Litro156 teaser

ISSUE 156

India

Featuring

Shashi Tharoor William Dalrymple Shehan Karunatilaka Abraham Verghese Amarjit Chandan Divya Ghelani Nikesh Shukla Vivek Santhosh Aatish Taser Mona Arshi Abha Iyengar Cover art / Scott Stulberg

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ISBN 978-0-9554245-5-7

editorial staff

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Editor-in-Chief Eric Akoto | Online Editor online@ litro.co.uk | Ar ts Editor Daniel Janes, ar ts@ litro.co.uk | Assistant Fiction Editor/Stor y Sunday Barney Walsh, stor ysunday@litro.co.uk lunchbreakfic Belinda Campbell, lunchbreacfic@ l i t r o . c o . u k | Tu e s d a y Ta l e s H a y l ey C a m i s , tuesdaytales@litro.co.uk | Essays Samuel Dodson, essays@litro.co.uk | Contributing Editor at Large Sophie Lewis, Rio, Brazil | Lead Designer Laura Hannum | Design Intern Elina Nikkinen Advertising Manager +44(0) 203 371 9971 sales@litro.co.uk | Guest Editor Shashi Tharoor

Litro Magazine believes literary magazines should not just be targeted at writers themselves, or even those with a particular interest in literature, instead Litro believes in reaching the general reader whether they be a commuter, someone browsing in bookshop or in a bar or cafĂŠ to meet a friend.

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#156 India / 2016 October table of contents 05

Contributors

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Guest Editor's letter: the Indian Diaspora

fiction

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/ Lost by Mona Arshi

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Diaspora by Shehan Karunatilaka

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Warehouse by Nikesh Shukla

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Firefly by Divya Ghelani

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Sharmini Subramaniam: name, unknown by Selma Carvalho

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The Dragon Slayer by Abha Iyengar

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In Search of Equatorial Roots by Vivek Santhosh

non-fiction

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Why My Father Hated India by Aatish Taseer

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Excerpt from My Own Country by Abraham Verghese

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poetry

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Mapping Memories by Amarjit Chandon

photography

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Photography by William Dalrymple

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CONTRIBUTORS Shashi Tharoor, an Indian politician and for-

mer diplomat, has published 15 bestselling works on India covering its history, culture, film, society, foreign policy and more. His monthly column, India Reawakening, appears in 80 newspapers worldwide. He is also a passionate lecturer and speaker— globally recognized for his contributions on current issues in India.

William Dalrymple, Scottish writer, curator and historian, regularly publishes essays and books regarding the history of South Asia and the Middle East. Influenced by travel writers such as Byron and Newby, he has also written on his personal journeys in India and Central Asia.

Aatish Taser has worked as a reporter for Times

Magazine and has written for the Sunday Times, the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times, Prospect, TAR Magazine and Esquire. He is the author of Stranger to History: a Son’s Journey through Islamic Lands. His novel, The Temple-Goers (2010) was shortlisted by Picador (UK) and Faber & Faber (USA). His work has been translated into over ten languages.

Abraham Verghese, a physician-author who

is well known for his 2009 novel, Cutting for Stonewhich landed as #2 on the New York Times trade paperback fiction list in 2011. His first book My Own Country was based on his own personal transformation through his work as a doctor. He has now written a total of three best-selling books.

Abha Iyengar is an internationally pulished free-

lance writer and poet. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, magazines and literary journals, both in print and online. She is a Kota Press Poetry Anthology contest winner. Her story, ‘The High Stool’ was nominated for the Story South Million Writers Award. She has won several literary contests. She is a member of The Poetry Society of India and ‘Riyaz’ Writer’s Group at The British Council, New Delhi. Abha is a social activist who is against all forms of aggression and injustice.

6 Nikesh Shukla is a writer of fiction and tel-

evision and host of the Subaltern podcast. His debut novel, Coconut Unlimited, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2010 and long-listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2011.

Meatspace is his second novel.

Shehan Karunatilaka, a Sri Lankan writer

who currently resides in Singapore is best known for his novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Matthew which tells the story of an alcoholic journalist to trying to track down a missing cricketer in the 1980s. Karunatilaka is also a musician and plays bass for Sri Lankan bands.

