LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug. 2018- Feb. 2019

LAKEVIEW International Journal of Literature and Arts

Writers’ Forum Sacred Heart College, Thevara

Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts, Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 August 2018 - February 2019 Published by Writers’ Forum Sacred Heart College Thevara, Kochi, India Only the copyright for this collection is reserved with the editors of Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts. Individual copyright for artwork, prose, poetry, fiction and extracts of novels and other volumes published in this issue of the magazine rests solely with the authors.

The magazine does not claim any of those for its own. No part of this publication may be copied without express written permission from the copyright holders in each case. The magazine is freely circulated on the World Wide Web. It may not be sold or hired out in its digital form to anybody by any agency whatsoever. All disputes are subject to jurisdiction of the courts of the Republic of India. Š Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts, 2019 Graphic Design - Mariam Henna Page Settings - Mariam Henna Cover Artwork - Jimmy Mathew

Editorial Board Chief Editor - Jose Varghese Associate Editor - Aravind R Nair Design/Layout Editor - Mariam Henna Review Editor - Jude Gerald Lopez Translation Editors - Minu Varghese, Mohammed Zahid Visual Art Editor -Shijo Varghese Photography Editor - Collins Justine Peter Student Editors - Gowri Nair, Sanjay Sreenivas Advisory Board - Alan Summers, Bill Ashcroft, George Szirtes, Kala Ramesh, Loree Westron, Mel Ulm, Patrick Connors, Rana Nayar, Sanjukta Dasgupta, Sudeep Sen

Editorial The previous couple of years hadn’t been easy on Lakeview. The only solution we had was to think of a combined issue of Vol.6, No.2 and Vol.7, No.1, originally meant to be published in August 2018 and February 2019. It seems the next two issues in order will also have to be combined in a similar manner.

We have a very small number of active editors at the moment and their personal, professional and creative pursuits are too demanding at times. But this doesn’t mean that the work on Lakeview will have to be compromised. We had been working on this through difficult times from its inception, but it turns out that these two years offered us harsher blows than the kind we had withstood. There is a plan to expand the editorial board in order to distribute the work evenly, and it might take some time. We sincerely hope that things will work out the way we plan it, and look forward to getting back to our normal schedule, with two issues per year, from August 2020.

These two years have also affected our plans to work towards print subscriptions. The sudden changes in Indian economy has led to huge differences in the financial investment we had figured earlier. We will therefore have to remain a journal available for free reading/viewing online, though it’s produced in high quality print format. It is possible to take personal print copies using some online services. We offer print copies on demand, but that too will be limited to certain periods when one of the active editors is available in India.

It is sad to see that many of the online literary journals that had inspired us are calling it a day. We are determined to continue this work because the voices we represent matter a lot in these times. We are grateful to our contributors and regular readers for making this happen.

The words of appreciation from writers like George Szirtes and Hanif Kureishi in response to our previous issue had been a great source of encouragement too.

I apologize to all the writers and artists who had to wait too long to get their works published in this issue. Thank you so much for your patience and trust in the Lakeview vision. I hope your works here would find their readers/viewers despite the delay, and the conversations about them, among all of us, would go on as usual.

Jose Varghese August 2018 – February 2019

In This Issue

Emma Venables (Short Fiction) The Suitcase Alan Britt (Poetry) Lady of Tuscany Saturday Night with Lila Downs Universal Traveler Magic Bus

11-14

15 16 17-18 19

Hanif Kureishi (Essay) Travelling to Find Out

20-23

Martin Bradley (Short Fiction) Rubicon

24-30

Jimmy Mathew (Visual Art)

31-38

Jim Brosnan (Poetry) As Shadows Lengthen Driving Long Distance What I Remember Murali Kamma (Short Fiction) River of Silence

39

Hilary Hares (Poetry) Connection Maiko The Philosopher's Path

50 51 51

Naina Dey (Short Fiction) The Moral Science Teacher

52-53

Vangelis Provias (Poetry) Optimism

54

Niles Reddick (Short Fiction) Adopted Royalty

55-59

William Doreski (Poetry) To Shame Instead of Flatter Dead Shoes This is Not a Poem of the Articulate Rain

60 61 62

39-40 40

Polina Simakova (Short Fiction) The Gathering

63-73

41-49

Brian Finney (Book Review) The Only Story by Julian Barnes

74-75

Keith Moul (Poetry) Tell Truth The Edifice

76 76

Sreya Sarkar (Short Fiction) Beef Biryani

77-87

Anthony Wade (Poetry) Always Remember The Vanities of Men The Loneliness

88-89 90 90

Hanif Kureishi (Essay) We are The Pollutants Stephen John Walker (Short Fiction) Rakahanga Gerard Sarnat (Poetry) Postcards From A Broad Paradise Lost, Regained, Lost Pretty Pulease Pulse Not Plato's Cave summer glacier's in Pakistan Steve Wade (Short Fiction) A Bird for Whom the Skies Were Made

91-93

94-104

105 105 106 107

108-109

V. Madhusoodanan Nair Tr: Variath Madhavan Kutty (Poetry) You Woke Me From The Great Slumber of Darkness

110

J. David Simons (Short Fiction) The Responsibility of Love

111-115

Fabrice Poussin (Visual Art)

116-123

Fiona Pitt-Kethley (Poetry) War and Religion

124-134

Sarah Mehjabeen (Book Review) A Bouquet of Stories

135-137

John Timothy Robinson (Poetry) The Approach of August Days

138

Janet H Swinney (Short Fiction) The Bhaskar Boys

139-150

List of Contributors

151-157

Editorial Board

158-164

Short Fiction|Emma Venables The Suitcase I will not let go of the suitcase. I tighten my grip on the handle and pull the battered leather corners closer to my thighs. You look at me with the expression of an exasperated father trying to negotiate with an infant. I play along, shake my head. But don’t worry, I won’t have a full-on tantrum – toes and fingertips lashing the ground – for that would mean having to let go of the suitcase.

You say you just want to help. A lady shouldn’t carry a suitcase if there’s a gentleman around. You expect me to smile, to feel reassured, express gratitude, but I turn, look for an escape route.

People, everywhere. Men, like you, everywhere. Rubble, everywhere.

Although, I have been watching rubble for days, as I’ve strolled from town to town, and I’m not sure if this rubble, the heaps beside the train tracks, the heaps children climb and exclaim over, are figments of my imagination.

I doubt this train will appear, though I wish for it with all the shaky remains of stamina I have left. We all doubt this train will appear, but none of us express our concerns. We have no words for each other, these women and I. Our words, pleasantries, measurements, predictions, were lost in the firestorms. And so we stand, on this station platform, tattered clothes catching the breeze, awaiting a train, destination unknown, that probably won’t turn up. But that’s all we have in war, isn’t it? Hope. Hope that we’ll wake up in our own beds, the walls still standing around us, with bread on the table and potatoes in the cupboard, and water in the bucket by the sink. Hope that our babies breathe despite the dust, sleep despite the sirens, keep fingers and toes and limbs intact despite the bombs.

Your hand touches mine. I step back. A sound leaves my throat without giving me a chance to shape, to edit, and so it must seem like I am in pain, rather than livid with you, our Führer, our fellow countrymen, and these women on this platform. I consider following the noise with a question: do you have a brother, a cousin, a best friend, up there? But I bite my lip until I taste blood amidst the halitosis.

You smile, an attempt to smooth over your sudden movements.

I look at your face. You are young, but your forehead wrinkles with experience and, perhaps, with the effort of empathy. A purple scar reaches from the right-hand corner of your mouth to your chin. Did you get that in battle? I hope you did. A lesson. I hope you howled for your mother when your skin burst open. I hope you continued howling – mother, mother, mother – until they dosed you up with morphine. I hope when you were sent home, your mother opened the front door 11

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

and looked away, unable to comprehend how her son had become tainted by war. I hope that second burned more than the sinews of your face leaking through. If I said these thoughts out loud, you would raise the alarm. Unpatriotic. I doubt the women around us would raise an eyebrow, they, like me, have bigger concerns: empty bellies, swollen gums, blistered feet. Besides, I’m not unpatriotic: I’ve handed over all the hearts I have loved, all the backs I have scrubbed.

Please, let me take the suitcase, you say. I take one more step back. He said that to me. When we bought the suitcase from the big department store. I can’t remember the name of it. Of course, it isn’t there anymore. I pointed and he, my husband, Volker, lifted the suitcase from the display and set it down on the floor. I knelt down, laid it flat and opened it. I admired the lining – blue with white flowers like Baby’s Breath. Perfect. I carried the suitcase around the store, letting it bump against my shins, as Volker picked out a new waistcoat.

And then he said: please, let me take the suitcase. I shook my head.

You’ll bruise your shins, he said. It’s empty, I replied.

You look at me as if trying to gauge the level of my madness. My dress, scorched and shredded at the hem, does not help. I can feel the soot in my ear canals, nostrils, the back of my throat. I can see the soot in my skin creases, nestled around my fingernails. I have pinned my hair back, though, because my mother always said a mark of a women rests with her hair. Of course, she went down from head to toe. Good quality, well-polished, well-heeled, shoes were her resting point. And I stand, before you, with no shoes on my feet, no stockings either. When the fire comes, when you hear crackle and creak of the city around you, you have to run in whatever state of dress you find yourself in, in whichever direction you find free of flame.

You look down the track, perhaps searching for the first indication of the train’s arrival. We’d hear it before we saw it, wouldn’t we? The way we do with the bombs. The floorboards quivering as if a party were taking place. The windowpanes chattering with their frames.

The empty pots and pans smacking each other in the kitchen. And then the mechanical monsters roaring in the sky, the screech of their cargo raping the air, the final thud. I want to say that you probably know all about that, don’t you? Or perhaps your friends, brothers, uncles, cousins, know about it? From a different perspective. Volker knew all about it. The tug of a lever, or maybe the push of a button.

The lightening of a load. The boom and glare below. Perhaps he got cocky in his knowledge. Perhaps he lingered too long, because they shot back. A direct hit. Shredded the fuselage, his legs, his torso, his ventricles, his windpipe, all his thoughts and prayers. The letter – assuring me his death was not in vain, was appreciated by the Führer himself – burnt in their fury along with the rest of our apartment.

I consider placing the suitcase on the ground, using it as a chair.

That’d be an end to it then, wouldn’t it? This little exchange over with 12

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

one simple, defiant, move. But I can’t sit on the suitcase. My husband sat on it once, dented the top. I scolded him, slapped his arm; it was still a relatively new purchase then and we were just starting our journey home after a holiday. We managed to push the lid out, but it involved opening the suitcase on a crowded platform just like this, revealing undergarments, crumpled shirts, and a stash of chocolates we had purchased from a gift shop. I can’t risk denting the suitcase now, not with all these people about, not with you staring at me.

My stomach rumbles and I push a hand to it. I try and recall the last time I ate. A raw potato? Yes, I found it in a field on the way here.

I could hear a child crying nearby as I picked it up, the cry of hunger, but once I bit into its mottled skin and tasted its waxy sourness, I couldn’t pry my mouth away. We all become animals in wartime, don’t we? Is that how you came to be standing on this platform with this amalgamation of German womanhood? Were you a mouse when you should have been an eagle? Is that why you’re decorated with scars rather than a uniform? Is that why you’re so desperate to help, to contribute something to the war effort?

A baby wails, and I turn to look, watching until its mother unveils her breast and the infant begins to suckle. My daughter, Edda, was quiet at first, when the first bombers appeared and distant streets succumbed. She lay in the suitcase, a perfect fit, with her fists clenched. I would put my index finger in her mouth, feel the nubs of her teeth, still in situ in her gums. Sometimes she would suck my finger. Sometimes I would have to pull away, the pressure too much.

Still, she would not cry. The other basement dwellers called her good, brave, a credit to her family. One said she was a credit to the Führer; I smiled, unconvinced. As the threat turned into knowledge, knowledge that the planes would appear every night, I kept her in the suitcase rather than putting her in the crib. It was easier that way, easier to carry her down the three flights of stairs to the basement when the time came. Of course, the suitcase was open. One side filled with her, swaddled in blankets. The other filled with provisions, if I had any, for the night ahead. The neighbours would sometimes make a joke as I carried kit and caboodle through the semi-darkness, but Edda would remain asleep throughout the journey, and that was the main thing.

A child runs past me. I step back just in time, preventing him from bashing the suitcase. Someone exclaims. Pain. I turn around, look at your scarred face. I consider apologising. Decide against it. You’re standing too close to me. It’s your own fault. You frown at me. Your scar turns a darker shade of purple, or perhaps my imagination runs wild again. I want to act like I stood on your foot on purpose, throw my shoulders back and hold my head up high, and look at you like a woman who is fully capable of holding a suitcase on a crowded station platform, but I look away. I think I see smoke in the distance. Not the type of smoke from bombs, but from funnels. I consider pointing, 13

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

turning everyone’s attention to the distance, but keep myself to myself. After all, it could just be a hallucination. Wishful thinking, perhaps.

The smoke thickens and I begin to feel, just as I told you we would, the urgency below my feet. I admit my heartbeat raced for a moment when I thought of what might be coming towards us, but it is definitely just the train. No bombers. For now. They’ve tricked me before, though. I say tricked like it’s some game I laughed off. I suppose at some level, to some men in uniform, it is a game, moving dots around maps, winning here and there, but never enough. And they are not the ones caught out. They’re not the ones sat in their apartments, thinking they’re safe, because the air raid warning system failed. They’re not the ones who wake up in the early hours of the morning to the rumbling above, the booming all around, the sound of children crying, of mother’s shushing. I was stood at the window as if frozen, watching a woman, all ablaze, screaming for water when the bomb hit. I remember little after that but heat and light and shock that the room I stood in, the living room, was intact when the rest of my apartment was engulfed. And then I remember daylight, clawing through rubble to find the crib. I hadn’t had a chance to put Edda in the suitcase, you see. I left her in the bedroom. I hadn’t seen the point of disturbing her on a night so silent.

The train appears amidst the smoke, screeches to a halt. I step forwards as do you. I feel your hand against mine. Let me help, you say. I shake my head. You attempt to unpick my fingers, one by one.

I shake my head again. No. Thank you. I pull the suitcase away. A tussle occurs. Back. Forth. Back. Forth. Let me help, please, you say.

No. Thank you. One of us knocks the latch. You and your enthusiasm to help. You and the battle you should have left well alone. You and your wading in to play the hero.

The case opens. A gentle thud. And there she is, Edda, lying on the platform, shrouded in the only piece of material I could find intact: the blackout curtain from my living room. I kneel, scoop her up, put her back in the suitcase. I close the lid, wait until I hear the latch click, and then look at you. I want to say that the cemeteries were overflowing, that I didn’t want to shove her into a courtyard with the others we lost that night, that I will bury her when I get to wherever this train will take me, but you have walked away.

14

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Poetry|Alan Britt Lady of Tuscany Lady of Tuscany, gesso-streaked walnut hair like lightning sizzling the brain, left knee demure above volcanic ashen skirt.

Chameleon mugging the mambo with banana peel stripe blazing its aquamarine spine & opaque claws clutching either side of a cataract moon before remembering it’s Tuesday, so, who gives a flying you know what; & you do know what; it’s all about that lady from Tuscany who’s been curling your eyelashes what seems like forever.

Lady of Tuscany, gesso-walnut hair, left knee demure above volcanic ashen skirt.

Chameleon mugging the mambo with banana peel stripe blazing its aquamarine spine & opaque claws clutching either side of a cataract moon before remembering it’s Tuesday, so, who gives a flying you know what; & you do know what; it’s all about that lady from Tuscany who’s been smoking your eyelashes what seems like forever.

15

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Saturday Night with Lila Downs Piano taps stained-glass notes, guitar weaves paw prints through balding conifers that dot the Siberian medulla oblongata, bass serves up heartache with a side of mescal & voice that is Plato, Aristotle & Socrates combined with razorblades dipped in duende slicing the fate of seagulls struggling California foam.

Actually, the mask she wore didn’t do any of that.

What she did was drift into a seductive nightmare called “La Llorna” while clutching a bloody placenta with a voice addicted to an undying faith in love.

Children frolicked a cataract moon.

But, tonight, from her garter lemón, this feral voice seizes the scalpel cauterizing her unrequited faith in love & raises it high above imagination like a dagger in the hands of Shakespeare’s many misguided lovers. (coda) Piano taps stained-glass notes, guitar weaves paw prints through balding conifers that dot the Siberian medulla oblongata, bass serves up heartache with a side of mescal & voice that is Plato, Aristotle & Socrates combined with razorblades dipped in duende slicing the fate of seagulls struggling California foam.

16

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Universal Traveler 1.

I’m going to Mars.

By the time you read this, Venus will be all the rage for Happy Hour.

But I’m going to Mars just the same.

Invest in Jupiter & its Las Vegas moons?

Humph, brokers text during frozen chocolate mousse, almond frangipane tart with cranberries and honeyed pistachios, brokers eager to sell time shares for this moon or that.

Already conglomerates raise their property value on Io & Ganymede.

So, we wait for the perfect time to buy and sell and sell and buy.

Correction, you wait. Remember, soon I’ll been gone a long time now.

I’m heading to Mars because Earth is too sad.

You might contact big brother, Steve, but he could be hard to find since metaphysical red-tailed hawks have lured him to Mexico where death devours guitarróns beneath a chameleon sky.

Missing barely three days now Steve’s soul rises like ashes through an emerald forest & smolders beneath the onyx eyes of a spotted owl.

17

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

2.

Sadly, underpaid professors have us believing that we must construct an entirely new universe & ignore the wonderful Earth we love to swirl like Cabernet above our thin-legged crystal of consciousness.

But I believe a sense of urgency needs to overtake these academics; they should spend one day in the footsteps of my brother.

3.

Ignore the vermilion eyelashes of a yellow oak leaf, or the armadillo lust of artichokes?

Never.

Before I go, I’ll digest a few poems by Alberto Blanco & savor the taste of mangroves, copper birds & mollusks submerging their dark hips in sea water.

I’m not in a giant hurry to leave myself behind, but one day, one day surely I’ll spread my segmented stained-glass dragonfly wings and propelled by solar winds I’ll glide through vacuumed darkness all the way to that pomegranate planet.

You see, on Mars alien moonlight still oozes through the tiny round window of a dingy tavern inside my imagination where a sublime antediluvian black wine matures.

Oh, yes, Mars!

18

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Magic Bus (For Silvia Scheibli & Steve Barfield )

We rode a bus that coiled us around a cloud forest of Ecuador, clouds draped like ponchos blancos over the mango shoulders of the Andes.

We rode a bus that survived Cotopaxi then sniffed the little mountain road like a bloodhound trailing a convict in leg irons stumbling through Amazonas, a bus that’s wrestled this mountainside a thousand times & seen it all, bus with a toucan sensibility, bus that knows the house number of Jose Marzumillaga, bus with the broad fingertips of Guayasamín, bus that carries the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana Benjamín Carrión from one glowing galaxy to another.

19

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Essay|Hanif Kureishi Travelling to Find Out

O

ne night, I went on a boat trip down the Bosporus with about a dozen models, fashionistas, several transvestites, someone who appeared to be wearing a beekeeper’s outfit as a form of daily wear, the editor of Dazed and Confused Jefferson Hack, and Franca Sozzani, the editor of Italian Vogue. We were in the European capital of culture, but it was like a fabulous night at the London club Kinky Gerlinky transferred to Istanbul and financed by the Turkish Ministry of Culture. At one end of the boat, in his wheelchair, was Gore Vidal. At the other end was V.S. Naipaul. It must have been June 2010 because I remember catching Frank Lampard’s ‘ghost goal’ against Germany on a TV in the hotel lobby just before we dashed out.

As the high-tech drum and bass beat on, and the Ottoman palaces drifted by, we godless, depraved materialists and hooligans became more drunk, stoned and unruly. Vidia, with his entourage, kept to his end of this ship of fools, and Vidal to his. We had been instructed to keep the two aged warriors apart, and I don’t believe they exchanged a single word during the four days we were in Turkey. Vidal was accompanied by two ‘nephews’, strong young men in singlets and shorts who took him everywhere. He was unhappy, usually violently drunk, occasionally witty, but mostly looking for fights and saying vile things. Vidia, in love and cheerful at last, accompanied by the magnificent Nadira, remained curious, ever observant and tight-lipped.

Earlier, despite his supposed animus against female writers, he had been keen to talk about Agatha Christie and how fortunate she had been never to run out of material. In contrast, from a ‘small place’, he himself had had to go on the road at the end of the 1970s, to explore the ‘Islamic awakening’, as he put it. He had been ‘travelling to find out’.

I had packed Naipaul’s Among the Believers, as a kind of guide, when I first went to Pakistan in the early 1980s to stay with one of my uncles in Karachi. I wanted to see my large family and get a glimpse of the hopeful country to which my uncle Omar – a journalist and cricket commentator – had gone. Like my father and most of his nine brothers, Omar had been born in India; he had been educated in the US with his schoolfriend Zulfikar Bhutto, finally turning up in Pakistan – ‘that geographical oddity’ – in the early 1950s. In his memoir, Home to Pakistan, he wrote: ‘There was in the early Pakistan something of the Pilgrim Fathers who had arrived in America on the Mayflower.’

At night, alone at the back of the house, I had insomnia, and felt something of a stranger myself. In an attempt to place myself, I began to work on what became My Beautiful Laundrette, writing it out on 20

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

any odd piece of paper I could find. In Britain we were worried about Margaret Thatcher and her deconstruction of the welfare state of which I had been a beneficiary. I wanted to do some kind of satire on her ideas, but in Karachi they barely thought about Thatcher at all, except, to my dismay, as someone who stood for ‘freedom’. My uncles and their circle were more concerned with the increasing Islamisation of their country. In Home To Pakistan Omar wrote: ‘There is an appearance of a government and there is the reality of where real power lies. I had serious doubts that we would become an open society and that democracy would take root.’ Zulfikar Bhutto had been hanged in 1979 and his daughter Benazir was under house arrest just up the street, at 70 Clifton Road, a property with a huge wall around it, and policemen on every corner. One thing was for sure: my family, like Jinnah, had envisaged Pakistan as a democratic home for Muslims, a refuge for those who felt embattled in India, not as an Islamic state or dictatorship of the pious.

Naipaul, who in the late 1970s travelled around Malaysia, Indonesia, Iran and Pakistan, had grasped early on that this distinction no longer held up. In Among the Believers – surprisingly without preconceived ideas, and with a shrewd novelist’s eye for landscape and individuals – he interviews taxi drivers, students, minor bureaucrats and even a mullah. He writes down what they say and mostly keeps himself out of the frame. As a teenager I had been a fan of what had become known as personal journalism, of firecracker writers like Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion and James Baldwin, imaginative writers who included themselves in the story, and who often, as with Thompson, became the story itself.

Naipaul, in one of the first reports from the ideological revolution, was doing something like this. But he was more modest, a writer of loss and restlessness. From Chaguanas, Trinidad (‘small, remote, unimportant’), he now travels widely, has an extensive look around and actually listens to people – mostly men, of course. He never interviews anyone as intelligent as he is, but he is genuinely curious, a rigorous questioner and not easily impressed. He even greets one subject, in his hotel room, while wearing ‘Marks and Spencer winceyette pyjamas’, of which he is so proud he mentions them twice.

Around the same time, Michel Foucault – more leather than winceyette – visited Ruhollah Khomeini outside Paris, and went to Tehran twice. Foucault, who was fascinated by the extreme gay lifestyle he found in San Francisco, had also written for the Corriere della Sera defending the imams in the name of ‘spiritual revolution’.

This inspiring revolt or holy war of the oppressed, he believed, would be an innovative resistance, an alternative to Marxism, creating a new society out of identities shattered by domination. It was new. But as Naipaul discovered, there was very little spirituality about this power grab by the ayatollahs. Soon they were hanging homosexuals from 21

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

cranes; women had to wear the chador. Even in Pakistan women covered up before they went out, and no one in my family had been veiled before. One of my female cousins revered Khomeini – ‘the voice of God’ – as an example of purity and selfless devotion. He was everything a good man should be. But she also took me aside and begged me to help her children escape to the West. Pakistan was impossible for the young; everyone who could was sending their money out of the country, and, when possible, sending their children out after it, preferably to the hated but also loved United States or, failing that, to Canada. ‘We want to leave this country but all doors are shut for us,’ my cousin wrote to me. ‘Do not know how to get out of here.’

‘Fundamentalism offered nothing,’ Naipaul wrote. He didn’t find much to idealise. The people Naipaul is drawn to want more, but they don’t know what it is. They are aware of their relative deprivation, but gullible – just like the protagonist of Naipaul’s masterpiece, A House for Mr Biswas. Biswas becomes a journalist; he is working on a story called ‘Escape’. But he is too intelligent for his surroundings. He becomes hysterical, endlessly dwelling on his wounds and victimhood.

He is subject to a power – colonialism – that always humiliates him, and he has internalised its contempt. There is only one way out: the belief that at least your children will have better lives than you.

Biswas’s clever son, Anand, is Vidia Naipaul: the one who would escape to Oxford, work for the BBC and become a writer. Naipaul had done all that, but he had also learned that you can’t escape the past. Now travelling in places like those he came from, he found a proliferation of anxious, wounded men like his father.

But this time round, their sons wouldn’t fester. They would turn to a new machismo, a politicised Islam, ‘because all else had failed.’

Late in Among the Believers, Naipaul runs into my cousin Nusrat Nasarullah, then a journalist for the Morning Star. Nusrat, with his ‘fruity voice and walrus moustache’, tells him: ‘We have to create an Islamic society. We cannot develop in the Western way. Development will come to us only with an Islamic society. It is what they tell us.’

Around the time of the Iranian revolution Bob Dylan released ‘You Gotta Serve Somebody’, which elaborates the impossibility of not being devoted to someone or something. Seeking a space outside of the colonisers’ ideology, Naipaul’s subjects in Among the Believers could only repeat – only this time more harshly – what had already been done to them. What began as an indigenous form of resistance, cheered on by a few Parisian intellectuals, soon became a new, selfimposed slavery, a self-subjection with an added masochistic element – one manifestation of which became Osama bin Laden’s devotion to death. Hence the helplessness and disillusionment that Naipaul found.

If the coloniser had always believed the subaltern to be incapable of independent thought or democracy, the new Muslims confirmed it 22

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

with their submission. They had willingly brought a new tyrant into being, and He was terrible, worse than before. One of the oddest things about my first stay in Karachi was endlessly hearing people tell me how they wished the British would return and run things again.

There were many shortages in Pakistan, but that of good ideas was the worst.

A few months after the Bosporus boat trip, Naipaul was invited to Turkey again, to address the European Writers’ Parliament, an idea of José Saramago’s. This time there was an uproar: Naipaul was said to have insulted Islam after saying in an interview that ‘to be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history.’ Naipaul never returned to Turkey – where now, as we know, there are more than three hundred journalists and writers in jail. Legitimate anger turned bad; the desire for obedience and strong men; a terror of others; the promise of power, independence and sovereignty; the persecution of minorities and women; the return to an imagined purity. Who would have thought this idea would have spread so far, and continue to spread?

(Published earlier in London Review of Books Blog and in What Happened: Stories and Essays, Faber&Faber: London, 2019, and reproduced here with the author’s permission) 23

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Short Fiction|Martin Bradley Rubicon ‘Kabir stop.’

‘Stop Kabir - hey I’m getting all wet.’

‘Grrrrr, Kabir. ‘ ‘Bibik - Kabir is wetting me again’.

‘Bibik - Kamil pushed me.’

‘No Bibik, it was Kabir.’

‘He started it.’

‘He pushed me first’ ‘Children, children, play nicely eh!’ Saree (the maid, aka Bibik) eventually says.

The children’s father, slim, tall, Omar is momentarily distracted.

He unconsciously plays with his ceramic watch strap as he, and wife Faridah, rest under a spreading bamboo bush, while the children play in the river. In the distance, clouds are turning a darker grey.

Omar continues to draw in the soothing smoke from his pastel coloured Sobranie Cocktail cigarette, observing a large butterfly, buffeted by a gentle breeze coming off the Kampar River.

The Batik Lacewing manoeuvres from flower to flower. Its ephemeral form flicks and corrects itself, flicks and corrects itself, repeatedly tacking, like some tiny, transient yacht, sailing in and out of the breeze. Finally, finding port on an equally delicate, purple and white passionflower, the butterfly allows itself to settle. There is a slight bounce to the flower as the butterfly alights on its tendrils. The bounce is barely perceptible to the naked, human, eye. The settled butterfly takes its succour.

Omar watches, smiles at the butterfly’s persistence, and is secretly pleased to see the creature’s gentle dance. Had he been but a few feet closer, Omar would have caught the equally delicate scent emanating from the disturbed passionflower. As it was, the flower’s perfume dissipated, un-smelled, into the languid heat of the rural day.

‘Ha, ha, ha - look at you silly boy’ ‘No, you’re the silly boy’ ‘Take that’ ‘No, you take that’ In the cool water of the Kampar river, Omar and Faridah’s two boys take a rare opportunity to enjoy the freedom of natural play. Kabir, their youngest boy, scoops water as it tumbles over a large, slippery, rounded rock. He intentionally deluges his elder brother Kamil. Pofaced Kamil is not amused. Already Kamil’s hair-gel is failing; this watery onslaught proves the final straw. His hair flops under the strain and, annoyed, he splashes viciously back at Kabir. Kamil’s brief, violent 24

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

anger is clearly demonstrated on his face.

‘Bung, bung, not so rough eh!’

Saree, the Indonesian maid, calls out to the older brother. She darts a quick look at the boy’s parents. The boy in the river nods. He has already forgiven his younger brother. The two fall to play-fighting, splashing and falling over each other in the tumbling water.

Faridah - the boy’s mother, Omar’s wife, distracted, unconcerned with the children’s horseplay, lies on her green mengkuang mat, laid over indigenous, course, elephant grass. She has entered a world of her own. She busies herself sending WhatsApp messages to friends back in Damansara Heights. She shuts out as much countryside as she is able, her mind positioned somewhere in cyber-haven, between luxuriant malls and ubiquitous girlfriends.

She reaches up, with a carefully manicured hand, adjusts her white silk Yves St Lauren scarf, nestles her iPhone to her ear. She is no longer content with just messaging her friends, but compelled to hear them narrate their city gossip, first hand. The phone’s signal wavers.

Momentarily she frowns, notices small, scuff-marks on her cream, Givenchy, shoes, barely perceptible by anyone but herself. She shudders at the whole irritating idea of the countryside. ‘It’s a nice enough concept’, she thinks, ‘totally impractical though, should be concreted, really.’

Omar reaches to touch his wife’s hand. Faridah, busy reconnecting with life in the city, shuffles her toned and well-cared-for body, moves the iPhone from one hand to the other, quickly, absentmindedly, taps the palm of her husband’s outstretched hand, twice. A disappointed Omar retracts his hand, looks at the children playing energetically in the river, smiles at their connectedness, eases himself off the mat and brushes down his trousers with his hands.

Once away from his wife, Omar saunters along a narrow path by the entertaining river’s side. He enjoys the peaceful, tranquil, atmosphere, drinks in the riverside’s ambience, the insect sounds ringing through the day’s heat. Omar observes stark shadows created by that persistent sun, curious patterns made from Breadfruit leaves.

