dealing high stakes poker, I wonder who cried, if anyone looking at that photo but if you've been there: if you've had your shoes x-rayed had every page of every book flipped if you've gotten the correct stamps and photos with great difficulty and know the river's real width, depth, breadth, volume . . .
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Underneath same page I remember a picture of a quiet middle-aged blind man retired switchboard jockey maybe from Baltimore and the story of a new operation procedure some science stuff that gave him that TV moment of taking off the blindfold and seeing for the first time in his life. He may not have it easy from now on I wouldn't know, Sight is such an anxious gift and, well, any kind of peace is a miracle.
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The Name of God “’God’ is an ambiguous word in our language because it appears to refer to something that is known. But the transcendent is unknowable and unknown. God is transcendent, finally, of anything like the name ‘God’.” Joseph Campbell Oh to drop the name drop the name, drop the name Oh to drop the name Kissing up Kissing up to God to get in good so God will remember your name when it's time. Fall on your knees Fall on your knees on the bathroom rug before the porcelain altar Fall on your knees in a crowded ballroom That's the "grand geste" pretend to pray, who's to know? go on fool thyself The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
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Brahman Aten Mother Earth Jehovah Krishna Allah Baha Stand in the corner Face the walls and rock like a mourner recite the name drop the name oh the name the geste attention to the real name of God Vishnu Waheguru Ahura Mazda Satan The Light Father Raven
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Feel the power in the name Feel it in your socks Feel the sweat, the juice of something coming something is about to happen Lord Pangu Shiva Wakan Tanka Zeus Christ MamiWata Bow down Bow down Bend thy head in praise in shame in submission in admission in contrition of the power the power Hari Yahweh
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Odin Vajrasattva Wicca Arya Tara Jupiter the name the power in the name God.
Moving Still one house with one chair ingenious invention to keep legs at 90° it is my house my chair, my view my rest, my energy down through the legs all to the center of the earth through to California the up and at ‘em gyroscope
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On Review You die then you get a year to reflect then a review session -- What? -I wish I hadn't always wanted the latest fashion that seems such a waste now and smoking though there was pleasure all that buying, burning lighting, discarding butts quite a pastime maybe I could have done better, been better without maybe all I left were my kids and they barely knew me they threw out my love letters and souvenirs so it's all senseless then you die? on review, I don't know.
E. Martin Pedersen, originally from San Francisco, has lived in eastern Sicily for over 35 years. He teaches English at the local university. His poetry has appeared in Ink Sweat & Tears, Sonic Boom Journal, Scarlet Leaf Review, Former People, Starving Artist and others. Martin is a 2011 alum of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
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FICTION
They are old; their bicycles are also old. Both are Raleigh and had the same type of bells; when pressed made a dull and difficult ringing sound. Like their proud owners, Thankannai and Andiappa, both must have been young and full of energy, once upon a time, long long ago. The clinking sound they make is not that piercing as it was once but it is enough to serve the purpose; it will alert others on the road, mostly pedestrians, or it helps to alert and call someone from behind the doors. Both Thankannai and Andiappa do not hesitate, whenever a chance arises, to boast about the reliability, roadworthiness, and greatness of their good old machines. “You know, when I was dealing in firewood …then there was no other source of income for me, and … those days, people did not have any other alternative source of fuel… During those troubled times… I used to load, even up to a hundredweight, on this very carrier… ha, that too, cut and carry firewood from far off places… and pedal tens of miles," Andiappa would fondly pat the once red, now almost dark brown and peeled at places, rexine sheeted bicycle seat and say, “If not for this, my family might have been dead out of starvation.” Anyone could feel the gratefulness in his choking voice. Oh! It is a different story when it comes to Thankannai. He neiThe Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
47 ther dealt in firewood nor had a family of his own. Born as a third son to a reputed goldsmith of the village, though successfully completing his Senior School Certificate examination, a rare feat in those days, sixty years ago, he chose to take to his father’s profession. Being proud of his son’s achievement, he presented him with a brand new ‘company bike’ bought for three ‘pavuns’, an equivalent of thirty rupees, a handsome amount, then. But the old man was disappointed. He preferred his son either to pursue his further studies or go for a white-collar job which would have enhanced his status in the society. Hence, he had no other alternative but to let his son work along with him in his workshop. To his surprise and contentment, Thankannai excelled in the new field as well and very soon gained a name for himself as a fine craftsman. To be short, he beat his own father in the very arena. But, it is in a way lucky that his father was not alive to see his son’s carrier taking nose-dive, peculiarly. Before long, Thankannai lost interest in the material life. Soon after his father's death, he gave up the profession and entrusted his part of the profession and his share in the property. Then, with some money in hand, he set off on a pilgrimage in India, starting from Rameswaram in southern India to Kasi in northern India, seeking perpetual rest for the souls of his dead father and mother who had preceded her husband by a year in death. Thankannai, returning home after four months, declared that he on to another pilgrimage within his motherland, Sri Lanka, starting with Kathirkamam, situated in the southern corner of the island nation. The significant point to note in this journey is that he cycled all the way, a temple to another, lodging at each place for a couple of days. This religious trip turned out to be a long one. Soon, there was no contact with anyone but for an occasional postcard sent from someplace. When he returned after a year and a half, there was no on the surface change in him except that he had gone thinner, wirier and darker. Also, one could see the placid, perpetual smile planted on his face. For the next thirty years, Thankannai lived like this. Though for others, it was an uneventful, dull, boring life, he seemed to be content with what he had chosen. Of course, his good old companion, the The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
48 ‘two-wheeler’, was with him. And, through all these years, it carried him wherever, whichever the temple he wanted to visit, thus proving itself to be an everlasting, unswerving appendage of a frail, old man. When his brothers and their families never returned even after all other villagers returned and resettled following the mass exodus of Jaffna in 1995, Thankannai, who already did not budge from his place and survived alone in the deserted land for half a year, had again to stay alone in their house for the next ten years or a little more. However, soon after the end of the war, he was able to contact his brothers, made them come to sell the common ancestral house. Refusing to take his share money, started living like a hermit in a small coconut leaf-thatched shed he erected in the neighbouring land of Sankaran. Sankaran and Thankannai were schoolmates and their friendship lasted from then on. Sankaran, in a way, was the only one who understood Thankannai and not even once interfered in his friend’s ways. Though Thankannai started living in Sankaran’s compound, he never depended on Sankaran and was leading his independent life as always, finding his means from bicycle repairing. He partook in temple alms whenever possible and also had a small vegetable plot behind his hut. The only thing he never discarded was his bicycle. Kumaran, Sankaran’s youngest brother, a teacher in his early forties, had seen only a small, green painted, tin trunk box in the ten by ten shed of Thankannai, when on some need went there. The trunk was kept above two short timber blocks. Apart from that, there was only a palm leaf mat kept rolled on a chair in one corner, and a clothesline on one side with a white verti hanging on it, neatly folded. Thankannai, a shy man of few words, now and then visited Kumaran, mostly when he returned from any shrine, to give some of the sacred pirasathams he was able to get at those places. Whenever he visited, he rang his bicycle bell at the gate, calling the inmates of the house to open it. There remained a slight confusion always, making Kumaran, his wife or children wonder if it was Thankkannai coming to give pirasathams or Andyappa coming to pluck the nuts from the tall coconut trees in their backyard. Last Wednesday evening, when Thankkannai came, Kumaran The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
49 was not at home and when he returned later at night, his wife told him about Thankkannai’s visit. ‘Where did he go today, Thankkannai said?’ asked Kuumaran, with a smile. ‘He neither went anywhere nor came to give any pirasatham,’ replied Kumaran’s wife, ‘but came to caution you.’ ‘Caution me? About what?’ ‘He told that traffic is terrible nowadays and accidents happen everywhere due to the uncontrolled increase of vehicles and reckless drivers. Today, he himself saw a serious accident, he said.’ ‘So?’ “’Tell your husband and your son to ride very carefully when they go out,’ he advised me.” ‘Did he come only to tell that?’ Kumaran smiled. His voice trembled slightly, making his wife wonder. * The Sunday after next, just before noon, Kumaran was taking bath before lunch and he heard the bicycle bell ringing at the gate. The usual question flashed within him, ‘ whom could it be? Thankkannai or Andyappa?’ But, it was only for a fraction of a second, and the next instant, Kumaran felt the heat of rolling tears, despite the cool bathing water, on his cheeks. The sudden realization made him choke; ‘hereafter, it could only be Andyappa!’ ‘How things happen so unexpectedly and so fast!’ * The accident had taken place just a week ago.
Ayathurai Santhan has authored two novels, Rails
Run Parallel and The Whirlwind. And three short story collections In Their Own Worlds, The Sparks, and The Northern Front and a prose poetry collection, Survival and Simple Things. Santhan, an engineer by profession, lives in Jaffna.
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Theatre A play and its Review
The Clown Show
Reviewed by Debbie Broadhead Brandt In classic Beck fashion, Gary Beck addresses somber issues in an amusing way in The Clown Show. In this play 3 characters are introduced: Mr. Barker, the Theater Manager, and clowns Koko and Pipi.These characters are believable and charming. Even the grouchy theater manager, Mr. Barker, grows on us in an endearing way as he continues to give the clowns more time to get ready. Before the clowns get ready, they manage to aggravate Mr. Barker in a whimsical, playful way. The poor manager does not know what to think of these irreverent clowns, as they tease and cajole him The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
51 to a frenzy. They are nothing like anyone he has ever seen before. Dan Snow is sincere and makes a great foil for the clowns as they remind him, to his chagrin, there has been a long history of female clowns. Nancy Beck , as Pipi, and Angela Madden as Koko, bring integrity and life to these two clowns as they pose the question, “Where is the circus?”. They find themselves wondering “Why must we perform once again for children who are not used to live audiences and prefer video games?” This trio shows true expression and rapport with one another as they deliver their message which provides a commentary on today’s society. They talk about being in a “sovereign state surrounded by air” and how “We shouldn’t fear our neighbors but fear a President who does bad things.” They also touch on the subject of bullying as Koko queries, “Why must we always work for bullies who do not understand us?” But, with courage, Koko and Pipi move forward as they “stem the tide of despair” to share their laughter with people who need them. I would love to see a sequel of the adventures of these characters!
Debbie Broadhead Brandt is a long standing member of Sidewalks Theater and Pasadena Little Theater. She interned at New Dramatists and has a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Houston. Ms. Broadhead Brandt has performed locally in New York and has written 13 plays. She is a retired Theater teacher.
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Clown Show
by Gary Beck (Two men in clown costumes are putting on white face. The boss enters)
Boss: Will you two hurry up. The kids are waiting. It’s bad enough that grown men should make fools of themselves, clowning around, but you’re late. 2nd Clown: Circumstances beyond our control…. Boss: I don’t care about any circumstances. Get ready and get out there, or you won’t get paid. 2nd Clown: We have a contract. Boss: Then sue me. Now get moving, or else. 2nd Clown: That’s not the state to put us in just before a show. Boss: Do you believe these guys? If you’re not ready in five minutes, I’ll put you in a state of shock. (exits) 2nd Clown: (to his back) That’s not the state I meant. 1st Clown: What do you mean? 2nd Clown: A sovereign state, you fool. 1st Clown: Why, then? 2nd Clown: Because, I’m bounded on five sides by air and on one side by The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
53 terrestrial matter. 1st Clown: I’m bewildered. 2nd Clown: (posing.) I’m a prince. 1st Clown: I mean you’ve bewildered me. Who makes you a prince? 2nd Clown: No one made me a prince. 1st Clown: You better explain yourself. 2nd Clown: You dare demand….Well, no matter. Do you attend, you fool? 1st Clown: All ears. 2nd Clown: Admit a little reason, then. I am, in front, back, both sides and on top, encased by air. 1st Clown: Ah. 2nd Clown: And my feet rest upon the earth. 1st Clown: Ah. 2nd Clown: Thus: I exist between aforementioned points, a principality. 1st Clown: Ah….Then you must always fear invasion. 2nd Clown: How so? 1st Clown: Well, neighbors being neighbors, will always….How shall I say it…. Poach? 2nd Clown: The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
54 Ah. 1st Clown: Seek territorial expansion at the expense of others. 2nd Clown: A perspicuous comment. 1st Clown: What? 2nd Clown: I don’t fear my neighbors. 1st Clown: Who then? 2nd Clown: Rather say what then. 1st Clown: Well? 2nd Clown: Say it! 1st Clown: If you insist on being petty. (no answer) All right, all right. What then? 2nd Clown: Internal revolution. It crumbles the foundation of the state. 1st Clown: Do you mean like a disease? 2nd Clown: Another perspicuous comment. 1st Clown: What does perspicuous mean? 2nd Clown: That you’re smarter than you look. 1st Clown: Ah. I always knew you recognized my intelligence (he does a brief smart song & dance.) 2nd Clown: But it doesn’t mean anything. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
55 1st Clown: Why not? 2nd Clown: Because once again we’re being ordered around by a bully who doesn’t understand or appreciate us. 1st Clown: It’s only temporary. 2nd Clown: So is this life…. I’m so tired of disguising myself in order to hide from so many horrors. 1st Clown: But we please so many people, especially children. 2nd Clown: Pleasure is fleeting. So is everything else, even the sidereal universe. 1st Clown: What’s that? 2nd Clown: The past, present and future of all things. 1st Clown: So what’s left? 2nd Clown: Enduring until the end. 1st Clown: That doesn’t sound very promising. 2nd Clown: Promises are always broken. 1st Clown: That’s not true. When I was six years old my Mom promised to take me to the movies, if I was good. 2nd Clown: And? 1st Clown: I was. She did. That proves that promises aren’t always broken. 2nd Clown: The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
56 In the vast scheme of things, what is a simple promise kept to a child? Everything is collapsing around us, despite the promises of our leaders to make things better. Yet we still paint our faces and put on our costumes in our attempt to stem the tide of despair. 1st Clown: It’s not that bad. 2nd Clown: It is. It is. And it will only get worse. (enter Boss) Boss: I thought I told you clowns to stop fooling around and get ready. 1st Clown: We’re almost done. Boss: If you’re not out there in two minutes, I’ll cancel the show and give you what’s coming to you. 2nd Clown: I hope you get what’s coming to you. Boss: What did you mean by that? 1st Clown: (To Boss) He hopes your efforts will be appreciated. Boss: Yeah. Now get going. 1st Clown: We’ll be right out. (exit Boss.) 2nd Clown: Will this suffering never end? But no matter what, we must go out there and be entertaining. 1st Clown: It’s our job. 2nd Clown: Then we should quit. 1st Clown: We can’t do that. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
57 2nd Clown: Why not? 1st Clown: Who would make people laugh? 2nd Clown: They’ll find somebody. 1st Clown: What if they can’t? 2nd Clown: They will. 1st Clown: But what if they don’t? 2nd Clown: Then they’ll get along without laughter. 1st Clown: They couldn’t. 2nd Clown: Of course they could. Laughter’s not that important. 1st Clown: You don’t mean that. 2nd Clown: I do. 1st Clown: Well we couldn’t get along without people. We need them. (enter Boss) Boss: This is your last warning. 1st Clown: We’re ready. (exit Boss. Both clowns stand up, put on red noses and clown hats.) Let’s go. And remember…. 2nd Clown: I know. Laugh, clown, laugh. (exit.) ### The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
58
FICTION
This piece of fiction has a backdrop story. It got evolved because of an email chat between Duane and me. I am giving below what went on between us: Duane: I've just learned about The Wagon Magazine and noticed your wagon logo. That kind of wagon I learned was called a conestoga, used for long distance overland travel across North America. The route of some of the trails those wagons used cross the area where I live and, though it was a century ago, the ruts still remain in some places. Krishna: Yes, I know. Before deciding, I did some research on the logo. the Conestoga wagon once ruled the road, measuring around 18 feet long and 21 feet tall and capable of hauling up to five tons of cargo. I would like to know more from you. Have you written any fiction based on those famous trails and caravans? I am just curious. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
59 Duane: You asked some time back if I had any stories set on any trails. I now do. The attached story is set on a little-known trail between two U.S. Federal forts - the Ft. Leavenworth - Ft. Riley trail. The story is set at a time of transition, after the U.S. Civil War when railroads were pushing west across the American plains. The setting, events, news and people are real except for the main character and her family. People can look up the stuff if they want to. I also attach a photo of the school. It no longer stands. A new, modern home is in its place, and new roads have been made because the town of Ozawki is now under water due to a flood control reservoir. I knew some of the story, but learned more in research for it.