He feels the warm kiss of heat on his exposed hands, and on his face. Her ambles, now in light, now in shade. That mischievous sun playing hide-and-go-seek among the tree’s abundant leaves, shadows sweeping across his face, light causing him to blink.

As he walks, Omar notices aubergine plants, spiky lemongrass leaves and lanky torch ginger stems giving birth to spikes of pink, spearlike, flower buds. They are all struggling to hold onto the quickly fading reminiscences of their domesticity. ‘Soon it would all be gone.’ He considers. ‘Soon nature will have reclaimed the soil from generations of the nation’s diligent workers.’ Omar looks on with a mixture of sadness and awe, glad to witness the sedate majesty of nature in harmony, free from the hand of man, yet harbours nostalgia 25

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

for man’s passing too. Omar notices the large, green, banana fronds, slightly swaying to a casual breeze, interrupting the potency of the tropical heat and, far in the distance, over the river’s murmur Omar can hear the occasional crack as a hefty, ripe, durian fruit crashes through the branches, falling to the fecund earth, its thick rind preventing the fruit from splitting, its sharp thorns protecting it from animal predators.

Along the path, and to one side, Omar observes the remains of many houses left to crumble. Older family members have long since departed. The younger have moved on, indifferent, city bound, breaking free from the eons of their claustrophobic hinterland. In due course, these very same children become crushed by city-life’s compromises. Their lives narrow and, in sadness, they realise that they are forever divorced from the very lands which give them the identity they can never recapture, elsewhere.

As he walks, further along the riverside path, Omar notices a cairn of rounded stones, worn smooth by countless years of water erosion.

They have been brushed, caressed by indolent waters. The stone cairn is midway between the riverbank and the water’s edge. The stones are thoughtfully placed. The composition a hymn to Zen, a confluence of man and nature. A stone poem. Omar closes his eyes tightly, and lets the dappled sunlight play upon his eyelids. He is unable to imagine the riverside without this lyrical structure. The cairn seems to reach out, carrying its monolithic melody to all who would hear it.

In the distance, but still within earshot, Omar can hear his wife on the phone. He can hear his children’s laughter overlapped with intermittent birdsong, the sounds of insects buzzing, chirping their way in the equatorial day’s heat.

‘Is it, really?’

‘Oh Nur don’t say that’ ‘That’s obscene, oh! She’s obscene, dear, you’re obscene.....tell me more’ ‘He did WHAT, he didn’t, did he’ A play-incredulousness inserts itself into Faridah and her friend’s conversation as, giggling; each enjoys the salacious nature of their phone tête-à-tête.

‘Well, he’s a white man - we know what they get up to, but her she should know better’ ‘Later, I’ll be back later, no, here in Perak, yes, I know, but, well, you know’ The conversations, one after another, continue are endless, meaningless, empty words, phrases barely meant, teasing, playing, drifting off onto the river, being carried like dead leaves along with the river’s currents, under the bridge, away, downstream.

‘Don’t say that, I’m sure that he is a perfectly nice man, even though he is married, what! Three wives, ok, yes I take that back, 26

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

don’t go anywhere near him.’

‘But, yes, dahling they all say that at first, then down the line, well you know, you’ve been there before.’

Faridah dials number after number, her well-manicured hands tapping her iPhone, leaving the tiniest traces of her Clarins (Super Restorative) hand cream on the glass.

‘Alhamdulillah,’ Faridah reflects, ‘Inshallah (God willing), the day will eventually come to a close, we will pack and leave, be gone from this festering, insect ridden place, go back to city and to the gossip, I mustn’t forget the gossip.’ she sighs a big, heartfelt, sigh and thinks...

‘Omar wanted to bring the children here. Let them have some fun, he said. Let them loose, let them run wild for a while, it’ll do them good. Bibik here will look after them, and you can just lay back and soak up the atmosphere.’

Faridah wants to laugh when she remembers this, but it seemed to mean a lot to Omar, so she agreed, packed the SUV and, after two hours driving, there they were in the countryside, beside this quaintly rustic, insect infested river.

Deadly boredom had set in after the first few minutes. Faridah had a terrible job trying not to let it show to her husband. Inwardly, she was screaming. Outwardly, she gave the briefest of smiles, tried to look interested in the surroundings.

‘It was a river, full stop. That... is... what... it... was... a river, and then………' She left the sentence hanging in her thoughts.

First, it was that ridiculous fly. It seemed to have nowhere else on earth to be - except in Faridah’s ear. The incessant buzzing had driven her mad. No sooner had she disposed of the fly, next on the list is the demented dragonfly. The creature was discomforting to say the least.

It had jittered forwards, backwards and shivered its raspy, wings. It was most unnerving. Luckily, Faridah managed to catch the creature a sharp blow with her Cosmopolitan magazine, but now it has left a nasty smear on Aishwarya Rai’s nose.

From young Faridah knew that she was made to endlessly glide through life. She was made to do very little, except, perhaps - shopping, walking and gossiping. And then some more shopping and perhaps sitting - looking as elegantly as she could - using her husband’s money to achieve this state of elegance with manicures, pedicures, styled haircuts, designer-cut clothes and the occasional offthe-peg accessory, or three.

The ebb and flow of WhatsApp messages had initially began to ease the tension of languishing in the countryside, but it had soon became evident that WhatsApp messages were never going to be the ultimate cure for all that frenzied rusticity.

Faridah doesn’t meant to be rude to Omar. She needs an immediate cure for all this countryside irritation. A good old dose of city gossip is what the doctor would have ordered. It is unfortunate 27

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

that Omar choses that exact moment to give her a tender touch. The countryside is just too real - too messy – too in her face. What Faridah needs is city bred fantasy.

‘Jun’ ‘It was Jun, you remember Jun’ ‘She married that Chinese guy – he had to convert, you must remember the row they had’ ‘No, lah, of course not, it was just a show’ ‘So, anyway, it was Jun that told me about Siti’ ‘Oh, you heard, ok, well – hold on,’ ‘Bik, Bibik, not so boisterous eh’, Faridah calls across to the maid who has now joined in the water-play along with the children and is not much older than the children – in her mind.

‘Alhamdulillah, maids! I must have a word with Omar, perhaps on the road home. I can’t do this rustic thing anymore’, she says to herself.

Omar is now far enough upstream to see, but not to hear, his wife, the maid and the children in the distance. Amongst the coarse lalang grass, Omar finds an old tree stump. He sits, partially looking, partially dreaming about wooden remains of the houses he had found there.

There were remains of old kampung houses, maybe they belonged to the traditional huge wooden Malay ‘Kutai’ houses (from the 1800s) or, because of the placing of the pillars, the ‘Rumah Limas’, or the Rumah Limas Bungkus as they are known in Terengganu, on the East Coast, with styled pyramidal roofs, originally built not for the field workers, but for the middle classes.

From his training as an architect, Omar recalls that Indonesian nobility had settled in Perak after many tribal clashes in Indonesia, somewhere in the 1500s. They had brought with them, to what was then Malaya, names like Kampar and Bali, which are the local Kinta Valley towns. They had also brought the "Kutai" house types, the traditional Malay Rumah Limas, or the more fanciful, older styles. He would have to see whether the foundations were wooden, or concrete, and if the lapik tiang (base of the post) could determine this. But that would have to wait for an excavation, and he was not sure when that could happen.

It is so very different from Kuala Lumpur, being here, by the river. It is as if life itself has slowed, mellowed to the pace of the countryside. An idea is taking hold in Omar’s mind: a fantasy about buying some of this land, by this river, building a small, ok large, house to accommodate his wife, family, maid and maybe family and friends who might want to visit to fish, or just lap up the atmosphere.

He smiles an uncustomary large smile as he considerers this. It is not impossible, and it would be great for weekends and, maybe, just maybe, they might decide to stay permanently. ‘The kids obviously love it here’ Omar thinks, “so does Saree, and Faridah would come 28

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

round, eventually.’ Omar was sure she would. ‘Perhaps I might say something, on the journey back.’

He treads carefully back to the family’s picnic site. Over lunch, which Saree has prepared under directions from Faridah, husband and wife, children and maid relax ‘Darling did you book that nice hotel in Siem Reap’ mentions Faridah.

‘Actually, I booked a wonderful chalet type place at Channa's Angkor Homestay, will just fit us all. We’ll be able to see the rice paddies in front, the beginning of mountain behind. It’s going to be glorious.’

‘Rice paddies. And will there be insects.’ Mentions Faridah. ‘I mean, more insects. Oh, Omar darling, more countryside.’ She sighs.

‘I thought we were going to be in a five star, waited on hand and foot.

Sumptuous meals, Amok curry that sort of thing.’

Omar is crestfallen. He thinks, ‘But where’s the romance it that.’

But declines to argue.

When the last piece of creamy potato salad has been scooped into the remaining drying baguette, and when the grilled fish is reduced to its moist bones, and all that is left of the lamb biryani is a few morsels of ghee rice, Omar stretches his legs. He lights a calming cigarette, and stands watching the children, once more entering the cool water.

The river-born breeze has chilled, and Omar gives a slight shiver.

It is a reminder that they need to consider packing, and get back onto the highway, before the rain comes. Omar lets the children play for a few more minutes, and then calls time. The children moan and groan, but comply.

Faridah puts away the hand phone she was about to use, and stares for a moment too long at the bag in which she has placed the phone. She turns and helps Saree collect the rubbish, and then stores the plastic airtight boxes, shakes and brushes off crumbs from the mat, which she folds ready for Omar to arrange in the back of the Nissan.

A lacewing butterfly tacks in the breeze and starts to seek shelter as the first few drops of rain begin falling.

The smooth engine starts with barely a whisper and, turning the windscreen wipers on, Omar navigates through the makeshift car park and out onto the rough road, over the ageing, wooden bridge, through the small rustic kampong and onto the main road, turning right to the North/South Highway.

Aside from the continual chattering of the two boys, now winding down as tiredness sets in; all are relatively quiet inside the car.

Saree turns to look at the two boys, just to make sure they are comfortable and, having performed her duty, sits gazing out of the car window. She dreams private dreams, dreams of the country she had left behind, dreams of her own, precious, family, dreams of her mother and the child back home. She muses upon her family’s imagined 29

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

excitement on receiving their first colour television, bought with money Saree has saved to send home, back to Indonesia.

The car glides onto the highway, joining a million other such cars, heading south towards Kuala Lumpur city. The car’s occupants are enmeshed each in their own thoughts. Omar has left the countryside he holds so dear. Faridah is fidgety. She is eager to be gossiping with her friends again, bored with using her iPhone and glad that each kilometre brings her closer to her beloved city. The two boys, Kabir and Kamil, have drifted off to sleep, finally worn out from their play, memories slipping into dream.

Omar and Faridah, simultaneously, break the silence.

‘I was wondering……..’ they each said.

Saree gazes out of the car window, not really seeing anything as her eyes are slightly glazed. She is considering buying an air ticket, home.

30

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Visual Art|Jimmy Mathew

The Only Witness Acrylic on canvas 42 x 30 inches 31

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Visual Art|Jimmy Mathew

Bamboo-spiritial 'E'scape Acrylic on canvas 36 x 50 inches 32

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Visual Art|Jimmy Mathew

Frangipani Acrylic on canvas 30 x 28 inches 33

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Visual Art|Jimmy Mathew

Floating minds Acrylic on canvas 36 x 28 inches 34

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Visual Art|Jimmy Mathew

Blossom Acrylic on canvas 30 x 42 inches 35

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Visual Art|Jimmy Mathew

Retrospective of an artist Acrylic on canvas 3 x 2.5 feet 36

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Visual Art|Jimmy Mathew

37

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Visual Art|Jimmy Mathew

38

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Poetry|Jim Brosnan As Shadows Lengthen Tonight I follow I-80 west, speed past endless acres of cornfields my hands tightly grasping the leather stitched wheel in the silence of my thoughts which reside in the vast space between clouds where shreds of story stubbornly remain— details revealed in lengthy letters mailed years ago, but not easily erased from my daydreams as I meditate in the solitude of Wyoming dusk.

Driving Long Distance Time stretches out to witness a pink-skied day’s end as it settles behind an endless string of power lines and stark skeletons of hardwoods.

A crescent moon hypnotizes me before my headlights cast a glow on a doe, her eyes glistening like cat’s eye marbles, her sleek body motionless on the shoulder 39

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

of the interstate, twenty-two miles before Iowa gives way to Nebraska and its sheared cornfields already prepared for an early winter snowfall.

What I Remember On these sleepless nights a west wind stirs Kansas fields of swaying wheat hours before dawn hours before an army of John Deere combines begin the harvest in clouds of dust hours when I no longer remember the swell of tide, the ocean’s roar, the scent of salt air, the rust-colored sunset we witnessed years before, now stored in the hidden avenues of my memory, even though your whispers never disappear in waist-high prairie grass.

40

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Short Fiction|Murali Kamma River of Silence

L

eaning forward from the edge of the terrace, with her heels raised and right arm outstretched, she saw them first—and knew, even before they stopped and looked up, that they weren’t passing by. They were coming to the house. One was a man—sturdy and dark, with thick hair that was fully white—and he had a pained expression, as if he were watching the beginning of a disastrous stunt. But the boy next to him was grinning. Taller than the man, with curly black hair and a slender body, he was wearing tight pants and a sky blue T-shirt with writing on it. Meena couldn’t read the words, but she could see the dark pools of his eyes as he gazed up at her. He crossed the road, without looking away, and the man followed him.

It wasn’t a big house despite the two stories, and the boy didn’t seem to think she was in danger. The man, though, was alarmed. Yes, there was a gap in the wall, but did he really think she wouldn’t be careful, that she would slip and plummet to the ground? If she came across as an acrobat or a diva, poised for a spectacular climax, he was like an agitated fan. Vigorously waving his arms, he shouted warnings, prompting Meena to step back and return to her chair. It was only a few yards away, in a safe corner, over which the drooping, full-leaved branches of a jackfruit tree formed an agreeable canopy. It was her favorite spot. She picked up her book, just as the man and the boy, who wasn’t much older than her, walked up to the front door.

Later, when Meena thought about her stay in the village, she realized how uneventful it would have been if these two visitors hadn’t shown up that day. Bored by the place, after the novelty quickly wore off, she was spending a lot of time reading, desperately waiting to leave.

The doorbell rang, and she heard voices. Opening her book, she settled back in the wicker chair. Meena decided to give her dad and great-aunt a chance to speak with the guests, but at some point she’d have to go down and meet them. Over dinner the previous evening, her dad had mentioned that his childhood friend would be coming to see him.

That’s when her great-aunt, while serving them prawn curry, had said, “He’s come a long way. He’s made something of himself, overcoming disadvantages. Remember how poor his family was back then? They used to live in a hut. He had to work from an early age. I still have that picture…of you, him and the other boy you played with.”

“Yes, I saw it, along with the other pictures on the wall,” Meena’s dad said.

“Those two boys belonged to the same community and the families 41

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

were struggling, but their lives took such different turns. I don’t know if you told Meena—” “Isn’t his son also coming?” he asked. Meena sensed the impatience in her dad’s voice—he was more interested in the present than the past.

“I believe so,” her great-aunt said. “His name is Gopi. A nice boy, though I don’t know him well. He is maybe a couple of years older than Meena. Things are different here now. People mingle more easily…there’s more confidence, less distance. It’s not like the old days.”

“Yes, but how deep is the change, really?” Meena’s dad said. She saw a flash of irritation in his eyes and he spoke a little forcefully.

But her great-aunt was not deterred. Unlike back then, she noted with pride, Gopi’s father now sat in her living room and ate at her table. There wasn’t a separate plate or glass for him, as the local custom had dictated in the old days. He was like any other guest, she claimed. So what if he’d had a menial job in the household as a youngster? That was history. There was wonder in her voice, as she reflected on the changes she’d seen in her village over a long life—but there was also, Meena couldn’t help thinking, more than a touch of defensiveness.

MMSomebody knocked loudly on the front door. Rising, Meena’s greataunt said the man who was going to bring fresh fish the next morning had come to collect money. When she returned to the table, dinner was almost over and the conservation drifted to other matters. * Meena resumed reading, though she kept thinking about the guests, especially the boy, who’d continued to look up, still smiling, even when he couldn’t see her. Thankfully, her stay in the ancestral village was coming to an end. She was eager to get on the plane.

Honestly, she couldn’t understand how her urbane dad—who was so city-centric back home that her mom had to use her considerable persuasive powers to make him move to the suburbs—felt at home in this rustic environment. Sure, it was picturesque, surrounded as they were by lush green paddy fields dotted with coconut and palm trees— while in the hazy distance, she could catch the glimmer of the brackish sea. But the sandy stretch that passed for a beach wasn’t inviting.

Although she’d enjoyed looking at the endless sheet of shimmering blue water when she went there, what really stood out for her was the overpowering smell of fish. Several fisherwomen had laid them out to dry that morning. As for the fishermen, Meena could see some of them in their bobbing boats, where they were attending to their nets in preparation for the next expedition.

Sometimes, looking around, Meena felt she was on a tropical film 42

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

set. Her dad was playing an unfamiliar role, a role that had more to do with his childhood. And what about her? Was she also playing a role, learning her lines and deciphering the story as she went along?

There was also a river here, she’d heard, not far from the house.

It wasn’t visible from where she was sitting, but she could see the hill that blocked it from view. When she asked her dad, he downplayed its importance and said it wasn’t worth going there. It was a tributary actually, he added, though it’s true that back when he was a child, it had felt like a river because of the volume of water. Now it was a sluggish, muddy stream.

“What are you reading?”

A startled Meena, raising her head, saw the boy standing fairly close to her. A breeze from the sea played with his curly hair, strands of which touched his eyebrows. He seemed like another actor in the film unspooling in her mind—and though his role remained unclear to her, he had no trouble with his lines. He exuded confidence and charm.

For a moment, as she wondered how he’d appeared on the terrace so quietly, they heard the tinkling of bells. A cowherd was passing by, taking the cattle home after a grazing session near the hill.

The boy had spoken in the local language—which Meena knew, though not fluently.

“I’m reading a storybook,” she said. It sounded unserious, but she didn’t know the right word. So she added, in English, “It’s a novel.”

“Okay.” He smiled. Then, switching to the local language, he said, “Do you read a lot of books in America? Your great-aunt says that you love to read.”

Closing her book, Meena rose from her chair. “I don’t know if it’s a lot. There’s not much to do here—so I read. Are you a student?”

“No, I’m not. I work.”

She felt her face flush. Changing the subject, Meena said that she liked the quote (she used the English word) on his T-shirt. “Don’t Count the Days,” it read.

“It’s not complete,” he said. “Can you guess what it says on the back?” “‘Make the Days Count’? I expected the entire quote to be on the front, but I think this way is better. Wasn’t it Muhammad Ali who said it?”

“Yes, you’re right! I call this my American or Ali T-shirt.”

Saying that she should get her own Ali T-shirt, Meena asked if she was wanted downstairs. No, Gopi said, adding that his father and her dad were having a good chat, not having seen each other in a while.

He’d come up to meet her. Unlike his father, who’d been worried that she might fall, he knew she wasn’t in danger and was reaching for a guava.

“Are there guavas in America?” he asked. “Do you like them a lot?”

Meena was, again, struck by his boldness. He wasn’t like the other 43

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

boys she’d seen here, boys who shrank from her—but were, at the same time, fascinated as they observed her from a distance, only to turn away quickly when she glanced at them. This happened whenever she went out, either with her dad or great-aunt, to shop, meet people they knew, or do some sightseeing in the area. But there wasn’t much to do in this rural backwater, pretty though it was, and she mostly stayed home, making the terrace her retreat. It was winter, thank goodness, allowing her to enjoy the balmy weather and the cool breeze that rustled the leaves above her. Summer here would be oppressive, unbearable.

Her dad, she was sure, would be at ease here even in the summer.

Far from being bored, he was having a good time and seemed, at least to her, like a local—although he’d lived in the village only for a few months as a child when his parents were doing research on a remote island. When they returned, he joined them in the city, where he mostly grew up and studied before moving abroad as a young man for an advanced degree.

Once, after checking with her dad, who was tied up with some paperwork, Meena walked alone to the colorful bazaar. She got the same curious glances and smiles, but she didn’t speak to anybody or buy anything. When her great-aunt heard about it, her expression showed disapproval, as if she’d bitten an unripe guava—and though she didn’t say anything, it was clear she wasn’t happy about Meena taking such solitary trips.

“Yes, they grow in some places,” Meena said. “I like guavas when they’re soft.”

“Who doesn’t?” Gopi laughed. “My father mentioned how he and your father and another boy used to pluck guavas from the trees without telling anybody. Then they’d head to the hill there to eat them.

I wonder if they’re talking about the river.”

“The river? I don’t understand. Why would they be talking about the river?”

“There was an incident,” he said, his eyes widening. “I thought you’d know about it. Never mind…it happened a long time ago.”

“I didn’t hear about it,” she said. “He might have told my mother, but I have no idea. Can you tell me now?”

Gopi smiled uncertainly, as if in regret. And she saw that he was torn, eager but also afraid to say more. “I don’t know…I’m not sure about the details,” he finally said. “Maybe you should ask your father.”

“Why?” she said, her eyebrows arching. “You seem to know what happened. Why aren’t you saying anything?” Coming closer, she stared at him and added, mischievously, “Do you want to hide it from me?”

“No, of course not!” Her remark stung, she could tell. “It’s just that…well, it happened so long ago—” “Why don’t we go to the river now?”

“What?” he said, taken aback. “What for? It’s not much to look at 44

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

these days.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I won’t be here for long, and I haven’t seen it. Let’s go. It’s not far.”

When Meena later looked back on this moment, she couldn’t say why he suddenly agreed—and she couldn’t explain why she had this crazy impulse to go there without informing anybody. Urging Gopi to follow her, she went down the stairs and slipped through the side gate to the lane outside. Nobody inside the house had seen her.

She saw Gopi pause on the stairs, as if he were trying to convince himself that her decision to go to the river wasn’t reckless—before he came down and joined her. They walked quietly, their arms touching, until they reached the bend and could no longer see the house. A few people glanced at them, but the direction in which they were walking, away from the market center, was sparsely populated and they didn’t attract much attention. It didn’t take long to reach the hill, which was long and shaped like a bell curve, with thick vegetation in the middle section.

“Is everybody rich in America?” he asked, as they began climbing the lower section.

“What?” She laughed, surprised as much by the question as its timing. “Far from it. Where do you get your news from? I think there are false…how should I say it?” Struggling to translate ‘misconceptions’, she added, “I think people here have false views of life there.”

“Yes, just as people there have false views of life here.” He grinned.

“You’re so right,” she said, holding his arm for support.

They stopped when the river became visible. Meena withdrew her arm. The river was depleted and tame—but looking at the hollowed out earth, she could tell that, decades ago, the water here had flowed swiftly, forcefully. Now the level was so low that one could walk in the riverbed. Silently, it twisted away from them towards the sea.

Gopi clasped her hand—but almost immediately, as if he’d received a jolt of electricity, he released it. The movie in her head was taking an unexpected turn. She still didn’t know his role. Turning her head, she saw that his face had turned red. He was staring ahead, anxiously, but when she smiled, his face brightened. He held her hand again, a little awkwardly.

“Do you want to go down to the river?” he said. “Or should we go back?”

“There’s not much to see here, as you said. So, did my father fall into the river?”

Gopi looked stunned. “You already know, don’t you? You know what happened.”

“I guessed,” she said in English, shrugging. As before, when the word she needed in the local language eluded her, she spoke in 45

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

English. He understood her, in any case. Chuckling, she continued, “Maybe I read too many novels. But you can tell me what happened. I could be wrong, of course.”

“No, you’re not. He did fall into the river. Your father couldn’t swim—at least, back then. So my father rescued him when he fell from the canoe they were in.”

Meena stood gazing at him, without speaking, and hoped he’d continue with the story. But Gopi had nothing more to say about it.

Instead, he said, “Let’s go back. It’s going to get dark soon. They’ll be wondering about us.”

“Fine,” she said, turning around. They’d already disengaged their hands, but as Meena started walking down the slope, she stumbled.

He caught her by the arm just in time. When he gently pulled her up and towards him, she became tense. His lips were parted and he was looking down at her mouth. Was he going to kiss her? Meeting his gaze, she shivered. The nervousness she felt was reflected in his eyes.

He tightened his grip—but then froze, perhaps out of fear. He released her. She relaxed, as did he, though her relief was tinged with sadness.

Acting more businesslike now, they resumed walking and reached the bottom much faster than they’d gone up. They were intent on getting back to the house. The daylight was leaking out of the sky, leaving lengthening shadows on the ground—and the birds, silent till now, were chirping in chorus. The approaching night seemed like a slowly descending curtain. Abruptly, the screen in Meena’s head went dark, and though she couldn’t tell if the movie had come to an end, she did feel less detached from her surroundings.

The house loomed into view, and they increased their pace.

“I think that’s your father,” Meena said.

Indeed, it was, although they couldn’t see his face. Walking past the house, he was going in the other direction. Had he come towards the hill, initially, before deciding to turn around?

“He’s looking for us,” Gopi said. “But don’t worry…I’ll talk to him.”

Sprinting forward, Gopi caught up with him—and as Meena approached the house, she could see them talking rapidly. Gopi’s father seemed angry and he was gesticulating wildly, his face still turned away from her. Should she walk up to them? Then, as she watched in astonishment, he slapped Gopi—and, following the briefest of pauses, struck him again. She could scarcely believe it. Shocked, she stood still.

“Meena, go inside!”

It was her great-aunt. Standing on the terrace, with her arms crossed, she was staring grimly at Meena. Where was her dad?

Silently, as her eyes clouded over, Meena opened the side gate and walked into the house. * 46

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

In her dorm room, taking a break from an assignment for her literature class, Meena was scrolling through the emails in her inbox, when two words—“Gopi’s father”— jumped out, transfixing her. Staring at the unusual subject line, she hesitated to go any further. What did her dad have to say about him? Meena was in college now, living away from home for the first time. On their last phone call, earlier in the week, he hadn’t said anything about Gopi or his father. In fact, they hadn’t talked about them since their trip a few years ago. Taking off her headphones to shut out the music, she clicked open the email and read it slowly.

Dear Meena, We spoke just two days ago, but late last night, I got some terrible news that I wanted to share with you. Gopi’s father died unexpectedly. I don’t have all the details, though I know it was a heart attack. I managed to get a plane ticket and I’m waiting at the gate to board. I’ll call you after I get there, but I also feel compelled to share something now.

You already know that Gopi’s father saved me when our canoe capsized in the river. What you don’t know is that there was another boy who didn’t make it. Yes, he was in that picture you saw at the house. Only Gopi’s father could swim, unfortunately.

He was filled with guilt and sorrow that he couldn’t save the other boy as well. The boy got swept farther down the river, and it was too late to do anything. I often wondered why he’d chosen me, why he didn’t try to rescue the other boy first. But he didn’t want to talk about it, understandably. And I promised not to say anything about the tragedy while he was still alive. I don’t think even Gopi knows what exactly happened that awful day.

I’m writing to you now because I cannot keep this secret any longer, and I want you to think well of him. I know you were distressed when he hit Gopi. You thought he was callous and narrow-minded, even though I assured you that he wasn’t. The river—or rather, the incident of that dark day—was the reason he got so upset. Although the river is very different now, the memory of it was still so painful that he got agitated when Gopi said the two of you had gone there. He was afraid, you see. Anyway, that’s what I believe. I hope this will help you understand him better. Maybe I could’ve waited to tell you in person, but I wanted to get it off my chest.

Gopi is doing well, by the way. Perhaps you can talk to him and 47

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

offer your condolences. I’ll give you a call when I see him. He got married last year, I heard. Take care.

Love, Dad Meena got the call as she was heading for lunch in the college cafeteria. The morning’s last class had just ended, and the promise of a leisurely lunch after being cooped up in a chilly room had loosened tongues around her. But the hubbub was so loud that Meena wouldn’t have heard the phone if it hadn’t been on vibrate. Ducking back into the big room that had emptied out, she shut the door and answered the call.

“Sorry, Meena, if it’s a bad time. I’m calling because Gopi is here.

Can you talk now?”

“Yes, Dad, it’s not a problem. My class is over.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said. Then the line got staticky, and for a moment Meena thought she was going to lose the connection. But after a brief pause she heard Gopi’s voice—loud and clear, as if he were in the same room as her.

“Hello, Meena, how are you?” he said in English.

“Fine, Gopi. My deep condolences. I was very sorry to hear about your loss. Your father was a good man. I hope you and your mother are doing okay.”

“Yes…your father helping.” Then, switching to the local language, he added, “I’m glad your father could come so quickly. We’re grateful.

They were close friends. When are you going to visit us?”

“Next year, maybe. I’ll let you know. Congratulations. I heard that you got married.”

“Yes, thank you. My wife is expecting. You should stay with us next time, even if it’s for a day or two. I’ll show you around. We’re in a different town now, not far away. But it’s still small, and maybe you’ll find it boring here.” He laughed.

“No, of course not,” she said, her ears burning. “I’m older now…”

Meena wanted to elaborate, though she didn’t know what she was going to say.

It seemed like Gopi also wanted to keep talking, but there were people around him and she could hear other voices close by, sounding a little impatient. He was obviously busy. The call ended, after quick goodbyes, and she was abruptly drawn back to the icy vacant room.

The silence was disconcerting. The two friends who had been walking in fron of her hadn’t come back to look for her, and there were no text messages. Perhaps they assumed she had other plans. Whatever. She should contact them, Meena thought, looking at her phone again. How weird it felt to be sitting here alone, surrounded by empty seats, as if 48

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

she were waiting for the next class to begin, a class that would have no other students.

49

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Poetry|Hilary Hares Connection At Nijo-jo Castle we leave our shoes outside the door.

Behind paper walls is a world where ancestry grew into God; a world where tiger and leopard were understood to be each other’s yang and yin.

On every screen a season has been hung in gold.

We tread along the passages of time, absorbing the patina of the ancient floor.

Our feet are silent.

Mortality is speaking to their soles.

50

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Maiko When she’s fifteen Namika will dress in silk, paint out her face, give up her name.

She’ll spend a year learning to dance, the next engrossed in the mysteries of tea.

She’ll hide her smile behind her hand, fix her hair so that she has to sleep like a corpse.

Learning to dance, brewing a perfect cup of tea will teach her how to play the game.

The Philosopher’s Path that Kitaro walked each day beside him the canal bringing wealth to Nanzenji above cherry blossom lost in contemplation

Maiko – apprentice geisha Nishida Kitaro was one of Japan's most famous philosophers who meditated each morning as he walked this path to his job at Kyoto University 51

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Short Fiction|Naina Dey The Moral Science Teacher

T

he paper chains lay in a heap on the table. Guni the school peon stood on a stool fastening a strand of paper chain to an overhead beam with a strip of cellotape. Binni watched him with anticipation. It had taken her most of last evening making paper chains with the help of her cousin several years older than her. First they had cut strips of coloured paper into equal lengths then pasted the ends with glue to form loops. Red, yellow, white, green, orange went one loop inside the next repeating the colour sequence. The bells of gold paper and the fake red and green hollies hung at equal distance around the room.

Some boys and girls stood huddled in a group rehearsing their lines in murmurs for the programme. Today was Christmas!