Author’s notes and sources for the Leavenworth Trail story are placed at the end of the story- Krishna Prasad The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
60
ON THE LEAVENWORTH TRAIL There’s goes Tunis on his bugle. I can hear it better with the door open. Today is so warm; I can have the door open. The fresh breeze is so nice after all the cold we’ve had. It’s been a long, long winter. Daddy would be here if the fields were dry enough to work it. We’re two weeks into April and he’s not yet able to get into the fields. So, he’s still walking into town every week to work there. I keep the place going while he’s gone. We thought of moving into town for the winter, but someone is needed here. A lot of other women winter over on their claim, so I’m not the only one. Tunis said he would do that whenever he passed by, then I would know to go get the papers he delivered. I’ll finish feeding the baby, and then we’ll go. I’ve fixed a shawl to go around my shoulders in a way that she can ride on my back. She likes the walks we take and often goes to sleep. That’s good. I wonder how many papers Tunis delivered today. I never know, but that’s fine. He doesn’t know ahead of time how many he can deliver. It doesn’t matter. In the last batch of papers, there was news of the marriage of Abe Lincoln's boy, Robert. I hope he's found a good woman, that family's had so much tragedy. And all the rallies for U.S. Grant for President. I hope he wins. He was a good general. He won the war for us. He'll be a good President. There was that notice about the consolidation of the three Leavenworth newspapers into one, now called the Times. All were free-state papers. It stated very clearly its position. I’ve memorized it. It gives me such courage. “We believe that every human being is a child of God and entitled to every right which we claim for ourselves. If the Constitution of the United States or the Constitution of the State of Kansas does not recognize that principle we shall fight it openly and boldly.” * I’m sure my parents would have been glad to read that. We weren’t alone in wanting Kansas to be a free state. And, we achieved it, thank the Lord! I aim to live this in my life and The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
61 teach my darlings the same. I wish I could know ahead of time when Tunis will pass by, then maybe I could run down and at least wave to him. Just seeing him would be wonderful. There’s no way for that though, and he says he can’t stop. I know that, but it would be nice to be able to see him once in a while. We're the only ones left in our family now since the war took our brothers Jaxon, Levi and little Tompkin. He was so proud to be a drummer boy. He died like a true soldier, they said. At least it’s nice to know that Tunis was with him. I wish I could put flowers on their graves, but they are so far away down south. At least we have locks of their hair. Mother and I braided them into flower cameos, one from each of them for each of us. I have them all now. It’s sweet to see them and remember them. I need to write their names on the back of the frames. I know I won’t forget who’s is who’s, but my little Sweetie and any other children that will come may not know after I’ve gone to the great beyond. Oh, my. When Tunis goes west, like today, he gives three short blasts. He doesn’t call them that, but that’s what they sound like. When he’s returning east he uses a different call of five blasts. It’s our code. I don’t know if he’s on some campaign to pacify the Indians, or just hauling supplies to Fort Riley. Maybe he was able to leave a note in the papers he delivered. There is a certain tree where he leaves the papers. He can toss them from his horse as he goes by. He’s not allowed to stop; the troop must make its time. Since our parents died, he’s the only one I have left. I didn’t want him to stay in the army after the war of the rebellion, but he said he likes the army life. I can’t imagine it, but what can I do to change his mind? If I could find a nice girl for him to settle down with, he might change his mind. He teases me about being a career bachelor soldier, but I know that’s not true. He’s also said he’s looking for good farmland while he’s out west. I know people are moving west, but I’d feel better if he settled around here. The country here’s not filled up yet. As soon as I bank the fire, we can set out. I don’t want to lose The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
62 the flame, matches are too precious to waste when the embers can keep burning. “All right, my precious, Olivia, are you ready for a walk? You ate all your lunch like the big girl you are. Mommy is so proud of you! Upsie daisy, onto my back you go! You like to see from high up, don’t you, Sweetie? That’s a good girl. As soon as I go out and shut the door, we’ll be on our way.” “Do you want Momma to feed the chickies as we go past their pen. They’ll be excited to have some extra food. “There you go, chickies. Here’s some more cracked corn. Make good eggs for my Sweetie. “That was fun, wasn’t it, Honey? “MUFFIN! Where are you? Where is that dog? I don’t want him following me. He needs to stay here and protect the place. You never know when a coyote may be lurking around. I don’t want to lose any more chickens! “He’s not… Oh, there you are. Good doggie. Stay here and guard the chickens while I go walk. No. Don’t come with us. Stay! Good doggie. Sit. Good doggie, good. “I feel better now. The barnyard sure is empty without the cattle or the hogs. Your Daddy wanted to make life easier for me while he was away. He only kept the milk cow to make sure you have plenty of good, rich milk! And one cow is much less work for me than all the other livestock. We’ll get more in the spring, though. In a couple years, you'll be able to raise your own calf. “We need a good barn. The shelter we built with the grass roof was good, but a real barn will be better. Maybe Hyram has earned enough this winter we can begin to build one this summer. He’s cut trees down by the creek for lumber. They’ve been curing since autumn, by spring they should be ready to cut into boards. Hyram heard of a traveling sawmill. If it can come by here, we’ll be doing good. “The pigsty is empty now. We butchered the last hog before your Daddy left. Now we have lots of good ham meat curing in the smokehouse. We have enough to last through to summer, easy. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
63 “Butchering is messy though. We’ll keep you out of the way so you won’t have to see it. Daddy shot the pig right between the eyes, so it didn’t squeal at all. I always hated hearing that when I was a little girl. No matter how tight I held my hands over my ears, I could always hear it squeal and scream. I would cry every time. My oldest brother would tease me, but Tunis would defend me. He understood, but he still had to help with the butchering. I think it’s worth the bullet to kill it quickly. “Maybe next year when we butcher, you’ll be able to play with the bladder. When it’s filled with air, it’s so much fun: a ball that almost floats in the air! I loved it when I was a little girl. I’m sure you will too! “Now we’re walking in the lane past the orchard. The trees aren’t very tall yet, but in the summer you’ll be able to play under their branches. The trees will be talking to you as the breeze blows through the leaves. The buds are getting larger. When they begin to blossom, it will look beautiful! The trees will make shade for you even though they don’t come up to Momma’s head; not yet anyway. In a year or two they should begin to bear fruit. That will be good. We’re all looking forward to it, as long as we get enough rain. That’s always a question. “I can see the end of the lane where your Daddy has left the top rails down at this place in the fence around the pasture. Since the cattle are gone, it’s okay. It’s easy to stop over the bottom one. “Do you think we’ll see the train today, Baby? From the top of the rise just ahead, we’ll be able to see it if it’s passing by. You know I mean the smoke; the train itself is too far away. It runs on the other side of the Kansas River, and that is fifteen miles south of here. If there’s a strong wind, and when does the wind not blow in Kansas… the wind will blow away the smoke and we can’t see it from here. “Funny, how this hill seems higher than it used to be. I know it’s not. The only change is you, Sweet Baby. You’re getting so big and strong, you’re heavier than you were in the fall and certainly since last summer. You were just a tiny, little thing then. Next summer you’ll be able to walk and you can walk with me. You’ll find lots of The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
64 flowers to pick on the way. There will be lots of flowers here in the pasture in the spring and summer. “Well! We’re at the top now. Here the land is flat, a big lovely pasture. We can see for miles and miles and miles in every direction! It’s like being on the top of the world! I like to come up here just to see the sky. It’s so HUGE!! One can really appreciate the grandeur of God up here. The sky is so big – and God is even “bigger!” I’ve loved hilltops like this since I was a little girl. We’ll come up here sometimes just to run and play. I promise. Your Daddy would like to have a field up here, but the soil is too thin, there are too many rocks. The bottomland is easier to farm; there are no rocks down there. The plowing there is easy. “OH! I see it! Right over there, Baby!! The train! That little stream of smoke just above the horizon! I know you can’t see it, but it’s there. The rail line was only put in three years ago. At least, I think it’s been three years. Yes, it was... We heard the railroad had reached Topeka while we were at Sam and Lilia’s wedding, and that was in January, just three years ago: 1866. Their little boy, Abe, is two years old now. I’m sure the two of you will be friends when you go to school. They live close enough you’ll both be in the same district. “I wonder what it would be like to ride in a train. They go so fast. I think it would be frightening. I’ve heard it’s dirty too, with all that smoke blowing back into the cars. But, my! What an experience that must be! Maybe, when you are a great big girl and are all grown up, you can ride on a train and tell Momma all about it. You'll do that, won't you, Sweetie? Of course, you will. “There’ve been so many changes I’ve experienced in my life: My family leaving Pennsylvania for Kansas. My brothers dying in the war fought between the states, which almost tore this country apart. My parents dying afterward… The coming of telegraph and railroads to Kansas… It's a different world than I was born into! I wonder what changes you’ll see. "Then there was all the new machinery Hyram heard that people saw at the State Fair this last September. It was impossible for us to go, you were too new and tiny to take all the way to Leavenworth. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
65 Hyram was so sweet. He said if you and I couldn’t travel all those forty miles, and we just couldn’t, he would stay home too. And he did! I’m so glad I have him. He’s a wonderful husband and Daddy for you! “I sure feel bad for Mrs. Barbara Hilty. It must be awful for her, losing her husband like that. I don’t know what she’s going to do. Joseph was drunk, I heard. It’s just terrible! Dead as soon as he hit the ground, they say. With two little children too; baby Josephine, just about your age and a big boy, Leonhard, about eight. He can be a help, but not for the whole farm. Maybe her brother, Michael, can help. It’s so sad! “He was veteran of the war too, survived all that, though wounded once, I think I heard, but still, to die because of the drink. Such a waste! I’m glad your Daddy took the pledge. “I heard Mrs. Hilty has a sister, Elizabeth, out west at Loudens Falls. Her husband, Hoffman, I think his name is, built a mill out there on the Smoky Hill River. It’s not even settled country out there, I don’t think, though a county was organized, about ten years ago. They call it Dickinson. I don’t know what for. I’m plenty content right here. Indians won’t come this far east. I like it here, just fine. “On a clear, still day like this, from the top of this hill, we can see for twenty, thirty or more miles around. We can see the people living around us. We can see the smoke from their homes. When the wind blows hard, we can’t see it though. Cooking fires are too small most of the year and don’t make much smoke, but when we’re all trying to stay warm, there’s enough smoke most of the time to see. “I can see smoke from houses in every direction. The country wasn’t this settled when we arrived ten years ago. We were some of the first people here in Jefferson County. It wasn’t even a county then! The county was organized shortly before we got here, in 1855. We helped build it up. Those first years were hard. Even as a little girl, I knew that! I didn’t know how hard it was for my parents, though. Without the help from the New England Immigrant Aid Society, we would have had to return east. We might not even have left home. The society helped us get here and stay here. My parents The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
66 wanted to help Kansas be a free state, and we did it! Our hardships and sacrifices were worth it! Life is so much easier now. And slavery is gone! Banished forever from this country! Praise the Lord! “Do you see the white spot over there, to the east? On top of the hill? It’s not far, about a mile away. That’s where you’ll be going to school. It is Pleasant Hill School, district 40; a nice little school. You’ll meet other children there and learn so many things. I was a teacher when I was younger. I’m glad I did it. Now I’m a teacher of one: and that one is you! And I love every minute of it! Someday there'll be more when you have brothers and sisters. Right now you're my only student, so I'm teaching you as much as I can. “The Military Road, the Fort Leavenworth-Fort Riley Trail, which is its actual name, connects the two forts. Fort Leavenworth was the first in Kansas. It’s near where the French had a trading fort when they were here. They traded for furs from the Indians. Now the French and the Indians are gone and people are moving in. The army uses the trail for troops to travel back and forth. Settlers can use it also, but the army has priority. “With the train going west from Topeka now, there’s a little less traffic on the Military Road. A lot of settlers going west still use it though. I’ve heard it costs less to ride the riverboats up to Leavenworth and then travel the Military Road, than it is to take the train from Westport. The people who have plenty of money do take the train, and it is faster, but there’s plenty who can’t. There’s still a lot of traffic on the Military Road. Some people even walk the whole way; those can’t afford a horse and wagon. When you’re poor, you do what you have to do. “You must be getting cold, Baby. I’m going down the hill now and we’ll be out of the wind soon, it’s not bad though. I can barely feel it. I wouldn’t have come if it was really cold. Then, the papers could wait. Going home it will be colder; we’ll be walking into the wind then. We can barely feel it now, but walking into it, we will feel it. “Of course, you’re on my back, and you won’t feel it at all! I’ll be the one!! Maybe you’ll fall asleep on the way back to the house. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
67 That would be good. “Now we’re entering the trees at the bottom of the hill. The stream is down here. With a source of water, more trees grow. Next summer I’ll bring you here to play. It’s such a lovely place. I’d rather the house be down here, but the bad night air of the summertime is dangerous. One is likely to come down with fever and ague. It’s serious. Some people even die. To protect ourselves we built the house on the other side of the hill. It meant digging deeper for a well, but your Daddy was willing to do that. The water he found tastes wonderful! “Are you going to watch Momma step over the fence rails? The cattle are gone now; Daddy took them all to Ft Leavenworth to sell before he went to Ozawkie to work. He was able to get a good price for them. Tunis told him the soldiers at the fort were tired of pork and wanted some beef. He sold all ten head. The money helped us get through the winter. His pay from working in Ozawkie will help too. That’s why Daddy isn’t with us every day. He’s away working, but he’ll be home in two days. The ten miles to Ozawkie is too far to walk every day. He boards in a room there with some other men. At the end of the week, he comes home to see Momma and his Sweetie. At least he didn’t have to go all the way to the fort to work like some men. Then he would have been gone all winter. “Pleasant Hill would be closer, but that town never really got started. Pleasant Hill was to be a free-state town which your grandparents tried to help start. It was right where the Military Road crosses the Grasshopper River. That would have been a good place for a town, but Ozawkie was already on the other side of the river. Your grandparents came here to support the free-state cause and Pleasant Hill was a free-state town. Ozawkie was already larger and has continued to grow. Though Pleasant Hill was on our side of the river, that didn’t count for much when a general store and the post office were already in Ozawkie. As much as we don’t like shopping in a town started by slavers, it’s the only store around. A pity, but that’s how it worked out. “Here we are, at the newspaper tree. At least that’s what Tunis The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
68 and I call it. And, here’s the bundle of papers he left. Oh! There’s two! This one looks like it’s been here longer. I must have missed his call. It’s harder to hear when the door is shut, like on cold days. Well. Neither is very big, I guess I can carry one in each hand. This’ll work. “He tries to leave the bundles close to this tree. That way I won’t have to search all around for them. Sometimes the bundle is really small. It just depends on how many papers he can find to save and how often it’s between times he goes west. Daddy usually comes and gets them when he’s home. Now we go back home. I’ll stop talking so you can sleep.” It’s such a nice day. The sun is bright. If the ground wasn’t so frozen, I’d be tempted to work in the garden. There’ll be plenty of time for that next month. Maybe. We’ve had one mid-winter thaw, back in February. But this year March was too cold. Some years it’s been nice to get a head start on the garden. The snow is melting from the last storm. The sky is so blue and the air is crisp. It doesn’t burn to breathe like on colder days. And, the wind is not as sharp as I expected it to be going back. On the on top of the hill, it will be stronger, but here it’s not bad. If Olivia will stay asleep when I put her down, I’ll be able to read some of the papers. It’ll be nice to catch up on what’s been going on. Not much of it affects us here, but it’s nice to keep informed. The house is in sight now. Everything looks fine. The trip back always seems shorter than the trip going. I don’t know why that is, but it is. I see Muffin. He’s still by the chickens, protecting them. I wouldn’t be surprised if a coyote came, even in broad daylight. There are so many of them, and they do love to eat chickens. “Here, Muffin. Momma’s back. Good doggie, good doggie. You stayed with the chickens to protect them for Momma and Baby. Good boy. You didn’t let any coyotes or possums get our chickies. That’s a good doggie, good Muffin. I have to go into the house now." The door is still locked. Good. No one has been here. Very good. Now, lay down little baby. There. Stay asleep, baby. That’s good. You need your nap. Momma needs your nap so she can read. Now, I can open the bundles of papers and see what we have. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
69 I’ll save the string and oiled paper he wrapped them in. It may come in handy some day. You never know what you might need in time. I’ll open the oldest bundle first. Let’s see… The oldest papers are dated December, that’s almost four months ago. No matter, it’s still news to me. This is interesting, in a paper dated the 17th, it says the people of Atchison voted in favor of supporting the expense of getting a railroad to come to town. That must be a very progressive town. Ozawkie wouldn’t vote for that much expense, at least not from the talk I've heard. Here’s a list of churches in Leavenworth. One, two three… there must be about two dozen here. I can’t imagine so many churches in one town, but then, Leavenworth is the largest city in Kansas. There must be thousands of people there. One of these churches, I see, is called the Society of Friends. That's another name for Quakers. They were a primary force for abolition. Without them, there would have been no Society to help us come out west and the Negros would still be enslaved. Such a pity that would be. And here is a synagogue in the list. That’s not a church, that’s Jewish! And some colored churches. Well, that’s good. I’m glad there are some freedmen in the town with their families, they deserve their own churches. Leavenworth must be a pretty diverse place to have all those kinds of people there. There’s a lot of ads here that have no meaning for me, but I‘ll save this for Hyram when he gets home. When he’s done with it, we’ll use it for insulation. Layers of paper do stop wind coming through the walls, and we can read them too! Nothing here on the new fashions. Oh, well. I can’t keep up anyway, but it’s nice to look at the new dresses. Maybe some other paper will have illustrations of the new fashions. The most beautiful styles come out of Paris. The clothes I wear here are so drab, but it's all we can afford, and who will see me on the farm, anyway? I’ll not complain to Hyram like some women do to their husbands. I know he works hard. His money needs to go to improve the farm. Without the farm, we would be lost. I put up as much food as I could last year that we kept in the root cellar and with the cow and chickens, we The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
70 got through the winter. I’m not worried. He takes care of the farm; I take care of the house and children. We’ll make improvements as we can. A real barn is next. This will be a prosperous farm one day. Here’s a paper from December 29. The headlines and ads on page one aren’t very interesting. We’ll see what’s on page two… Well. This is interesting. The headline reads: “A New Religion.” I wonder what that’s all about. "A Frenchman who visited this country a dozen years ago said he found in the United States one hundred and thirty-nine religions, but only two soups.” SOUPS? That has nothing to do with any religion! How far down do I have to read to find that? Oh, here in paragraph four: “Having supped up some of the more recent religions in such a manner as to satisfy the most critical we come to Babism, which is the very latest yet heard in Kansas.” Babism? I’ve never heard of that. It must be new. “Our information on this subject is derived from an article entitled “Bab and Babism” in the January number of Hours at Home, by Prof. E.P. Evans, of the University of Michigan. Those who have read his articles in the North American Review (and everybody ought at least to read the one on Pompeii – the most scholarly and accurate statement ever presented to American readers on that ever-interesting subject) need not be told who Prof. Evans is. “Babism is Asiatic, like cholera…” Well, that's not a very nice thing to say. Christianity is Asian too, for that matter. Christ was Asian! The Holy Land is in Asia. Do people not know that? If they taught school, they would. “…though only a quarter of a century old, has already millions of adherents – its proselytes coming from the most intelligent classes of society as well as from the poor and ignorant. Its founder, Mirza-Ali-Mohammed, was born in 1824. His father was a silk merchant of Shiraz. The young man studied at Kerbela – and studied not only the Koran but the Old and New Testaments. He welcomed truth, no matter from what source. He was early called “the elect of God,” and was supposed to have the gift of working miracles. His The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
71 purity of life, the wonderful charm of his countenance and his marvelous eloquence surrounded him with disciples. He took the name of Bab or Door by which alone one can attain divine knowledge. His apostles were sent out and missions established at Ispahan, Kashan, Teheran, and in all the chief cities of Persia.”* Is this just a religion for Persians? Have they sent any missionaries out? Wouldn’t it be interesting if they sent missionaries to Europe? To America? We’ve sent plenty of missionaries to the rest of the world; it’s our turn to receive some. I’m sure we could learn something from others, though not everyone here will agree with me on that. What does the Old World have to teach us? We don’t know. We might be surprised. Could there be some new truth here? I don’t know why, but a dream I had last summer has come to my mind. It was a hot day in August and I dreamt of water. We were so dry then. There was a small open boat on the water, bobbing up and down. It was beside a grim rock wall, with a large sort of door in the wall. People were on the boat and were trying to get into the door in the wall, but the boat couldn’t be still in the water. The waves heaved it up and down and threw the people around… it was awful! Now, I have to look at something steady for a moment. I was beginning to feel sick at my stomach. That picture on the wall…. that’s better now. I wonder if that’s how the women felt. There were women in the boat, being lifted by the men up to other men reaching out from the door. And, children crying in confusion and fear. There was shouting, but not all from the boat. Angry shouts were coming from inside the door. People inside were hateful toward the people in the boat. They even threw things at them. The people in the boat were exhausted and resigned, ready to give up. Yet, at the same time I looked up and, above the wall, in the clouds in the sky, which were amazing and glorious, in colors more magnificent than I can remember, there was a sort of banner-waving free and on the banner were letters, big as anything: B A H A. I wonder what it all could mean? Then I woke up and it took me a while to come back and reThe Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
72 alize I was in my bed, and then the heat, and Hyram snoring softly beside me as if nothing at all had happened. I could not shake off the horror of that experience. Now, it all comes back. Why now? I don’t know… Could there be some connection with this new religion in the paper? I don’t know how it could be… Is this BAHA in it anywhere? What does it mean? Oh, well… “One of his most effective missionaries was a woman, Zerrin Tadj, or ‘consolation of the Eyes.’ She was a woman of great physical beauty and her knowledge of Arabic was equaled only by the most celebrated scholars of her day. She preached with a simple but fervid eloquence which won thousands of converts to Babism.” ** A woman? Well, what do you know? A woman disciple. This is something interesting. It's nice to know that not all religious leaders have kept us, women, out. What might it have been like if one of Christ's disciples had been a woman? If there had been, I’m sure history would have been really different for the past two thousand years. Maybe this religion will make a difference in its time. I want to learn more about… (CRASH!) “Olivia! What did you do? NO!!” ## Notes: * Leavenworth Times Conservative, December 17, 1868, p.1 ** Leavenworth Times, December 29, 1868, p.2. (spelling in original) End Note: Some of the events in this story are true. Brother Michael did move in with Barbara Hilty to help with her farm, then, together they moved to Louden’s Falls where they built a store which they operated. Around the store and mill, the town of Enterprise was platted. Barbara married another Joseph, this time Joseph Ehrsam, who had forged the equipment for the mill. He then opened his own machine shop which, under various names, remained in operation for a century. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
73 In 1897, in response to a letter from baby Josephine, who was then living in Chicago, Barbara invited the first teacher of the Bahá’í Faith in North America, to vacation in Enterprise and give his lessons. He did that in July and August. As a result, Enterprise, Kansas was home to the second Bahá’í community west of Egypt. The newspaper account contains several errors of fact, among them inaccurately referring to the religion as ‘Bábism,’ its precursor, though simply, Bábi, is more accurate. Interestingly, also in 1868, Bahá’u’lláh, the Prophet-Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, a prisoner of the Ottoman Empire, arrived in Akka and established the Bahá’í World Center there, which is now in the state of Israel. Many Kansas Bahá’í s have traveled there as pilgrims and served there in various capacities. Two of them, simultaneously, served as members of the highest administrative council of the Bahá’í Faith for twenty years.
Duane L. Herrmann is a fifth generation Kansan, several branches of his family have been on the North American continent since before the American revolution, with one Native branch even longer than that. He writes from, and about, all these perspectives. His full-length collections of poetry are: Prairies of Possibilities, Ichnographical: 173, and Praise the King of Glory. His poetry has received the Robert Hayden Poetry Fellowship, inclusion in American Poets of the 1990s, the Map of Kansas Literature and the Kansas Poets Trail (Wichita, KS) and other awards. Other writing has received the Ferguson Kansas History Book and Writer’s Matrix awards. His work has been published in more than a dozen countries in four languages in print and online. These accomplishments are remarkable considering his traumatic childhood embellished by dyslexia, ADD and PTSD. The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
74
POETRY
"Scatter" is a beautiful word its chatter and sound churn like the anklets of soul; Clinking the beads of body that drown as a rusk into the sea of dawn scattered, the rays that float over a neon sky scratching its simmering slate The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
75 scattered,the prayers that crawl from the speakers of mosques Meandering in streets, scattered is the incense that flow from trees scattered is the damask glory of the day which like moths coil against the jasmines of night scattered are the chirpings that flung across the twilight scattered are the colors of rainbow that drop as hails collecting them in a pit by roadside scattered, the moans of patangas* that impreg the river of light scattered the voices that cluster inside mind scattered, the head that knocks thoughts of dead The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
76 weaving in blood a laced emotion of scars, the fingers that once felt like flowers scatter in the gardens that glide through the throat of moon swallowed by its own serpentine wails scattered, the eyes that wiped their own tears, scattered, the hair that riped with each passing year scattered the shells that splash against the sea coast scattered, the tinctured butterflies and leaves, scattered, the lives that evolved from seeds, "Scatter"is such a beautiful word its cadence and rhythm woven to the pulsating
Manisha Manhas, a student of literature, has a Masters degree from Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar. She is an English teacher with Punjab education board. Her poems have been published in various literary journals and online magazines like Kashmirlit, Langlit and Glomag. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
77
POETRY
Dust The dust is swathed in colors pink frost, evening's blue grey the dust that tramples upon the amorous heart, skinned bodies where does the dust go to? do they gather on these hills, their rocks, their caves I gather armfuls in benighted present, past, a cupful of tears wind ways into them as the hills whistle.