Binni’s was a junior school that taught till class four. It was the only English medium school in town. Binni had never imagined such a school could exist. Her previous school was a sprawling, threestoreyed affair with a large playground and a basketball court. The new school consisted of a small concrete building that housed the headmistress’s office that doubled up as a hall for cultural events and a couple of classrooms for older students. The rest was one stretch of squares with bamboo matting for walls covered with thatch. The ground underneath was a queer sandy soil. One didn’t have to look hard to find tapering shells and glittering pieces of mica studding the sand.

On her first day Binni was confused, bewildered. Sitting in a corner she silently watched the boisterous boys and petulant girls. They spoke Hindi and Oriya. Once or twice the landlord’s youngest daughter who was in the same class with her had come up to talk. Finding Binni unwilling to communicate she had gone back to her seat resignedly.

Binni was clearly a misfit with her convent school background.

As teachers came and went with the passing of day Binni found herself getting increasingly aware of her difference from the rest of her noisy classmates. Some teachers took her presence for granted. Some others pointed out to her reserve, her beautiful handwriting as things to be emulated. Binni could discern a silent resentment in the rest of the class.

She came in to teach moral science. Her lips tinted bright pink, high- heeled, her hair reaching down her waist in a straight cascade.

Binni stood by her table, bending over her exercise book scribbling furiously as she dictated ignoring the bored hum of voices around her.

“Cleanliness is next to godliness” Binni wrote. Making up for missed lessons became a regular affair with Binni for she had joined midsession.

52

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

But it was the moral science class she looked forward to the most. There were no tests for moral science, no marks to be scored though. “By doing you get, by giving you earn”. Binni stood under the gulmohar tree watching her walk away with her husband, her cascade of hair reaching below the line where her white shirt was neatly tucked inside the green belted skirt. She turned back once and smiled at Binni. A crimson blossom floated down the air. Binni felt a sudden surge of envy. She didn’t like the husband with his handlebar moustache.

Last Thursday was somewhat different. It was no longer singlelined messages Binni was made to write.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.

The lines went round and round inside Binni’s head spiraling downward like a never-ending song till her heart ached. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou aniontest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Binni listened to her mother reciting from Gitanjali as she chopped vegetables, her father playing Begum Akhtar on his stereo.

It had to be today, thought Binni, on the day of Christmas among the golden bells, the fake hollies, the red, yellow, white, green, orange paper chains she had made herself. Today when she comes in Binni will speak with her heart in her mouth. Binni turned her face towards the open door that stood out from the dun-coloured wall like a rectangle of white light. The sun was shining brightly outside. *

53

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Poetry|Vangelis Provias Optimism When all bookstores go out of business and libraries are closed down we will still have books.

When books are burned and story telling is prohibited we will still remember sentences.

When we forget sentences and pay no attention to expressions we will still have words.

When words become void and meanings dry out we will still have feelings.

When feelings die and desires are lost a young writer will be born who will be distant from society but a part of cosmos.

There, she will anew discover desires and feelings and use them to create words.

Words that will become stories.

Stories that will be put in books.

Books that will fill again our libraries and bookstores.

54

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Short Fiction|Niles Reddick Adopted Royalty

P

olly didn’t feel like going into Wal-Mart at midnight and working until eight in the morning. Her feet were hurting from all the walking she’d done at the farmer’s market, grocery store, and mall, seemingly an every other week cycle she put herself through, and when she became bored with it, she changed it up a bit by switching stores, the order of her visits, varying the times she visited, or changing the route she took. She needed the Wal-Mart money to pay her bills, and in the middle of trying to survive, she was also working on her registered nurse’s degree at the community college.

Polly was fortunate and blessed to be the recipient of a scholarship, so she was going tuition free. Most people, in fact, had the opportunity in Tennessee to go to college tuition free. This was something the progressive mayor of Knoxville turned Governor— Haslam—had set in policy, and it had worked. Tennessee lead the way in the nation on federal financial aid application submission and even President Obama had come to Tennessee to talk about this program to the nation. Polly liked Obama, not because his own father was from Africa like she was, but because he had a way of speaking that people liked. She didn’t think he had been the best president, but then, she didn’t think any of the modern ones had been. Of course, she did believe that good and bad were determined many years after they left office, so time would tell.

Polly said “time will tell” a lot. She’d said it a lot to Maxine, a slim black and feisty female who worked at Wal-Mart and had become a friend to Polly. When Maxine talked about her own children and what they might or might not do in life, Maxine had told Polly, “I told them to take they problems to the Lord ever chance they got cause you don’t know if you got tomorrow, but when you wake up and you above ground, honey, it’s a blessing.” Polly liked Maxine even though she knew Maxine was a bit off kilter, particularly when she started talking about “the helicopters.”

Maxine apparently believed that the helicopters, not just from the regional hospital, but the state patrol office, were coming over her neighborhood and spraying people. “It’s that Agent Orange is what it is. They killed all them people in Viet Nam and now they killing us black folks.” No amount of “Now, Miss Maxine, I think those helicopters are trying to help people, working wrecks on I-40, and getting people to the hospital quickly, or going after criminals” could convince her.

Maxine would respond, “Baby, now I know you come from Africa and was raised by white folks, but it’s different here, and you got to understand. They see you as black. When you start talking, they know 55

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

you from somewhere else, but you can’t trust them. You see them helicopters coming, you get in the house. I know people thanks I’m crazy, but I done seen it.”

Polly stood in her bedroom, glanced at herself in the floor-length mirror. Her hair was slick and pulled back into a ball. She had puffy eyes. They looked as if they were water balloons, the fluid moving somewhere else when she pressed on them and then returning when she didn’t. Her Wal-Mart shirt, her name stitched in cursive that most students didn’t understand because cursive was no longer taught, was cleaned and pressed and tucked neatly into her jeans. After all, she took pride in looking the best she could, even if it was working at WalMart, a place she had come to believe was illusion turned to disillusion.

It was an illusion to her because she thought it a representation of America, a place that had everything the world could offer, that offered people good deals, was fair and honest and built from the ground up

by Sam Walton, and perhaps at one time, this was an accurate vision.

Now, however, it had become the corporate giant that cornered the market, buying in bulk, so it could sell products at lower prices.

Small businesses had evaporated, vacating downtowns like ghost towns of the West. Many of the products were imported and broke easily because they were made of plastic, and the people had been hypnotized by the bouncing yellow smiley face that talked of rolled back prices while hearing patriotic songs of an American past. In reality, prices weren’t much cheaper than competitors and because so much was bought in bulk, many of the products had outlived their shelf lives, but people continued to come flowing through the electric doors, like endless waves on a beach. They loaded buggies, unloaded them in the self-checkout sections that had grown with a need to alleviate the pressure of the number of part time employees to maximize profit, they reloaded their buggies to push them to their vehicles, unloaded the buggies again before they drove home to unload a final time. All of this exercise was not decreasing the weight in America either. Polly’s time there had created in her mind a state of disillusion, and she longed for the day she finished her RN degree and could divorce Sam Walton’s legacy altogether. She actually believed if he were alive today, he would divorce himself from it, too.

Polly’s adoptive parents, Jasper and Corrie Brown, had taught her to help others, to witness to everyone, to live simply and frugally.

When they died in a car wreck in their sixties, they literally had nothing but the clothes on their backs. The doe had bolted out in front of them, they swerved to miss hitting her, and the car flipped, and slammed into a culvert upside down. One of their friends had hypothesized that the deer was actually an angel sent to bring them home. There had been no fan-fair funeral, just a simple service with some friends attending in addition to Polly, and none of their friends had offered to help Polly or be there for her. Polly didn’t understand 56

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

that at all; in fact, she assumed they would be of more help to her. She wondered if it was because she was black, that she was from Africa, or that her parents were seen as outstanding models of Christianity, and their friends were not the models they seemed to exhibit. She didn’t know why, but she knew she was on her own at eighteen and would likely have to go to work full time once she graduated high school. Polly didn’t even have the funds to pay for the funerals, but the co-owners of the funeral home, the Knox brothers, let her pay it on time, with no interest added. Polly had opted for the least amount—no visitation, just a graveside preacher with pine boxes and small metal markers.

Even after the friends had blessed her and the minister had tried to be of comfort, Polly stood in the city cemetery with all its crypts and monuments—logs for the Woodmen of the World, white granite crosses for veterans, concrete cherubs for children—and she wept, not for her adoptive parents, but for herself. She’d become a citizen and lived in America for five years, since she was thirteen, and all that time had attended public school. She knew she should not be in the cemetery alone by herself, a place where drug deals went down on a regular basis, a place where acts of prostitution took place on marble slabs in the middle of the night for fifty dollars. In fact, Miss Ollie who’d run the largest house of ill repute in her day was buried in the cemetery, though her tombstone name read Harriet. Polly had heard that in school from boys talking about it when the teacher left the room, planning to go there in the night for some foolishness or another. She thought boys were dumb for the most part, or at least that is how they seemed to her in high school.

“Hey baby, got a smoke?”

Polly hadn’t seen the man approach, but she surmised he’d been watching the service from behind one of the crypts covered by shadows of the red maples.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Loan an old man a dollar?” He grinned, showing only a few teeth, a life somehow lost along the way.

“Don’t have a dollar, but I can talk to you about God.” “Bitch, you crazy. God ain’t done shit for me.” The homeless man sauntered off, his faded and stained khakis about four sizes too big and sagging just enough to be in style with some of the younger boys in town had he been their age.

“It’s about what you can do for God.” Polly cupped her hand and yelled after him, but the old man had kept going. She hadn’t been afraid, but realized she should move on. In the fall, the sun set even earlier, and she knew she should not be in the cemetery come dark.

Nodding goodbye to her adoptive parents, Polly had climbed in her used car, an old tan-colored Altima, she purchased in part from money she’d earned when she waited tables at the Baker’s Rack downtown 57

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

before she got on at Wal-Mart. She used the car to get to school, home, work, and church.

She’d kept thinking about being alone. Polly knew she’d come into the world alone and would leave the world alone, and she had been raised in a Christian tradition in her hometown of Askum, Ethiopia, a place that had received worldwide attention because it was purportedly the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, held in a small church and guarded twenty-four hours a day. Not even the head of the Christian church of Ethiopia had seen it—only the one who was chosen by all priests for purity was to guard and protect it until death had been inside to see it and no one had certainly looked inside it, where it was believed to hold the tablets revealing the ten commandments, Aaron’s rod, and manna from heaven. Duplicate arks had been fashioned and placed in all Christian orthodox churches, and Polly believed the ark was a symbol of power and of history (it had been in Ethiopia for many years, since Sheba’s son Menelik, by King Soloman, had it taken there after the collapse of Jerusalem). Polly’s maternal grandmother told her when she was small she was a direct descendent of Solomon and one day she would be brought to greatness because of this. She had no proof of such, of course.

Polly wanted to believe her grandmother, but that was very difficult given circumstances life brought her way. Plus, she had heard too many Americans trying to connect themselves to historically important or wealthy people just in the few years she’d been in country. It amused her to hear those stories, too, because she knew if just the limited people she’d known in high school who thought they were descended from royalty or historically important people, and she extended that view to the same percentage of students in all American high schools, then the total number would exceed what might be mathematically possible. Clearly, she believed that Americans had a deep need to cling to a belief in something greater than poverty and lower class roots, which is from what most of civilization descended.

Polly had been eight when her own mother had died of AIDS in Ethiopia, and Polly’s father had given up the coffee work at the farm and went to Kenya in search of work. He had the AIDS virus as well, and within a year, he had shriveled to skin stretched over a skeleton and died. Polly’s two siblings had stayed behind with her paternal grandparents in Ethiopia to continue work on the coffee farm, and Polly went to live with an aunt and uncle in Uganda. She had been too young to help financially in the family. Later when her aunt and uncle could not care for her, they took her to the orphanage and left her to the care of Jeremiah and Rebecca Wafumbi. Jeremiah and Rebecca had been unable to reach Polly’s grandmother, her mother’s mother, or get a message to her. They’d comforted Polly on the loss of her parents, on the rejection she felt from her own family, and it wasn’t until the Christians from America expressed interest in adopting Polly that Polly 58

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

had begun to feel wanted again.

Polly and her adoptive parents had been living in a small clapboard house next to Mt. Zion church, where Mama Corrie played the piano in exchange for rent, and where Papa Jasper helped the preacher, a friend they’d met on a mission trip some years prior. Polly had stayed on in the house for three months, until graduation, making ends meet as best she could waiting tables and had been thrilled when Wal-Mart called her for an interview. Though it hadn’t been a full time offer, the pay was better and there was no relying on tips from tight customers no matter how nice, how good the service, how much she smiled and asked them about them. The only full time employees at Wal-Mart were the management and they had benefits; the part time employees had no benefits, except what they might get through the government, but Polly was young, didn’t need anything much.

When Polly had gone by to make a payment on Mama Corrie and Papa Jasper’s services, the Knox brothers told her about a garage apartment behind Professor Bray’s near the private university in an older, but good, part of mid-town. It had occurred to Polly at the time that it was folks like the Knox brothers that made Jackson special— families who had made their lives here, who were always helping other people in small ways, when it wasn’t required.

She was excited about graduation and she wished Mama Corrie and Papa Jasper would be there to celebrate with her. Polly vowed she’d make her own pound cake to celebrate. That’s what Mama Corrie always made and her cakes had always been moist and almost melted in her mouth. She missed them. She thought about writing to the orphanage and inviting Rev. and Mrs. Wafumbi, but she knew they couldn’t leave all those children to come to her high school graduation.

She thought she might invite Maxine, but the school had planned for a helicopter to come and drop blue and gray balloons, school colors, on the graduates. Polly thought that might send Maxine over the edge.

Polly changed her focus from the mirror and folded her pajamas and placed them on the edge of her double bed. She wanted to visit Africa again, see the Wafumbis and her family. She couldn’t afford it, but she vowed she’d go when she got her nursing degree.

She opened the venetian blind in the bedroom to let a little light inside and walked into her living room, turned off the flat screen TV (a deal she’d found at Wal-Mart), and made sure her coffee pot was unplugged, a habit she’d been grilled on by Mama Corrie. She loved coffee, almost as much as she liked the coffee she occasionally bought at Starbucks. Polly locked the dead bolt to her garage apartment, got in her Altima, and headed to Wal-Mart.

59

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Poetry|William Doreski To Shame Instead of Flatter In Boston’s smoothest men’s shop you pick clothes to shame instead of flatter me. Decked in this garb, I’m that “someone else” Rimbaud met in Paris when he fumbled with himself in the dark. Imported cotton shirt, drawstring khakis, canoe-shaped alligator shoes, even a watch with a fancy dial to rebuke my clunky old Timex.

You’d prefer clothing brewed in Manhattan’s garment district, but the geometry has shifted and nothing domestic would fit me.

I don’t recognize current fabrics: this shade of brown offends me, and the baggy feel of these pants enfeebles from the waist to the floor.

These shoes want someone young to dance inside them. The watch ticks in a distant time zone.

Stepping outside in summer glare I greet the city as if newly released from prison. New shoes, new shirt, new pants, new watch, and secret new underwear tough enough to shield me from lawyers unaware that legally I’m answerable only to you and your fixed aesthetic gaze.

60

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Dead Shoes Shoes at the back of my closet: flap-soled, split-seamed, reeking of stories they’d like to tell.

The saddest are the desert boots that hiked all over Somerville, up Winter Hill, into Charlestown the summer of being so alone I tried lying on the railroad but spooked when a train hooted.

Their red composite soles stiffened decades ago, but their souls retain the taste of filthy asphalt, a breath of crankcase oil and vomit.

Not so sad are the penny loafers that strode through the hurricane on Duxbury Marsh. The tide arose and stranded us in a cottage with cheap wine, beer, potato chips, and a mutual lust for drama.

Almost cheerful are the Keds I sported for tennis on tough urban courts with sagging nets and junkies retrieving the balls for quarters and friendly words.

These sneakers have torn at the seams, but their soles remain as thick as the bunk bed we shared in a hut in the saddle between Mount Adams and Mount Jefferson one spring when a freeze burst the water tank and rime furred the rocks and froze all the tiny alpine flowers.

The hiking boots I wore that trip have disappeared into the ether, but their duplicates, still wearable, crouch in the dark, waiting for me to resume the life afoot I can never quite abandon, even with these dead shoes mocking me with their many outthrust tongues.

61

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

This is Not a Poem of the Articulate Rain Today the rain speaks in French, the French I failed to learn in high school. Also, the French I failed to learn in college. Also, the French I failed to speak in Paris. Also, the French I failed to speak in Lyons.

Also, the French I almost spoke in Marseilles. The rain knows every language. Sometimes it comes down in Russian, sometimes in Mandarin, and often in Navaho or Lakota. Frequently it pours Spanish, sometimes trickles German, occasionally drips Swahili, although with an obnoxious British accent. I don’t speak, understand, write, or lip-synch any of those languages. And I don’t speak, read, or write any language well enough to compete with celestial incantations. The rain speaks in French because French pleases the sky this morning.

Tomorrow maybe a clear day will produce, in place of speech, a highpitched buzzing the neophyte might mistake for a cicada. Or maybe a dry but cloudy day will trill like a harp, uttering a few sharp phrases to rumple the dust.

62

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Short Fiction|Polina Simakova The Gathering 1 These days, people like you always ask me why Wazenski tried to kill himself. As if I’m the one who caused it, you know. Or as if I know better than he does. Sam and Miles, the other two – it’s like they don’t exist, no one ever talks to them. You’d think it’d make more sense to ask him, but no – it’s gotta be me for some reason. Maybe that’s ‘cause we ain’t put out a new album yet, and there’s not much else to talk about. We tour a lot now – started in ’16 and we’re still going, don’t know where he gets the energy – Australia’s next. I guess he needs to be on the move not to think about it too much.

Variety and The Source asked me why it happened. Entertainment Weekly focused on how. I wonder what kind of spin you’ll put on it – you work for Sound and Vision, don’t you? But you’re after our dirty laundry too. Just like his psychotic fans, you are. Won’t even bother to say it’s shallow. The guy just wants people to leave him alone. He’s not depressed. I don’t know what to call it. He’s just kind of freaked out all the time. I guess that’s where I come in.

It all works on a subconscious level people prefer not to visit.

The easiest thing in the world for him would have been to stay away from me. But instead he took me into his band and brought things to their current state. I never understood that masochistic urge he had.

He thinks it helps him work – and I see his point, we get all those Grammy’s, though whether it’s worth it for him is a good question. But sometimes he loses it a little – especially during tours when we’re all jammed up – and that’s exactly what happened in that hotel room.

Usually Sam watches his mood. This time he was out with some bitch.

I know it’s my fault. Funny, that, coz’ I don’t feel it anymore.

But to answer your question – yes, I’m the reason he did it. My jealousy scares him. It was a desperate lunge of sorts, but I also think Wazenski didn’t really want it to work – he just wanted to hurt himself to get his mind off it. I guess that means we’ve learnt to coexist with it. It’s the fifth man in the room when we practice, the shadow that follows us around. I know now the Christian crap is a lie – it doesn’t hurt to be jealous at all. Hurts others though, sure does. Sometimes it’s all over his body, like some kind of plague – I can literally see it.

It hurts him like Job’s leprosy. In those times he thinks of kicking me out – there’s some would love him to. But so far he hasn’t, and it’s been ten years. We’ve developed a dark sort of understanding, like symbiosis. I guess he knows I’m not the only one in the world who envies him –not by a long shot. He’d rather have me around to remind 63

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

him that’s what all of us jealous fuckers are like. I’m like a shot that helps him deal with the disease.

When I met Wazenski in ’08, he was a legend. I was forty-one and still relying on Facebook and flyers to fill my shows. He was thirty-seven. I don’t know what prompted me to do it – an awful fucking idea, it was. I guess I just wanted to feel like a legend for a second. The irony is he never feels like I thought he felt – I was kind of grabbing at thin air there. People wonder why he’s so down all the time, when things seem to be going so well. I’m guessing you don’t have the guts to ask him about it in the face, that’s why – but I forget, he doesn’t talk to the press anymore. That’s why you’re onto me.

There’s the dust, see. Everyone just thinks he’s developing OCD – no one ever sees it, ‘cept us. It’s not a shared drug-induced hallucination or anything like that, before you ask – Wazenski’s got issues, but he’s clean. He’s always been clean.

I just hexed him in a way.

2 It was April – wet and sleek in London, and filled with a special kind of gravity that accompanies the last, labored breath of winter.

People were tricking towards the London Borderline Arena in Hammersmith through the large black doors. The venue was by no means full – but it was good enough for the Black Beans, the littleknown local band performing that night. The show could have run as usual, with the modest success they were used to (the clue was in the name of their venue). Alex Cornfield, the front man, hadn’t been certain he’d have the guts to do it until the last minute, when he realized no one else was going to turn up. In his twenty years of performing, he’d never mastered the skill of whipping up the people, but there was always room for improvement. He decided it was worth the try. The time was nearing half past ten.

The Beans launched themselves into the song Alex had shown them a day ago. He’d found it on the web, among the supposedly leaked songs to be released this year – he was a bit of a geek. The song had a crazy guitar solo he’d skipped. Alex felt uneasy performing it – it felt like he was intruding on something intimate, like a bedtime ritual – but it seemed to stir shit up, even without the solo. The club came to life. Later, when his band mates blamed him for his betrayal and for the incident, he was reluctant to admit it. But he’d done it for a very particular reason he’d never admit to anyone, except himself. He was jealous. He was seeking a vicarious experience of stardom, if only to see if it was that different from his own. Twenty minutes into the gig, when the Beans were well into their repertoire, Alex told himself it had gone well, all in all. And then everything changed.

Alex had sort of smelt Wazenski’s presence before he came into 64

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

sight. He was recognizable, with his trademark hair and slim, angular physique. The other two well-known members of the Ravenous, Wazenski’s band, were flanking him when he stormed in. But he was so far ahead they couldn’t reach when they tried to grab him. The rest of the club saw Wazenski a moment later, when he swiftly stepped over the metallic fence which separated the stage from the fan zone, and pulled himself up next to Alex. It looked like one long, intense push-up. Alex was terrified into stupor before he even did anything.

There was something abnormal about Wazenski, as if he was one of those musicians who had a deal with the devil – like Mozart and Paganini.

‘Who the fuck do you think you are?!’ Wazenski yelled. The mike Alex was holding caught some of his words, and the crowd erupted into screaming to celebrate his arrival. He ripped it out of Alex’s hand so harshly Alex lost his footing. ‘This shit’s mine! I’ll fucking do you!’

A part of Alex had expected the leaked song to be a fake – shit like that just didn’t happen, not to unassuming people like him. It all should have ended with a bit of fun. His body had nearly gone into stupor, but something told him he had better react before the man killed him on the spot. It was Friday night, and the noise outside was worse than the roar inside the club. That must have been why the security did nothing at all. Or maybe they thought this was all part of the show.

‘I’m sorry!’ Alex shouted into some other mike he’d picked up.

His voice sounded shrill, as if he was an adolescent. ‘We didn’t mean anything! It was a mistake!’ He backed away from Wazenski towards the edge of the stage, and gestured for the rest of the Beans to vacate the spaces for the Ravenous, Wazenski’s band. Knowing his place was an essential survival skill, as his mom used to say.

‘Mistake?!’ Wazenski echoed furiously. He was holding the mike at some distance, and his voice fluctuated between loud and inaudible.

Alex was reading his lips. ‘That’s what you call my stuff being anally raped by you?! It was a fucking demo, it wasn’t even out! Fuck you!’

He stood silent for a moment, disheveled and moody like a raven, with his hair sticking in all directions. ‘Raven’ was his nickname from years back – eventually, he’d used it to christen his band. He cleared his throat, and said: ‘We’ll take it from here, guys. You’ll get your money back for the tickets.’

That should have been the end of it. Alex had had to jump off the stage and twisted his ankle, but that was nothing. Humiliation aside, he was grateful he got off so easy. He didn’t want to attract more attention to his person, and decided to stay put in the corner under the stage. He had no idea where the rest of the Beans were, but he resigned himself to suffering through a Ravenous concert. Wazenski started singing. He was a multi-instrumentalist – played on everything he could see while he was getting used to the new guitar. When 65

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Wazenski did his guitar solo, it sounded like electrified violin or a scream of a predator caught in a trap. Alex got a weird feeling in his chest – it was like heartburn. It would take him months to pick the shards of his self-esteem off the floor. He didn’t even notice it when events took a turn for the worse.

No one knew how it happened, exactly. Twitter and YouTube were to blame – the moment the eye-witnesses uploaded their videos of Wazenski, passers-by and fans stormed the club, seeing there were no tickets. Soon the crowd was pressing into the stage in waves, grabbing at it like animals trying to scramble aboard Noah’s ark, screaming and holding their phones in the air. They reminded Alex of the pagan torch procession from The Wicker Man. He didn’t know what security was doing. He had a vague feeling he should get the hell out of there before Wazenski remembered him. He looked towards the doors – and saw them.

They didn’t look like punks, exactly – more like heavyweight boxers, with their huge tattooed arms and shaved heads. They were holding vodka bottles –enormous that almost looked like decorations – though glass was supposedly prohibited in the Arena. He knew exactly who they were. Wazenski had the most extreme fan base on the British rock scene. Alex had heard a lot about it – it seemed they called themselves Wazzocks, absurdly and creepily. They pushed their way through, stepping on the people who didn’t move quickly enough – and soon they were right next to Alex. They drank in the sight of Wazenski in a circle of red projector light like salivating dogs.

It was as if a camera was looking at him, pointing a finger and saying ‘You. Yeah, you.’ The huge fan with a dragon tattoo all over his bicep elbowed everyone away and yelled: ‘Marco, look at me, look! You rock, man! I love you!’

Alex stared at him as if he had two heads. The blue tattoos reaching all the way to the man’s face, his fat muscular arms – it could have come straight from a low-budget horror movie. Eventually the fan noticed him. ‘What the fuck are you…’ Suspicion, understanding and rage crossed his face in quick succession. ‘You’re the fuck-up who stole the song!’ The man shouted. He reached his arms towards Wazenski, as if he was the sun. ‘Look at me, look! I’mma kill ‘im for you – I’mma slice his fucking throat like you wanted! Just like you wan’ed!’

The beat had died out just a moment before, and Wazenski heard him – looked down in confusion, and then his eyes went wide. The fan smashed his vodka bottle against the sharp metallic edge of the stage – and the next moment Wazenski leapt off it and landed between Alex and the fan, and covered Alex with his body.

‘I don’t need that shit! Leave him alone! Fucking psychos!’ But without the microphone, his voice was barely audible.

‘I want you to notice me!’ The man screamed in a kind of painful 66

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

ecstasy. Somehow he was louder than Wazenski. ‘Look me in the eye when I kill ‘im!’ He swung the bottle – Alex realized Wazenski now stood in front of him. They both leaned away from the blow and scraped their backs against the stage. The bottle collided with Wazenski’s head – then he hit the man squarely in the solar plexus.

The huge leader of the Wazzocks slowly collapsed onto the floor.

It seemed his weight made the building shudder. Wazenski looked down at his ringed fist calmly then raised his head to stare at the rest of them, as if to say ‘Anybody else?’ The rest of the Wazzocks backed away, apprehensive. They left a white circle around the two of them.

Alex straightened, shaking all over from the adrenalin that flooded his veins. He wondered why there was suddenly so much room – but then he saw the tightly packed human mass move away from the stage, like a waterfall that had broken through a rock. Soon they were all running for the doors, as if the building was on fire. Alex couldn’t seem to move from the sheer terror.

Someone shouted: ‘The cops are here – run!’

‘Well, that’s that.’ Wazenski said. He sounded eerily calm. Then he walked towards the entrance without sparing Alex another glance.

3 Wazenski stopped by the entrance, drinking in the cold air. It smelt like it was about to rain. The Metropolitan Police transits were parked all around the club, blocking the flow of traffic and the way out. The wind was shaking the Borderline Arena sign and whipping his face, but it felt good – his body felt hot all over. He was glad his band mates weren’t there yet – Miles would be urging him to make a run for it, floor it and all that. He just wanted to stand still. The wine-coloured current had already soaked the back of his shirt and was trickling down his temple and bicep. He didn’t notice the moment Sam emerged from the crowd and started yelling at him.

‘–like you don’t mind getting killed for a fucking tweet! What were you thinking, covering that piece of shit when we should be suing–’ Sam faltered, stared at Wazenski hard, and winced. ‘Holy shit.’

‘What now?’ He snarled. ‘Something on my face?’

‘Blood.’ Sam said.

‘Yeah.’ Wazenski said, and gingerly reached for his nape. ‘It’s fine.’

‘No it’s not. Fucking bastard.’

‘I couldn’t let him kill the guy.’ Wazenski said, suddenly exhausted.

‘It’d be on me, after what I said... I’d have to live with it. God, I want a cigarette.’

‘Who said anything about murder? You should have let Big Al mess ‘im up, he deserved it! He–’ They fell silent as the cops approached – a redheaded woman with a nametag reading ‘Sergeant Mills’ took a firm hold of Wazenski’s 67

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

shoulder. ‘It’s you, isn’t it.’ She said. It didn’t sound like a question.

‘Let’s go.’

He started to laugh softly, almost to himself. ‘Oh, that’s epic. Epic.

Sure, why the hell not?’

‘This son of a bitch dances on our performance rights, and you arrest one of us?! That’s unbelievable!’ Sam exploded. He pointed a finger at Alex, who had just exited the building. ‘Why don’t you deal with that?’

‘Sir, an entertainment lawyer –’ ‘Just drop it.’ Wazenski said.

Sergeant Mills looked at him. ‘You strike me like a sensible kind of guy. Don’t make this difficult and get into the car.’

‘Why are you onto us, because we’re rich? Isn’t that discrimination?’ Sam snapped. ‘He didn’t do anything!’

‘Go home.’ Wazenski stated calmly. ‘Get Miles and go home, okay?

I knew what I was getting into when I started this.’

‘But you didn’t! At least we ain’t hit nobody!’ Sam yelled, livid.

Sergeant Mills watched them like a hawk. ‘What about Cornfield – look at what he did to his head, it’s fucking beef! That’s assault! I bet he’s got concussion. Are you just gonna Cornfield walk away?!’

Wazenski looked up at Sam in alarm. ‘This is a very bad idea, don’t do that – it wasn’t–’ He turned to Sergeant Mills to find her gone.

Bile was rising in his throat, burning it like a badly chewed potato. He stood leaning again Sam, and wearily watched Sergeant Mills grab Alex and turn him around.

‘It’s a great idea. He deserves it!’ Sam replied savagely after a pause.

Wazenski said nothing – and the next moment Alex Cornfield made a lunge at him, though Sergeant Mills held him in an armlock. ‘What’s your problem, man? I said I was sorry about your fucking song, we apologized – this is bitchy!’

‘I didn’t –’ ‘That’s enough.’ Sergeant Mills snapped. ‘Both of you, in the car.

Now.’ ‘Fuck it. It was your fault anyway.’ Wazenski said. Cornfield didn’t protest, which proved it kind of was. They got into the car, and Sergeant Mills walked around to get to the driver’s seat. Once she drove off, she glanced at Wazenski through the main mirror.

‘Wait, aren’t you that guy?’

‘Yeah.’ Wazenski said without enthusiasm. ‘No autographs those who arrest me.’