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78
You Never Know the angst a painful being the food left over eaten by the mangy dog all these pictures are left over, selfies stay away I want these pictures whipped statue, eight year old raped the plot, the madness what story telling is this what conspiracy give me those pictures to make a rotten lie of life, my life. You never know what happens this minute as I write this. You are swathed in pictures my country, see over there the wind blows across petite hills over there the rains glare into dark, dark.
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79
Summer Rains These summer rains are a whisper, not rains the wet earth looks upward and soil breaks loose turtle like. The snake climbs up the sodden earth to discover friends. Children ask questions and play time will be over. The sun dial ticks ruthlessly even as the sun wanes and summer rains devour the earth. I measure time Others measure hours but like all creatures summer rains are intransigent huge metaphor of living myth.
Ananya S Guha lives in Shillong in North East India. He has been writing and publishing his poetry for the last 33 years. The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
80
POETRY
Eunice D’Souza Today the wall of the classroom grows parched mouths with tongues darting out, hungry for a day of calm. Peace. Smoke. Or maybe a matter-of-fact, peppery sandwich. But Eunice, that butt of ashen cigarette in your hand, a tongue that rolls a slang, lashes out on many small-town breed specimen, a purring cat to keep you company, that boring feline licking milk from a tray, a taut Siva lingam that you mistook to be an ashtray, a powdered face with a sun melting on the forehead, Eunice, you failed me today! Would I go by your hair-flaying, skin-splitting sarcasm? Your Miss Louise? Eunice? The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
81 I don’t have professors loving me in my youth. I don’t hit a heart, strike an arrow. I don’t smoke in public. But, today I see a storm brewing up in the rows of clouds in Goiragre, a sky that cooks up a desire--and here my classroom in disarray, pens, chalk, whiteboard, miserable, that uncalled for revolution, love or not-love, call it the wind, the spray and splatter of rain on my windowpanes, a handful of sweaty Godhuli Gopal trickling down the glass. The sticky, rain soaked flowers. You smirked. Eunice, how would you put a desire right, a desire that wrings your throat like a boa? A desire that feeds on you, that fattened leech, it makes you fall down, in pallor-stricken droplets, in a whizzing, heavy gravity, in tatters and sorrow, in absolute recklessness? The runaway girls of my class settle for a life of starched white wedding dresses, of till-death-do-us-part men, of children, of dogs that wag tails in adoration--- that picture perfect existence, Eunice. And here, in a not-so-great classroom of a not-so-great university I don’t even have a man, nor a cat with a blue-eyed intensity, an opulence, staring back at me. With disbelief. With disinterest. I die alone, Eunice. Here. Every day. Siva lingam - an abstract or aniconic representation of the Hindu deity Shiva Goiragre - name a place in Meghalaya, Northeast India. Godhuli Gopal - Mirabilis jalapa, a flower that blooms in the evening The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
82
The Lover A not-so-true story of letting a Mediterranean lover enter your life unannounced like an intended fall from serpentine stairways at home. Read John Barthes. Make the incident look a bit catchy. Perform. Fall flat on the ground, let out a shriek. Histrionics. Moan like an incandescent moon caught unawares in sheets of grief. Stretch out your six yards to store a stubborn summer, breed seven moody stories without a beginning, without an end, chew betel nuts, squat languidly on your Malabar courtyard for hours and hours--then stealthily rise from the ashes, a heroine of your life, that tinsel town moment of a Madhubala and a Nargis wallowing in solitude, the starry mogre ke phul, drunk, scattered--fictionalize him, write him off. Malabar – Coastal area of Kerala, an Indian state. Madhubala, Nargis – yesteryear stars/actors mogre ke phul - Arabian jasmine The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
83
Trees It started with a disenchantment with the tress, the loud, well-built fig and tamarind. They grow their fingers longer and longer, enter the bedroom in the easternmost corner of the house. They wear your fatigue in the crown, suckle you dry. The trees stand erect on his opiate eyes. Dance to a forced amnesia in his pupils. The roots squeeze out a cry on rare occasions but otherwise he is fine. He is an exhibitionist and it’s his garden. You wear flowers in your hair. Pin a bunch to your chest. You smell of tipsy poppies all day long. He pares you down to a memory of good old times, the days when you grow camellias on your breasts, clasp your hands on the mouth, laugh like a child.
Dr. Namrata Pathak teaches in the department of English, North-Eastern Hill University, Tura, Meghalaya. She has an M.Phil and PhD from English and Foreign Languages University (formerly, CIEFL), Hyderabad. She has three books to her credit. The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
84
POETRY
Moinak Dutta
. Few lines written on a sojourn to countryside The sprawling fields green came open To us once we moved through the forest Cottages that stood in the day's flame Looked like perfect places to rest, The rhythmic beats of drum Filtered through foliage thick And as they to us did come We thought what that music was, And then the day gradually waned As wane our minds and limbs We thought of all that had been profaned And basked in light as it seems, Then we felt the silence of those ageless trees and the breeze running through them with ease. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
85
A letter from Solan How many times have I thought to write A letter to you, A really long one filled with all the flavours and smell That came one after another to me As I went touring from one place to another, Time, it seemed speeding like trains Hurrying , having its own rhythm; I peered out of the windows of flowing time, like a wonder struck one, Trees went past, So also hills and valleys, And rivers too, I found them all singing for me And for you too; At that little station of Solan When we stopped for awhile, Got down with what desire know not I, But those sights, They wrapped me with curious blessed feel, At one point thought I should leave all my bags and baggage there on the loco And just stay back, Right there, But you, Your face came like call of home.
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86
One day of Spring If it is that splendid one Of a day of spring I would take the light of dawn And take within All that smell and fragrance Of flowers drenched hap I would get the perennial sense Of earth's beauteous lap And be truly jocund By the sights and sounds I would build my own land Out of usual bounds, There would I train my eyes My ears and my heart There would I with mirth lie On the blessed earth, And think and sing more Of spring as she arrives I would more poems pour Taking a plunge, a dive, And you might think what it is That creates such a pleasure dome I would just ask you to sit And gather dreams there some Which could make all merry And fill all with love true
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87
I would ask you not to hurry But just to get that hue Of the season's awesome presence Its overwhelming cue I would just lend that sense Which beats that blue in you And makes you admire How life with spring gets gay I would light that fire of love of a blissful day.
I dreamt that I stood in a valley I dreamt that I stood in a valley one night The sky fell on my shoulders with her light The stars and other celestial things They glittered quiet, in my heart they did sing Of life and its wonder as spread far and wide I stood there complete, taken over by the sight As if again am I made to feel and hear How all things have place right there In thy bosom, thy overwhelming beauty, How under the canopy of sky I saw thee, From far how came the songs of silence Carried by ether, through the woods dense, As if that song had been there all night and day
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For us to hear it and be glad by that lay, I stood in the valley and I dreamt of thee One morning filled with that same calm and glee The sky then was filled with songs too Mellifluous, touching me by its blue, I spread my arms like a winged one I dreamt of thee again that beautiful morn And songs came to my mouth, my lips They touched right there where thy beauty I keep, And made me to just stand there quite amazed I dreamt of thee in the morning's blaze, I stood in the valley and dreamt of thee And I dreamt that thou stood before me.
Moinak Dutta is post graduate in English and at present, he is a teacher of English at Kolkata. He has written and published poems and fictions in many a magazine. He has written book reviews. He is a translator of Bengali poems including Rabindranath Tagore, Purnendu Patri, Joy Goswami, Nirendranath Chakraborty and some other contemporary Bengali poets. Please contact him @ email :moinakdutta@yahoo.co.in The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
89
FICTION
Seeta’s childhood was spent in a sleepy suburb on the outskirts of Delhi, unremarkable, and no different from any other, except for the fact that her grandparents had an orchard. Their house was the largest house in the entire neighbourhood and their garden was an orchard. The wrought iron gate at the back of the house was rusty but no one looked at it, only at the splendid neem whose gnarled trunk had a peeling bark and a pungent scent. The gravel path which lead from the tree was used for rollerblading by Seeta and her cousin Golu, but it was grossly inappropriate for it, arms flailing they would inevitably roll down backwards crashing into either the gate or the neem. When they were six years old they went on the terraced roof of the house. It was frequently used for drying pickled lime and homemade chips which would be spread on bed sheets and left under the sun. But the day they went on the roof there was wheat spread out on a white sheet. It was to be sifted through later, and the pebbles or husk which got among the grains had to be separated with a sieve. They had just emerged from a havan held downstairs and The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
90 still had semolina pudding in the cups of their hands, but they lost no time in licking their fingers and jumping onto the wheat. They cupped the wheat in their hands and chanted om namah shivaya, letting it fall in the pretend sacrificial pyre they imaged, in imitation of the havan downstairs. First they let the grains fall in this pretend pyre and only later onto themselves. When their aunt found them a while later the grains were scattered over half the roof glinting in the sunlight and the children themselves were dusted with gold. They were often reprimanded for mischief. One of their favourite games was standing on the headstand of their grandfather’s bed and leaping flat faced like a starfish onto the mattress as if it was a pool full of water. The game ended the day Seeta jumped a little too far and the bridge of her nose struck against the polished metallic edge of the bed. There was no blood though in later recounting of the incident by Golu profuse blood was added and copious tears that Seeta shed the entire day. The latter bit was true; Seeta had shed tears for the better part of the day. Cartwheels and kala mundi continued though and both the children were adept at it, exhibitioning their skills in the garden though Golu cartwheeled into a hedge once and the gardener refused to work in a household where his plants would be subjected to such torture. They were water children, though none would exhibit this trait more than Seeta’s younger brother Nonu, born when she was six years old. He had a tub in which he would bathe and splash himself with water, till his lips turned blue from the cold and his toes and fingers crinkled as if crepe. He would show them proudly while Seeta rubbed him with a towel and threatened to tell mother. This threat he would laugh at knowing his sister’s soft spot for him - she loved him as she loved no other. Years later she would see strips of Calvin in the newspaper and think how his hair stood on his head like her younger brother’s did. When her brother was two years old she decided that the games that she devised for him had to be different from those that she played with Golu who was after all of her own age. She decided to try hide and seek. They would play in all the unoccupied rooms of The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
91 the house. In their own room and in the large drawing room where you could not run and where the table placed in the middle of the room ominous with crystal figurines placed on it was a source of terror. When Seeta spotted where her little brother was hiding he would run and circle around this table delighted that she could not approach for she feared crashing into it and breaking the crystal. Nonu, would hide behind the heavy thick curtains of the drawing room and wait to be caught. He would peep out from there just when he could be seen and Seeta would close her eyes to prolong the game and make a big show of fruitlessly searching in all the corners of the room - behind sofa’s and under tables. When she finally spotted him peeping out from behind the curtains, she would run to lift him and he would laugh gleeful and swing in her arms. When they were eight years old, Seeta and Golu decided to try to ride a cycle. They were quick to learn and whenever the cycle wobbled and gave them difficulty they would simply jump off it on to the lawn. This continued for weeks until an uncle of theirs who was visiting showed them a better way. Their other amusement apart from cycling was playing chess which Seeta’s father had taught her and she tried her level best to induct Golu in the proper moves of the game but was steadfastly ignored. Whenever she would corner the King and shout check he would either start retracting his previous moves or his King would become omnipotent assuming powers usually held by the Queen and would start moving in huge sweeps across the board to avoid the assailant. At this point the game would end, and Seeta would deliver a monologue on the rules of play and Golu would develop selective hearing and his comprehension skills would suddenly suffer a drastic reduction. When it rained the children would develop other amusements. Nonu was not allowed to play in the rain as he caught a cold too quickly but the others could not be restrained. Whenever it rained the spouts would gush out water and they would wade barefoot under them. One day it rained so much that the drains near the house were overflowing with muddy water and Seeta staged an accident The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
92 while playing catch me if you can - Her cousin panicked and said that he couldn’t find Seeta and everyone assumed that she had fallen in the drain. The whole house was in an uproar. Attention seeking Seeta who was hiding behind a tree was spotted by a neighbour who mercifully shouted out her location over the wall. Her mother beat her with a ruler later because she was so angry - and that was what made Seeta grow out of practical jokes. Playing with the mud in the rain was such an enjoyable past time that it outstripped all others as the favourite. One day the children took it to an extreme. They had been travelling by car and were headed back home - when they spotted a mountain of cement near the roadside. It was raining and some of it had turned to slush. They insisted so much that they wanted to roll in it despite being told repeatedly that they couldn’t be left near the road. At last the adults grew tired, told them to get out of the car and drove off. They had intended to come back by the U turn which was ahead in the road and were only trying to scare the children. After all the children were not the only one who could play practical jokes; as a ploy it was brilliant and they succeeded in scaring the children so much that as the car was driving off - Golu and Seeta who had jumped out with much enthusiasm stood stock still and ashen with alarm. They were still silent when three minutes later the car circled back and they quietly clambered in speechless for the rest of the way. Seeta’s father who was in the Merchant Navy used to be home for three months in an year and away for the rest. When he was home he would tutor his child in mathematics. He was brilliant at mathematics – he had never taken an examination in mathematics in his entire life in which he had not managed to secure full marks. This talent had not passed on to his poetic and dreamy daughter who did not even like classical music because of the beats it involved, and this despite being told several times by those who knew about such things, that she sang like an angel. Every morning the poor man would move a wooden table in the middle of the verandah and place two chairs opposite each other. Brilliant at maths he might have been but at disciplining his daughter The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