The rain had developed into a storm. With the traffic and all, there were no cells left by the time they arrived at the Fulham Palace Road police station. The cop on duty announced it to Sergeant Mills right in their presence, while she searched them. ‘So you’ve brought them in without checking with me – no wonder shit hits the fan –’ He fell 68

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

silent, and stared at Wazenski. ‘Isn’t that –’ ‘Get over it.’ Wazenski said.

The cop on duty glanced at Sergeant Mills. ‘You for real? What’d he do?’

‘Excellent fucking question.’ Wazenski muttered.

‘Raided a club. Never mind that.’ Mills said. She had just confiscated Wazenski’s cigarettes. ‘But what’s with the cells?’

‘What d’you mean, what’s with the cells?’ The cop on duty snorted.

‘I’ve got the rest of the looters from that Borderline place. Aptly named, that is. Picked ‘em right off the streets like apples. Should stick a sign on the door – ‘NO VACANCY’. You’ll ‘ave to take ‘em someplace else.’

‘Where am I s’posed to take them, where?’ Sergeant Mills crossed her arms resolutely. ‘Jimmy sent me here, and–’ ‘Chill out, I think there’s one left.’ He shot Wazenski an uneasy glance. ‘But pers’nally, I wouldn’t leave ‘im there.’

‘Well, I’m gonna have to –’ The cop sighed. ‘Fine. You’ll see what I mean.’

The humming rose almost immediately as Alex and Wazenski entered the corridor, accompanied by Sergeant Mills. It was like an echo of a waterfall. The place was packed with the people they’d left behind. There was a common smell of adrenalin, male rage and alcohol. Alex wondered if the sound of their steps had roused them, like mad blind dogs. Then the shouting started. ‘Hey, I’m sorry about your head, Marco! Lemme kiss it better! We’ll forget the shiner you gave me and we’ll ‘ave us a good time!’

It was the same voice. Wazenski stopped still (Alex nearly ran into the back of him), and stared at the door as if he could see Big Al through it. ‘Came round, did he?’ He muttered.

‘Move it. They won’t bother you.’ Sergeant Mills said in a dispassionate voice. ‘Besides, you’ll have Cornfield for company, now that we’re overstocked and understaffed.’

‘Very funny.’ Wazenski snorted when she stopped next to the cell intended for the two of them. ‘What, you’re not afraid we’ll rip each other’s throats?’

‘I’ll take my chances. You can always stay with them, if you prefer.’

She waved in the direction of the Wazzocks’ cell. ‘I’m sure you’ll have lots to talk about. Lots to do, even.’

Wazenski gave her an ironic look. ‘Looks suspiciously like you’re trying to intimidate me. But that might be my imagination.’ He said.

‘I’ll stick to Cornfield, thank you.’

‘Wise choice.’ She shoved them inside and handed Wazenski an ice pack. ‘This might help stop the bleeding. But just to be clear – you won’t get special treatment. I don’t care just how famous you are. I’ve got enough trouble on my hands.’

Wazenski took the dirty-blue mattress against the wall. Somehow 69

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

that was understood from the start. Alex intended to keep his silence once her steps had died out. But Wazzocks were raving some doors down, screaming obscenities – it should have been hilarious, but it wasn’t. He found himself saying: ‘Does it bother you?’

Wazenski looked at him wearily. ‘What the fuck do you think?’ He pressed the ice pack to him temple and added: ‘I guess that’ll be the stuff for my new song. Gotta get somethin’ out of this.’

‘You make anything into a song, can’t you.’ Alex said. He hadn’t meant to. It sounded whiny and pathetic, but that’s exactly how he felt. Jealousy was bleeding through his voice. Wazenski narrowed his eyes, as if he’d tasted it in the air.

‘It’s auto-cannibalism, but I can’t help it.’ He said. ‘‘s like, I’m constantly eating myself. I think it’ll be the spring, actually. This kind of shit can only happen in spring. It drives people crazy, you know, spring. It’s dirty, like labour. But then that’s the idea of spring. It has to be dirty.’

‘Can I join your band?’ Alex joked half-heartedly. ‘People tell me I do a pretty decent impression of you.’ It was bad taste to offer reconciliation so artlessly, but he almost couldn’t help it. If they would be stuck together for twenty-four hours, he wanted to minimize the antagonism. Jealousy was more than enough. He’d been jealous for most of his life, more or less – but never with such ferocity as now, when he could envy Wazenski from up close. He couldn’t help thinking he’d intended to turn out like Wazenski – as did everybody who went into rock music.

‘I don’t think so. I went into music to escape myself. If you constantly channel shit, you don’t have the time to think about it.’ That was when Alex got it a little. It should have cured him of his jealousy right away. But somehow it didn’t – it made it worse. Wazenski could sit here complaining about whatever mental shit he had going on because was Wazenski. Alex’s shit didn’t even matter enough to share it. They sat in silence for a long, dreary time. His mind kept brewing over the things he could say, like ‘Some fans you got.’ That one was plain tactless. He said: ‘I appreciate what you did.’ It felt like stepping on his own throat.

‘I sure as hell don’t appreciate what you did.’

And that was it.

The sight of Wazenski’s head was making him sick. The blood had caked despite the ice pack he’d put down some time ago. It didn’t even look like blood. A dove-coloured shimmer of sorts seemed to be surrounding him – it looked like a slimy kind of dandruff, or wet muesli. He couldn’t see too well. Alex was starting to doubt his sanity – maybe he had a concussion. But Wazenski was starting to look worse. His eyes had a reddish glow, like they did at the Borderline Arena. It wasn’t too cold in the cell, but Wazenski was sort of shivering. Later he would say he’d known it was his fault, instinctively 70

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

– but that was taking it too far.

‘You alright?’

The look Wazenski gave him was filled with some kind of agony – it chilled him right to his bones. ‘There’s this stuff everywhere, I hate it. I hate it. I fucking hate it.’ His voice had a ring to it.

It was some kind of dust. Alex looked down at his hands to see if he’d been smeared in it too – maybe it was on the walls. But there was nothing. A kind of ‘ping’ sounded in his mind – he almost knew what this was, and it made his insides drop a little – but he couldn’t put a finger on it. When he looked back, the shimmering stuff was all over Wazenski. He saw the shock in Alex’ eyes and looked down at his shirt to watch the dust crawl out from under the collar like cigarette smoke, or the foam rising from an overflowing sink. Alex might have thought he was losing his mind if Wazenski hadn’t looked like he was losing his.

The shimmer had reached his hair.

‘What the fuck is this, get it off me! Get it off me! Get that bitch in here!’

‘Hey!’ Alex yelled. ‘We need help!’ He couldn’t help thinking Wazenski was finally out of his chill character. And though it was mean, he felt satisfied.

Sergeant Mills turned up almost immediately, which left Alex to suspect she’d been nearby all along, silent as a cat, listening in on them. It wouldn’t surprise him if she tried to sell the tape later. She unlocked the door and surveyed the cell. Wazenski sprang up. The shimmering substance floated around him like a cocoon, sometimes getting into his nostrils. It circled around his mouth, waiting for him to speak so it could crawl inside.

‘Get it off me and let me out!’ Wazenski snarled. ‘Get it off!’ He pulled his shirt over his head, ripping some buttons, and threw it under her feet.

Mills stared at the shirt, and then at Wazenski. ‘Sir, there is nothing on your skin. Calm down.’

‘Can’t you see it’s all over him?!’ Alex said. ‘It’s like –’ Wazenski turned his head to look at him. ‘You see it? You really do?’

‘Yeah, sure I see it.’

The suspicion arose in their minds at the exact same moment.

But instead of looking at each other, they looked down, almost afraid to meet each other’s eyes. They could feel this creepy, elusive thing in the air. It stood in the air like a physical ghost, something they couldn’t see but could smell. Alex knew Wazenski would verbalize that feeling – but desperately wished he didn’t.

‘He’s doing it.’ Wazenski said. ‘Oh my God – you’re doing it. ‘s like what you did with my song, why are you doing it?’

‘Doing what?’ Mills asked with skepticism.

Alex felt like he’d been kicked in the gut. ‘I’m not – I, I’m not doing it on purpose, I –I mean, I’m sorry…’ He stammered. His mother 71

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

had read Grimm Brothers’ fairytales to him when he was a child. She’d have said it was a curse. He had no problem with that idea, except he felt he was the one cursed with jealousy. It kept him awake at night, it wouldn’t let him work, achieve anything at all… But he’d never expected it to affect someone else like a plague.

Wazenski yelled: ‘Get the fuck away from me!’

‘Wow! Keep it down, both of you!’ Mills snapped. ‘What kind of weed is in those cigarettes, exactly? Or is this withdrawal? If you think this will get you released –’ ‘Not released, no – I want another cell! Please just let me into their cell and you can keep me here for a fucking week!’

‘Sir, your lawyer just called to say he was on his way, and I’m sure he’ll –’ ‘Let me the fuck out of here!’ He screamed. ‘Bitch, bitch, fucking bitch, I’ll sue your ass!’

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir, you –’ Unease was finally lightening up Mills’ eyes. She must have realized she’d be in a creek without a paddle if Wazenski did something to himself on her watch. He appeared pretty deranged.

‘Just fucking help me, do your fucking job!’

A timid knock on the door of the cell announced the arrival of the cop on duty and a tall man in a trench coat.

‘Mills, this is Mr. Burgoin –’ The cop saw Wazenski, faltered, and shot Mills a questioning look. ‘Mr. Wazenski’s lawyer.’

‘Marco, kid, what in God’s name is going on?’ Burgoin bent down imperturbably, picked up Wazenski’s shirt and handed it to him in an outstretched hand. ‘Is this the guy we’re suing? Fill me in, will you.’

Wazenski made no attempt to take the shirt. He was staring at the dust which had settled in heaps around him, like sawdust or scuffs left over after renovations. ‘You don’t see it either.’ He said with a kind of somber finality.

‘See what?’ Burgoin said, baffled. ‘Your head looks swollen, I can see that– Sam told me there’s been some kind of brawl.’

‘The dust, the– The fucking dust.’

Burgoin sighed.

‘Kid, I have no idea what you’re on about, but I’ll deal with it. Is that idiotic sect bothering you again?’ When Wazenski said nothing, he turned to Mills. ‘Why are they in the same cell? That’s illegal. My client –’ He took in the state of Wazenski. ‘I don’t like the look of my client, Sergeant Mills. You’re looking at a lawsuit.’

‘Bail him out too. I wanna talk to him.’

‘Didn’t he hit you on the head?’

‘No.’ Wazenski said. ‘He didn’t.’

Sergeant Mills stopped in the doors. ‘What? Sir, did you just admit to giving false testimony?’

‘I –’ 72

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

‘My client admitted to nothing like that!’ Burgoin interrupted.

‘He probably has a concussion from the kind of treatment he was subjected to. Let’s go. What is it you wanna talk to him about, I can’t see for the life –’ ‘Music.’ Wazenski said. ‘Wanna talk to him about music.’

A month later the Ravenous released Labour Spring, introducing the new line-up.

73

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Book Review|Brian Finney

The Only Story by Julian Barnes

The Only Story, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Cape, 2018.

I

recently finished reading one of my favorite author’s latest novel, Julian Barnes’ The Only Story. This is his 23rd book. As often happens with experienced writers he dares more with less. He often uses short sentences and everyday vocabulary. Yet he constructs them into a complex narrative.

Take as an example his introduction of the words of the title.

“Everyone has their love story,” the much older married Susan tells Paul, the young narrator who’s fallen for her. She goes on to elaborate: “it may have been a fiasco, it may have fizzled out, it may never have got going.” But, she concludes, “It’s the only story.” The narrator says, “I feel rebuked. Not rebuked by Susan. Rebuked by life.” Simple and complex at the same time.

Section One is told in the first person and recounts Paul’s naïve conviction at the time that his first love will last forever. “My attitude to our love was peculiarly straightforward. . . I simply thought: Well, that’s the certainty of love between us settled, now the rest has to fall into place around it.”

But Section Two, which tells what happens to the pair when Susan leaves her husband and moves with Paul to London, soon elides into the second person as the affair turns into a difficult longterm relationship: “You realise that, even if she is the free spirit you imagined her to be, she is also a damaged free spirit.”

By the last Section Three they are no longer living together, and Barnes quickly switches to the third person to reflect the distance that separates Paul from his younger self: “nowadays the raucousness of the first person within him was stilled. It was as if he viewed, and 74

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed.” At the same time Paul acknowledges, “In love, everything is both true ad false.”

In other words, first, second and third person narrations each have a different truth to tell. The narrative as a whole sees equal validity in all three persons. Barnes, the skilled novelist, uses different narrative voices to reinforce his relativist vision of both the experience of love and the act of writing about it. Paul often talks about his experience of love in terms of novel structure: “The end had been terrible, and far too much middle had overhung the beginning.” Love is a story we tell ourselves; but it changes with each telling.

Read it for yourself. It’s relatively short – and masterful.

75

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Poetry|Keith Moul Tell Truth Before dropping beyond western hills the sun does magic on every surface: that deep gold magic that enriches the antique telephone line with all its windings; that softens crows’ wings more, while surrounding the blackness.

The Jefferson River tributary to the Missouri on its turbulent journey leaps faith revealing prairie lies that miseries possess its reaches, everywhere stark. This river tells only truth, muddy as it is yet so clear in ancient purpose to link the whole plateau. Now western yellow, eastern rose, black bird hearts pump for home.

The Edifice She died angry with no interest in reconciliation, only self-absorption; left no guidance to those following, no instructions, no directions to her personal treasures long secreted. The universe had abused her, but we could not understand.

Her complaints did not reveal, lifted no veils, cited no authorities, identified no tormentors.

Psychoses may attach to any objects, whether inanimate or animate, Spring's green leaf, Fall's brown leaf, a child's education, a child's selfimmolation, some burns are beyond our capacity.

Moss clings to a wall, to stone steps, a house front, the roof, and the chimney spire. From beneath velvety covering seeds pop, scatter and often bloom.

76

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Short Fiction|Sreya Sarkar Beef Biryani

W

hen Laboni’s father had learned that the College Service Commission had randomly placed her as a lecturer in a college in central-east Calcutta’s, Park Circus area, he had gathered his brows in a frown and advised her to keep her commute simple, to college and back. He told her that there was no need to venture deeper into the Muslim neighborhood. He was a mild-natured, enlightened Bengali bhadrolok who had brought up Laboni and her sister to be confident and independent-minded, but the idea of his young, educated daughter going for work to Park Circus every day, sat uncomfortably on his reluctant acceptance of the fact that not everyone thought as progressively as him when it came to communal differences.

Laboni joined the position with her share of trepidations, soon to realize that Park Circus was not just a place where a majority of the population was Muslim. That it was also a culturally different space, separate from the city’s uniform landscape and it was not just the decision of the people living here to segregate themselves. She had inferred from random conversations with her college colleagues and students, how the people here recurrently faced discrimination. It was difficult to find jobs if one was a Muslim from Park Circus, because of their image of being “trouble-makers”. Men and women looking for work as factory hands or domestic workers had to assume common Hindu nicknames to gain entry into the city’s informal labor market.

The area had been blacklisted by banks, making it challenging for the people to get credit. Muslims from varied socio-economic backgrounds jostled for space in this overcrowded neighborhood for it was not easy to find homes elsewhere. Their flocking together had resulted in the unfair stereotyping of Muslims as community-bound, culturally inwardlooking, backward and frozen in the past, removed from the feverish pace of urbanization. People here grappled with disadvantages, yet they had a spirit to embrace life with all its colors and fight on and, Laboni appreciated this quality in them.

Zaytuna college was located at the intersection of two crooked lanes, fringed by a ladies’ tailor shop on one side and a Muslim boy’s school on the other. There was a vocational training institute on the opposite side of the street, with people streaming in and out throughout the day. It was a peaceful neighborhood with a good mix of elderly and young folks, everyone respectful of the other. While she had grown to like the neighborhood over the last year and a half and got used to the periodic blaring of Azan from the local mosques, she was still to adapt to the bizarre staff room politics at her college.

77

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Laboni stepped off the bus and turned into the narrow lane leading to the college on a December morning, to find Abdul, the stout, grim college gatekeeper, drop her the same lukewarm nod she had become used to when he caught sight of her. As her slim frame glided through the entrance, wrapped in a Kashmiri shawl over her long, flowing kameez, her eyes rested for a moment on the marble slab at the entrance that read, “Zaytuna College for Girls” in an ornate black font.

The college was run by an education trust headed by the celebrated freedom fighter Farooq Ali whose contribution to the Indian freedom struggle was so inspiring that he still had letters of admiration trickling into his mailbox forty-five years after independence.

About half of the teaching staff were Muslim and the other half Hindu and that should not have mattered at all if most conversations did not inevitably take on an uncomfortable religious tinge, no matter what the topic was.

Laboni had never really thought much of these petty distinctions, but more recently, she had started getting embroiled in an unhealthy tussle of narrow parochialism. The glaring lack of interest in academia among the students in the classroom she taught, had created a noxious vacuum in her. It had dug a hole in her heart that needed to be filled with some kind of stimulation and in this case, the unwanted excitement came from a rather negative source, and that saddened Laboni endlessly.

As she made her way to the staff room steeped in conflicting sentiments, Nusrat, the college principal beckoned her to the principal’s office and reminded her of the special feast that was planned later, to celebrate the college’s completion of five years.

“I wish we had the funding to celebrate it properly with a cultural show and all, but the dinner is all we get this year, because of all the expensive renovation,” she said with a touch of sadness in her voice.

The college had added a large hall on the ground floor and that had taken up a lot of their funds for the year. The hall had created the much-needed extra space but also hatched new problems.

Nusrat continued grumbling her fair, round face pinkening with worry.

“The boys' school next door is proving to be such a nuisance. We have to keep the windows closed at all times. In the winters that is still possible, but just imagine what will happen during the summers. That big examination hall will feel like a steam oven. I wish we had a whiff of this problem before we decided to sprout so many windows on the wall facing the boys' school.”

A small smile curved Laboni’s mouth. She had caught the boys clinging to the classroom windows facing the college, delivering flying kisses to the girls as they sat writing their tests. Laboni had warned them to stop their hideous behavior and pacified them for the time being but the girls’ appetite for attention had already been whetted 78

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

and how can one really stop a group of young women who were determined to attract boys? They were busy coquettishly rolling their eyes at them, forgetting all about finishing their papers. This had called for intervention on behalf of the teachers and led to the decision of closing the windows facing the boys' school. There was a happy unanimity in that verdict, something that was not very commonly found in the staff room.

Nusrat drew Laboni out of her train of thoughts with the same question she had asked her the day before.

“Did you count the heads? I have to make sure that we have the right number of each kind of biryani boxes. The last time it was such a nightmare sorting through them, remember?”

Laboni remembered it all too well. The goat meat or what Bengalis fondly call mutton biryanis and the beef biryanis had got all mixed up and caused such a hoopla. As a matter of fact, that was the reason that she had signed up to help Nusrat with ordering the food this time.

“Yes, I counted twice, just to make sure.”

“Well, did you include the administrative staff?”

“Yes.” “And Abdul?”

“Yes, of course. I thought that you had ordered already?”

“I would have ordered if I didn’t have to deal with Anisah’s complaint against her part-timers, first thing in the morning.”

Anisah was the cranky full-timer in the History department. She was a stickler when it came to making sure that everyone in her department did their tasks perfectly.

Nusrat was already dialing the number of Nizam Palace to order biryani. “And if you see Anisah, please send her in.” * Laboni noticed Anisah in a serious discussion with two of her part-timers as she entered the staff room. She was still in her burqa.

Anisah was a pious woman and very proper in every way. While that added a dimension of dignity, it also made her seem severe and unfriendly, at times. Laboni was glad to go unnoticed this morning, for Anisah had a bad habit of picking on her unnecessarily. She wrote a short note about the principal wanting to see her and placed it on Anisah’s desk, before plucking out the roll call for the first class.

“Here is the Principal’s favorite,” Anisah threw at Laboni right at that moment, as she hung up her burqa and straightened her salwar kameez.

“Nusrat Mam wants to see you in her office. I just left a note on your desk.” Laboni spoke stiffly.

“So, now Nusrat Mam has made you her errand boy as well! The things you do to remain her favorite.” Anisah’s mouth had an 79

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

obligatory smile pasted on it, the kind of smile that did not reach her kohl-rimmed eyes.

Laboni did everything to avoid an altercation with Anisah but today she was just not in a mood to compromise. “I don't mind doing a bit of extra work for her." How she wished Anisah did not take that tone with her.

“Of course, you don’t! You like being in her good books.”

“I must be doing something right, if I have earned the Principal’s respect, don’t you think? Unlike some of the old-timers who just sit around complaining in their free time.”

Anisah’s eyes widened for a moment and then they shrunk back to their usual narrow slits.

“Nusrat Mam is dignified that way. She does not care who has joined the college when and from where, when it comes to acknowledging merit. That is not something that can be said for the majority of the people, right?” said Anisah.

“What do you mean? Everyone in this college is unbiased when it comes to merit…”

“Oh please!” Anisah rolled her eyes. She could definitely join the Bengali film industry with her flair for over-the-top drama, thought Laboni, pursing her lips in irritation.

“Sometimes you are so slow, really! I was not talking about our college. This place is like a sanctuary amidst all the madness enveloping us with its poisonous and wrong interpretation of history.

Don’t you follow the newspaper? A mad politician has been running around in a chariot with a bow and arrow calling it a rath yatra, causing such pandemonium.”

“But the politician was arrested for the trouble he caused, wasn’t he? Now, would that have ever happened in any country that is not secular?” said Laboni pointedly. “Take our neighboring country for example.”

“Well, who knows what might follow the mad man’s chariot ride?

Now the Hindu fanatics have just the right kind of encouragement to demonstrate their goonism.”

The Ram rath yatra had been a hot button issue for many in the country for more than a year now. The leader of Bharatiya Janata Party, an upcoming national party, had traveled nearly ten-thousand kilometers in a truck decorated to resemble the chariot of the god Ram to promote the construction of a temple at the reputed site of Ram’s birth, which was now occupied by a sixteenth-century mosque.

Indian National Congress in Delhi had followed a strictly secular approach towards politics since Indian independence and the coalition governments that followed after, also maintained a similar outlook.

Calcutta had been under the Communist party regime that had separated religion from politics for more than two decades. So, the Rath Yatra organized to stoke the Hindu sentiments, was an entirely 80

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

new phenomenon to most Indians in the Nineteen-nineties. Laboni was as alarmed as others at the implication of carrying out such a campaign but that could not become a reason to be snubbed by a biased person, that too for no fault of hers.

She turned to Anisah with a deliberate dash of insolence in her tone. “Fundamentalists don’t need encouragement, they only need an excuse. Anyway, let’s not turn everything into a punching match. This has got nothing to do with us.”

Anisah glared at her and was about to say more when the shrill bell rang out announcing the beginning of the first period and the wrangle broke up as quickly as it had started, but Laboni knew that the remnants of the argument would continue floating like stubborn dust particles in the staff room till they found a future disagreement to settle on, locking the teachers in an endless loop of negativity. * The afternoon passed quickly and uneventfully as the teachers scrambled to finish the day’s work between teaching classes and submitting grades from the last examination. As the evening arrived, the students gathered along with the teachers in the new hall downstairs to listen to the Trust president’s speech. The girls looked bored and were more than happy to be allowed to leave after a while. Laboni gazed at the last of the girls departing, thinking back to her college days when she would twitter and bounce around with her friends, full of hope and excitement just like them. Youth has an extraordinary, light touch to it and as years pass and worldliness sets in, the spritely optimism of youth diminishes under the weight of responsibilities, she thought with a sigh. Laboni was not really that old, but she felt so ancient right then, for some undefinable reason.

She turned back to re-enter the hall where dinner was being served. Her stomach growled with hunger as her olfactory senses filled with the appetizing biryani smell of saffron and rose water, but as she bit into the piece of meat in her box, her insides recoiled and her temper flared up instantly.

“This is deliberate. Who…who did this? Who swapped my mutton biryani? If you dislike my presence in this college, terminate my employment, but don’t insult me like this!”

Laboni pushed away from the beef biryani box with disdain and stood up to leave.

“Imagine if this would have happened to any of you…if someone stuffed pork in your food, how would you have reacted?”

Nusrat’s eyebrows flew up to her forehead. “Please Laboni, no one meant this to happen. It was a mistake. We have so many mutton biryani boxes…I am sure it was a mistake.”

Farooq Ali addressed the staff in his sternest voice. “Please 81

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

separate the boxes in two different areas of the hall."

The staff scrambled to divide the two kinds of biryani boxes with care, a nervous hush enveloping the hall, but the damage had already been done.

“Mistakes like this happen. One has to be open-minded about these things,” grumbled Anisah in a subdued voice.

A senior teacher frowned at her and turned to Farooq Ali. “If every moment you are going to bring up religion and difference in culture in the staff room, this is bound to happen. Farooq Sir, I don’t mean to cause trouble but there needs to be a discussion about keeping our opinions to ourselves and learning to coexist, peacefully.”

“Why are you talking like this? Do you think I am responsible for what happened?” Anisah glared at her.

“No one is blaming anyone, but collectively we are responsible for what happens among the teachers. If we keep squabbling with each other for every petty reason, something like this is bound to happen,” said another teacher.

The senior teacher spoke again. “This is an educational institution, the focus should be on educating the girls, not shaming the teachers for belonging to a different community.”

“Now please don’t start the rant about lack of equality,” quipped Anisah.

“No, we are not allowed to do that, because you think that only you have the right to rant!” The senior teacher turned her eyes to Farooq Ali again.

“I don’t always support how Laboni reacts to Anisah’s comments but, Anisah should also be careful about how she speaks to others. Her tart words hit us hard sometimes.”

“Nobody really meant any harm to anyone deliberately so, please let’s get back to dinner,” said Farooq Ali in a quiet but steady voice.

“Laboni has already decided to cause trouble. Whatever we do or tell, will not convince her otherwise,” said Anisah. She looked at no one in specific when she said, “I don’t understand why we need to keep appeasing her just because this is a Muslim college.”

“Oh, I know what you do and what you tell! And I don’t understand why we need to keep tiptoeing around you in our own country,” said Laboni in a shaky voice as she picked up her shawl to leave. “I can’t work here. Farooq Sir, I am going to submit my resignation. I am sorry things came to this.”

“Laboni, please don’t make a hasty decision. Let us talk later, once you have calmed down.” Farooq Ali knew that there was no point trying to talk to her at that moment. “In your heart, you know this is a misunderstanding.”

He looked embarrassed and visibly disturbed. He was in his eighties, and had a history of fighting shoulder to shoulder with his Hindu and Sikh friends during the war of Indian independence. The 82

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

philanthropist in him had raised money and founded the education trust that had sprouted educational institutions in Calcutta, in the hope that Bengali men and women would take to education and march towards modernity. He was optimistic that they could mend what the British had destroyed and continued with the Bengal Renaissance, a process that been left unfinished, but instead what the elderly man was encountering, was a bunch of entitled young women, fighting among themselves over religious dissimilarities.

He was a frail man whose sturdy frame had started drooping with age, he never raised his voice, but when he spoke he could still make his authority felt. “This institution will not tolerate any kind of regressive talk or discussion anymore. From now on, if there is a single incident of religious or communal discussion, I will close down this college, I promise you that! Anisah, I would like a word with you tomorrow.”

Anisah’s heart filled with a vague sense of dread. The small, annoying skirmishes in the staff room had transcended to a higher and more serious level of trouble and a part of it was her fault. Had her life-long struggles and the resulting bitterness not skewed her behavior towards Laboni, she could have prevented this. She was not a bad person. Her Allah knew that.

The rest of the people in the hall were trying to think of ways to salvage the evening when Abdul ran into the hall, anxiety gnarling his facial features.

“Farooq Sir, please stop Laboni madam. A fight has broken out in the slums nearby. Jalal from the training center said that a group of rioters is moving towards this neighborhood. Laboni madam refused to listen when I tried to stop her from leaving.”

“Why are there rioters on the streets?” Nusrat hated how the evening was turning out. All she had wanted was a congenial dinner to diffuse the tension building up in the staff room for some time now.

“Jalal said the mob was chanting Allah’s name. I think it might be a communal riot.”

“But this neighborhood is so peaceful,” said Nusrat. “There has never been any trouble of this kind here.”

“I heard on the radio that Babri Masjid was attacked by kar sevaks earlier today. Maybe that is the reason why,” said one of the staff members.

“That is dreadful news,” said Farooq Ali gripping his walking stick to steady himself.

“We have to get Laboni back…she is not safe outside,” said Anisah, grabbing her burqa. “Nusrat Mam give me your burqa, quick!”

“No…you should not go outside!” said Farooq Ali, assembling a small group of staff members to look for Laboni. “We will look for her.”

But Anisah insisted on accompanying them. * 83

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

The biryani boxes lay forgotten on the table, as the rest of the crowd in the hall, regrouped with an entirely different purpose this time. Nusrat asked the teachers to close down the college windows and extinguish as many lights as possible. There were nervous whispers in the building as the teachers and the staff waited in the semi-dark with terror-filled hearts. Minutes ticked by, and then the sudden noise of the front door being thrown open hastily, made everyone jump. Anisah and Laboni, both clad in burqa stumbled in.

Laboni held on to Anisah like a child, clutching her hand like it was the only support that kept her upright.

“There is a group of men coming towards the college. I wrapped Laboni in the burqa before they caught up with us. They…they saw us entering the college,” said Anisah.

“I don’t have a good feeling about this. Now they know that there are people here at this hour,” said Farooq Ali returning with the staff members. “They are going to come looking…I know how these events unfold.” Ghosts of previous horrific experiences flickered in his aged eyes.

“If they ask around they will get to know that there are Hindu teachers in the college…what if…”

A loud knock interrupted his words. The knocks grew louder with passing seconds and were accompanied by restless voices. No one dared to move. The knocking continued and the voices turned even more animated. “You need to open this door now…”

“Abdul, open the door,” said Farooq Ali. “We can’t!” Abdul’s face was covered in sweat.

“You all go inside the hall. We were having dinner before this started,” said Farooq Ali with firm authority to everyone. “That is what we will tell them. We also have to convince them that we are all from the same community, whatever be our religion.”

“They will not necessarily understand that refined message. We have to tell them that there are only Muslims here,” said Anisah.

“Please don’t insist on that Anisah,” said Farooq Ali knowing how the mixed staff might react to this suggestion but right then Laboni joined the conversation.

“We should listen to Anisah.”

Laboni covered her head with her shawl as others waited for her to explain. She did not, but the other teachers who were observing her started covering their heads too, with dupatta and shawls, whichever they had near them. They realized that if they wanted to survive, they had to blend in. * Abdul opened the door with an unsure smile on his face. He saw a tall wiry man wearing a rounded skull cap, peering down at him. There 84

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

were a few more men lurking in the dark behind him.

“Why did you take so long to open the door?” he said, sheathing the chopper in his hand in a dirty rag.

“Is there a problem?” Abdul deliberately tried to appear clueless.

“Have you not heard about what happened at Babri masjid today?

Those Hindu activists tore down the old mosque!”

Abdul nodded his head processing what he was hearing and said as meekly as he could manage, “I am a mere gatekeeper. My job is to protect this college. How will I know what happened elsewhere?”

“Who is in there?” asked the man with a scowl, annoyed at Abdul’s ignorance.