93 he was a total failure who would wrench the hairs on the arm of her father to amuse herself. He could never raise his voice at her and even when he did it was in so distraught a voice as if it hurt him to do this that she took the entire proceedings as a joke. But she loved him and for his sake did study. She got a distinction in the final examinations against the expectations of her mother who predicted after witnessing the studies on the verandah that she would fail. As a present her father swung her in his arms and she floated light in the air and jumped right on to his feet whenever he tried to put her down. Her father could not believe the sadism of his child. Anyway he had other things to worry about - he worried that his daughter had a slight squint - a wide eye it was called, and used to drive her to Meerut every day for reiki and acupuncture. Both of them loved eating potato chips and her father used to buy two packets, one for them each. He would only eat half of his though and the rest was passed on to Seeta. This policy was buying two separate packets was encouraged by her father because of an incident famed in their household. The family had been to Rotterdam where her father’s ship was docking and were walking along the port, Seeta three years old and with a bag of crisps. Her father put his hand in the packet without asking her, and she was so infuriated at sharing the tomato flavoured chips that she threw the entire packet on the road. The gulls swooped down immediately seeing the chips scattered to the wind and the sea. After this no one ever dared ask Seeta for any crisps and were hesitant to accept even if she offered them voluntarily. Her father stayed the entire winter - and decided to inculcate the values of physical exercise in her. He thought she read too much and that this should be balanced with daily morning walks. They would get up at the crack of dawn and walk kilometres. She could only measure the passage of time by the fact that when they set out the sun was nowhere to be seen and now it gleamed bright in the sky. She had been feeding small stray puppies with rotis all through summer but now they had grown and big. Whenever they saw her they would lope towards her in affection and expecting food but now she The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
94 shrank away from them - they had grown too large and had big teeth, they no longer seemed small and vulnerable. One morning when they set out under what was still a starry sky, they spotted the cord of a radiator in the driveway of their home. It was from the car her father said. The bonnets were opened and sure enough they had been burgled. She tried to inspect for clues later in the afternoon feeling like a detective but could not find any. After her father left Seeta was at a loss as to what to do with her mornings. This feeling of unoccupied time and heart lasted a very short while though as her cousin had learnt how to build a swing out of ropes. He swung these over the neem tree and knotted them together. One had to sit on the rope, and kick at the ground with one’s feet. A cushion was provided for Seeta who refused to sit without one. They spent many long afternoons at the swing. When it got too hot they would get some neembupani for themselves but they would not go inside. Their garden also had two big mango trees, a lemon tree and a guava tree. The guava tree was just the right size for Seeta to climb up. She would sit at the lowest branch and read Wuthering Heights and Swami and Friends. One day engaged while reading the former book she fell into a dreamy doze and was about to topple off the tree. She did topple, in fact but was saved by her trousers which got caught in another branch and she hung upside down screaming for help while everyone inside the house was snoozing on this dull Sunday. Left to her own resourcefulness she reached out to another lower branch and managed to hoist herself to on to it. This adventure had cost her the trousers but Seeta never grudged anything gone into the making of a story. She had a splendid tale to recount to her grandparents in the evening when they sat together to drink chai and so she was happy. That night there was a storm, the heat was relieved by electrical currents in the air. In the morning Seeta found a ladybird in the grass. Her uncle and aunt had been examining the damage done to the trees but Seeta could only look at the ladybird in the leaf strewn lawn. The bougainvillea tree with its white blossoms had been swept The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
95 away, the other one bearing magenta flowers was still there but the loss was still mourned. The nightingale shrub, the jasmine was still there to spread its scent in the nights to come and one could be thus be grateful for what remained. The festivals were an occasion of great joy to them. The ones they loved best were those of Holi and Diwali. On Diwali they would light diyas, Seeta was such a purist that she would scorn candles only using them sometimes to light lanterns when their long stems would come useful. Her cousin who could not let the candles go to waste would place them, also in a cluster and use his father’s lighter to light them instead of a matchstick. He had flair and was careful of exhibiting a touch of glamour in all things he did. He would light bombs too; slim paper coated rolls with short wicks. He would light them at the flame of the candles and then throw them wherever he felt like it – they would explode in the air with loud bursts of noise. Once he threw them on the saree of a visiting relative - it burst in her lap. It was a harmless bomb except for the noise which it caused but her cousin was under strict supervision for the rest of the festival and Seeta had to plead on his behalf. It was Holi though when they were really in their element. So were the uncles in their household - who would revert to adolescence on the day and would fling everyone who came with mitthai to their house in the mudpit before they greeted them. Sometimes the boxes of gunjiya would be soaked in the mud along with the unsuspecting guest and Seeta and Golu lamented the loss of the sweets. But Golu and Seeta did their own preparations before the festival. All of them devious and fool proof. Like the digging of the pit filled with mud was done the evening before, they too used a water pistol to fill balloons with water which they stored in buckets. They also rubbed their skins with castor oil so that any colour or ointment which their friends or foes would rub on them would have no effect. One memorable Holi they had made so many balloons that they wondered what to do with those that were left over. Golu had an idea - to go to the terrace and throw them from there on to people driving scooters and motorcycles. Seeta would never manage to duck The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
96 out of sight fast enough. The motorists would see her peeping out from over the wall and hurl abuse. They managed to make a lanky fellow on a dilapidated bike almost skid but such successes were intermittent. Golu was not a very good shot and the ones Seeta would throw would be so limply thrown that they were bounce on the road without bursting. Often their other cousins, Dhruv and Shivira would come for Holi and would stay on longer. On these visits there would be endless board games and they would play dumb charades at which the girls excelled. The boys were better at badminton but luckily for the girls preferred cricket. Seeta and Shivira would play badminton till the shuttle got lost in the hedges when they would take to playing catch me if you can and hide and seek. One evening when they were playing one of these games it got very dark and they found that there was no moon in the sky. The hiding places got easier but they could not be found no matter how hard they were sought and so it got rather tiresome. Bored and gloomy they were walking to the outhouse where they could try hopscotch. Suddenly they saw a disembodied hand throw a brick over the wall. Three of them screamed and Dhruv who didn’t claimed that he had been too stunned. What they claimed to have seen later varied only in particulars - Golu who had been the nearest to the wall had been startled by a brick landing at his feet. Seeta and Shivira swore that it came from over the wall and that they had seen a hand in a white sleeve throwing it. Dhruv said that he just saw it dropping out of the sky but that he heard an eerie moaning sound. The plot next to their house was vacant but a little preliminary construction had been going on and labourers sometimes camped over there. But after an hour of discussion when they got a ladder and peeped over the wall they saw no one over there, not even a light. And after all why would a labourer throw a brick? Dhruv said that he had goose bumps seeing the brick, Seeta said that she too had been rooted to the spot - there had been something uncanny in it. Shivira elaborated at length the starched white sleeve with had swung with a flourish but disagreed with Seeta about the colour of his fingers. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
97 They all agreed that it had been a ghost and that they were lucky to escape with their lives. Sometimes she would go and visit her maternal grandparents too who had a bit of wild country behind their house. One weekend, her mother’s brother was also on a visit and had bought his daughter. She and her cousin decided to play with the son of the watchman at the gate and had told him to come and look for them after counting to fifty. In the meantime they had found two trees with the thickest of shrubbery around them and were hiding there. Suddenly Seeta saw a snake approaching her cousin - it was a thin brown snake but with a wide fan; a cobra and it was coiled but stealthily inching towards her cousin with its fan spread wide. Seeta who had only seen snakes on the discovery channel before, stood looking at it, she wasn’t sure if its posture was one of attack though she did know that snakes did not harm unless threatened. It glinted in the sunlight and left narrow marks in the sand which had accumulated on the gravel path. She shouted loudly to her cousin, ‘Run, there’s a snake’ and they both took off almost at the same moment towards the verandah. Later, they found out form the watchman’s son that some snakes did live in that area burrowing holes in the sand between the rocks and that is why he did not play there much. For the rest of the spring holidays Seeta made her cousin run errands for her, it was a debt the cousin had to pay since Seeta had saved her life! She had brought a book of stamps and a pouch of coins. These were her father’s. He had collected these multi-coloured stamps on various journeys to foreign lands and the coins too. Seeta would show them to anyone who would care to see and all her cousins were as dazzled by it as she was. But the book was stolen that spring, stolen or lost; it could not be conclusively determined what had happened. But Seeta, when it wasn’t found anywhere, could not be induced to broach the subject anymore and spent much of the evenings moping. Only the birds in the trees whom she loved to listen to in the evenings and the peacock’s feathers she found one day comforted her for their were peacocks too in that area who would roam on the lawn when it was not inhabited by humans and would shed their feathers The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
98 as an offering, a gift. She presented these feathers to her mother in a bunch with great solemnity, who placed them on the mantelpiece. But they must have fallen from there on to the ground for they were swept by the cleaning lady, along with the dust, straight into the dustbins placed behind the kitchen. That summer her father said that he would not be home for the holidays, when he would finally manage to come home she was told, she would have started school and would not have any mornings free to spend with him. Seeta, who used to walk in her father’s shoes, oversized and smelly and comforting, and who loved her father dearly was furious. He promised her a present as compensation. She said she wanted a bookcase which would hold all her books. He said he would build her one himself, with sliding glass panes and drawers at the bottom. She turned thirteen that summer and it was the arrival of the bookcase which signalled the end of her childhood. She discovered books, where they was no garden, but there were stories which opened her mind to things she never knew - to enchanted lands and wondrous places. Along with the Atlas, Roget’s Thesaurus, a small book of idioms, the Dorling Kindersley science encyclopaedia, Wren and Martin, the Lord of the Rings was the first book to be placed in the case and she did not feel what she had lost, the comfort of an orchard and the idyllic past times because of the bookcase. At school she was doing well now, especially in the subjects traditionally grouped under the label ‘the humanities.’ One day when she was found not wearing a tie, yet again, this was the third time in a row that it had happened, her class teacher who taught languages asked her to write a poem on the ‘benefits of wearing a tie.’ How would she write a poem, her classmates asked? How would she make it rhyme? She did write one perfectly rhymed, with cadences that came from having a poet’s ear, but which was subversive, it ended with the lines – ‘I’ll never wear a tie, I’ll never wear a tie!’ She had composed it by the end of the school day and when their teacher came to collect them for lunch, handed it in to her. She was asked to read it aloud in class and all her friends marvelled, gathered and clustered around her. How is it done? they asked. But Seeta did not The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
99 know the answer to that herself. The processes of composition were mysterious. Her habit of reading and writing, and her love of music were to remain with her for the next four years after which she went to college, a law school, and was inducted into the practical and straight laced realities of life. But that is a tale told elsewhere, that tale does not belong here. Here, she sat with her grandmother in the verandah shelling peas, while the monkeys tried to wear her shirt which she had slung on the washing line without plastic clips. Here in memory it was always summer.
Dr Parineeta Singh holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Surrey and a Master's in Creative Writing from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She has been published in many international magazines and anthologies, most recently The Ghastling. She lives in Delhi. The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
100
Critique
I
T
he Tempest is believed to be the last play to have been solely authored by Shakespeare, though he was to collaborate in the writing of two more plays. The famous passage after the masque in the play (“Our revels now are ended . . . and our little life is rounded with a sleep” IV.i.148-58), as indeed the play itself, is regarded as the weary bard’s farewell to the theatre and his audience. But in a sense the revels have never ended and The Tempest remains one of the most re-enacted plays down the centuries, in its “original” form as well as in numerous adapted forms, in the English-speaking world as well as in states then “unborn” and “accents unknown”. That, however, is hardly surprising as the themes and concerns that The Tempest addressed keep recurring as each civilization evolves. Mythological works and literary classics have been adapted/retold down the ages. Indeed, in some cases, such as the Indian epics, as we all know, the retellings themselves are so ancient that it is difficult to determine when the “original” telling took place! It is accepted that the tellings as well as the retellings, the “originals” as well the reThe Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
101 makes/adaptations, with regard to both form and content, are products of their respective times and shaped by their respective contexts and concerns. The fascinating question remains however why it is some works, more than others, enjoy an unceasing afterlife, or rather a rich and continual variety of afterlives. Coming to The Tempest itself, what is it in the play that has ensured it such a long and varied afterlife? The editors of the play in the Arden 3 series list the features that make it uniquely adaptable. There is first the setting of the play, an island set in an indefinite time and place, which lends it “uncommon transportability”. Artists and writers have always found in an island setting an opportunity to comment on human relations without the constraints of reality and verisimilitude. This is especially true of works that attempt to present future utopias or dystopias, e.g. Robinson Crusoe, Lord of the Flies. Such a work, set in an island, lends itself to “reimaginings and reimagings of the same or other islands”. (Arden 3: 73-74) Secondly, the characters of The Tempest embody the most basic human relationships: father and child, king and subject, master and slave, all of which display “the dynamics of freedom and restraint, obedience and rebellion, authority and tyranny” (Arden 3: 74) and make limitless adaptation possible. The vagueness surrounding two of the four major characters of the play, viz. Ariel and Caliban, has also enabled a wide range of transformations. Ariel, a spirit, and androgynous by definition, could be male or female, young or old. As for Caliban, in the play itself, he is addressed or referred to with such a variety of names (son of a witch, “salvage”, monster, thing of darkness) that he could be portrayed, in the remakings, as indeed he has been, as “a reptile, an ape, an Indian (West or East), a black African, a European wild man or an eclectic combination”(Arden 3: 75) Thirdly, Shakespeare’s use of art, spectacle, magic, music and evocative poetic language has enabled artists “to recreate the drama in their own terms through non-dramatic media.” (Arden 3: 75-76) The masque, which plays such a thematically central function in the play, though it comes towards the end, has itself been transcreated in The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
102 a rich range of versions, as we shall see. I attempt to make a quick survey of adaptations of The Tempest down the centuries and then to discuss in some detail two 20th century non-English adaptations. The first is Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (translated into English as A Tempest) and the second is the Tamil play Sooraavali (“Whirlwind”) by Indira Parthasarathy.