“Teachers and staff of this college.”

The man narrowed his eyes. “Are there any Hindus here?”

Abdul’s eyes opened wide. “What will a Hindu teacher do in a Muslim college? All are our own community people here.”

“That is not what we hear. We have information that half of the teachers are Hindu here.”

“In the beginning, the college tried to employ a few Hindu teachers, but you know how that can turn into a problem, so now everyone here belongs to our community.”

The man tipped his head. “Let us in.” He marched inside without waiting.

He saw Farooq Ali waiting at the entrance of the hall. “Salaam Wallehqum.”

“Wallehqum Salaam, what is this about?”

“A riot has broken out in the city—we are making sure everyone is safe in the neighborhood. My name is Javed. I and my friends are checking the houses to make sure everyone is safe.”

“That is very kind of you, but are you from this neighborhood? I have not seen you here before.”

“I… I live in the slums nearby.” He coughed uncomfortably. “We heard that Hindus teach in your college.”

Nusrat came forward. “Is there a problem with that? The college service commission makes these decisions, not us.”

“Madam, I understand… but you have to also understand us. We want this neighborhood safe and secure. How can that be if there are Hindus here?”

“There are no Hindus here,” said Anisah calmly. She thought it a bad idea beating around the bush with these men.

Javed moved his eyes to Anisah trying to decide if he should trust her.

“Did I interrupt a celebration?”

Farooq Ali cleared his throat with a quick cough. “Today is the college foundation day so we arranged a dinner, a humble daawat.”

“The city is burning, and you are attending a daawat?”

“We had no clue what was happening outside, otherwise how could 85

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

we be celebrating at this hour…anyway most of the biryani boxes are untouched and I think we have all just lost our appetite after hearing about the attack,” said Anisah, trying to placate Javed when one of his companions walked up to the table and started opening the food boxes one by one.

“What kind of biryani is this?”

“It's Nizam’s beef biryani,” said Nusrat hurriedly. She was glad that Anisah had the good sense of hiding the mutton biryani boxes in the storeroom.

Javed’s companion shook his head incredulously. “You have lost your appetite, yet folks from the slums would kill for some of this.”

Javed put down the hideous rag wrapped chopper on the table to join his companion in opening the boxes, their eyes appreciative of what they were seeing.

“Take the boxes, please. No one will be able to eat here anyway,” said Farooq Ali. “That is not the point!” said Javed narrowing his eyes, lethality bouncing back into his voice.

“I have a niggling doubt that you are hiding Hindus,” he said lifting the chopper in his hands.

Farooq Ali looked him in the eye with a serenity that could come only from someone of his age. “These are turbulent times, ushering in a wave of mistrust. It is natural to feel suspicious.”

Javed blinked, pondering for a brief second about what he had heard and swept his eyes around the hall, scrutinizing every face with hawk-like precision. His eyes settled on a downcast face standing at the back.

“Madam, you don’t seem to be interested in what is going on here,” he said to Laboni, whose eyes flew up at him, blood draining from her already pale face.

“I am not feeling too well,” she replied in a feeble voice.

Javed observed her pale face carefully.

“Have this biryani madam, you will feel better. The Nizam Palace spices cure the best of colds, my mother says. Not that we get to eat it often. Ammi would love some…,” Javed drew in a sharp breath to stop himself from babbling further.

His eyes focused on Laboni again. “Sit down over here madam, eat this biryani.”

Anisah looked at Laboni, panic filling up her insides. “She is not feeling well, she told you. Please don’t make her eat forcefully.”

Javed ignored Anisah and continued staring at Laboni.

“What is your name madam?”

“That is enough. Please stop harassing our teachers!” said Farooq Ali. Javed’s face grew dark with emotions.

“I am just asking her name, why would that enrage you so much, 86

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

unless you all have something to hide.”

Nusrat, who was quiet all this time, started in an even voice, “It is sad that you have to verify again and again that there are no Hindus here. I am the Principal of this college and I am requesting you to leave my teachers alone. They are all respectable people.”

Javed turned to lock his eyes with Nusrat in a long staring contest while the rest of the people in the room held their breath.

Laboni broke the stalemate, stepping towards Javed decisively.

“My name is Laila Bano and this is Anisah Iqbal.” She pointed towards Anisah.

“Madam, tell me...am I asking for too much? What is the problem? Please, eat the biryani…” There was a strange eagerness in his voice as if he needed some kind of confirmation urgently.

“How can I eat alone? Everyone is hungry in this room in spite of what we are telling each other. Let us all eat together.” She opened a few biryani boxes, passed one to Javed and another to his companion.

She took in a spoon full and started chewing slowly. Javed and his companion observed her for a few seconds and started eating from their boxes. They tried not to hurry too much, but they almost finished their share before others could.

Laboni exhumed a calm grace as she asked politely, “For how long do you think the trouble will continue outside? We have elderly staff members here. I wish they all reach home safely.”

Javed replied, his mouth full of biryani, “Don’t worry, we are just passing by. This neighborhood looks respectable and trouble-free. We will be heading back now.”

“Please take a few boxes with you. We have plenty here,” said Laboni.

Javed wiped his mouth with his hand and grinned. “My friends would really appreciate that. Thank you, shukhriya.” * Javed and his companion left with a few Biryani boxes soon after, assuring them that there will be no more trouble in the area.

As Abdul closed the door behind them, Anisah walked up to Laboni, tears rolling down her face. Laboni looked oddly unruffled as she gave Anisah an assuring smile. Nusrat and the other teachers gathered around her and held each other’s hands wordlessly. Farooq Ali sat looking at the teachers as they silently built bridges between each other. Preaching can go some distance but nothing teaches a person better than real life situations demanding extraordinary actions. Sacrificing one’s way of thinking for the collective good is the biggest triumph of integrity and unity, thought Farooq Ali and sighed, for he could finally see a ray of optimism amidst the black clouds of bleakness and ignorance.

87

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Poetry|Anthony Wade Always Remember Many make pilgrimage to the Norman towns that were engulfed in the violence that arrived along their sandy shores on the sixth June nineteen forty-four, and many take away untold varieties of mementoes exhorting, 'Lest We Forget’.

On a nondescript wall opposite the Hotel du Normandie in one such town are painted two young girls, sisters perhaps, migrant girls possibly, who stand in a field of blood-red poppies, and the elder stretches up to write, “PLEASE NO MORE WAR", while below the younger has written “LOVE" and filled in the “O" with a symbol for disarmament.

Almost unnoticed on an obscured corner behind the museum a lone piece of artillery points up into the sky as though still alert even after so many years of peace, as though asserting what those young girls already know, even from their school yard, that violence is ever present but those most ready to be violent are least likely to be threatened.

88

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

89

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

The Vanities Of Men I climbed among the names and traced men deeply incised into the many surfaces of Lutyens’ lauded Monument at Thiepval to the Missing, more than seventy-three thousand lost with no trace, husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, sunk in liquid mud-filled shell holes, scattered to the winds by high explosive, or buried without ceremony in the stinking soil of Flanders, their graves lost or forgotten.

It looms large against the plain falling away behind like an opened window promising a brighter future, and claims to have been erected to honour their glorious fight for freedom, won at last by repetitively securing small measures of liquid mud populated by rats and seeded with fragments of comrades during the long, long months when the generals’ resolve never weakened.

Now I see in its triumphalism an arrogant assumption that the old order was secured and the surviving empires could continue to plunder for the greed of the already rich, untrammelled by new territorial ambitions, echoing in stone the politician’s claim that this was the war to end all wars, with no accounting done for the lost lives of other, lesser men.

The Loneliness Dying is a lonely place, A perfectly singular experience.

Will there be any song That can reach my heart?

There will be no song, nor any silence, That can reach my heart.

90

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Essay|Hanif Kureishi We Are The Pollutants

T

he recent furore over Penguin’s wise and brave decision to ‘reflect the diversity of British society’ in its publishing and hiring output seems to have awoken the usual knuckle-dragging, semi-blind suspects with their endlessly repeated terrors and fears. They appear to believe that what is called ‘diversity’ or ‘positive discrimination’ will lead to a dilution of their culture. Their stupidity and the sound of their pathetic whining would be funny if it weren’t so tragic for Britain.

You might even want to call it a form of self-loathing; it is certainly unpatriotic and lacking in generosity.

The industries I’ve worked in for most of my life – film, TV, theatre, publishing – have all been more or less entirely dominated by white Oxbridge men, and they still mostly are. These men and their lackeys have been the beneficiaries of positive discrimination, to say the least, for centuries. The world has always been theirs, and they now believe they own it.

Some of us have been fortunate enough to force a way through the maze and make a living as artists. It was a difficult and often humiliating trip, I can tell you. There was much patronization and many insults on the way, and they are still going on.

We are still expected to be grateful, though those in charge – never having had to fight for anything – have always been the lucky ones. And these lucky ones, with their implicit privilege, wealth and power – indeed, so much of it they don’t even see it – are beginning to intuit that their day is done. Before, with their sense of superiority and lofty arrogance, they could intimidate everyone around them. No more.

It was never not a struggle to become an artist, with racism, prejudice and assumption all around, visible and invisible. I remember standing in a room with Salman Rushdie in the early 90s just after The Buddha of Suburbia was published, discussing how it could be that we were the only people of colour there; indeed, the only people of colour in most of the rooms when it came to books. And that was the case with all of the culture industries. The first TV producer I ever met asked me why my characters had to be Asian. “If they were white we’d make this,” he said to me.

It is not coincidental that at this Brexit moment with its xenophobic, oafish and narrow perspective, that the ruling class and its gate-keepers fear a multitude of democratic voices from elsewhere and wish to keep us silent. They can’t wait to tell us how undeserving of being heard we really are.

But they should remember this: they might have tried to shut the 91

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

door on Europe, refugees and people of colour, but it will be impossible for them to shut the door on British innovation. We are very insistent, noisy and talented.

When I was invited to join Faber in 1984, the fiction editor was Robert McCrum. He was excitable then, and so was I. I couldn’t wait to be on his list of writers since he was publishing Kazuo Ishiguro, Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky, Peter Carey, Mario Vargas Llosa, Caryl Phillips, Paul Auster, Lorrie Moore, Danilo Kis, Marilynne Robinson and Vikram Seth. Not long before Salman Rushdie had won the Booker prize for Midnight’s Children and that masterpiece, with its echos of Gunter Grass and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, suddenly seemed like a great opportunity. The world was coming in; what had been a narrow and sterile place was opening up. These books were successful; readers discovered that they wanted them, and something similar can happen to Penguin This is not a gesture that can be made only once. It has to be repeated over and over again. British culture – which is the single reason for wanting to live in this country - has always thrived on rebellion, cussedness and non-conformity. From pop to punk, from Vivienne Westwood, Damien Hirst, Zadie Smith and Kate Tempest; from Alexander McQueen to Oscar-winning movie maker Steve McQueen, it has been the voices of the young and excluded that have made British culture alive and admired. It is widely acknowledged that there is no other country in Europe with the cultural capital of Britain, and no more exciting place for artists to live. This is where art and commerce meet. These artists’ work sells all over the world.

The British creativity I grew up with - in pop, fashion, poetry, the visual arts and the novel – has almost always come from outside the mainstream, from clubs, gay sub-cultures, the working class and from the street. Many of the instigators might have been white, but they were not from the middle-class, a class that lacks, in my experience, the imagination, fearlessness and talent to be truly subversive.

The truth is, the conservative fear of other voices is not due to the anxiety that artists from outside the mainstream will be untalented, filling up galleries and bookshops with sludge, but that they will be outstanding and brilliant. The conservatives will have to swallow the fact that despite the success of British artists, real talent has been neglected and discouraged by those who dominate the culture, deliberately keeping schools, the media, universities and the cultural world closed to interesting people.

It is good news that the master race is becoming anxious about who they might have to hear from. At this terrible Brexit moment with its retreat into panic and nationalism, and with the same thing happening across Europe, it is time for all artists to speak up, and particularly those whose voices have been neglected.

No one knows what a more democratic and inclusive culture would 92

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

be like. It is fatuously omniscient to assume it would be worse than what we already have. The attempt of reactionaries to shut people down shows both fear and stupidity: but it’s too late. You will be hearing from us.

(Published earlier in The Guardian and in What Happened: Stories and Essays, Faber&Faber: London, 2019, and reproduced here with the author’s permission) 93

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Short Fiction|Stephen John Walker Rakahanga

A

rain squall worked its way around the north side of the island but didn’t come ashore. Even if it had, the patrons at the outdoor bar wouldn’t have been disturbed.

Skipper Jake’s, the pre-eminent watering hole in the Cook Islands, sat at the end of a pier along the north edge of Avarua overlooking a small anchorage. Second only to Quinn’s Bar in Papeete, this was the place in Polynesia to rub elbows with rogues and rascals, vahines and wanderers, ex-pats and pirates, scribblers and scoundrels. Not internationally known, and well off major trade and tourist routes, Skipper Jake’s was in a South Pacific backwater—its main attraction to those seeking a less-public life.

Week’s end. The usual assembly—Maori, European, and mixed blood—stood two deep at the open-well bar on the lower level. A tin roof protected the locals and punters from the occasional rain shower. Wooden tables with palm frond umbrellas scattered around the pier gave seating for those wanting to order fresh fish and chips or sandwiches from the kitchen’s short order menu.

Up a flight of steps at the long bar in the restaurant level, owner Jake Cartwright held court as he did every Friday afternoon before the dining room opened to the public. Two regulars sat at that bar: Reggie Pobjoy and Malfrey Pinchot-Wiggins. Known as “Wiggie,” Malfrey was a middle-aged Brit who claimed to be an ex-para. He worked odd jobs around the islands and sometimes hired on as a cook—sous-chef, he called it—on passing freighters.

Reggie enjoyed his first Suva beer of the day while he watched Jake sort the lunch receipts. He lit a cigarette and turned on the bar stool to look out to sea. At high tide, ocean rollers broke on the island’s barrier reef sending up sheets of white foam.

“You still serious about going back to France?” Jake said, not looking up from the pieces of paper scattered on the bar.

“Yes, mate. It’s something I need to do. Things to sort out. Several reasons.”

“Oh, yeah. Name two good ones.”

“I want to try’n find the folks who helped me in ’41. I want to see if I can find the safe house in Paris where I was hid. And, maybe—just maybe—who fingered me to the Gestapo. That enough, mate? We’ve had this discussion before.”

“Waste of time. The Gestapo? It’s been over twenty years. You think the Frogs are going to help you do in one of their own after all this time? Didn’t they send a whole lot of French Jews—their neighbors and such—to the death camps?”

94

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Jake raised his head from the paperwork and looked to the left.

Turning back to Reggie, he lowered his voice. “Speaking of Frogs.” He pointed with his pencil toward two white men—one in a linen suit, the other in a police uniform—who stood at the lower level bar talking to one of the female bartenders.

“That must be the French copper from Papeete who’s been snooping around asking lots of questions. Bobbie’s giving him the tour.

Thought they might show up here sooner or later.”

“Not much gets by you on Rarotonga, does it, Jake?” Malfrey said.

Jake frowned and nodded to the Maori bartender. “Have another drink, Wiggie. On the house. And, old son, move off a bit and try to keep it shut while the coppers are about. Right, mate?”

Malfrey, with a hangdog expression, slipped down the bar away from Jake and Reggie. The bartender placed a double scotch in front of him.

The two white men walked up the steps to the restaurant level.

Robert “Bobbie” Peel, a New Zealander and the Cook Islands’ new assistant commissioner of police, made the introductions.

“Evening, Reggie. Jake.” The policeman nodded toward Malfrey.

“And Wiggie, of course. How are you?” Peel removed his hat; the visitor did the same.

“Here’s someone I’d like you to meet,” Peel said. He turned to the man in the white linen suit. “Monsieur DeRemer, this is Monsieur Pobjoy, or should I say Captain Pobjoy. And, of course, Monsieur Cartwright, the proprietor of this fine establishment.”

The newcomer shook hands with Jake and Reggie. Jake pushed his paperwork aside.

“Right. What’s your poison, mates?”

“One of your fine single malts would be good,” Peel said.

“A chilled glass of Chablis, if available,” DeRemer said, “or a rum with cola over ice.”

“Monsieur DeRemer is an inspector—detective—with the French gendarmerie on Papeete,” Peel said. “He’s looking for a man who killed a police officer. I told him you know most of the white men in the Cooks.”

The bartender placed the drinks on the bar. DeRemer sampled the Chablis. “This is quite good, Monsieur Cartwright. Not French?”

“No. Australian, sorry to say.”

Malfrey slid off his bar stool and walked toward the gents’.

“I have a photo,” DeRemer said. “I would appreciate it very much if you could give it a moment of your attention.”

The French policeman took a small manila envelope from the inside pocket of his coat and slipped out a photograph. He laid it on the bar. Reggie picked it up. The face in the photo was of a man— maybe thirty—with longish dark hair, wearing a floppy hat. He was sitting at a bar. There was a surprised, maybe even frightened, look in 95

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

his eyes. Reggie recognized him. He handed the photo to Jake and winked at the two policemen. “That’s you, isn’t it, mate?”

“Nah. Too good looking,” Jake said. “When did this all take place— the murder, I mean?”

“Seven years ago, in May, 1957.”

Reggie took the photo back and held it at arm’s length. “Goin’ to need specs soon. Spooky lookin’ fella. Who’d he kill?”

“A police sergeant and former Foreign Legion officer. Heinrich Vater. A very sordid affair, I’m afraid. All over a prostitute. But to be entirely honest, his death was no great loss to France.” DeRemer took a drink from his glass, and then looked out towards the reef. “This is an exceptionally beautiful venue.” He turned back to bar.

“Vater was former German Army, probably Nazi and SS. He served in Indochina and Algeria with the Legion. From my interviews, I have concluded that he was genuinely hated by everyone who knew him.

He enjoyed beating up prostitutes, but no charges were ever made against him. My suspect, Jean DeGroote, apparently took exception to this anti-social behavior and stuck a knife in Vater’s chest. DeGroote may have a Swiss passport, but we have reason to believe it is a forgery. And he may also be a deserter from the Legion.”

“Why do you think he’s here, in the Cooks?” Reggie handed the photo to the French detective. “What’s his real name?”

“His real name? I’m afraid I have no idea. After the debacle in Indochina, many legionnaires took steps to avoid a return to France.

Our sources in Saigon reported that a legionnaire named Émile Volantes purchased a false Swiss passport in the name of Jean-Philippe DeGroote. But the name DeGroote, or Volantes for that matter, may not be accurate. There are stories about legionnaires who exchanged identity tags with dead comrades. This entire episode is obscured by the aftermath of defeat and the fog of war. And our hurried exit from the colony seven years ago.” DeRemer took a sip of wine. “When I was on Nouméa last week showing this photo to others, I interviewed a lascar seaman who said he was crew on a tramp out of Papeete that rescued a white man of this description adrift east of Tongareva— Penrhyn Island you call it. He left the ship here on Rarotonga.”

DeRemer replaced the photo in his wallet.

“What was the name? One of my ships? A tramp?” Reggie stood back from the bar.

“No, Reggie,” Peel said raising his hands. “Not one of yours. No one would ever think of calling your vessels tramps.”

“My apologies, Captain Pobjoy,” DeRemer said, “The vessel in question was the Dorado. Not one of yours.”

“Sorry, Monsieur DeRemer, I take special pride in my little flotilla.

And no one has ever referred to any of them as a tramp.” Reggie sat back on his stool. “Jake, let’s have another round here for our new friend.”

96

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Jake nodded toward the bartender, who brought the same again.

Malfrey, who’d returned to his stool, leaned forward with a hopeful look on his face. Jake ignored him.

“There’s a lot of white driftwood floating ’round the islands,” Reggie said, “Don’t know them all. Could send a description of that fella out to my stations. It’d be some weeks before you hear from most of them, if at all. How long are you staying on Raro, Monsieur DeRemer?”

“This is actually my—How do you say it?—swan song, Captain Pobjoy. I return to France in a few weeks to begin my retirement. I am sure my superiors in Papeete sent me on this journey through the islands as a farewell gift. I hold no false hopes of finding this man, but the opportunity to tour le beau paradis is quite satisfactory.”

“Where in France? I’m off to Paris myself in a month or so.”

“Très bon. Paris is my home. How long will you be there, Captain Pobjoy?”

“Don’t know for sure. Some weeks. How do you feel about collaborators, Monsieur DeRemer? Wait a minute. I can’t keep calling you ‘Monsieur.’ What’s your given name? I’m Reggie.” He extended his hand again.

The French detective smiled and grasped Reggie’s hand, “Theatris, but my friends call me Theo.”

“Monsieur DeRemer, you’ll have to excuse Captain Pobjoy. Some folks tend to become somewhat informal after living in the islands for many years.”

“No need to be a stuffed shirt all the time, Bobbie.” Reggie said.

“Collaborators, Theo. What do think about them?”

“May I ask why the interest, Cap . . . Reggie?”

Jake reached across the bar and placed a hand on Reggie’s shoulder. “I can best answer that, Monsieur Theo. My mate doesn’t like to talk about his war experiences. He was shot down over France in 1941, helped by the underground as far as Paris, and then got picked up by the Gestapo. Spent over three years in a Stalag.”

“I am most sorry to hear that,” DeRemer said. “I also was a guest of the Germans for a short time. Fortunately, I was able to escape and join the Free French Forces in North Africa. Why do you ask about collaborateurs—collaborators?”

“I’ve always had the feeling that someone must’ve fingered me to the Gestapo. I’ve no proof that’s what happened, but there was a lot of discussion about it in the Stalag. There was some talk, rumors mostly, of a deserter, an English soldier gone bad, who was responsible for turning in Allied airmen to the Germans. Ever hear the name Paul or Harry Cole?”

“No. The name is not familiar to me.” He took a notebook from the inside pocket of his coat and wrote down the name. He turned the page in his notebook, wrote again, tore out the page and handed it to Reggie. “This is my address in Paris. Please contact me when you 97

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

arrive, Reggie. Perhaps I may be of some assistance. At the very least, I would be pleased to show you some of the sights of my beautiful city.” * The two policemen finished their drinks and left the bar. Reggie watched them walk along the pier toward the town center, and then turned on his bar stool and looked out to sea. He lit a cigarette.

“That’s your man on Rakahanga, isn’t it?” Jake said. “One of the lotus-eaters, isn’t he? What’re you going to do?”

“Not sure, mate. Must have a chat with DeGroote or whatever his real name is, during my final island visit.”

“You really selling out to those fellas from Wellington?”

“Tweed and Black? Sure. Why not? They’ve made a good offer.

Maybe I’ll open a pub here on Raro. Could you handle the competition, mate?”

“What competition? You’d drink up all the profits. Speaking of profits, it’s your go at buying a round, Wiggie.” * Just past noon, a stiff northwest breeze flung curtains of white foam over the atoll’s barrier reef. After its four-hour journey from Manihiki, the Southern Cross Trading Company’s flagship, M/V Suwarrow, dropped anchor in deep water outside the entrance to Rakahanga’s lagoon. Reggie Pobjoy stood on the bridge sipping tea from a white porcelain mug. Throughout his final tour of the islands in the Northern Group, he’d thought long and hard about how to deal with this situation. What if Émile’s story—if that’s his real name— sounds reasonable? How can killing a copper be reasonable? Or acceptable?

Reggie had dealt with all sorts during his almost twenty years in the islands and before, but never with someone who’d killed a policeman. After his war experiences and the years spent building the company, he thought he was a pretty good judge of men. JeanPhilippe—or Émile—had proved to be intelligent, honest, and a dedicated employee. He didn’t seem like someone who would kill for no reason. Theo did say the gendarme was probably an ex-Nazi.

Maybe there’s something to that. Killing an ex-Nazi is not a bad thing.

But what’s the best way to sort this out?

“James, hand me the binos, ´inē. Please.”

James Marsted, Reggie’s nephew, handed him the binoculars.

“Meitaki ma´ata. Thank you.” Through the surf spray Reggie saw the masts of a yacht anchored in the lagoon opposite his station. * 98

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

The first shallow-draft lighter from the Suwarrow shot through the narrow gap in the barrier reef and motored to shore. A mob of naked children splashed around it anxious to see who and what treasures had arrived. Several adult islanders waded out, grabbed the sides of the boat and pulled its bow up onto the crushed coral beach. Homecoming Rakahangans in the lighter waved and shouted to the friends and relatives who crowded the beach. The entire population of the atoll— only about 150—were there for the arrival of the Suwarrow.

With jandals in his left hand, Reggie rose from the stern seat, placed his other hand on the gunwale and swung over the side into knee-deep water. Small fish nibbled at his legs as he waded ashore.

Manihiki had sent word about his visit. Many old friends greeted him.

Reggie’s neck was soon festooned with shell and flower leis, his nose and forehead almost rubbed raw. Toa, the island’s ariki, and former Southern Cross Shipping Company employee, said a pig was already in a pit on hot stones and there would be a himené that evening in his honor. Reggie knew then he couldn’t leave until the next day.

His eyes searched the crowd. The man he looked for, his station manager, emerged from the line of coconut palms above the beach. He waved and walked down to meet his boss. They shook hands.

“Kia orāna and welcome back to Rakahanga, Monsieur Reggie.

Très bon to see you again.”

Reggie placed a hand on the man’s arm and led him away from the crowd.

“Kia orāna and g’day to you, Jean-Philippe. Or should I say . . . Émile?”

The trader stood silent for a moment facing his boss, and then looked past Reggie toward the ship.

“What has happened? How did you—?”

Reggie sensed fear in his trader’s voice. He held up a hand and nodded to the right. The island’s Resident Agent, a New Zealander who Reggie didn’t know well, came toward them along the beach.

“Let’s get the goods up to the store, and then we can talk in private.” Reggie squeezed Émile’s arm. He turned to greet the official. Émile walked away to supervise the unloading of the station’s cargo.

“Good day, sir.” The government man waved his hat in greeting.

“It’s Captain Pobjoy, isn’t it? I’m Balmforth. Peter Balmforth, the Resident. We met briefly on Raro last year. What brings you out our way?”

“Kia orāna. Just Reggie, please.” They shook hands. “Doin’ a visit to the islands to have a word with my traders.” Won’t mention about selling the company, unless he asks.

Balmforth turned and looked after Émile. “Last visit is it? Heard you’re selling out. Have you then? Who’re the new owners?”

How’d he know that? “An outfit out of Wellington, Tweed and Black.”

99

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

The agent took a notebook out of his breast pocket and wrote down the names.

“Surprised Avarua hasn’t mentioned this detail, but they don’t keep me as well informed as I would like. But I do have my sources.

Can’t complain. I’m only here for another year.” He replaced the notebook in his pocket. “Hope Jean’ll be staying on. He certainly has some interesting stories to tell, when you can get him to open up, that is. Keeps pretty much to himself most of the time.

“Well, Captain Pobjoy, stop by the office and bring me up to date on the gossip from Avarua. I’ll be traveling with you back to Manihiki.

Cheers.” With another wave of his hat, he strode off down the beach toward Nivano village Pompous twit, Reggie thought. If he wants any gossip, he’ll have to hunt me down. Not looking forward to the trip back to Manihiki with him. I’ll have to invent some problem to sort out in the ship’s engine room. * Reggie took his time strolling up the beach. Other Rakas came to him with greetings. By the time he reached the coco palms, his collar of leis almost came up to his chin. Entering the palm forest, he was pleased to see the well-swept crushed coral path leading to his store. The company’s trade store was typical colonial-style island construction: single-story, a rust-red tin roof, and a covered verandah on three sides. The building served not only as the store but the home for the trader and his family.

Everything around the building was as it should be: no debris— fallen fronds or coconut husks—or other trash on his property. Jean, or is it Émile?—doesn’t matter—has been a treasure and will be a great loss to the company.

A crowd mingled outside when Reggie entered the trade store. Émile stood off to the side of the counter, hands at his sides, watching Reggie. He lit a cigarette; another still smoldered in an ashtray. Reggie went behind the makeshift bar and took a couple of Hinano beers from a propane-powered refrigerator. He motioned for Émile to follow him outside.

The two men walked out and stood in the shade of the palms.

Reggie handed his trader a beer.

“A French copper from Tahiti was on Raro three weeks ago looking for you. Said you killed a chap over at Papeete some years ago, another copper. I’d like to hear your version of what happened.” Émile took a drink; his eyes narrowed. “Vater . . . Heinrich Vater.

The man was, as you English say, a swine . . . a pig. Told everyone he was at Dien Bien Phu, but was really in hospital in Saigon with . . . how you say? . . . the syphilis.” He took another drink. “Oui. C’est vrai.

100

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Yes, I killed him. And would do it again. But it was in self-defense. He had a pistol and I had only my knife. It was either him or me. And that’s God’s truth, Monsieur Reggie.”

“Why the fight? Why’d you kill him? Why’d you sky off?”

“He had beaten a friend, a prostitute, and was going to rape her.

I heard her screams and kicked open the door to her room. He pulled out his gun, but I was quicker with my knife.” He took another drink.

“Why did I run away? Who’d believe me? There were no witnesses.

My friend, who he’d beaten, was unconscious when I knifed him. And he was a flic, a copper, as you say.”

“Well, mate, that Frenchman’s been passing your photograph and description around from Tahiti to New Caledonia. Someone in Nouméa remembered you being put ashore on Raro awhile back. A friend of mine recognized you straight off. And that chap Balmforth . . . you’ve made an impression on him. He’ll find out sooner or later.”

Reggie placed his hands on Émile’s shoulders. “Not to worry. My friend’s not going to say anything, but it might be a good idea for you to think about movin’ on.” Reggie turned and pointed out to the lagoon. “Where’s that yacht bound for?” A ketch flying an American flag rode at anchor inside the reef.

“Samoa, I think. Maybe Fiji.” Émile’s thoughts jumped back to the night he’d told Bobbie that someday he may have to leave the island.

He’d told her that he’d done an evil thing and men may come looking for him, that men might come to take him away. She said she could never leave the island and would wait for him to return.

“Bobby and the children? I can’t take them with me.”

“No worries there, mate. Your kin have unlimited credit as long as we own the station. And I will speak to Toa. They will never want for anything. And you can send for them later if you want.”

“But what about the store?”

“Got that all sorted. Always like to plan ahead. Brought my nephew, James, with me. He’s worked for us on Raro for a couple of years and been itchin’ to try his hand on one of the islands anyway.

You know ’im. He’ll stay on until the new owners make their decision to keep the store open or not.” Reggie handed Émile a thick envelope.

“What’s this?” Émile opened the envelope and looked at the American $100 bills.

“Your wages. And a bit extra to see you through.” Émile counted the money in the envelope. Five thousand dollars.

“Why? Why me? Why now? This is too much. I’m a fugitive, and you’re giving me this? Why?” “You’ve done a smashing good job here. You’re honest and responsible. And you’re in trouble. Everyone should get a second chance. Also, you’re French . . . don’t try to deny it.” Reggie waved a hand, dismissing any argument. “Your people helped me during the war. And you killed a Nazi.” Reggie drank from his bottle. “I’d like very 101

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

much to hide you out here on the stations, but independence for the Cooks is coming soon, and we old colonials may not have the influence we once had. It’s probably best for you to move on.”

“Pardon, Monsieur Reggie, but I must have time to think about this.”