II Most interestingly, the first major adaptation of The Tempest, made during the Restoration, was a radical revamping of Shakespeare’s original with another title added. Called The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island (1667), written by John Dryden and William Davenant, an operatic version of which was prepared by Thomas Shadwell a few years later, it held sway for nearly a century and a half before Shakespeare’s text was restored early in the nineteenth century. We can easily see how Shakespeare’s tight, compact but highly suggestive plot and thematic structure were lost by the fact that in the Restoration adaptation, Miranda has a sister called Dorinda, Prospero a foster-son named Hippolito and Sycorax becomes Caliban’s twin sister. The play emphasized royalist political and social The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
103 ideas with monarchy as the natural form of government and an insistence on patriarchal authority in education and marriage. While Ariel remains true to Shakespeare’s original, Prospero here loses control and Caliban’s role is drastically reduced. Portrayed merely as a buffoonish monster, coupled with a sluttish sister, he represents humanity’s bestial side (Arden 3: 77-78) With the Romantic stress on the primacy of the poetic imagination, The Tempest’s perceived focus changed significantly. The emphasis now was more on reading and individual response than on theatrical representation and its impact on the collective psyche. Coleridge for example called the work “a purely romantic drama that addresses itself entirely to the imaginative faculty” (quoted in Arden 3: 86). It was but natural that the Romantics identified Ariel, who embodied the spirit of fancy, and Prospero, Ariel’s sutradhari, with Shakespeare himself. It was also natural that in the age of Shelley (who called Satan the hero of Paradise Lost), writers found some merit in Caliban’s rebellious claims to ownership of the enchanted island. However, in the dramatic productions, Caliban was still “a salvage and deformed slave”, “a hereditary bondsman”. (Arden 3: 89-90) Caliban becomes a more interesting figure in the light of Darwinian evolutionary theory in the Victorian age. In Robert Browning’s monologue Caliban upon Setebos, Caliban speaks of his mother Sycorax’s god Setebos and raises theological and philosophical questions. Imaginings of Caliban also gave credence to the view that “human life had evolved from some sort of aquatic animal”. (Arden 3: 91). This continued into the early 20th century when Caliban was presented as “ape-like, part-animal, part-human, symbolizing primitive man before his evolution to a more civilized state”. (Arden 3: 94-95) Miranda however becomes a pale figure, reflecting the largely dominant patriarchal perspective of the Victorian age. In fact, in most theatrical representations, the lines angrily addressed to Caliban by Miranda in Shakespeare’s original were assigned to Prospero on the grounds of decorum! (Arden 3: 92) The identification of Ariel and Prospero with Shakespeare also continued well into the 20th century. The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
104 Theatrical representations, needless to say, go hand in hand with critical interpretations and evaluations. The close association of The Tempest with the New World and the perception of colonialism and imperialism as its major themes began quite early in the 20th century. For nearly three centuries after the play’s creation, with very few exceptions, neither criticism nor dramatic performance had emphasized its American sources or resonances. But now there was a close identification of Shakespeare’s last play with the New World and issues of colonialism and imperial expansion. This was, of course, also due to the unearthing of a wealth of non-literary documents relating to early American colonial history, especially the pamphlets containing accounts of travellers returning from colonizing expeditions. A major source was William Strachey’s report (circulated in 1609, two years before the staging of The Tempest) of an expedition to Virginia: how one of the ships of the fleet was driven by a hurricane on to Bermuda’s rocky coast, how “the passengers and crew reached shore safely and spent nine months in Bermuda’s salubrious climate and on its abundant provisions before sailing to Virginia in two newly constructed vessels” (Arden 3: 41). Drawing from the Bermuda pamphlets, as they came to be called, and other travel narratives of the early 17th century, Shakespeare, it came to be believed, created the island and the play as a microcosm of the colonial enterprise and explored, directly or subtly, its impact on both the colonizer and the colonized. However, there was a striking shift in the paradigm from the mid 20th century. While in the first half scholars saw colonialism as a benign enterprise, with a picture of Prospero as pitying the aborigines and instructing them “in civilized speech” and leading them “from savagery to civilization” (Sidney Lee, quoted in Arden 3: 100), the second half of the century, thanks to postcolonial theory, saw the original inhabitants of the New World as well as of all colonized regions as victims and losers in an imperialist hegemonic project. The European settlers/colonizers were seen in this view as ruthlessly exploiting the natural as well as human resources of the colonized spaces and imposing their language and world view on them. Alongside such politico-cultural theories, psychoanalytical theories also The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
105 helped fashion the image of colonizer and colonized. The Freudian concepts of id, ego and superego and the Lacanian perspectives on the self and the other provided frames of reference for interpreting the relationship between the colonizers and their colonial subjects. Thus, in one psychoanalytical view, “Ariel and Caliban came to be seen as embodiments of Prospero’s subconscious mind; in its most reductive form, Ariel is his superego, Caliban his libido”. (Arden 3: 110) In another view, Caliban was regarded as suffering from a “dependency complex” and Prospero from an “inferiority complex”. In yet another, Prospero was seen as entertaining incestuous thoughts and as showing relief at the arrival of Ferdinand! (Arden 3: 118) It is but natural that these critical theories and perspectives in general and on The Tempest in particular influenced the production of the play if only by a process of “cultural osmosis” (Arden 3: 112) In a 1970 production for example, Prospero was the colonial governor, Ariel his mulatto house-servant and Caliban his darker field-hand. In the final scene, as Prospero left the island, Caliban was shown shaking his fist at the departing ship and Ariel as lifting Prospero’s bent staff and beginning to straighten it: “one native rejected Western technology, the other sought to appropriate it” (Arden 3: 114) Peter Brook’s 1968 experimental show suggested the play’s plot and themes through mime and movement. Filled with images of violence, it shows an enormous Sycorax giving birth to Caliban, Caliban taking over the island, leading his followers in a wild orgy and assaulting Prospero until Ariel diverts the mob, as in the original, with ribbons, costumes and trinkets. (Arden 3: 114-115). Film productions of The Tempest also exhibited a range of perspectives and adaptations. In the 1991 film entitled Prospero’s Books Prospero himself is shown as the author of The Tempest which he is writing as he is exiled. He carries it to the island along with other books (including the works of Shakespeare!) that a Renaissance scholar would find of interest. The scenes and the people in the play—the Europeans extravagantly costumed and the natives naked-- correspond with Renaissance conceptions of the savage and the civilized. It is however Ariel who completes the script of The Tempest. In the climax, Prospero throws his books The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
106 into the ocean; all the books sink except for Thirty-Six Plays by William Shakespeare and the script of The Tempest, which are grabbed by Caliban! (Arden 3: 119-21) III After this rather sketchy survey, I would now like to pass on to the two adaptations that I wish to discuss in some detail. The first is a French play entitled Une Tempête by Aimé Césaire, published in 1969 (translated into English as A Tempest in 1985 by Richard Miller and revised in 1995). Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was a Francophone and French author and politician from Martinique, a Caribbean island which was once a French colony and is now one of the overseas regions (“departements”) of France. A student activist while pursuing higher education in Paris, where he came under the influence of the Senegalese writer Leopold Senghor, Césaire was one of the founding fathers of “negritude”, the black consciousness movement which sought to assert pride in African cultural values to counterbalance the inferior status accorded to them in European colonial thinking. (In fact, he coined the term “negritude” in his famous French poem published in 1939 and translated in 1969 as “Return to My Native Land”. In his “Discourse on Colonialism”, originally delivered as a speech in 1950, in which he attacked American imperialism and older forms of colonialism, he also said the pioneers of the Negritude movement had deliberately chosen the word “nègre” as a term of defiance. “Since there was some shame about the word nègre, we chose the word nègre.”) (Césaire, quoted in McNary:11) Césaire spent most of his life in Martinique where he taught in a secondary school—Frantz Fanon was one of his students and later a contemporary activist. Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest openly identifies and explores the colonial themes merely suggested in Shakespeare. The full title of the play was “A Tempest: Based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest: Adaptation for a Black Theater”, thus announcing the work’s political intent. It was an all-Black cast in the original production (as well as in English), but, in a rather puzzling device, all the actors enter and the Master of Ceremonies invites them to choose the character they The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
107 wish to play and also to choose an appropriate mask. This raised the question of authenticity of representation which has not been satisfactorily answered. The characters are the same as in Shakespeare, with two alterations: Ariel here is a mulatto slave, though possessing magical powers which Prospero controls, as in Shakespeare, and Caliban here is a black slave, and not the rather vague and indeterminate physical figure that you find in Shakespeare. There is also an addition in the form of Eshu, a black devil god, who enters uninvited during the celebratory masque of the pagan gods and goddesses, sings an obscene song and dances an obscene dance, forcing the goddesses to leave abruptly, and angering Prospero no end. Almost the first feature that we notice as we read the play is the proportion of the part and speeches assigned to Prospero and Caliban. We find that there are many more dialogical interactions between the master and the slave here than in Shakespeare. In Shakespeare, in terms of speech, Prospero towers over not only Caliban but everyone else. It has been calculated that Prospero speaks nearly thirty percent of the lines, the next highest figure being Caliban’s at less than nine percent! In Césaire’s adaptation, at least whenever Caliban and Prospero meet, there is an equal, and equally powerful, exchange of speech. Indeed, language and speech play a central role in the play demonstrating the constant power struggle between colonizer and colonized, resulting, it would seem, in a reluctant acceptance of negotiation on the part of the former at the end. The first word that Caliban speaks as he enters the stage at the bidding of Prospero is not just a speech, but a speech act. Prospero has just spoken to Ariel about Caliban. “I’m going to have a few words with Master Caliban. I’ve been keeping my eye on him, and he’s getting a little too emancipated.” (A Tempest (hereinafter cited as AT) I.ii.p.10) He then calls out to Caliban twice. Caliban enters and says “Uhuru”. “What did you say?” Prospero asks, puzzled, and Caliban repeats the word. (AT:I.ii.p.11) Now the word “uhuru” is a Kiswahili word meaning “Freedom”. It seems as though by just uttering the The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
108 word Caliban declares his independence. In this sense, the utterance constitutes a performative speech act (like the utterance of the word “talaq” or like “Vandemataram” or “Jaihind” used by the Indian freedom fighters, constituting a declaration of freedom) It is, of course, true that, for a performative speech act to be successful, the right conditions have to obtain, and they don’t here in this case. But Caliban’s use of the word has two effects: (a) It unsettles and disorients Prospero for the moment, indicating a temporary loss of control. (b) It is a hint and warning that Caliban possesses a knowledge beyond Prospero’s. Moreover, the use of the word “uhuru” links the play to the radical political movements in Africa in which it was used as a slogan. (McNary: 13) Caliban, however, cannot continue speaking in his native language to Prospero, not just because the latter objects to it-“Mumbling your native language again! I’ve already told you, I don’t like it” (AT: I.ii.p.11)--but because it would mean lack of communication and he would run the risk of being ignored. The tension over language manifests itself again when Caliban says, later in the exchange, “I’ve decided I don’t want to be called Caliban any longer . . . I’m telling you that from now on I won’t answer to the name Caliban”. When Prospero demands to know why, Caliban says, “Calibanisn’t my name . . . It’s the name given me by your hatred, and every time it’s spoken it’s an insult”. (AT: I.ii.ppp.14-15) After all, those who have power over the world name the world and also the people! (Incidentally Shakespeare’s source for the name “Caliban” has been widely discussed. The most common view is that it is an anagram of “cannibal”. Other sources suggested include “Carib”, meaning Caribbean, “Caulibon”, a gypsy word for black or dark things, and even the Indian word “Kaleeban” meaning a satyr of the goddess!) (Arden 3: 31-32) Now, when Caliban objects to being called by that name, Prospero asks, “All right, suggest something else . . .” Caliban replies “Call me X”. [Perhaps with the suggestion, we may add, that he would like to be identified rather with Malcolm X, the African American Muslim minister and activist who was a staunch critic of the USA] Call me X. That would be the best. Like a man without a name. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
109 Or, to be more precise, a man whose name has been stolen. You talk about history . . . well, that’s history, and everyone knows it! Every time you summon me it reminds me of a basic fact, the fact that you’ve stolen everything from me, even my identity! Uhuru! (AT: I.ii.p.15) And he exits. In fact, even in Shakespeare, Caliban is not just a slave, but a speaking slave, the subaltern who speaks. Stephen Greenblatt argued that Shakespeare’s choice to make Caliban speak, and speak intelligibly in the language of Prospero, “complicates his identity, opening up the space for a mysterious measure of resemblance between the monster and his master”. (Greenblatt: 31) To use Homi Bhabha’s terms, the mimicry plays a disruptive role, challenging Prospero’s authority. Aimé Césaire stretches this possibility further, making Caliban match Prospero’s linguistic reach, in terms of both quantity and power, the resemblance becoming a menace. It could even be said that it is Caliban’s bilingualism—though his use of his own language is minimal—that poses the greatest challenge to Prospero, and puts him in a double bind, as it were. The slave can talk back in the master’s language and defy him or speak in his own language and mystify him. It is the threat posed by Caliban’s articulateness that seems to dictate the final decision taken by Prospero in AiméCésaire’s adaptation. In a complete break from Shakespeare, Prospero, rather than returning to Italy along with the other Europeans, decides to remain in the island with Caliban. And this, though he had told them earlier that he would be sailing with them. When he speaks to Caliban, in the presence of the others, after calling him “devilish”, he asks him if he has anything to say in his own defence: “Take advantage of my good humor. I’m in a forgiving mood today”. Caliban however refuses to defend himself and goes on to make a defiant speech in which he declares how he hates him for his insults, his ingratitude, and, “worst of all, more degrading than all the rest, your condescension”. He adds: Prospero, you’re a great magician: you’re an old hand at deception. The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
110 And you lied to me so much, about the world, about myself, that you ended up by imposing on me an image of myself: underdeveoloped, in your words, undercompetent that’s how you made me see myself! And I hate that image . . . and it’s false! But now I know you, you old cancer, And I also know myself! After a few more hostile exchanges, Prospero seethingly admits: Well, I hate you as well! For it is you who have made me doubt myself for the first time. and announces his decision to stay back, saying “My fate is here: I shall not run from it.” (AT: 66) Once a colonizer, always a colonizer, he vows that he will not give up his colonizing or as he calls it his civilizing mission. The ending of the play is an anticlimax. It is many years later, Caliban and Prospero are the only ones in the island. Prospero is old, weak and weary and his speech is “weak, toneless, trite”. He sees all around animals grinning at him. He seems to have a gun in his hand and shouting “I shall protect civilization!” he fires in all directions. He calls out weakly and then shouts to Caliban to make a fire. “In the distance, above the sound of the surf and the chirping of birds, we hear snatches of Caliban’s song: FREEDOM HI-DAY, FREEDOM HI-DAY!” (AT: 68) IV Indira Parthasarathy (pseudonym of Dr Ranganathan Parthasarathy) is the author of nine full-length plays and half a dozen one-act plays. Of the full-length plays, while three are social dramas with existentialist themes, six can be called retellings. He has himself sorted these six into three groups, such as tonmam (myth), varalaaru (history) and tazhuvalaakkam (adaptations). But all of them are retellings in the sense that Dr Parthasarathy always brings a fresh, often revolutionary perspective to them, whether it is history, myth or a literary classic that The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
111 he recreates. To take just one example, his play on Aurangzeb, instead of depicting him as a fundamentalist and nothing more, makes a psychological study of the Emperor as ultimately a lonely figure craving for love. While it presents by and large a favourable picture of Dara as a liberal and secular idealist (making us wonder what history would have been if he, rather than, Aurangzeb had succeeded Shah Jahan), it critiques Shah Jahan’s aesthetic dream projects and the economic injustice and misery that they caused. Indira Parthasarathy’s plays include two adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, one of King Lear (entitled Irudi Aattam or “Endgame”) and one of The Tempest (entitled Sooraavali “Storm/Tempest/Whirlwind”) In both, the characters and the setting have been indigenized/Tamilized, with the major characters corresponding to those in Shakespeare. The plot outline of Sooravali, including the ending, is the same as that of Shakespeare’s play. All the characters have Tamil names, with Miranda simply being called Kanni (“virgin”). Caliban is here a dark-complexioned man of thirty, the son of a sorceress and a native of the island and he is called Karuppan (“Blackie”). Ariel is a young man of about eighteen, wearing a white-coloured shirt and shorts. He is interestingly named Maaruti, suggesting Lord Hanuman’s powers, intelligence as well as devotion to his master, in the Indian epic Ramayana. Karuppan is certainly more articulate than Shakespeare’s Caliban. From the beginning almost till the end, he adopts an adversarial position in relation to Muthuvel (Prospero’s name in the play). He repeatedly affirms that he is the rightful owner of the island, the son of the soil (mannin maindan) and charges Muthuvel with stealing the land as well as enslaving him. He calls him vanderi, “newcomer” or “immigrant”/“settler”. The Tamil word—is it in the neuter gender, or an adjective being used as a noun?--certainly carrying a more disapproving connotation than its English equivalents. Towards the end, he points to the royal personages and asks Muthuvel, “These people usurped power from you. So you came here and grabbed my land. What kind of justice is that?” (IP: 705) (One is reminded of the The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
112 early settlers in America, the Pilgrim Fathers, the Puritans who fled England to escape persecution and went to the New World and colonized and persecuted the natives there!) The most significant feature we notice in Indira Parthasarathy’s adaptation lies in the portrayal of Muthuvel, the Prospero figure, as more aware, more sensitive and open-minded than his Shakespearean predecessor. The bard’s protagonist is a veritable despot, the very emblem of the colonial master and patriarchal authority. He decides everything for his daughter, even when she should sleep, how long she should sleep, not to speak of the prepositional phrases which may follow the verb “sleep”. He places one young man before the girl and tells her to choose a husband! Sooravali on the contrary seems to be basically more about the education that Muthuvel receives through the play than the education he imparts as a colonizer. Everyone, his daughter as well as his two servants, has eventually a gradual positive influence on him. I have already mentioned Karuppan’s tirades against his master, which do at the end have an impact on him. Kanni is by no means as naïve and helpless a figure as Miranda. Early in the play, when Muthuvel narrates the past events to her, he says that it is power and position that legitimize everything, and that he learnt this basic lesson only later after his exile. Upon this, Kanni says, “You seem to have learnt it well. . . . how well you are driving Karuppan around!” (IP: 658). Muthuvel is startled at this and says that the case of Karuppan is different as he is both a savage and a slave and as such has to be treated harshly. Maaruti (who corresponds to Ariel) plays an even more potent, though apparently unobtrusive, role in the transformation of Muthuvel. Early in the play, when Maaruti (Ariel) asks for his freedom, Muthuvel asks him what he feels about the same demand made by Karuppan. Maaruti is silent. While the silence can be construed in either way, Muthuvel understands that Maaruti doesn’t want to openly endorse Karuppan’s demand. Muthuvel says Maaruti is being diplomatic but for his part he still proclaims that might is right and that is the way of the world. However, it is through the musical drama that he presents for The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
113 Muthuvel and the couple (which corresponds to the masque of the gods and goddesses in Shakespeare) that Maaruti brings about the final transformation of Muthuvel. In an amazing dance and song spectacle, Maaruti recreates the Varaaha avatar from Hindu mythology, the incarnation of Lord Vishnu as a wild boar in order to rescue the earth from the demon Hiranyaaksha. The dance shows the demon grabbing the woman who represents the earth (Bhooma Devi), proclaiming that the earth is the possession of the mighty. Her protests that she belongs to everyone are of no avail. He sinks her into the ocean and goes down himself too. Then another actor emerges wearing the mask of Varaaha, plunges into the ocean, emerges holding the woman in one hand and fighting the demon with the other. The demon falls at the end. Two other women appear and garland Varaaha and Bhooma Devi. They all dance, singing, adding another element of aesthetic pleasure and surprise, fusing myth with bhakti literature, a paasuram (hymn) from Nammazhwar’s Tiruvaymozhi, which celebrates how the earth was beautifully intact after its rescue by Varaha. Here is a translation of the paasuram: The seven plains stood firmly in place, the seven mountains stood firmly in place, the seven oceans stood firmly in place, when my father lifted the Earth with his tusk teeth! (Nammazhvar, Tiruvaymozhi 7.4.3, Verse No. 3372 in Naalaayira Divya Prabandham, Translated as The Sacred Book by Srirama Bharati) The dancers also add: Music, water, land, air and fire all belong by right to all the people who live on earth! /who live close to the earth. The one who rules the earth by force shall be utterly destroyed. This is God’s decree! All the demons who haughtily violate the code of the earth are enemies of God. Glory, glory, glory be to Goddess Earth! - (IP: 697) The point of the spectacle, which Maaruti seems to indirectly convey, is not lost on Muthuvel. So, at the end of the show, he asks Maaruti, “Who is the demon, is it me?” Maaruti hurriedly denies any such imputation, but Muthuvel assures him that no offence has not been taken and adds, “Even searching for an identity is a form of The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
114 arrogance / egoism” (IP: 698) The message however has gone through. In the final scene, Muthuvel admits that he had no right to usurp Karuppan’s land just because others usurped his. He begs forgiveness of Karuppan even as he forgives his fellow-countrymen. Karuppan too shows grace and admits that he has learnt a great deal from Muthuvel, including the thirst for freedom. In a final act of reconciliation Muthuvel embraces Karuppan before embarking. The play ends with nadaswaram music. V The two plays, by Aimé Césaire and Indira Parthasarathy, as seen so far, certainly lend themselves to interpretation from a postcolonial perspective, as does Shakespeare’s play. But then a postcolonial, cultural materialist, New Historicist, framework is by no means an exclusive key to an understanding of The Tempest. Indeed, there have been quite a few critiques in the last few decades of the cultural materialist interpretations of the play. Howard Felperin, for example, does not deny the need to place the work in its historical context (i.e. the Jacobean context of colonizing projects, in which Shakespeare himself might have had a stake). However, he objects to the misrepresentation “of Prospero—and by analogy Renaissance Europe-- as a unique agent of dispossession and tyranny.” If we go down “the dark backward and abysm of time”, to use Prospero’s phrase, history had always been a cycle of repetition, a “recurrent nightmare” of occupation and oppression. Even looking within the play, to quote Felperin, The island, to which Caliban lays mock-dynastic claim as “mine by Sycorax my mother” (I.ii.331) was never actually his mother’s, any more than it is “his” rather than Prospero’s. The island had already been expropriated by Sycorax from its native inhabitants—the nymphs and nature-spirits of Ariel’s genus—when Prospero expropriates it in turn from Sycorax. And its natives—at least one of them—were already in bondage before Prospero imposed it (or something similar but less harsh) upon her son. - (Felperin: 55) It is also possible to place the famous monologue spoken by Prospero at the end of the masque in the context of the larger vision of history that is indicated. Prospero says that “the great globe itself,/ The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
115 Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve” (IV.i.148-56). This might be taken to mean that in “some ultimate, profound, and prepotent sense no one owns anything and never did own anything: the condition of death or apocalypse or utopia”. (Felperin: 57) Such a view, of course, will constitute a “utopian hermeneutic” rather than “a hermeneutic of suspicion”. (Felperin: 60) Alternatively, we can go back to the question of language. The Tempest certainly yields a great deal of insight into the power of language as an instrument of protest and resistance as well of marginalization and “thingification”. But that is not the only function of language in the play. In an article significantly entitled “The Discourse of Prayer in The Tempest”, Tom McAlindon points out the predominance of words of blessing and curse and related words of religious or divine import. (We should perhaps remember that 1611, the year of the first production of The Tempest, was also the year of the appearance of King James’ Bible). Even in the first scene, the curse “A plague upon this howling” is followed soon by “All lost! To prayers, to prayers!” shouted by the mariners. Later in his cave, as Prospero sees his daughter and Ferdinand together, he says to himself, “Heaven rain grace/On that which breeds between ‘em” and the gods and goddesses do so, in the betrothal masque that follows. From this point of view it is possible to say that the play is centrally about a father’s blessing for a daughter who is herself a blessing. The language of prayer is used by the other characters too. Ferdinand asks Miranda for her name, “chiefly that I might set it in my prayers”. Even Caliban at the end says he will seek grace. VI To return in conclusion to our two adaptations. I have foregrounded the portions and passages that lend credence to our regarding them as discourses on the postcolonial predicament. So indeed they are. But there are other pointers as well in the two plays. In both, the complaint against the colonial masters is not just that they tyrannize over and marginalize their colonized subjects but also that they are not in harmony with their physical environment, the Nature that surrounds them and its resources. In Césaire’s play, Caliban calls The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
116 Prospero “anti-Nature”. In Shakespeare too, Caliban speaks some of the most evocative lines in the play describing the various kinds of music that he hears. (“This isle is full of . . .”) In Aimé Césaire, Caliban talks of the sea as his pal and of the wind which sings songs to him. He is angry that Prospero, by means of his gadgets, bends and breaks the forces of Nature (the ants, the insects and the mud) and uses them as a kind of anti-riot arsenal. (AT: 53-54). He charges Prospero with treating the earth as if it were dead so that he could “walk on it, pollute it . . . tread upon it with the steps of a conqueror”. On the other hand, he, Caliban, respects it because he knows that it is alive. Indira Parthasarathy’s Sooraavali too, as we noted from the musical drama framed within the betrothal entertainment, is not just about colonization—the colonization and oppression of man by man—it is also about the desecration and destruction of Nature. In these days, when there is a greater awareness about issues of ecology and the environment, we will be quite right if we stretch our interpretation of the two plays to say that they speak up against all forms of exploitation of Nature and of those who live close to Nature. That will include insensitive governmental agencies that take away land and water from native tribes in the name of development as well corporate sharks who set up mineral water plants and sand mafias who loot the soil. Of the two adaptations we have seen, Indira Parthasarathy’s Sooravali is closer to Shakespeare’s original in structure, content and overall thematic significance. Aimé Césaire’s play is admittedly political and part of a radical, activist project. (In fact, he said, in an interview, that he had set out to translate Shakespeare’s play, but “when the work was done, I realized there was not much Shakespeare left”, which statement, of course, is also debatable). There are a number of features in Sooravali which closely connect it with The Tempest apart from the basic plot. The triple themes of reconciliation, reunion and regeneration, which E.M.W. Tillyard and early 20th century critics saw as characterizing The Tempest, as well as the other last plays of Shakespeare, are operative in Indira Parthasarathy’s adaptation too. Parthasarathy also accords a central role to the theme of illusion and reality which he regards as a key feature of Shakespeare’s play. In his The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
117 Preface to his play he cites the famous “Revels” passage and goes on to say that the philosophy underlying it (reality and illusion, nijam and totramayakkam) is the principle underlying Advaita philosophy. The betrothal masque serves several functions in Shakespeare’s play, the most important being the high value put on classical myths in Renaissance literature. Indira Parthasarathy retains the masque element, but magically transforms it, as we saw, by reenacting an ancient Indian myth and investing it with a new significance. Aimé Césaire also retains the masque and the myth from Shakespeare but only to reject them as part of an oppressive White humanist agenda. In fact, if we look at the other plays of Indira Parthasarathy, we will see how he foregrounds the transforming power of myths everywhere. We are being told that we live in a post-Truth age. The term has gained currency in recent years and is being increasingly used to refer to a political culture in which “people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on facts”. (Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary) In such a situation, it is myths and literary-cultural creations that can positively transform institutions and individuals. But to achieve that end, the myths and the literary masterpieces need to be constantly retold and reinterpreted. And, for performing that mission, who better than creative writers like Shakespeare and Indira Parthasarathy? REFERENCES
Arden 3. The Tempest. Ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan.The Arden Shakespeare.3rd Series.First published by Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1990. Revised with additional material and new cover and published by Bloomsbury. London, 2011. Bharati, Srirama. The Sacred Book of Four Thousand: Nalayira Divya Prabandham Rendered in English with Tamil Original. Chennai: Sri Sadagopan Tirunarayanaswami Divya Prabanda Pathasala, 2000. Césaire, Aimé. UneTempête (French). Originally published in 1969. Translated into English as A Tempest by Richard Miller, 1985. Revised English translation 1992. New York: Ubu Repertory Theater Publications. The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
118 Felperin, Howard. “Political Criticism at the Crossroads: The Utopian Historicism of The Tempest”. In The Tempest. Theory in Practice Series. Ed. Nigel Wood. Buckingham: Open Univ. Press, 1995. pp.29-66. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century”, in Learning to Curse. New York: Routledge, 1990. pp. 16-39. McAlindon, Tom. “The Discourse of Prayer in The Tempest,” from Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. Excerpted in Harold Bloom’s “Shakespeare through the Ages: The Tempest”. Edited and with an Introduction by Harold Bloom. Volume Editor: Neil Heims. New Delhi: Viva Books, 2010. pp. 247-61 McNary, Brenda. “He Proclaims Uhuru: Understanding Caliban as a Speaking Subject”. Critical Theory and Social Justice. Journal of Undergraduate Research, Occidental College. Vol. 1. Spring 2010.pp.1-26. Parthasarathy, Indira. Sooravali (Tamil). In Indira Parthasarathy: Natakangal. Muzhutthokuppu. (“Indira Parthasarathy: Collected Plays”). Chennai: Kizhakku Pathippagam (Kizhakku Publishers), 2007. pp.650-707. The translations from the Tamil play provided in the paper are mine. The Tempest by William Shakespeare (cited in the paper as TT). Ed. Maqbool Hasan Khan. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2001.