“Take your time, mate. We’ll deal with the punters.” Reggie nodded toward a young man who’d come ashore on the last lighter and waited at the edge of the palm grove until Reggie motioned for him to join them. “You remember James, don’t you?” The two men shook hands.

Reggie and James went into the store. Minor chaos reigned with the owner, an old friend, manning the counter—there were bargains galore. Émile walked out through the palm grove and sat on the bench.

It’s been almost four years since I had this bench placed here so I could watch the sunsets over the lagoon. Over the lagoon of my island paradise. Now it is all finished. Whose fault? Why won’t my past go away? One name, one man—Carlo Pioletti. He ruined my life.

Because of him I joined the Legion, went to war, and had to kill Vater.

He’s responsible for Musette’s and Annick’s murders. And now, he’s a wealthy businessman, the pride of Paris. Perhaps, it’s time to settle the score, and then return after independence. It might be easier to slip into the island life with another new identity. Émile walked up onto verandah and waited for Reggie to join him.

“I accept your offer with many thanks and many regrets. My first concern is for my family, but your promise is most reassuring. I know you to be an honorable man. Forever in your debt I am, Monsieur Reggie. And I will return someday.”

“I’m very glad to hear that . . . Émile. May I call you Émile?” The trader nodded. “When you return, if I can be of any help, you know where I live on Raro. Or you can always leave word at Skipper Jake’s.”

Reggie lit a cigarette. He offered one to Émile. “I’m leaving the islands myself for a while. Don’t know when I’ll return.”

“The word is you’re going to France. Why is that?”

The island telegraph still works. “Unfinished business. Do you know Paris?”

“Oui, bien sûr. Of course. I lived there for many years,” “I don’t recall you talking about that.”

“Did you ask?”

“Right you are. I understand. You thinkin’ about going back?

That’d be a bit dangerous, wouldn’t it? Does the reach of the Polynesie Française gendarmerie extend to Paris?”

“Perhaps. Probably not. And it’s been many years. At the moment, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“By the way, who are you? What is your real name?” Émile stood at attention. “Captain Pobjoy, my name is Émile Patrice Plude.” He saluted.

102

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

* The next morning the sea was calm. Many Rakahangans had paddled or swam out to the exposed reef to wave farewell. The lighters ferried back and forth through the gap taking copra and passengers to the ship. Reggie sat in the stern of the last lighter—he delayed his departure until Balmforth had gone aboard the Suwarrow—and saw Émile carried out to the American yacht in a small outrigger canoe. He wondered if he’d done the right thing. Never would he’ve turned Émile over to the authorities. His conscience was clear on that. He hoped that Émile would someday walk into the bar at Skipper Jake’s. * Phil Hope, the owner of the American ketch Tailor Made, helped the island trader up over the side of the yacht.

“Howdy, Jean. What brings you out here? Care for a beer?” He didn’t wait for an answer but turned to his wife, “Hey, sweet thing, bring our guest a cold one, will ya? That was quite a bash last night wasn’t it? Didn’t know anything about it until a young man, James I think his name was, came out and invited us all. That Reggie guy must be some big shot, right? Too bad we had to leave the party early, but we’re heading out today. Surprised not to see you and the missus in the crowd.”

“I wanted to spend the night with my family.” I can’t tell him that we sat on the bench until dawn. Our baby girl slept in Bobby’s lap, and the boy on the sand by our feet—the last sunset together.

Judy, Phil’s wife, and her sister Betty were sunbathing topless on the foredeck. She stood, waved at Émile, and then bent down to retrieve her bikini top from the deck. With a playful smirk, she adjusted it over her large breasts and went below. Betty rolled over onto her back.

“Didn’t know I’d married such an exhibitionist,” Phil said. “It must be the tropics that does this to American women. Whatcha think, Jean? You’re Swiss, a European. You know about these things.” Émile didn’t answer. Phil turned around and was surprised to see the Rakahanga man down in the dugout lift up a large canvas bag.

“What’s this? Bon voyage presents?”

“Lost my position. Sacked.”

“Sacked? What do you mean sacked?” The American looked confused. Judy came back up into the cockpit and handed cold beers to the two men. She held another for the islander, but he was already heading back across the lagoon. She shrugged her shoulders and took a drink from the bottle.

“Somebody call me?” Greg Sacker, Betty’s husband, came up into the cockpit. “Thought I heard my name used in vain.” He extended his 103

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

hand. “Hey, Jean. What’s up, buddy? Come to say good-bye?”

“I’ve been fired, as you say in America, and have to go somewhere.” Émile pointed to the ship outside the reef. “The man who I worked for has sold the store to others. They are changing everyone.

The ship is going back to Raro, but I’d prefer to leave the Cooks, so I hoped ….”

“Say no more, amigo,” Phil raised his hands. “Or mon ami, as you would say. Sure, you can come with us. Right, Greg? You’ve been a great host while we were here. We’d enjoy returning the hospitality.

Hey, wait a minute. What about your family? Not coming along? It’d be a little tight, but we could manage, I think.”

“No. They’ll remain here until I’m able to find a new position.”

“Okay. We can drop you off in Pago Pago or Apia, if you like.

Actually, we’re planning to take a look at the Tokelau Islands before heading back to Hawaii. Ever been there?”

“Hawaii, no. The Tokelaus, are they French?”

“No. Kiwi, like the Cooks, but no one ever goes there.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“A cold beer would taste real good right about now.” Betty Sacker sat up, topless, on the foredeck. “Or do I have to get it myself?” Judy threw back the last of the other bottle and said, “I’ll get you one, Sis, and I can use another.” Betty returned, went along the starboard side with two beers, and handed one to her sister. She sat on the cabin roof and removed her bikini top. Émile had been exposed to multitudes of native breasts for years, but this display of white, albeit very tan, women’s breasts stirred emotions that had become, perhaps, jaded by the daily exposure of dark brown flesh. Maybe it was the idea that these breasts were forbidden fruit. They belonged to others, not available to him.

“Okay, girls, fun in the sun’s over,” Hope said. “You two are on the anchor. Time to get underway. Jean, store your gear below. We’ll sort things out later. I want to clear the reef before the tide turns.”

The Suwarrow had raised its anchor and was steaming south on its return trip to Manihiki when the Tailor Made motored through the gap. Émile stood at the stern shielding his eyes with his hand. He could make out Bobby and the children on the beach; Toa and James stood with them.

I must return. This is the life I want. I’ve never known such happiness. I hope to have the strength to deal with the future. My family will be well cared for in my absence, I know. Bobby, I will return. *

104

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Poetry|Gerard Sarnat Postcards From A Broad Paradise Lost, Regained, Lost Down the road from Orange County’s Disneyland cons on Tinseltown’s Skid Row where 10% of our U.S.homeless’re dying to inherit Eden Tent Village scarce modular pods scary odd-looking folk who called themselves Original People when I took care as their physician live inside manure plus pollutionspreading windstorm conditions.

Bhang for your buck, cannabinoids been used for millennia in India where preparations include charas (resin), ganja (flower) plus my fave bhang (seeds and leaves) milkshakes which I drank in Varanasi after procuring a sturdy dog leash an unaltered buddy toggled around moi’s waist to restrain this wasted self from dashing into streets or Ganges to pursue ineffable passions.

Anthropocene, humanity’s own geologic era, despite Spengleresque adumbrations, no pun intended indeed the die’s cast since that name itself carries some seeds of destruction because those simplest things become chronic, toxic problems -- like in our water supply or air despite their abundance.

Pretty Pulease Pulse From Fred Hoyle’s Steady State to Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj Searching for self, it makes my head Swim looking for your shadow In Suzyque’s big bang black-holed donut.

If only Wagner could score Lou Reed Logic, pipe Mozart’s music under our Earth Which sits on one giant turtle standing on An elephant who’s supported on God’s shoulders Throughout this universe’s infinity of hearses.]

105

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Not Plato’s Cave “People should be very free with sex, they should draw the line at goats.”

- Elton John Fresh from the drum roll of a dermatologist’s full body check no melanoma or Kaposi’s this year – I prowl airport trapezes, get funneled through lion-tamer hoops that CAT scan Hari Krishnas’ Kama Sutras - no bombs in my Tampax.

Landed ladylike, heroin-chic Marie hugs me unspecially, juggles conflicting advisory warnings, ponies up in a deep voice to my hubby Richard, “You can touch, but let’s not schmooze.”

Ménage spent Xmas wired in a cotton candy Santa Fe adobe (turned out to be our menagerie’s last), barricaded in the big top except when cabin-fever drove Snow White to cross-country ski for corn dogs and hornier provisions.

Down circus alleys, we mounted Dick’s Clydesdale. More given to scratching his balls than blinkering, three lady barkers jockeyed his contortionist four-ring chimera.

‘Tween snorts and syringes, roller derby queens cycled tightropes; no net, cannons still smoking, fatigue stiffened all puckers.

Tuckered troupe done with the exstasis of Calliope’s wheel, we relaxed in bed voyeuring New Year’s Day Rose Parade suckers.

TV on mute, steel-tipped boots dig in to the Socrates Radio Network.

Bruises chained to a wall, caving to the sideshow of onanist cravings, fire-eating sword-swallowers hurtle our shadowy knife-throwing Barnum & Bailey strongman.

106

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

summer glaciers in Pakistan drop drip droppity drop drippity drip, bored writer’s block waterboard torture express making CIA words dance a cabal of salty turbaned suburban Taliban extract amygdalae from poppy field cuttings to turn me into pretzel seed while some first-class Afghan carpet flies Kabul’s best bull shit artists, who prep on The Art of the Deal, into Qatar which – pots calling the kettle black – Egypt, Saudi Arabia & three other Gulf states cut diplomatic relations because of “extremism.”

107

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Short Fiction|Steve Wade A Bird for Whom the Skies Were Made

T

he eagle and the owl, both solitary birds by instinct and by tradition, encountered each other twice each day: in early morning when night-time drifted off towards sleep, and late evening when daylight slipped away as night-time roused from his slumber.

The two had much in common: each a predator, and with no natural enemies, they formed a friendship of sorts.

Pleasantries they exchanged about hunting methods, and what mammals and birds were plentiful. And though their meetings were brief, with spring now on the way, they spoke too about their plans to hunt down a mate and raise a brood. They would then whistle and hoot their good mornings or good nights, one no longer able to fight the call of sleep, the other - every cell in his body firing to take to the air and tear a flyer from the sky, or home in on a runner and reach it before the creature went to ground.

One particular topic, however, which lessened the pull of sleep and eased the urge to hunt, was why the other chose his particular time to be about when he did.

For the eagle, the daylight allowed him to see for miles. He could telescope in on a rabbit or hare, climb higher into the sky, and then put his own body between the sun and the mammal’s vision. With the animal now blinded by the sun, the eagle became invisible to the rabbit or hare. Within seconds the creature was in his talons taking its first and final flight.

The owl’s retort was philosophical. Better to stay safe and hidden behind the cloak of darkness. And why expend so much energy under the burning sun? The forests were abundant with squirrels and rats.

These creatures, along with quail and pheasants, became excited at dawn and dusk. They forgot their vulnerability. Became easy prey. So a quick meal left the owl with all the night to perch on a rocky outcrop on a cliff or sit silently, concealed in the middle branches of a tall conifer tree. With no need to hunt till his appetite returned, he was free to watch and think.

The eagle didn’t get it. All birds feared them both, and no fourlegged runner had them on his diet. So why waste the waking hours thinking? Apart from honing your hunting skills, or seeking out a mate, the skies were there to display to all the animals and birds your majesty and beauty in flight. To demonstrate his point, the eagle then crouched, unfurled its great wings and leapt skyward.

“Weeeo-hyo-hyo-hyo,” the eagle yelped as he glided along a mountain face as he cut through the valley like a bird for whom the skies were made.

108

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

“Kveck,” the owl called after the eagle as a warning. But, deciding his pitch was too high, too likely to draw unwanted attention, he twisted his head behind him to his left and quickly to his right. “Boohu,” he added in his more-subtle, deep-base delivery. Then he too took to the air, though on silent wings, and followed a shadow-filled route home to his tree-hollow.

Not long into a dream crowded with dancing squirrels and brightly coloured pheasants singing at dawn, a huge boom bellowed from the valley; the sound of a rifle-report: man, the only hunter who killed to feed no hunger. The owl ruffled his feathers, closed his eyes again and tried to shake off the images that, even then, he knew would never leave him alone: from the blue sky his friend the eagle falls, his great wings lifeless, the wind playing with his feathers, his eyes as clouded as a stagnant pond, and his talons more limp and useless than the webbed feet attached to a plucked mallard.

109

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Poetry (Translation)|V. Madhusoodanan Nair Translator: Variath Madhavan Kutty

You Woke Me From The Great Slumber of Darkness.

Bringing me awake from the Great slumber of darkness You gifted me a colorful feather of life You gave me a sky for my wings And a nest in the branch in your soul.

Where else would I smell you as you are But in the little flower and tender breeze?

When life flows, where else would I find A river that is filled with you, With not a drop of you left out.

Where else will I find a sky that is you Transformed into a petal of dream That you have spread out?

When the lullaby of a thin stream tires When a little nightingale cries When time falters, when a stone turns Fruit sweet; I have entwined my Heart with your heart – And I go seeking refuge in you.

I cannot tear away I cannot tear away from your heart No matter what heaven beckons My heaven is when I melt And fall into the depths of your Soul and am extinguished.

To melt into you is eternal truth.

110

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Short Fiction|J. David Simons The Responsibility of Love

E

ven by the most benign and generous of standards, Max was not a handsome man. His bulging, frog-like eyes crowded either side of a flat, boneless nose. There was his almost non-existent chin. The blubbery lips that glistened with nervous spittle. Straight, greasy hair that no amount of expensive conditioner could flatter. A physical repulsiveness that, reflected back at him by observers, caused his shoulders to hunch, his chest to cave inwards, his thin body to stoop, his whole being to shrink in readiness for the next insult or look of revulsion that was sure to come.

It was a great pity that even the kindest of people would hardly ever venture beyond this veneer of distaste for if they did, if they actually talked to him, they would make the most wondrous of discoveries. That Max had a beautiful voice. Not a singing voice but a speaking voice. A deep yet soft, gentle, well-mannered, soothing, charming tone. A wooing voice. A voice that could pontificate on even the most boring of subjects and still enchant an audience. With one’s eyes closed, it was possible to believe that it was the most gorgeous of men who was speaking.

Max was an only child of elderly parents who both passed away when he was still in his early twenties, leaving him a decent sum. He continued to live in their spacious Victorian brownstone apartment, the one he had been born in. He lived a secluded existence, he had no friends and the idea that he might attract a girlfriend was fanciful and remote. He was resigned to a life without love, sexual pleasure or companionship. But that did not mean he could not enjoy other aspects of his existence. He loved music, he loved books, his inheritance allowed him to indulge in fine food and expensive wines.

He arranged to have most of his essentials delivered where possible so that he hardly ever needed to go out. Why should he? When all that would happen was to be laughed and stared at.

His apartment boasted a south-west facing balcony, just broad and long enough for a small table and chair, with a view out on to a park, a rare half-block of green space in this part of the city. It was on this balcony that he sat reading, drinking wine and nibbling on expensive delicacies when the weather was clement. Being located in an apartment building, there was a neighbouring balcony, but it had never been used, as the occupant for as long as he could remember was an elderly widow confined to a wheelchair. It was therefore with some surprise that one day as he was outside reading, a young woman should emerge on the adjacent balcony and introduce herself as his new neighbour.

111

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

‘I thought that…’ Max stuttered. ‘I thought that Mrs…’ ‘I believe she passed away a few months ago,’ the young woman told him. ‘I am the new tenant. Catherine. Catherine Vance. And you are?’

‘Ah yes, I’m sorry… Max.’ ‘Pleased to meet you, Max. I just wanted to let you know that I am a piano teacher. Pupils will come to my home for lessons. I sincerely hope I shall not disturb you.’

‘I like music,’ was all that Max could muster in response.

Catherine was not a beautiful woman but not unattractive either.

She was petite with dark wavy hair that she wore unstyled, the kind of hair that Max felt demanded to be tied up with ribbons. She was neat and precise, all her movements performed with short, sharp gestures.

Catherine liked everything to be in its proper order. Like notes on a piano score.

From next door, Max could hear Catherine’s pupils stumbling over their assignments, especially the beginners, of course. He quite liked these faulty, repetitive sequences, possibly because they reminded him of his own imperfections. He had compassion for these students. And his tolerance was often rewarded by the occasional gifted student, or even Catherine, who would play for herself later in the evenings. As he sat on the balcony, reading his book, sipping on his wine, nibbling on his cashew nuts, he looked across at the park opposite while Catherine played her Debussy, always Debussy, and thought that a life such as his, devoid of the usual social and physical intimacies, could have its pleasant moments as well. This rare moment of positivity was further rewarded when Catherine stepped out on to her balcony with her own glass of wine. She kept many plants on her little patio, so there was no room for a table, just a chair. She sat down and said as she often did: ‘I hope my students don’t disturb you.’

‘Not at all,’ he replied. And that would usually be the end of their interchange as he would then be compelled to retreat inside. But feeling somewhat buoyant this evening, no doubt egged on by the uplifting qualities of a rather pleasant Grand Cru Beaujolais, he added: ‘I actually enjoy their efforts. It gives me hope.’

‘Oh. In what way?’

‘That playing the piano is still relevant.’

‘It has been for hundreds of years.’

‘But these days there are so many other distractions.’

‘I know what you mean.’

And so the conversation continued. The sun went down and despite the sudden chill, neither of them decided to leave or even to go inside to fetch a jacket or a cardigan. She was mesmerised by his voice, of course, and he was seduced by the fact that another person, one of the opposite sex even, did not seem repulsed by his looks or his company.

112

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Max and Catherine. They started to spend more time together, on those summer evenings, after she had finished up with her students.

He found space for another chair on his balcony and she would step over the low dividing railing and there they would sit, weather permitting.

‘Will you read to me?’ she asked him one evening.

‘Why would you want me to do that?’

‘You have a beautiful speaking voice.’

‘Really?’

‘No-one has ever told you that?’

Max shook his head. ‘My mother used to. But I never believed her.’

‘Why wouldn’t you?’

‘I just thought she was saying it to make me feel better.’

‘Oh, Max,’ she scolded.

He smiled sheepishly. He loved it when she used his name like that.

She went on: ‘Your voice… it’s so… what’s the word? Mellifluous.

Yes, that’s it. You could be one of those people that do voice-overs for advertisements. Or promoting the latest films. Or speaking the news.’

‘That’s very nice of you to say so.’

‘I’m not just being nice, Max. I honestly think so. As a fact.’ She stamped her foot on the metal balcony floor. A childish gesture, he thought, that endeared her to him even more.

‘Well, thank you,’ he said. ‘I shall accept the compliment. And what would you like me to read to you?’

It started off with The Little Prince, after that they alternated with their choices, mostly the classics. He introduced her to Orwell. She came back at him with Woolf. He countered with Kafka. And after that she went all American on him with James and Steinbeck and Hemingway. Then, on a particularly warm and pleasant evening, she said to him: ‘Let’s go over to the park.’

‘The park?’

‘Yes, why do we need to sit in this cramped little space when we can stretch out over there? I’ll find us some fruit and snacks. You can bring the wine.’

‘Yes, I can do that. Bring the wine. Of course.’

He managed to find an old picnic basket of his parents which they packed with glasses, a bottle of his finest Burgundy, a small jar of caviar. Catherine contributed cheese and olives and crackers and pears.

‘A moveable feast,’ she declared.

For Max, this was a huge adventure. To go out in public like this.

With a woman. He carried the hamper. She brought her book of choice. Madame Bovary. Together they emerged from the elevator, 113

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

then crossed the road and entered through the wrought iron gates.

They decided they would head for the far side where there were benches, trees for shade and beds of seasonal flowers. As they moved towards their destination, he felt her body close to his and she took his arm in hers. The feeling of exhilaration, of sheer joy, that passed through him at that moment was overwhelming. He actually felt his heart leap. It was a sensation that he always thought was exaggerated in novels – his heart leapt to her touch – but now he realised that such a thing could exist. His heart soared. It beat that little bit faster.

His skin tingled. His footstep was lighter. He could feel the weight and heft of her arm on his. He started to hum. When they reached their destination, they found a bench in a shady bower. He commented on the vibrant colour of the geraniums, she on the lovely pink blooms on the butterfly bushes. She had let go of his arm but he felt that she was sitting closer to him than perhaps ordinary decorum allowed. He realised he was shaking with delight. He read to her. Madame Bovary.

How appropriate. A woman in charge of her own destiny. A woman willing to take risks. A woman who didn’t care what others thought of her. He was transported. He was in ecstasy. He took her hand. She didn’t pull away. He had never held a woman’s hand before. The skin was cold, even though the day was warm. So soft to the touch. He could feel himself become aroused, even though he didn’t want to think of this moment as sexual but as sensual, as loving. He put down the book. She was staring out towards the broad avenue that led to the heart of their city. That dainty little face with those dark waves that he wanted to tie with ribbons. He still held her hand. He couldn’t help himself, some instinct propelled him forward, to overcome his fears, a lifetime of being rejected, mocked and humiliated. He leaned his face in towards hers.

‘I love you,’ he said as he kissed her on the side of the mouth.

She jumped. Her body actually lifted up an inch or two off the bench. She began screaming. He wasn’t even sure if she was saying actual words. There was just this high-pitched shriek. She was up on her feet now, pushing him away. And just as before his heart had leapt with joy, it was now shrivelling and shrinking and hardening against the pain. Now he could hear the words she was saying: ‘What did you think was going on here? Did you honestly believe I would want to kiss someone like you? I was just being nice. Can’t a girl just be nice to you without you wanting to take advantage of her? Get away. Get away from me. You disgust me.’

Later that evening, Max threw himself off his balcony. Not so much as threw, but by just allowing his body to fold and collapse, he dropped over the railing, all reason for loving and living having drained out of him so that there was nothing left to hold him up. With a glass of fine wine in hand. Catherine heard the scream of a passer-by above 114

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

her piano playing. Debussy. Always Debussy. The last wondrous and exquisite sounds Max ever heard. She rushed to the balcony. She saw the splayed and twisted body lying on the pavement below, blood and wine pooling vermillion on the concrete. It was her turn to scream.    One becomes responsible forever for those we have tamed. That was the cross Catherine would have to bear for the rest of her life.

115

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Visual Art|Fabrice Poussin

Her Empire

116

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Visual Art|Fabrice Poussin

Home

117

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Visual Art|Fabrice Poussin

Life Always

118

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Visual Art|Fabrice Poussin

Light and Shadow

119

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Visual Art|Fabrice Poussin

Teasing Heaven

120

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Visual Art|Fabrice Poussin

Origins

121

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Visual Art|Fabrice Poussin

Wait

122

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Visual Art|Fabrice Poussin

The End

123

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Poetry|Fiona Pitt-Kethley War and Religion (A history of war in twelve parts)

I In ancient times the Gods directed War, dispensed a portent, showed the way to go, delivered easy wins to mortal men.

The sky grew dark. The winds began to blow, The seas were parted. Rivers ran with blood.

The greatest books were often based on Wars.

We take our views of God, or Gods from them.

The Bible, taught to billions through the world, portrays a God, like Cecil B. de Mille.

A cast of thousands, chariots and all, prevails against the idol-worshippers.

The Righteous triumph, all is well again.

The Lord of Hosts must always win of course.

His Chosen suffer exile? It’s because they have offended Him and they must pay.

The Golden Rule is all can be explained There are no loose ends in this scheme of things.

All Homer’s Greeks and Trojans fought this way.

Heroes were always half-divine themselves – the sons of Gods, their parents favoured them and gave them gifts to help them in their tasks, Tailored the weather to their battle needs – darkness at noon, or sudden tempest squalls.

124

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

II Religion soon became political with emperors whose subjects worshipped them, fought to retain their bloated, evil gods, who lacked such weapons as live thunder-bolts.

Gods who need armed defence are not much use.

Most Roman generals stopped to read the signs: the flights of birds, the way the entrails lay, a dream, a meeting, shadows in the sky, or listened to oracles’ ambiguous words, heard what they wished to hear, then paid the price, They sometimes even deified themselves.

Their subjects burned their incense cynically, paid lip service but prayed to older gods.

While others, like a host of crazy fans, backing pop divas, film stars, footballers, even believed their rulers were divine.

III War has a second set of casualties Great art falls hostage to the conquerors.

Looting spreads culture quickly round the globe.

Though hardly moral it does little harm.

Some leaders though are more inclined to smash. wipe out the cities of their enemies, rase them as though their sites had never been.

With every war, more evidence is lost.

A city dies, a city is reborn… foundations on foundations endlessly.

Conquerors write their version of events.

Carthage is chiefly seen through Roman eyes.

And Troy is known from Grecian Homer’s words.

So much was systematically destroyed little remains to tell us how they lived.

And yet along with all a war destroys It fuels a culture of its very own – marches, war music, epic poetry.

Technology comes on by leaps and bounds

125

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

IV When Constantine adopted Christian faith and put its God back on his pedestal, the Church swept out the old, brought in the new.

One God and only one became the rule.

New lamps for old, the gods were turned to saints.

The temples got a coat of Christian paint as images were hacked or modified.

But magic reigned in superstitious hearts.

The Gods lived on eternally disguised.

Centuries later nothing really changed.

Old festivals persist in many lands – from catching snakes and carrying them through a town, to decking bowers and grottoes, dressing wells.

Relics were saved and fought for, to the death.

(Most holy martyrs had more bones when dead than average bodies have in living form.

The splinters of the Cross could build an ark.

The infant Christ lost twelve foreskins at least.)

Malory, Chrétien de Troyes et al portrayed a Catholic Dark Ages world.

Pagan and Christian life were intertwined – prayers to the Virgin, wizardry, the Grail, The Holy Spear, the sickly Fisher King, Knights followed damsels to enchanted woods, killed evil monsters, found themselves ‘in thrall’.

Chivalry was the order of the day.

(Not much was said of those they left at home) The symbols and the quest were everything.

Swords came from lakes or stones, inscribed with names, not “made in Sheffield” but Excalibur.

A glamorising of Man’s darker side – torture or murder in the name of God. While objects hold cult status in men’s eyes, the heathen enemies are demonised.

126

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

V In Shakespeare’s plays, more ordinary men, Swapped jokes before the morning’s battle broke.

Humour became a natural aid to strife.

The kings still played the parts of orators and egged the rabble on to braver acts.

Our modern life is not too far removed.

It’s still traditional to laugh and joke when faced with horrors that are absolute.

Placate The Reaper with a Rictus grin.

Nobility is for the noble born, The underclasses take another way and show a different kind of bravery.

The humble Tommy rotting in a trench laughed at his fate and thought of those at home.

Those at the top provided rhetoric.

The royals mouthed platitudes, then drove away, Elected politicians did the rest.

Speeches by speechwriters filled in the gaps.

The War Office controlled the people’s moods.

One day, the fighting, ranting action speech laced with the worst statistics for effect.

(Maximum figures made up the first set.

The minimums, the optimistic ones, were used to grace the morrow’s radio bulletin.)

Some desperation fuels the urge to fight – too much could make the men lie down to die.

127

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

VI Words are a neutral force, not bad or good.

Those that society most often hates are not the really deadly dangerous ones.

Ladies who shrank appalled at words like “fuck” lapped propaganda up like cats with milk.

“Patriots, heroes, chivalry, the Right, The Fatherland, the Church, the Mother tongue…”

It’s terms like these that lead a man to hate.

These can spawn torture, murder, genocide.

For words give shape to formless wicked thoughts – Those seldom voiced by ordinary men.

The weak need an excuse for what they do and long for something definite in life.

A call for action always gets results.

Leaders are last to give apologies.

Taking offence looks the more manly part.

Election time? You’ll win more votes by war.

The early days, before a War’s declared are full of trivial quarrels, incidents – The Boston Tea Party, or Jenkin’s Ear, The crossing of a line, some petty theft.

Catastrophes are triggered in this way.

One act of folly harms a billion lives.

128

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

VII Few men have faith in weapons by themselves And they will always feel the need for more – some God to pray to as they risk their lives, a charm to carry, mascots on a plane, a plated medal of St. Christopher or prayer books lent by superstitious wives whose tracts are filled with tales of near escapes – mysterious archers, angels at the Front, Bibles that all stop bullets on the chest.

While superstition keeps Man soldiering on, religion buoys up pomp and circumstance – a leader’s funeral, a State parade, The Last Post bringing tears to brave men’s eyes, The Unknown Soldier honoured everywhere.

Organised faith still takes the hand of War. And few religions dare to question it.

Each side believes that God is with their side.

Good shall prevail, according to the men who lead a comfortable, prosperous life.

Question these rules and chaos must ensue.

The Government decrees a war is “just” (A cynic knows this means a threat to trade).

Torture is winked at while the status quo remains untouched, but cross a frontier and you’ll become tomorrow’s Enemy.

Your former friend, who sold you armaments, turned iron to tanks and sent you steel for ships, will turn the arms and use them against you.

129

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

VIII God, or Gods plural? What can be the truth?

Olympian quarrels had their match on earth.

A world run by committees might explain all history’s cock-ups and atrocities.

Perhaps the Gods are simply having fun, observing us as we might look at ants – marvellous creatures building up that hill and organising all their work like that.

But in the end which of them really cares?

So what if all those clever ants get squished!

Monotheism has its drawbacks too – One God with far too much upon his mind, backed by a series of incompetents, angels who flunk their tasks and get it wrong.

The Saints, a Catholic bureaucracy.

(You’ve lost a key, Saint Anthony might help.

More complications? Better try Saint Jude.)

Our prayers get scrambled, Chinese-whisper style, passed up a line of saints and archangels.

130

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

IX

The Holocaust became a stumbling block.

How could a loving God allow all this?

Millions have lost religion over it.

(And yes, there have been other genocides.

The Picts? Just ask the Scots where they have gone.)

Past generations never questioned things – sorrows, bereavements, all part of life’s course.

These days we want an easy PC god, whose every action is explicable.

There’s money to be made in every war..

You need more deaths? Well, Science will provide, Inventing yet more devilish machines, more ways to kill or maim the human race, from ancient catapults to atom bombs, chemicals straight from Hell’s laboratories.

Live by the sword and you will die that way.

Inventors of such hellish mechanisms may meet poetic justice in the end.

Give pain and you must learn to take it too.

Phalaris, who designed a brazen bull in which his master’s prisoners could be burned (their dying screams resounded through the mouth) was first to try it out from the inside.

Whom should we blame most for the Holocaust?

Hitler? His aides? Or thousands of camp guards?

Or all who gave their conscience to the State?

To vow obedience is the easy path, the downward way that leads you straight to hell You should be careful whom you choose to serve. more careful still what you then choose to do.

Servant and master are accountable.

Obedience often leads to wickedness.

Most leaders like to delegate vile tasks.

The blood and tears might stain their uniforms.

Their torturers are several down the line.

131

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

X The Twentieth Century – and, somehow, War Can never be as small as it once was.

The Roman Empire, Alexander’s realms, Embraced a smaller tract of territory.

The whole wide world is now a battlefield.

Our soldiers die in newsreels everywhere, in countless scenes rehearsed in countless takes.

Men, women, kids… we witness many deaths, far more than ancient tyrants ever saw.

Enough to make us worse than cynical?