T. Sriraman has translated into English Krithika’s novel Vasaveswaram (Macmillan) and two plays by Indira Parthasarathy, Ramanujar (OUP) and Aurangzeb (Seagull). His interests include Shakespeare studies, Stylistics and English grammar and usage. A former Professor of The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, he now lives in Chennai The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
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RIPPLES & REFLECTIONS
Santhan Ayathurai Words Work, a literary forum organized by the Paw Print Publishers, was held on the 18th of August, in Colombo, Sri Lanka The welcome address by Manikya Kodituwakku on behalf of the Paw Print highlighted the organizers’ ambition in bringing the writers in English of the country together through such events. This was followed by Poetry reading moderated by Daisy Perry and the participants were Madri Kalugalle, Dilantha Gunawardene and Khrishantha Bagyadutta. Mr. Bagyadutta’s reading was something more than a recital; it was a performance and his modulations and enacting the scene of his poem attracted the audience. The Words Work lecture, titled ‘The need to build platforms for Literature’ was then delivered by Capt. Elmo Jayawardene and that, too, was warmly received. The next session, after a break, was a panel discussion, titled, The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
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‘New Directions in Sri Lankan Writings-in our times,’ moderated by Annemari de Silva. Those who participated were Madhubashini Ratnayake Dissanayake, Dinali Fernando and Vihanga Perera The culminating event was a session of prose reading by Sunela Jayawardene, Charulatha Abeysekere and Ayathurai Santhan. The authors were then briefly interviewed by the moderator Vihanga Perera. The first two authors read from their respective books and Santhan read his latest short story, Reverberation, which is due to be published in the forthcoming issue of The Wagon Magazine. The event turned out to be a three-hour line up of readings, discussions, opinions and talks from a varied pool of voices new and seasoned in Sri Lanka's English literary discourse.
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121
POETRY
Full moon, cold blue lips desert hot made as red as in the pic with a kiss taught stolen by the devil in a dervish's swirling mist The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
122
Even till the last second that something in me died you still looked chocolate brown seductive and endearing Why then did the music stop My heart go cold and grow still to stop beating Your charms fall on deaf ears I light match after match in vain to try to again spark the fire in my heart where once it blazed and now there is only the ashes not the wood or the shaving, not the coal or the kindling I strike match after match in vain Though you still remain to others as ravishing as you were to me even to that last second when the music stopped and I to you died
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123
The moon behind you white globe artificial shines and your armpits sleeveless entire entice seduce shining with the light of my aching concupiscence that knows tantric delight and does not differentiate but wants all and sundry longs to be not in the light but the dark where in the feel of such fair skin lost to all sense of propriety I can do the seldom talked of rubbing glide, slide, and ride
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124
Come, let me undo the unseen laces of your dress and feet watch the fabric swish and fall around you, on the floor to reveal not the cold of marble that struck pale fire from you but the heat of the warmth of a hand and the burning that it feels
when placed between your thighs
that is the fire burning in your poetry of lights and passion filled
eyes when in the grip of lust, love and life
and in my nights that sight of hot flesh that is pliant make the muse also to set a roaring fire ablaze in me that cannot be doused that longs for the cleft between your breasts as fiercely as these words that are wrought magicks of images making love to the empty air to come in arcs of fountains imaginary steeds leaping into wombs to bring forth children marching hard, proud sentinel throbbing guard of long lines of
verse to crown that picture
in the mind, of the real muse and not some however beautiful and
graceful stone sculpture
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125
Wind your hair around your face and let the zephyr blow it across its space while feeling as if sprayed by drops of rain in the monsoon my whole body arches in the sudden drive to plunge in the torrent of words, windblown, windswept, windwept, windhover,
windworn, windlorn, windtorn, windwound,
winding down after the climax
wingdings wrapped in the wrinkles of a sari that flies in the breeze upwards and reveals to the mind's eye boggling blowing sights that allure and make one gently die
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126 Naked as thirst and nude as water elongating longing in a haze of silver and gypsy mirrors on the blouse's brocade work that, swelled fully in the night brings rain and desire blush veiled and behind it the heart
Dr Koshy AV, is working as an Assistant Professor in the English Department of Jazan University, Saudi Arabia. He has five books of his own to his credit including poetry, criticism on poetry, literary criticism and theory and essays on various subjects and has co-authored, co-edited, and contributed to and anthologized another ten. One book, Art of Poetry, was reprinted once. He has been appearing in anthologies worldwide online and offline and has won several awards and nominations for writing. According to him his best book so far is "Scream and Other Urbane Legends", a collection of short stories. But his best work is yet to come. He runs several influential literary groups under the name THE SIGNIFICANT LEAGUE and its satellites. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
127
POETRY - Translated from Malayalam
Malayalam - Sunil Jose Translated by Ravi Shanker N MO(FA)THER Abruptly, one day, Mother began to speak in the tongue of father. Her demeanor became grave. Voice thickened. She sat and walked like father. We were stunned hearing (Un) Motherly words like Globalization, GST, Reactionaries and Ideological Perceptions coming out of her mouth. It was sister who cried at first calling out to Lord Krishna The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
128 wondering what was happening. Father, who used to read newspapers sitting in his arm chair or tea shop, got ruffled. We now had two fathers in the kitchen and the patio. We, the children, were perplexed, unable to decide who more of a father was. The father who wore a sari excelled in the new transfiguration. The language became more cocksure without any stammering issues. Things progressed so much that she sat in the arm chair and called out to the kitchen “A strong cup of tea, please!” When I cried “We don’t have a mother anymore” the married sister consoled “Don’t worry. Mother must have become a father from constant experience.” Even situations that demanded more of a mother could not bring mother back from being a father. At the same time Father became more of a mother like milk tea diluted with water. We tried hard to contain this transformation within the house itself. Served dinner first to mother. Arranged newspapers for her The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
129 around the arm chair in the morning. Registered our love through making the tea stronger. Father reached the kitchen without paying heed to the daughter. He became more of a mother. Washed clothes and swept the floor Became the slice of moon Waiting for father at the door step. Mo(fa)ther spent her time In the arm chair. After tea and siesta she went out saying “I’ll be to the shop and back.” Because it was rainy season she didn’t forget to carry the old fashioned umbrella of father. Before the surprise of this unusual journey could be fathomed, she greeted Radhakrishnan Master, who came that way, in father’s voice and straightaway entered Dineshan’s tea shop. Though there was no one else in the shop the woman’s voice with a rough tone scared him when she ordered “Strong tea.” He mildly greeted her as Radhechi and asked about her well being. “Our Party will face a tough time in this election. How many comrades sacrificed with their Blood and sweat! Yet!” He had to make sure that this was indeed Radhalakshmi Chechi, mother to Ani and Suni. The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
130
When Anil and Anitha came enquiring after her Dineshan pointed towards the side alley. Descending the side alley at the western junction, crossing the fields, to the right of the school, citting on the culvert, Mother was exchanging pleasantries with the passersby. Anitha sobbed. Anil shouted. Took her back home walking. Washed her hands and feet. Sat her on the cot. Father came from the kitchen with cool water. Children fanned her. Mother beckoned me near as I looked bonkers. and winked at me. Whispered in my ear. “Don’t get scared. It’s nothing. I am suffocating in this Mother robe and role. That’s why. That’s why.”
Ravi Shanker (Ra Sh) translates from Malayalam and Tamil to English and
vice versa. He has published English translations of stories by Bama (Tamil), Mother Forest ( from Malayalam) and Waking is Another Dream (Sri Lankan Tamil Poetry). He has published poems in magazines, journals and anthologies. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
131
Malayalam - Sunil Jose Translated by Dr Betsy Paul. C
Unexpected Jolting out from an afternoon snooze, it was in the middle of a day that the cat in our house started to talk. Matching any accomplished orator it went on addressing all in the family, friends, fable, chair, bed, and, the cooker, all the almirahs, our family well, the pond, cowshed, goat's pen, chimney, the chirawa, the rat trap, Jimmy the dog, and, all those whom it was acquainted withNaming each, and each, separately, greetings went on and on. Not even exempting the three hens which the fox had spared, the baby bull which Ammini, the cow gave birth that very day, and, even, the washing machine. The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
132 I had my misgivings much earlier its seemingly innocuous slouching and sprawling were indeed tactical moves schemed to learn, things. On the third day after grandfather died, I had noticed, (as it stretched out,) that unusual glint of its eyes. what secret does it hold with its wiped face and, glistened moustache. It remembered how it miffed in the woods, and, was tamed at home. The topic for the extempore was“The relevance of a house cat In contemporary Kerala� as it was carving out a long feline epoch sometimes dropping names, sometimes, falling into deep reveries of silence, (reminding one of debates in TV channels) it heard mother calling out from the kitchen. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
133 “who is it that is making such a noise there?” and, it opened its eyes and, making a peculiar gesture By turning its face to a side it shook off the past, and, the present, and, as though on trail of a fish scent it ran to the side where the kitchen was Crying out, “miao, miao”.
Dr Betsy Paul. C is a poet and teacher who writes both in English and Malayalam and has published poems in the Indian P.E.N., and in Poemlets, an anthology of poems. She is working as an associate professor in the department of English, St. Aloysius College, Elthuruth, Thrissur.
Dr.Sunil Jose is a poet, artist and teacher from Kerala. His poems have been published in various print magazines, anthologies and in online publications. He has published two books of poems namely, Poovukalkondu Poorippikkenda Edangal (Places to be filled with flowers), DC Books Kottayam, 2007 and Irupurathil Kaviyathe Pinneyum (Not More than Two Pages, Again), Fabian Books, Mavelikkara, 2009. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Malayalam, St. Aloysius College, Elthuruth, Thrissur. The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
134
POETRY
Qutub Minar
We sit on a little patch of grass in the shadow of Qutub Minar. We open our little packs of rice. The footfalls of the visitors are knocking at its locked doors. It was locked the day people avalanched down its steps in a stampede. That was decades ago. On this summer day of dry mouths there are no birds on the naked trees, there are no cats on the busy streets. All around history whispers at the funeral of its dead. We eat our rice sitting in the shadow of Qutub Minar where there is none to watch us except its pointed head. The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
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What does it mean to claim that this body is mine? What does it mean to claim that this body is mine? What made me in the beginning the swimmer that I was, wriggling my way down a moist tunnel in a race with millions that tailed me? It was not me. And when I broke into the yellow cell that was open as if only for me in the red depth of a hollow way did it own itself? No it didn’t. In a trice, then, I couldn’t see myself from the cell. We conjoined, ran roots into one another, grew big into one. When I saw the light and began to grow my branches they grew not from me but from the earth. I was of the earth made of soil, sun and water. I was not mine. If I am not mine what claim do I have over anything else? If this body is not mine, how come this house or this woman be mine? Or this language or this air or this god? How can this country be mine? The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018
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Reading too much poetry can harm you Reading too much poetry can harm you dear poet. The spectres of the poets will lay siege to your fort like marauding sultans. Their only aim will be to break your walls, your idols and forms, and supplant them with their own dusty pillars and halls, their gods. Perhaps they would only want to smash you to smithereens just to show you that writing poetry of your own means to wage endless battles with alien hordes.
The Wagon Magazine - August - 2018
137
Wet leaves Certain memories stick like wet leaves on a mirror. They won’t fall off on their own. They will cling to you, oozing pain from their edges, in your moments during a silent summer night when all you want will be a blank wall to look at. When I was a boy at school, during recess, I saw a little girl lying on the floor of the urinal frothing at her mouth.
Prathap Kamath writes in English and Malayalam. His published works in English are Ekalavya: a book of poems (2012), Blood Rain and Other Stories (2014) and Tableaux: poems of life and creatures (2017). His poems have been anthologized in The Dance of the Peacock: An Anthology of English Poetry from India (Hidden Brook Press, 2013), and published in journals like Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts, Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, Chandrabhaga, Muse India, Modern Literture etc. He is an Associate Professor and a Research Guide of English with University of Kerala. The Wagon Magazine - August- 2018