Perhaps the images of pain we see might harden us till we no longer care.

We watch our Wars with dinners on our laps, The mines explode while we eat sandwiches.

The most we do is lift our credit cards, phone in a tenner for the refugees.

More frequently, we just ignore the sight.

“Another bloody war!” This isn’t news.

There’s always conflict somewhere in the world.

132

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

XI Wars, endless wars, how does the race go on?

Yet, death cannot catch up with life, it seems as couples take a valedictory shag, Coming together, strangers become friends.

Meeting then parting dictates different rules.

Even the prudes begin to procreate.

Girls who said no, say yes the night before their men go off to fight, perhaps to die.

Go forth to War, be fruitful, multiply.

The soldier, always mindful of his end, creates new souls, ensures his line goes on.

One life runs out, another life begins‌ War children walk with women dressed in black, as men are posted missing, never found.

The dog-eared sepia photo in the frame reveals a stranger in his uniform.

His mothballed suit is boxed beneath the stairs.

Sometimes the house still smells of cigarettes.

They hardly knew him but they mourn his loss – the father who could never play with them, the husband who was never really there.

133

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

XII At birth and death that other world draws close.

The door that separates is opened wide.

How much more so when millions are involved?

Even cynics have near-death-experiences and stolid atheists begin to pray.

War magnifies the actions of a man to heroism or monstrous cruelty.

A bomb is dropped. A frontier is crossed.

We hear the soldiers knocking at our doors.

Injustice rules the chaos of the streets.

Our looks turn skyward waiting a reply.

A Hell on earth, the dogs of war unleashed The spirits cry out for their daily drink.

The ancient sacrifice is made again in hecatombs of souls. Charon’s boat is full.

The monstrous gatekeeper does overtime.

Men, women, children – no-one is exempt.

Hell’s Seven Circles bulge with new recruits, The Pearly Gates swing wider to receive The jostling crowd that’s trying to get in.

In Peace we lead more ordinary lives.

The minefields that we cross are mental ones, the barbed wire barriers of the human mind, the prison camps erected by ourselves.

And few of us can make the Great Escape.

134

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Book Review|Sarah Mehjabeen

A Bouquet of Stories

The Best Asian Short Stories, Ed. Monideepa Sahu, Kitaab International, 2017.

The Best Asian Short Stories was assembled by editor Monideepa Sahu with a view to giving readers around the world a vivid taste of Asia. The book succeeded in doing that and then some. Not only is the anthology effective in exhibiting the culture and diversity of Asia, it also touches upon a raft of issues in different countries in a subtle yet striking manner.

The book is filled with tales collected across all of Asia, from Jordan to South Korea. Short stories don’t generally provide us with a lot of context, but a collection of thirty-three stories — curated carefully — is sufficient to showcase Asia to the world, even as an introduction to tease the reader's curiosity with respect to these diverse countries and cultures.

The story that gripped me the most was Free Fall in A Broken Mirror by Hisham Bustani. A story from Middle East, it shows the struggle of a young woman who tries to rid herself of the restraints of society only to find that some shackles are more enduring than others.

This is a story that will make you think for days after reading it.

Through the ages, the conservatism of many Asian societies has often stopped people from pursuing their dreams unhindered.

"You have no idea the passion with which I love dancing. Me? Dancing? What if someone saw me? What about my social standing, my respectable job, my connections who would never understand?"

The woman in this story loves to dance and yet she is bound by the invisible chains her family has imposed on her.

"Do you know, when I was telling my mother my dreams, she said out of the blue, 'I'd rather die than witness the misfortunes you will 135

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

visit upon us".

However harsh that maternal comment may seem, it isn't unusual for readers from hidebound societies to have had their own experience of predicaments like this. The story stands out because of its empathetic approach. Namely, that society all too often dictates how a person should behave, that society demands that we be who it wants us to be — not who we are — is a common theme in some of the stories, especially from Middle Eastern and South Asian countries In O Thiam Chin's The Three Bears, innocent people are censured and blamed simply because they do not fit the perception of other people living in that society. Although they are friendly and helpful, people gossip behind their backs because they do not follow the traditional rules set by society. A massive psychological clash is seen in this story which mirrors recent trends in various Asian countries.

But most of the time, conflict stems from family interactions.

Families in Asian countries are often very unlike those in western ones.

This aspect is brought out prominently in Pigs by Francis Paolo Quina, where a boy is reprimanded time and again by his father for crying and acting like a "gay-boy". His own father abuses him for not hitting a person back, and not being "man" enough. Of course, families are not always this unforgiving. Soniah Kamal's Jelly Beans is a hilarious story about a Pakistani family flying in to America to "save" their son from a white woman only to discover new ties and reinvent existing bonds.

Amidst the different shades of societies in Asia, a theme that emerges repeatedly is war. Shashi Deshpande's Independence Day tells the story of a woman revisiting memories of Partition refugees.

What appealed to me about this particular story was the narration.

"But memories are not records; they refuse to stay enclosed within covers. They choose their time and spring out at you. Like my own personal memory does now, rushing at me through dark tunnel of the years. " As is often the case with stories dealing with wars and upheavals, they do not always end on a positive note. Amir Darwish weaves a heart-breaking tale through the story of Samar, the tale of a mother and son who flee from their homeland to find safety only to be met with stranger consequences. The brutal reality they face, portrayed through fiction, captured me. This story packs a punch in the gut.

What I really loved about the anthology was the way various authors brought up different aspects of their native lands in a nuanced, subtle fashion. Farah Ghuznavi's Big Mother touches on the Rana Plaza incident, considered the deadliest structural failure accident in modern human history, but in a way that also shows how the incident affected one individual. Although fictional, this story hit too close to home for me. The lead character in the story, Lali, is such an inspiration on her own. Her grit to keep going and survive regardless of the curveballs life throws at her, is admirable. This story goes to 136

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

show how much a person can endure only if they have the will to.

The very first story in this anthology, Fits and Starts, catches the reader off guard from the very beginning. The story revolves around a man and a woman working hard to make ends meet. However, they soon become friends, and try to find pleasure in their little escapades.

It's a story that may seem basic at first sight, but as we dig deeper, the story gets more interesting. An implication evident here is the extent to which people will go in trying to improve their financial situations. Park Chan-Soon's Ladybugs Fly from The Top tells a similarly themed story of a man risking his life as he struggles just to earn a living despite having several degrees.

"We're diseased young buds that can't grow or flower, no matter how much we want to." The Asian obsession with education in general — and degrees in particular — is brought to life with great clarity in Ladybugs Fly from The Top. Last, but not least, a story that made my jaw drop was Girls' House by Clara Chow. The story starts in a way that makes it seem as though the main character is trying to get her grandmother to tell her some stories about her life. But the story very quickly takes a dark turn, and the ending leaves you wanting more.

Inevitably, for a collection of this size, a few of the stories were slightly lacklustre. But I still feel that every story in this anthology is worth reading because they present a portrayal of every corner of Asia, and they are authentic and heartfelt. There are also a bunch of amazing stories in this anthology, ones that stand out. These tales work very well as stand-alone stories but serve their purpose even better when they are combined into a fragrant bouquet of blossoms that represent Asia to the world.

137

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Poetry|John Timothy Robinson The Approach of August Days The morning looks pale, overcast in tone, no bolero of color on rain-wet grass or atmosphere.

At my feet, insects seem to groan, almost struggle the trespass of life’s blessing, a fear.

Deception has occurred in sleep; to wake brings half-remembered images, real as texture of walls or bed-frame. Though now, the hour is late.

Remembered in glimpses, a mind stalls.

Thoughts present themselves as proof; of life, of fate.

The real assumes peculiar seemingness.

Ideas are appeased in neutral moods; malformation of abstract sky, a floating, pithless vellum of an instinct non-existent, lost; broods.

They seem void, yet possess the infinite of forms, and only change aspects of themselves; thought exudes, though of these lesser groans an older ghost has warned.

138

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Short Fiction|Janet H Swinney The Bhaskar Boys

B

y the time she was six months gone, she already walked with her feet splayed out, her belly well out in front of her, the babies vying for precedence. At full term, they wrestled with each other to be the first to leave her body, or the last to hang back. It was a difficult birth and, afterwards, her body was raddled with trenches, seams and potholes that meant certain quarters of her anatomy were no-go areas in the marriage bed for years to come.

She sized the babies up dispassionately as they lay in their cots.

‘Babies’ seemed to be the wrong word for them: two prescient little old men, with eyeballs as soft and dark as Muscat grapes. She felt nothing for them except an objective curiosity. Which would evolve into whom?

And what sort of travelling companions would they turn out to be?

Right from the start, the new arrivals had a relationship that was intense. They came with crests of hair that stood up stiffly like the beards on old coconuts. When they weren’t wreaking violence on each other by trying to yank it out, they were cooing fondly in each other’s arms.

One day, while they were still babes in arms, Meena hauled them off to Zaveri Bazaar, escorted by her friend Pinkie. They stood outside the Moti Ram, the jewellers, Meena holding one twin and Pinkie the other. Meena’s idea was that, encumbered only by one infant rather than two, she might manage to choose some gold bangles for herself.

Pinkie, meanwhile, would wait for her at their favourite café. The babies didn’t fancy this at all. While the two women stood discussing jewellery aesthetics the babies wriggled towards each other across the conversational gap until they were tethered only by their boottees.

And then they stretched out their arms like trapeze artists and made a grab for one another.

Alarmed by how close they’d come to dropping both infants, the women tried to separate them. But the babies held fast. The women moved towards and away from one another as though they were engaged in some antiquated English country dance. But still the babies stuck to each other like glue, howling a hideous duet every time there was a risk of being prised apart. People with nothing better to do gathered to observe the goings-on. The expedition had to be abandoned, and they took a cab home. After Pinkie had departed, Meena collapsed on to the settee, where the two self-satisfied babies lay in her lap crooning contentedly to each other for the rest of the afternoon.

When Hari came home late from work that evening, after an unusually protracted journey, he switched on the television to find that 139

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

the city had been rocked to its unsteady and communally divided foundations. Bombs had gone off in nearly every quarter, one of them at the Bombay Stock Exchange, and another in the jewellery market.

There were at least two hundred and fifty dead and God knew how many injured. The explosive used in Zaveri Bazaar had been packed into a bright red Bajaj scooter that stood right outside Moti Ram’s.

Following this episode, Meena felt an unsettling mixture of awe and alienation whenever she looked at the twins.

Still, whatever she might feel, it was clear that she was the ‘goto’ functionary for the pair of them. For months beyond what was considered normal, she kept them supplied with vast quantities of milk. The more they suckled, the more she produced. Every morning, the van from St. George’s Catholic Mission turned up to collect the excess quantities of milk she had expressed and take it off to other mothers in a less fortunate position. Apart from this, the newcomers had her fetching and carrying for them all day long, and insisted, even when she was dead on her feet, that no-one else’s attentions would do.

Weeks passed without Meena and her husband being able to settle upon names for their offspring. They got into the habit of referring to them as ‘The One and The Other’, and despite the generic nature of the terms, this seemed to work pretty well.

The babies began to speak as soon as they were sitting up, and came with a fully-formed vocabulary. ‘Loquacious little bastards, aren’t they?’ said Hari at breakfast one morning. ‘I’ve never known such facility with the English language.’

‘You should hear them swear in Hindi,’ Meena said.

‘They swear in Hindi?’

‘Only when you’re out.’

Hari thought about this for a moment.

‘Well, that settles it then. We’ll call them Vikram and Seth.’ Pleased with this development, he promptly lost interest in them.

Inevitably, one day, when they had just started to walk without rolling over, an ayah dressed the pair of them in white: short white trousers and tiny shirts with mother-of-pearl buttons down the front.

Once their hair had been tamped down with almond oil, they looked like two marionette customs officers or two, minute tennis players.

As their feet couldn’t immediately be set on the path that led to government service they were enrolled, instead, for coaching in the South Andheri Gymkhana and Racquet Club. By the time they were five, they were thrashing the living daylights out of older kids on the junior training courts using seventeen-inch racquets and a reduced height net. The club’s chief coach soon spotted their potential, and began encouraging them to develop their repertoire of strokes.

Before long, they were taking part in the club’s under tens 140

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

tournaments, sometimes one winning, sometimes the other. The day when Meena watched the pair of them trot out of the clubhouse to face each other across the net in their first all-Bhaskar final was the first time she felt a stab of maternal pride. Such good boys, such talent.

What had she done to deserve them?

But at even-stevens in the third set, Seth blasted a forceful back hand down the line that knocked off Vikram’s newly-acquired spectacles, and gouged a chip out of the side of his nose. Vikram screamed with rage. He flung his racquet down and stomped off the court. The match was called a draw, but it took three strawberry shakes and a fabulous amount of Elastoplast to get Vikram to calm down. When they got home, he marched straight into the back bedroom and threw up lavishly into Seth’s box of hand-carved ivory chessmen. Seth made a lunge for Vikram. Meena grabbed his shirt and held him back.

‘Mother!’ Seth yelled. ‘Please inflict due retribution on my sibling who shows scant regard for my personal liberties.’

‘Personal liberties?’ squealed Vikram, ‘You made a pusillanimous attempt to disable me. You and personal liberties have but slight knowledge of each other.’

‘Neither of you will be going further with this business unless you learn to treat each other with respect,’ Meena declared. ‘This is competition not thuggee. And the art of decent competition is not just to prize your own skills, but to recognise the virtues of your competitor. Without your competitor, who are you, eh?’ She surprised herself: it was the first time she had advised anyone on anything since she had helped Pinkie to pick out nail varnish. ‘You will apologise to each other, and you will not sit at table until you’ve done so.’ There was nothing doing till seven o’ clock when the maid started dropping the mix for medhu wada into the oil and the first sputterings could be heard from the kitchen then, suddenly, it was all sweetness and light, sit up and beg.

Thereafter, the twins went hell-for-leather with their practice.

Meena went out of her way not to discriminate between them. Her first question when they came off court, no matter who won and who lost, always was, ‘Mango shake or banana, boys?’ If they played each other, she had another card up her sleeve: ‘Where should we go for pau bhaji today?’ she would say. She left the discussions about footwork, tactics and what all to their coach.

Despite this, tension mounted every time the pair of them were due to meet in a final. No-one discussed tallies, but everyone was counting. At the point where Vikram trounced Seth in a match that didn’t even reach a tie-break, and Seth locked himself in his bedroom for the week-end, Meena tried discussing the situation with Hari, but he was busy overseeing some contract with a firm in Dubai, and his eyes were empty when he looked at her. So, in the end, she tried 141

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

coach Bobby Bhambra.

‘I don’t like the turn things are taking. It’s ugly.’

‘You want these boys to be professionals, heh neh?’

Meena nodded. What else was there for her junior obsessives to do?

‘Well, then? They’re doing fine.’

Once they were in the under fifteens league, Seth put on a spurt of growth, and acquired the bulk to be able to deliver heftier ground strokes. Vikram remained slight and nimble. There were constant skirmishes about which of them had the more effective approach for dealing with their opponents. ‘Your game belongs in a previous century,’ Seth would taunt. ‘Perhaps in the court of the Britishers’ Henry VIII. Are you impervious to the pace that baseliners can produce? Aren’t you humiliated when they pound you to a pulp?’ ‘I believe in cunning and finesse,’ Vikram would retort. ‘I don’t aspire to a technique that has all the subtlety of an elephant expelling wind.’

Meena spent her whole time salving egos: ‘What to do?’ Each of you so gifted, nah? You will each find your own way of winning.’ But the apartment was a constant war zone. On the evenings when Hari eventually came home from work, he would yell at them to for God’s sake give him peace and withdraw to the balcony, chanting ‘Om shanti, Om shanti’.

Once they were on the national circuit – New Delhi, Indore, Chennai, Lucknow − it was Meena, not Hari, who oversaw it all. She acquired proficiency in marshalling vast quantities of luggage and getting it on to trains, dealing with devious taxi drivers and harassing recalcitrant hotel staff. She managed the boys’ large expenditure and their slender income. A dispassionate Hari stuck his hand into his pocket and made up the shortfall.

By the time the twins reached the under-eighteens league they were already playing better than boys older than them. ‘Two works of genius you’ve got there,’ Bobby said to Meena one day contemplating their performance on the practice courts, with the beady satisfaction of a man who’s trained geese to dance the tango. And, in that first year’s tournament, both boys dispensed briskly with the opposition and made it to the final. At the South Andheri Gymkhana and Racquet Club, excitement ran high. Wealthy patrons wanted to see a fight. Bets were placed both in public places and among the discreet circles of the well-heeled elite.

The day came. The twins stalked on to court, crisp and cool, like long-time professionals. They hunkered down and played three hardfought sets, each of them challenging the other to the full. The heartstopping moments came thick and fast, and the crowd ooh-ed and ah-ed at every one. There was nothing to tell the contestants apart 142

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

except style, and the score board reflected this.

At last, they arrived at the fourth set tie-breaker. Digging deep into mental reserves, they drove on, sending each other skidding and diving at full-stretch across the court, and performing many implausible balletic movements to execute a drop-shop or slam down a misplaced lob. When the score was four-two in Vikram’s favour, the moment arrived when they needed to change ends.

Vikram left his chair, swept back his hair and stalked to the baseline as casually as a professor entering a poetry class. Seth, on the other hand, strutted out like a film idol, a young man who enjoys feeling the jiggle of his balls in his pants. Vikram steadied himself to serve. As he drew back his racquet and came up on to the mounds of his feet, Seth placed a hand on his hip, took a step forward and flung back his head with a baroque flourish. Vikram stumbled, fluffed the toss and the ball rolled away. He glared down the court. Seth stuck out his arms and turned up his palms. ‘What?’ The crowd roared with laughter. A pain shot through Vikram’s chest and out below his shoulder blade. Clearly, the crowd thought they were being treated to some form of vaudeville. But not for long, because Vikram’s game fell apart. After another five minutes, he had to trample off court, befuddled with sweat, his eyes locked on his shoe laces after Seth’s easy victory.

Vikram flung his kit into the corner of the sitting room. He had been driving round town for some hours in his second-hand Maruti, trying to cool down. Seth was sitting in front of the television with his legs splayed, watching some badass movie, with his hand deep inside a family-sized bag of Lays’ chips. He’d had a shower, and a cloud of some heavy floral odour hung about him.

‘Why would you do such a thing?’ Vikram yelled, inserting himself between the viewer and the screen. Seth wove to and fro, trying to keep his eyes on the picture.

‘What?’ he said, feigning innocence.

‘You know damn, bloody well what. And have the decency to at least turn the sound off while I’m talking to you. How dare you humiliate me in such a way?’

Seth shrugged, his eyes still on the screen. ‘Gamesmanship, bro’.’

Vikram’s lips tightened as he drew them back over his teeth. ‘“Gamesmanship, bro?” What kind of fucking sentiment is that? You’re my brother. Doesn’t that count for anything in your mono-dimensional scheme of things?’

‘Nope,’ said Seth, fisting another handful of chips into his mouth.

‘You’re my opponent. Surely you're aware of the psychological dimensions of game play in tournaments at the highest level — chess, badminton, all of them?’

Vikram gaped at him: ‘I’ve always thought I our relationship went 143

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

beyond that sort of stuff. Not even thought it, felt it.’

‘Then stop thinking and feeling and bloody grow up. If I’ve put your nose out of joint, then put away your books on Caravaggio and take a close look at Lao-Tse and Machiavelli instead, brilliant exponents of the art of military strategy.’

‘And what did Lao-Tse and Machiavelli have to say about the moral virtue of betraying your brother by publicly impugning his sexuality?’ screamed Vikram.

‘What-ing his what?’ Seth finally withdrew his eyes from the screen while an insanely grinning family promoted Knorr Mast Masala. ‘Come off it. Everyone can see you’re as bent as bloody corkscrew. They don’t need me to point it out. Anyway, what are you bothered about? Don’t you know? The Government’s planning to make shirt-lifting legal.’

Vikram reddened to the roots of his hair. He grabbed Seth’s newly acquired trophy off the coffee table, whirled round like a disorientated discus thrower, then crashed out on to the balcony where, uttering an eerie whining sound, he jettisoned the thing on to the ground six floors below, narrowly missing the mali who was tending the lawn.

Meena sat in the Sea Green café and ordered herself a juice. She was wearing a large pair of dark glasses which she fingered nervously.

Behind them, her eyes were puffy and black-ringed. She was waiting for Bobby. And here he came, a man of purpose with a steady tread, his pink turban rising to a pristine, blade-like peak. She stood to greet him: ‘I’m worried sick,’ she said, before they’d even sat down.

‘Everything’s gone oot pataang.’

‘Tell uncle all,’ said Bobby, ordering himself a large chocolate drink.

‘The pair of them are barely speaking.’

‘I watched them on the practice courts the other day. Vikram is certainly lacking lustre.’

‘Seth is bullying him.’

‘He’s getting too cocky. He thinks he knows it all. That’s not a good attitude for a player to have. Certainly not if he wants to be a top player.’

The chocolate drink arrived.

‘So what to do, eh?’ Bobby stirred the drink then licked the long spoon lovingly.

‘You seem unconcerned.’

‘Meenaji,’ said Bobby, ‘My guess is we have been thinking about the situation in completely the wrong way all along and I have an idea.’

Meena waited for more, but nothing was forthcoming. Bobby swallowed the last of his drink, deftly wiped the milky rime from his moustache and pushed back his chair. ‘See you at the club on Tuesday, eleven o’clock. Be sure you’re there.’ He trailed his hand down her 144

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

back quasi-affectionately till it touched the bare flesh below her sari blouse. She shivered. ‘And for God’s sake, get some rest,’ he said. ‘You look pretty peelie-wally yourself.’

Bobby positioned the boys at one end of the court where they ambled about disconsolately, performing a few racquet tricks for each other’s benefit. Suddenly, a languid figure strolled in from the other end. Bobby looked at Meena and grinned.

‘It’s LP!’ she gasped.

‘Just watch!’

LP, fresh back from sweeping the board at the US Open, effortlessly pitched a ball into the air and sent it down the centre line with a formidable amount of spin. For a moment the astonished boys stood rooted to the spot, but then Vikram was off his marks and intercepted with a cross-court volley. Seth backed him up so that when the ball came back he was already in position to drive it straight down the line. There then followed the most remarkable display of tennis antics Meena had ever seen. LP had the pair of them scuttling about the court like pye dogs on a beach. After about twenty minutes, he had wiped the floor with them. But they, working as partners, had invented more ways of luring an opponent out of position and finishing him off than they had ever imagined before. LP waved, pointed at his watch, tucked his racquet under his arm and sauntered off. The boys stood looking at each other with their jaws hanging.

‘Astounding!’ said Vikram.

‘Magnificent!’ said Seth. There was an awkward pause. ‘I’m really sorry,’ he added.

‘I’m over it,’ said Vikram.

Bobby escorted Meena into the clubhouse and ordered her a large whiskey and soda even though it was barely lunch-time. ‘There you are, you see. It just struck me. They’ve been doubles players all along.’

The new formula worked like a dream: Vikram the artist – sensitive, innovative and left-handed; Seth the tactician – wellorganised, analytical and right-handed. Between them, they had all aspects of the game, including the physical dimensions of the court, covered. Their opponents fell before them like skittles. While other pairs had elaborate systems for covertly signalling their intentions to each other, the Bhaskars had no need of such devices. Several commentators suggested that they played as though they were one person.

Off-court, it was a different matter. Meena had to mediate their squabbles over kit, smooth their path with officialdom, organise their visas, shepherd them through international airports, keep their finances in order, make sure they slept an adequate number of hours 145

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

and steer them away from the lure of the alcohol in the hotel minibar.

They were big boys who showed no signs of growing up.

‘Aren’t you interested in any of this?’ she snapped at Hari one day as she stood in their threadbare sitting-room, hair unravelling over her stained kurta, trying to organise piles of clutter into suitcases that were bound for Melbourne. But Hari professed no interest in anything at all. As he sat wanly in the corner of the balcony that overlooked the sea, it was hard to tell whether he was in the process of having a stroke, or whether he’d already had one. Fixed stolidly in his highbacked chair, his eyes cast up towards the ceiling, ‘Purnam adah, purnam idam,’ he crooned, ‘That is Whole, this is Whole, The Whole arises from the Whole’.

‘A pox on your hole!’ said Meena under her breath, at the same time hoping he would fork out a few thousand more for living expenses.

To celebrate the twins’ birthday, as well as their entry into the men’s league, she decided on a celebration. She booked a table for afternoon tea at the Oberoi Hotel, and commissioned the staff to bake a multi-tiered birthday cake with iced tennis racquets on the top.

There was no point in taking Hari along, and she couldn’t think of a good reason not to invite Bobby. But when the day finally arrived, the boys themselves had a change of heart.

‘It’s not our sort of thing, Ma, not our milieu.’

‘You’ve left it a bit late to tell me,’ Meena huffed.

‘I think perhaps you overestimate the allure of the chocolate sponge,’ said Seth.

‘And the seductive quality of the rose pekoe infusion,’ added Vikram.

‘Yes, Ma, let’s do something different.’

‘Such as?’

‘Let’s go up to Lonavala, and have fun at some resort.’

‘But we’ll have to go through the whole palaver of getting train tickets, and by the time we get there, we’ll have to come back.’

‘No, the train would be far too inconvenient,’ Vikram agreed. ‘Ask Bobby to drive us.’

Reluctantly, Meena rang Bobby and asked if he could put his Mercedes at their disposal. Which he did.

They checked into one of the upmarket spas. The boys went off to cavort in the pool, while Meena booked into the beauty salon for various facial treatments and a hairdo, leaving Bobby alone in the bar to acquaint himself with approximately one hundred pipers.

They reassembled for a lunch that was so late it could almost be called dinner. The gathering emitted a positively phosphorescent glow. The twins were flushed with the effects of their exertions in the flume; Meena was luminous under a patina of rose-tinted cosmetics, and 146

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Bobby exuded the lubricious aura of one who is confident of his charms. Eventually, halfway through a plate of very decent gajar halva, Meena put down her spoon and suggested that it was time to think about going home.

‘What? No.’ said Vikram.

‘What’s the rush?’ said Bobby.

‘You’ll have to get down that road in the dark if we leave it any later, and you’ve had a fair bit to…you know…’ she looked pointedly at his glass.

‘Take it easy,’ said Bobby. ‘I can hold my drink.’

Meena frowned. She had the safety of the boys to think about.

‘No, really, Ma,’ said Seth. ‘Let’s take advantage of the overnight accommodation, eh?’

‘Good idea,’ said Vikram, ‘We can cruise back in the morning when there’s nothing to worry about. No harm done.’

Bobby refilled his glass. That settled it: they were staying.

It was chilly in the dimly-lit corridor and the textured vinyl walls were cold to the touch. Bobby followed close behind Meena like some domestic pet, as she struggled with her bag and the sliding pallu of her silk sari, trying to find the right room number. As she scratched about trying to get her key into the appropriate lock, not helped by a wooden fob that was about the size of a cricket bat, Bobby stuck his hand on the door jamb, barring her way.

‘Excuse me, Bobby.’

He brushed his finger along her cheek.

‘Looking very beautiful tonight, Meenaji.’

Meena sighed.

‘Thanks, Bobby, but I need to get into my room.’

He fingered the pink and gold edge of her pallu. She didn’t care for the way the silk slithered between his fingers.

‘Don’t you think the pair of us deserve a little treat for doing so well with those two boys?’

‘The boys are just fine, with us or without us,’ she snapped.

‘Now, now, Meenaji, under-estimating your talents, I think…and mine.’

‘I’d really like to get some rest.’

‘Hari-ji not much use to you now, eh? Ram! Ram!’ That last was like a stab in the back. She flung his arm away, got into her room and slammed the door.

The following morning the television was on in the breakfast room.

The hand shuttling Meena’s boiled egg to her mouth stopped mid-air.

Mayhem in Mumbai. The screen was filled with darkness, punctuated by flares of light and contorted faces. Victoria Terminus attacked, the Taj and the Oberoi hotels still under siege, flames, smoke, terrified 147

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

tourists and hotel staff using their cell phones to try and save themselves. One hundred and fifty dead so far and the tally still not complete. A handful of wrong-headed desperadoes paddling in from Pakistan and creating bloody pandemonium. She looked at the boys.

‘Did you know about this?’ she demanded. Four unfathomable eyes looked back at her darkly.

They got their big break at the French Open. The top Indian pair fell apart and refused to play together, and the historic Australian duo dropped out because of food-poisoning. This moved the twins up the leader board and significantly improved their chances of success.

The excitement on the circuit was palpable. Was India about to unveil another star turn? Even back home, there were vague murmurings of interest.

The pair held their nerve and excelled themselves up until the semi-finals when they were drawn to come up against the Bobbsey brothers for the very first time. The Bobbseys were a different bag of potatoes. Seasoned campaigners, with a serious number of grand slam titles under their belts, their reputation had long preceded them.

They were built like lumberjacks, as befits people who dine almost exclusively on beef, indulged in complicated fist-pumping rituals and looked as though they’d never read a comic strip, let alone a book, between them.

‘What’re you so scared about about, yaar?’ Meena drawled – the demanding nature of long haul travel was making itself felt – ‘You’re my beautiful, talented boys. You always do well.’

‘Don’t you get it, Ma? They’re twins!’ Seth thundered. ‘They’ve got our number.’

‘Phoo!’ said Meena, liberating another gin from the minibar — over the years, she’d come to appreciate its virtues — ‘They’re sloggers, that’s all. You come from only one egg, same-same. They come from two completely different ones. They only know watered-down versions of the same thing, whereas you boys’ – she swirled her drink around her glass – ‘are one glorious super-artiste formed of complementary talents.’

The Bobbseys did recognise that there were new kids on the block, but beat the shit out of them anyway. The Indian press made minced meat out of what was left.

‘Perhaps you need a better coach is all,’ said Meena, when she interrupted Vikram crying in the toilet.

‘Do you have to pick today to tell me this?’ she screamed. She was busy arranging for Meru cabs to take their luggage to the airport.

‘I can’t go on like this.’

‘You can’t go on like this? I can’t go on like this.’

‘I can’t cope with this chaos. I need to concentrate on higher 148

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

things.’ Hari stood by their sagging settee in simple kurta and pyjama, a cloth tote bag across his shoulder. ‘The ashram’s in Karnataka. I don’t expect you to visit.’

‘Visit? I should bloody well think not,’ said Meena, ramming a recalcitrant lock on to a suitcase. ‘You’ve no idea how much these boys have taken out of me.’ A thought crossed her mind. She straightened up.

‘And just what provision have you made for us?’

‘I’ll sort something out once I’m settled.’

‘You mean you haven’t.’

‘I’ve always shared everything with you, dearest. No need to worry.’

‘All you’ve ever shared, Hari, is your absence. Never here when needed.’

The preparations for the Olympics were intense. They lived in a febrile atmosphere where every word was loaded with unintended meaning that could be seized upon and spun into a flaming row. And even though the reputation of the nation, not just the twins, was on the line, it had been as difficult as ever to secure the sponsorship needed to pay for their kit, and Meena had frazzled herself to a crisp trying. The situation wasn’t helped by her relationship with Bobby, which had taken an unpleasant turn. ‘Cock-teaser,’ or worse, he would mutter, every time he encountered her in the clubhouse. Her only alternative was to steer clear whenever she saw him coming.

They took a couple of suites in a Knightsbridge hotel. The boys fought their way convincingly to the final with exemplary flair, and were about to meet the Bobbsey twins once again.

‘Up their fundaments!’ said Vikram.

‘Adhere to the agenda!’ said Seth.

The whole city thrilled with excitement.

On the Big Day, the boys had long since set off for the courts when Meena stepped into the lift. Camera-conscious these days, she had done her best with her appearance, and she’d taken several Ritalin to counter her bone-sagging weariness. A couple stood beside her, united by affluence, the woman’s hair teased into immaculate filigree, the man’s suit elegantly cut. As they descended past the sixth and fifth floors, Meena’s eye wandered along the jacket’s shoulder seam. No back street darji could manage that. At the third floor, to her surprise, the woman got out. By the second, she was experiencing a strange tug at the pit of her stomach. By the first, the electricity between her and her fellow traveller had begun to fizz. As they continued their descent, it flared, and she could feel the urgent energy of his body radiating through his clothes. At the ground floor, as the doors opened, he said, ‘I think, perhaps, you would prefer to return to the twelfth floor?’ So 149

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

they did.

As they lay in the soft cocoon of the hotel duvet, he swept his hand over her belly.

‘Sorry about the scars,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit of a mess, I know.’

‘No need to apologise. Scars on the exterior don’t diminish the soul within.’

He placed a soft kiss on her left breast. Evidently, he was a man who enjoyed kissing and knew how to do it well.

‘You are, I think,’ he said, ‘a woman with much potential…’

Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she felt herself unfurl like a new leaf. ‘…perhaps unrecognised.’

‘Recognise it now,’ she murmured, and allowed him to enter her for the umpteenth time that afternoon.

As the sun began to slide over the roof tops, she asked him if she could switch on the TV. The match had gone to a fifth set tie-break, and both pairs were carroming about like scalded cats. The spectators were drunk with excitement, the commentators busy remarking yet again on the unusual nature of the contest: two pairs of twins from opposite side of the globe. ‘Yes,’ thought Meena, ‘only Divine Providence could conjure that one up.’

At last, with Vikram providing distraction close to the net, Seth found the gap between the momentarily bamboozled Bobbseys and smacked the ball right down centre court to the baseline. It seemed to hover for a moment, and then plopped neatly on to the chalk. The crowd jumped out of their seats, the Bobbseys thumped their meaty hands to their foreheads, the twins dropped to their knees and kissed the turf.

And now the camera followed them as, once again on their feet, arms aloft, they surveyed the stands, acknowledging their fans, then turned to the players’ box, ready to salute their support team, and scouring it for the faces they knew best. In among the masseurs and medics, there was the bumptious Bobby, his pink turban as crisp as ever, but absolutely no sign whatsoever of their beloved mataji.

Meena lay back in the welcoming arms of her lover. ‘Ha!’ she thought. ‘They didn’t see that one coming.’

150

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

List of Contributors Alan Britt Alan Britt has published over 3,000 poems nationally and internationally in such places as Agni, Bitter Oleander, Bloomsbury Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Christian Science Monitor, Confrontation, English Journal, Epoch, Flint Hills Review, International Gallerie (India), Kansas Quarterly, Letras (Chile), Magyar Naplo (Hungary), Midwest Quarterly, Minnesota Review, Missouri Review, New Letters, A New Ulster (Ireland), Northwest Review, Osiris, Pedrada Zurda (Ecuador), Poet’s Market, Queen’s Quarterly (Canada), Revista/Review Interamericana (Puerto Rico), Revista Solar (Mexico), Roanoke Review, Steaua (Romania), Sunstone, Tulane Review, Wasafiri (UK), The Writer’s Journal, and Zaira Journal (Philippines). His interview at The Library of Congress for The Poet and the Poem aired on Pacifica Radio, January 2013. He has published 16 books of poetry. He teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University.

Anthony Wade Anthony Wade, a graduate lawyer with a Master’s Degree, is an Irish national educated in England who also worked in The Netherlands. An emerging poet he has in this his first year of publication published two poems in Ariel Chart, a poem in MonthsToYears, a poem in Boyne Berries Issue 24, three poems in Scrittura Magazine, with two poems accepted for future issues of The Dawntreader. An active member of the Midleton Writers’ Group he now lives by the sea in East Cork with Pamela, with whom he is married, and a very dim and loved marmalade cat, Basil.

Brian Finney Brian Finney is a writer and Professor Emeritus of Literature at California State University, Long Beach. Educated in England, he taught and organized extra-mural courses for the University of London. Since immigrating to the US in 1987 he has taught at UC Riverside, USC, UCLA, and California State University, Long Beach.He has published eight books, including Christopher Isherwood: A Critical Biography (1979) which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Terrorized: How the War on Terror Affected American Culture and Society (KDP 2011/2018), and Money Matters: A Novel ( 2019). He is married and lives in Venice, California.

Emma Venables Emma Venables completed her Creative Writing PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has taught Creative Writing at Royal Holloway and Liverpool Hope University. Her short fiction has previously featured in The Gull, Litro Online and The Lampeter Review.

151

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Fabrice Poussin Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at Shorter University. Author of novels and poetry, his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, and dozens of other magazines. His photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, the San Pedro River Review as well as other publications.

Fiona Pitt-Kethley Fiona Pitt-Kethley was born in 1954. She studied at the Chelsea School of Art where she obtained a BA hons. before going on to become a full-time writer.

As a student she ushered at the Old Vic and National Theatre. While writing, she sometimes worked as a film extra. She married the chess grandmaster and former British chess champion, James Plaskett, in 1995. They have a son Alexander and 8 rescued cats. In 2002 they moved to Spain. At first they lived in an ex-pat area until driven out by tyre-slashing English and Irish pensioners.

They are now much happier living amongst the Spanish in Cartagena. She goes rock-hunting and hill-walking in the Sierra Minera, an area she is currently writing poetry and prose books about. She also enjoys fishing for her dinner, listening to local Flamenco concerts and snorkels for several months of the year. Recently she took to film extra work again in Alex de la Iglesia´s La Chispa de la Vida.She is currently putting together a large new collection of her poetry from the last ten years.

Gerard Sarnat Gerard Sarnat’s been nominated for Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards,, won prizes and is widely published including by Oberlin, Brown, Columbia, Johns Hopkins and in Gargoyle, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, MiPOesias, Brooklyn Review, LA Review. KADDISH FOR COUNTRY was selected for pamphlet distribution on Inauguration Day nationwide. “Amber Of Memory” was the single poem chosen for his 50th Harvard reunion Dylan symposium.

Collections: Homeless Chronicles (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014), Melting the Ice King (2016). Gerry’s a physician who’s built/staffed homeless clinics, a Stanford professor/healthcare CEO who’s been married since 1969 with three kids plus four grandkids and more on the way.

Hanif Kureishi Hanif Kureishi was born in Kent and read philosophy at King’s College, London.

In 1981 he won the George Devine Award for his plays Outskirts and Borderline and the following year became writer in residence at the Royal Court Theatre, London.

His 1984 screenplay for the film My Beautiful Laundrette was nominated for an Oscar. He also wrote the screenplays of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) and London Kills Me (1991). His short story ‘My Son the Fanatic’ was adapted as a film in 1998. Kureishi’s screenplays for The Mother in 2003 and Venus (2006) were both directed by Roger Michell. A screenplay adapted from Kureishi's novel The Black Album was published in 2009.

152

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel and was produced as a four-part drama for the BBC in 1993. His second novel was The Black Album (1995). The next, Intimacy (1998), was adapted as a film in 2001, winning the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film festival. Gabriel’s Gift was published in 2001, Something to Tell You in 2008, The Last Word in 2014 and The Nothing in 2017.

His first collection of short stories, Love in a Blue Time, appeared in 1997, followed by Midnight All Day (1999) and The Body (2002). These all appear in his Collected Stories (2010), together with eight new stories. His collection of stories and essays Love + Hate was published by Faber & Faber in 2015.

He has also written non-fiction, including the essay collections Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics (2002) and The Word and the Bomb (2005). The memoir My Ear at his Heart: Reading my Father appeared in 2004.

Hanif Kureishi was awarded the C.B.E. for his services to literature, and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts des Lettres in France. His works have been translated into 36 languages.

Hilary Hares Hilary Hares lives in Farnham, Surrey and has an MA in Poetry from Manchester Metropolitan University. Her poems have found homes online and in print including Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Interpreter’s House, South and Magma. Her collection, A Butterfly Lands on the Moon is sold in support of Phyllis Tuckwell Hospice Care.

J. David Simons J. David Simons is a novelist and literary editor. His five published novels include The Credit Draper (2008), An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful (2013) and A Woman of Integrity (2017). His work has been short-listed for The McKitterick Prize, he has been awarded several writers’ bursaries from Creative Scotland and The Society of Authors, and he is a former recipient of the prestigious Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. He is also an editor with The Blue Pencil Agency and has been a mentor for The Scottish Book Trust.

Janet H Swinney Repentant education inspector, based in the UK, but with family ties in India.

Eleven of her stories have appeared in print anthologies. 'The Map of Bihar', published both in the UK and in the USA, was nominated for the Eric Hoffer prize for prose. 'The Work of Lesser-Known Artists' was a runner-up in the London Short Story Competition 2014. Other stories have been published by online journals including the ‘Bombay Review’, ‘Out of Print’ and ‘Joao Roque’.She has had listings and special mentions in many competitions including Fish, Fabula and 87Bedford. Her first collection of stories will be published later this year. She is working on a play based on the stories of Manto.

153

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Jim Brosnan Dr. Jim Brosnan, full professor of English at Johnson & Wales University, Providence, RI, placed second in NEATE’s 2010 Poet of the Year competition.

Jim has published four chapbooks of poetry and over 450 poems which have appeared in the Aurorean, Mad Poet’s Review, The Leaflet, The Bridge, The Teacher As Writer, and Voices of the Poppies Anthology (UK). Jim has won five awards in the National Federation of Poetry Societies competition. His first poetry collection, Nameless Roads, received a silver medal in a national contest. Jim was awarded a university fellowship for his second collection, West of the Mississippi.

Jimmy Mathew Jimmy Mathew is a self-taught Indian artist born in 1977 at Kottayam, Kerala.

His colourful paintings are deeply personal and documents his own life journey of becoming a full-time artist. He assisted and worked with world famous artists in the first Indian biennale [Kochi-muziris]. In the last 15 years, he sold lot of paintings to art collectors, philanthropists, hotels, house owners, and professionals who find a connection with his work, passion, and drive.

His mission is to demystify the world of contemporary art and interior design and bring them together. Jimmy portrays human life as coming from the darkness in to the light. A life not perfect, but one who is striving to live as a good person.

"An Artistic Life".

John Timothy Robinson John Timothy Robinson is a mainstream poet of the expressive image and inwardness from a steel mill town in the state of West Virginia. His poetics was developed in the tradition of James Wright, Rita Dove, Donald Hall, Marvin Bell, Maxine Kumin, WS Merwin, Tess Gallagher and Robert Bly among many others. John’s work has appeared in over seventy journals. He is also a published printmaker with fifty-three art images and photographs appearing in nineteen journals, electronic and print in the United States and Italy.

Keith Moul Keith Moul’s poems and photos are published widely. In August, 2017, Aldrich Press released Not on Any Map, a collection of earlier poems. These poems are from a new work about prairie life through U.S. history, including regional trials, character, and attachment to the land. They may parallel in some ways Spoon River. They are collected now in Voices beneath the Winds, seeking a publisher.

Martin Bradley Martin Bradley, a UK philosophy graduate, is founder-editor of The Blue Lotus an e-magazine dedicated to Asian art and writing, now in its eighth year. He is Art Consultant to Zhe Xuan Fine Art Gallery, in Kuala Lumpur. Martin was 154

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

invited to read his poetry in Delhi, India (2010) in the Commonwealth Writers Meet, also in Siem Reap, Cambodia (2013) and The Philippines (twice in 2013). He has had 5 books published recently and was winner in a Warren Adler competition for writing (2012).

Martin has had short stories, poems and art articles published across Asia.

Murali Kamma Murali Kamma is the managing editor of Khabar, a monthly magazine. His debut collection of short fiction, Not Native: Immigrant Stories of an In-between World, will be published in 2019 by Atlanta-based Wising Up Press. Most of these stories first appeared in various journals, including The Apple Valley Review, Rosebud and South Asian Review. He has interviewed Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, William Dalrymple, Amitav Ghosh and Pico Iyer, among other authors.

Naina Dey Dr. Naina Dey teaches at Maharaja Manindra Chandra College (University of Calcutta). She is a critic, translator and creative writer. Her books include Macbeth: Critical Essays, Edward the Second: Critical Studies, Real and Imagined Women: The Feminist Fiction of Virginia Woolf and Fay Weldon, Representations of Women in George Eliot’s Fiction, Macbeth : Exploring Genealogies and a book of poems Snapshots from Space and Other Poems. She was awarded the “Excellence in World Poetry Award, 2009” by the International Poets Academy, Chennai. She was a course-writer for Block 3 Unit 1 titled “Corporeality” and Block 4 Unit 2 titled “Gendered Postcolonial Identities” of IGNOU MWG-008 Gender and Life Narratives, 2014. She has taught gender as a member of the guest faculty for P.G. course in English at Bhairab Ganguly College (West Bengal State University), and has presented papers both in India and abroad. Presently she is also a guest lecturer in the P.G. Dept. of English, University of Calcutta. Her translation of Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury’s “Gupi Gain and Bagha Bain” will be released soon.

Niles Reddick Niles Reddick is author of the novel Drifting too far from the Shore, two collections Reading the Coffee Grounds and Road Kill Art and Other Oddities, and a novella Lead Me Home. His work has been featured in eleven anthologies and in over two hundred literary magazines including The Saturday Evening Post, PIF, New Reader Magazine, Forth Magazine, Cheap Pop, Flash Fiction Magazine, With Painted Words, among many others.

Polina Simakova (Agrippina Domanski) Polina Simakova is a 20-year-old theology student. She uses the pen name ‘Agrippina Domanski’. Her work has been published in The Lampeter Review, Dumas de Demain (in French, twice: La Guerre en Bosnie, Rachelle), On 155

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Religion, and 34th Parallel. One of her short stories has won the Mearnes Award (The Truffle Box) and another has placed among the winners of the 2016 Audio Arcadia short story competition (Marshes). Her most recent publications have been in Luna Station Quarterly, Audio Arcadia (2018) and The BFS Horizons of the British Fantasy Society (Long Days).

Sarah Mehjabeen Sarah Mehjabeen has reviewed well over a hundred books in recent years, including a variety of Advance Reader Copies from different international authors. She administers an influential Facebook group known as “Book Club Bangladesh” which has 1.5 thousand members, where books are reviewed and recommended to a wide pool of readers. She is also the acting Dhaka Representative for another group of voracious readers called Litmosphere which has almost 5000 members. In addition to this, Sarah has a personal international following on Instagram consisting of booklovers and literary activists.

Sreya Sarkar Having spent her childhood in a civil service family surrounded by voracious readers and fervent political discussions, Sreya nurtured a wish to write from an early age. After a short stint as a journalist in India, she set off for her second Masters in Political Science at University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, following which she worked as a public policy analyst in U.S. think tanks and published numerous articles and op-eds for newspapers. She currently lives in Boston and is working with Delhi-based Red Ink Literary Agency to get her first full-length novel published.

Stephen John Walker Stephen John Walker, as a young man, explored the wharves around Seattle’s waterfront gawking at, and sometimes sneaking on board, the multi-masted, derelict lumber schooners awaiting their final voyage to the knacker’s yard.

He dreamt of running away to the South Pacific or the Caribbean to be a crew member on a copra schooner. Later in life, his work and travels fulfilled those dreams. His debut novel, Hotel San Blas: A Caribbean Quest, a finalist in the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, is set among the islands along Panama’s north coast and Vietnam, and is available from Amazon.

Steve Wade A prize nominee for the PEN/O’Henry Award, and a prize nominee for the Pushcart Prize, Steve Wade’s fiction has been published widely in print and in digital form. His work has won awards and been placed in writing competitions.

His fiction has been published in over forty-five print publications, including Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts, Crannog, Boyne Berries, Zenfri Publications, New Fables, Gem Street, Grey Sparrow, Fjords Arts and 156

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Literary Review, and Aesthetica Creative Works Annual. He has won the Delvin Garradrimna Annual Short Story Competition four times. www.stephenwade.ie

V. Madhusoodanan Nair V. Madhusoodanan Nair is an Indian poet and critic of Malayalam literature, who is credited with contributions in popularizing poetry through recitation.

He is best known for Naranathu Bhranthan, the poem with the most number of editions in Malayalam literature as well as his music albums featuring recitations of his own poems and poems of other major poets. Kerala Sahitya Akademi honoured him with their annual award for poetry in 1993. He is also a recipient many other honours including Sahitya Akademi Award, Asan Smaraka Kavitha Puraskaram, Padmaprabha Literary Award, Kunju Pillai Award, R. G. Mangalom Award, Souparnikatheeram Prathibhapuraskaram and Janmashtami Puraskaram.

Vangelis Provias Vangelis Provias is a Greek writer, based in Athens. He has published two collections of short stories, “Missolonghi Square” (2016) and “The Black Shoes for the School Marching Parade” (2014), both by OLKOS editions. He has translated, in Greek, the memoir “Insomniac City” by Bill Hayes (ROPI editions, 2017). In 2016 he completed the sponsored by the U.S. Department of State program “Study of the U.S. Institute on Contemporary American Literature” at the University Of Louisville, KY, U.S.A. He is currently working on his first novel.

Variath Madhavan Kutty Variath Madhavan Kutty lives in Vancouver, Canada. He loves to translate good Malayalam poems into English. He has earlier translated Kumaran Aashan's 'Pensive Sita' (Chinthavishtayaya Seetha) and 'Compassion' (Karuna). His translation of Shatrughnan's novel Bharata's Destiny (Bharatha Jatakam) was published in June 2018.

William Doreski William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has published three critical studies and several collections of poetry. His work has appeared in many journals. He has taught writing and literature at Emerson, Goddard, Boston University, and Keene State College. His new poetry collection is A Black River, A Dark Fall. He has a blog at williamdoreski.blogspot.com, and is on Twitter at @wdoreski.

157

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Editorial Board Chief Editor Jose Varghese Jose Varghese is a bilingual writer/editor/translator from India. He is the founder and chief editor of Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts and Strands Publishers. He is the author of the books “Silver Painted Gandhi and Other Poems” and “Silent Woman and Other Stories”. His poems and short stories have appeared in journals/anthologies like The Salt Anthology of New Writing 2013 (UK), Unthology (UK), 10RED (UK), The River Muse (USA), Chandrabhaga (India), Kavya Bharati (India), Postcolonial Text (Canada), Muse India (India), Re-Markings (India), Dusun (Malaysia) and The Four Quarters Magazine (India). He was the winner of The River Muse 2013 Spring Poetry Contest, USA, a runner up in the Salt Flash Fiction Prize 2013, UK, a second prize winner in the Wordweavers Flash Fiction Prize 2012 and his poem was commended in Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize 2014. He has done research in Post-Colonial Fiction and is currently working on his first novel. He writes for Thresholds: The International Short Story Forum, Chichester University, UK and was a participating writer at Hyderabad Literary Festival 2012 and the 2014 Vienna International Conference on the Short Story in English.

Associate Editor Aravind R Nair Aravind R Nair teaches graduate and postgraduate classes in English Literature at Sacred Heart College, Thevara. He did his masters at the University of Hyderabad and has an M.Phil from The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. An odd assortment; he counts himself an avid fan of sf, anime, alt rock and Egyptology. He steers clear of ‘serious’ literature. However, he feels that the occasional classic is an occupational hazard!

158

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Design/Layout Editor Mariam Henna Mariam Henna is currently pursuing her Masters in English at Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities and is the chief editor of Chaicopy, an MCPH Literary Journal. Her works of fiction and travel have been published in Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts, Children’s Magazine and Trip Designers. She is also an Associate and Design Editor at Strands Publishers She hopes to become a teacher someday and inspire a curiosity for learning.

Review Editor Jude Gerald Lopez Jude Gerald Lopez is an aspiring writer who has finished working on his novel When Lines Blur (unpublished). He also writes short stories and poems and has been published in Efiction India magazine, Decades Review and previous editions of Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts. He maintains a blog and also contributes to publications on Medium.

Translation Editors Minu Varghese Minu Varghese is a bilingual writer and translator from India. Her MPhil dissertation was on the history plays of John Osborne and Bertolt Brecht. She has taught English Language and Literature in India from 1995 under various institutions of IHRD and is currently working as English Language Instructor in Jazan University, Saudi Arabia. She is the Malaylam translator of the Finnish children’s book (based on its English translation) ‘Simo and Sonia’ by Tiina and Sinikka Nopola, illustrated by Linda Bondestam (Sampark: Kolkata, 2014). She writes poems and short stories in English and Malayalam.

Mohammad Zahid Mohammad Zahid’s maiden poetry collection The Pheromone Trail is the Best Book Award winner from the Academy of Art Culture and Languages, Jammu & Kashmir, India.

His poetry has appeared in peer reviewed journals The Four Quarters Magazine, Maulana Azad Journal of English Language & Literature of MANUU Hyderabad, Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts, The Ghazal Page, Muse India and Poetry.com.

He is a translation editor for Kashmiri language for Muse India and Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts.

A banker by profession, he has a keen interest in photography, hunting landscapes with his camera.

159

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Visual Art Editor Shijo Varghese Shijo Varghese is a faculty member in the Department of English, Sacred Heart College, Thevara. He holds an M Phil Degree from Sree Sankara University, Kalady. He has his Master’s degree from University of Hyderabad and his Bachelor’s from Christ College, Bangalore. He is an aspiring writer and is interested in fine art and music too.

Photography Editor Collins Justine Peter Collins Justine Peter, a former BA Copy Editing student of SH College, is an aspiring writer with stories published in eFiction India and CLRI. He has won prizes in various photography and short-film competitions and has also contributed the cover image for the first issue of Lakeview. He is currently pursuing a postgraduate diploma course in Advertising and Marketing Communications in Conestoga College, Kitchener, Ontario.

160

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Advisory Board Alan Summers Alan Summers, a Japan Times award-winning writer based in Bradford on Avon, England, runs With Words, which provides literature, education and literacy projects, as well as online courses often based around the Japanese genres.

He is a co-editor for Bones Journal (new and gendai haiku), and his latest collection Does Fish-God Know contains gendai haiku and short verse published

by Yet To Be Named Free Press: There is also a forthcoming book titled Writing Poetry: the haiku way. Alan is also currently working on a children’s novel, an adult crime thriller, and the Kigo Lab Project. He blogs at Area 17, and is a featured haiku poet at Cornell University, Mann Library, as well as the World Monuments Fund haiku contest judge.

Website: www.withwords.org.uk Blog: http://area17.blogspot.com Bill Ashcroft Bill Ashcroft is a renowned critic and theorist, founding exponent of postcolonial theory, co-author of The Empire Writes Back, the first text to examine systematically the field of post-colonial studies. He is author and co-author of sixteen books and over 160 articles and chapters, variously translated into six languages, including Post-Colonial Transformation and On Post-Colonial Futures and Caliban’s Voice. He holds an Australian Professorial Fellowship at the University of New South Wales, Australia, working on the project “Future Thinking: Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures.”

George Szirtes George Szirtes, was born in Budapest in 1948 and came to England as a refugee with his parents and younger brother following the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. He grew up in London and trained as a painter in Leeds and London. He is the author of some fifteen books of poetry, roughly the same of translation from Hungarian, and a few miscellaneous other books. His first, The Slant Door (1979) was joint winner of the Faber Memorial Prize. In 2004 he won the T S Eliot Prize for Reel, and was shortlisted for the prize again in 2009 for The Burning of the Books and for Bad Machine (2013). There were a number of other awards between. Bloodaxe published his New and Collected Poems in 2008. His translations from Hungarian have won international prizes, including the Best Translated Book Award in the USA for László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango (2013) and his latest book for children, In the Land of the Giants won the CLPE Prize for best collection of poetry for children, also in 2013. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in the UK and of the Szécheny Academy of Arts and Letters in Hungary. He is married to painter, Clarissa Upchurch and recently retired from teaching at the University of East Anglia. For a fuller CV see his website at georgeszirtes. blogspot.co.uk

161

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

Kala Ramesh Kala Ramesh has long had a fascination for Indian classical music and has worked extensively on Pandit Kumar Gandharava’s gayaki and nirguni bhajans along with the paramparic bandishes of the Gwalior gharana, under the guidance of Vidushi Smt Shubhada Chirmulay, Pune. Kala has performed in major cities in India. Kala discovered haiku in 2005 and feels she’s addicted to this art form from day one! She also writes in related genres like, tanka (five line poem), haibun (tight prose embedded with haiku), senryu, and renku (collaborative linked verse). Her poems have appeared in anthologies, print and online journals. Her book titled “Haiku” brought out by Katha in December 2010 was awarded the Honourable Mention for Best Book for Children: The Haiku Society of America’s Mildred Kanterman Memorial Merit Book Awards. “The Blue Jacaranda” won the Genjuan International Haibun Contest 2012 (Japan). Her collection of tanka poems, “the unseen arc” won The Snapshot Press eChapbook Award 2012 (UK).

Loree Westron Loree Westron is an American writer living in the UK. Her short stories and literary criticism have been published in journals and anthologies including London Magazine, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice and Western American Literature. In 2010, she helped set up the Thresholds International Short Story Forum, for which she served as Editor until 2013. She is currently finishing a PhD at the University of Chichester where she also teaches Creative Writing.

Mel Ulm Mel Ulm is the editor and founder of The Reading Life, a premier Asian based literary book blog with over 100,000 visits a month. He is an internationally published philosopher. His posts on Indian literature have been recommended by The Economic Times of India and he will be a regular contributor to the Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society.

Patrick Connors Patrick Connors was Lead Artist in Making a Living; Making Art, a pilot project of Cultural Pluralism in the Arts at the University of Toronto.

He recently published in Barrie and Belgium. His first chapbook, Scarborough Songs, was released by LYRICALMYRICAL Press this Spring. He headlined an event of Sunday Poetry at Ellington’s called, Artists as Activists. He is a manager for the Toronto chapter of 100,000 Poets for Change.

Rana Nayar Rana Nayar is Professor and Former Chairperson, Department of English & Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh. His main areas of interest are: World Drama/Theatre, Translation Studies, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies.

A practicing translator of repute (Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow & Sahitya Akademi Prize winner), he has rendered around ten modern classics of Punjabi into English, ranging over novels, short stories and poetry. He was awarded 162

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

First Prize, in an All India contest, organized by Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi for his translation of Baba Farid’s Shlokas into English. Among other works, his translations include those of Gurdial Singh, Mohan Bhandari, Raghbir Dhand and Beeba Balwant, published by Macmillan, National Book Trust, Sahitya Akademi, Sterling, Fiction House, Katha and Unistar et al. Apart from this, he has one collection of poems Breathing Spaces (Unistar, Chandigarh) and three critical books, i.e., Edward Albee: Towards a Typology of Relationships (Prestige, New Delhi, 2003) and Inter-sections: Essays on Indian Literatures, Translations and Popular Consciousness (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2012), and Gurdial Singh: A Reader (Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 2012) to his credit.

Moreover, he has directed over twenty major, full-length productions, and acted in almost as many.

Sanjukta Dasgupta Dr.Sanjukta Dasgupta, Professor and Former Head, Dept of English and Former Dean, Faculty of Arts, Calcutta University, teaches English, American literature and New Literatures in English. Recipient of the Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship and several other awards and grants, she was also the Chairperson of the Commonwealth Writers Prize jury panel (2003-2005). Her published books are The Novels of Huxley and Hemingway: A Study in Two Planes of Reality, Responses : Selected Essays, Snapshots (poetry), Dilemma (poetry), First Language (poetry), More Light (poetry) Her Stories (translations), Manimahesh (translation), The Indian Family in Transition (co-edited SAGE), Media, Gender and Popular Culture in India: Tracking Change and Continuity (lead author, SAGE, 2011) Tagore: At Home in the World (co-edited 2012, SAGE). She is the Managing Editor of FAMILIES : A Journal of Representations Awaiting Publication in 2013: Radical Rabindranath: Nation, Family and Gender in Tagore’s Fiction and Fils.( lead author, Orient Blackswan) Editor:Golpo Sankalan (Contemporary translated Bengali Short Stories) (Sahitya Akademi) Sudeep Sen Sudeep Sen [www.sudeepsen.net] is widely recognised as a major new generation voice in world literature and ‘one of the finest younger Englishlanguage poets in the international literary scene’ (BBC Radio). He is ‘fascinated not just by language but the possibilities of language’ (Scotland on Sunday).

He read English Literature at the University of Delhi and as an Inlaks Scholar received an MS from the Journalism School at Columbia University (New York).

His awards, fellowships & residencies include: Hawthornden Fellowship (UK), Pushcart Prize nomination (USA), BreadLoaf (USA), Pleiades (Macedonia), NLPVF Dutch Foundation for Literature (Amsterdam), Ledig House (New York), Sanskriti (New Delhi), Wolfsberg UBS Pro Helvetia (Switzerland), Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland), and Shanghai Writers Programme (China).

He wasinternational writer-in-residence at the Scottish Poetry Library (Edinburgh) and visiting scholar at Harvard University. Sen’s criticallyacclaimed books include The Lunar Visitations, New York Times, Dali’s Twisted Hands, Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Distracted Geographies, Prayer Flag, Rain, Aria (A K Ramanujan Translation Award), Ladakh and Letters of Glass.

Blue Nude: New & Selected Poems | Translations 1979-2014 (Jorge Zalamea 163

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

International Poetry Prize) is forthcoming. He has also edited several important anthologies, including The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, Poetry Foundation Indian Poetry Portfolio, Poetry Review Centrefold of Indian Poems, The Literary Review Indian Poetry, World Literature Today Writing from Modern India, The Yellow Nib Contemporary English Poetry by Indians, Midnight’s Grandchildren: Post-Independence English Poetry by Indians, Midnight’s Grandchildren: Post-Independence English Poetry from India, Wasafiri New Writing from India, South Asia & the Diaspora, and, Lines Review Twelve Modern Young Indian Poets. His poems, translated into twenty-five languages, have featured in international anthologies by Penguin, HarperCollins, Bloomsbury, Routledge, Norton, Knopf, Everyman, Random House, Macmillan, and Granta. His words have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Telegraph, Financial Times, Herald, London Magazine, Poetry Review, Literary Review, Harvard Review, Hindu, Hindustan Times, Times of India, Indian Express, Outlook, India Today, and broadcast on BBC, PBS, CNN IBN, NDTV, AIR & Doordarshan. Sen’s newer work appears in New Writing 15 (Granta), Language for a New Century (Norton), Leela: An Erotic Play of Verse and Art (Collins), Indian Love Poems (Knopf/Random House/Everyman), Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe), and Initiate: Oxford New Writing (Blackwell). He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS and the editor of Atlas. [www.atlasaarkarts.net]. In January 2013, Sudeep Sen was the first Asian to be honoured to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture and read from his own work as part of the Nobel Laureate Week in Saint Lucia.

164

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019

165

LIJLA Vol. 6.2 - 7.1 Aug 2018 - Feb 2019