Writer Divya Ghelani, who published her work in The Times and The Bookseller, is currently adapting her historical story, The Imperial Typewriter, into a short film. She is currently working on her debut novel, RUNAWAY.

Mona Arshi is an emerging poet whose debut

Small Hands (Liverpool University Press, 2015) won the Forward Prize for best first poetry collection. Her poems often tackle topics of grief, humour and self-awareness, while others draw on cases she worked on as a lawyer.

Amarjit Chandan is Punjabi poet and essayist. He writes a variety of world poetry and fiction, often invoking the theme of place in his writing.

He often writes about his hometown in the Punjab, Nakoda. Amarjit has been awarded several lifetime achievement awards for his poetry by both the Punjab government and the Punjab community in Britain.

Vivek Santhosh is a writer living in the San

Francisco Bay Area. He was raised in India and Oman.

An engineer by profession, he lived in Atlanta and Boston before moving west to Silicon Valley. When not writing or travelling, he enjoys reading and playing Ultimate Frisbee.

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Editor's letter: the Indian Diaspora Dear Reader,

No other country has anything like it—an annual jamboree of its diaspora, conducted with great fanfare by its government.

India has been doing it, with great success, for thirteen years now, timed to recall the return to India of the most famous Indian expatriate of them all, Mahatma Gandhi, who alighted from his South African ship in Bombay on 9 January 1915. Each January, a selected Indian city overflows with expatriate Indians celebrating their connection to their motherland at a grand Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (Expatriate Indians’ Day).

India is the only country that has an official acronym for its expatriates— NRIs, or Nonresident Indians. In my book India: From Midnight to the Millennium, I suggested, only half-jokingly, that the question is whether NRI should stand for ‘Not Really Indian’ or ‘Never Relinquished India.’

Of course, the nearly 25 million people of Indian descent who live abroad fall into both categories. But the nearly 2000 delegates who flock to India from over sixty countries for each Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (or PBD, as our

bureaucracy has inevitably abbreviated it) are firmly in the latter camp. They come to India to affirm their claim to it.

The ease of communications and travel today enables expatriates to be engaged with India in a way that was simply not available to the plantation worker in Mauritius or Guyana a century ago. To tap into this sense of allegiance and loyalty through an organized public gathering was an inspired idea, which India continues to build upon each year.

Sometimes the real value of a conference, however, lies in the conferring.

Indians have learned to appreciate how much it means to allow NRIs from all over the world the chance to share their experiences, celebrate their commonalities, exchange ideas, and swap business cards. Because when India allows its pravasis to feel at home, India itself is strengthened. I can think of one more meaning of NRI: the National Reserve of India.

Emigration—both of transported colonial-era prisoners and indentured labour, as well as some voluntary fortune-hunters—

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created an Indian diaspora in South-east Asia, Africa and the West Indies. The experience of passage was not pleasant. To be an indentured Indian labourer transported to the Caribbean on British ships was to enter a life-and-death lottery in which your chances of survival were significantly worse than to be a shackled African slave. The cultural result of this tragic experience, though, was the creation of a common sorrow-filled bond between slavery-induced and indentured labour. The ‘Brotherhood of the Boat’ became the subject of poetry, shared folklore and above all music that persists to this day. Literature has at last followed.

This expatriate “reserve” and poems, through which Indian writers added profoundly to the rich storehouse of Indian literature, as Indians in the diaspora have written in various ways of their connections to their homeland and their new lands.

The diaspora in the US and the UK have already become well-enough known, ever since the publication of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children in 1981, when a new and

ancient land imposed itself on the world's literary consciousness—a land whose language and concerns have stretched the boundaries of the possible in English literature. A generation of post-colonial Indian writers has brought a larger world—a teeming, mythinfused, gaudy, exuberant, many-hued and restless world—past the immigration inspectors of English literature.

But those writing in and of the global South have received relatively short shrift in our focus on diasporic Indian literature. It is time this was redressed, and that is why this issue of Litro focuses particularly on India and the global south. In short essays, stories and writers dislocated from their national and cultural moorings explore aspects of the expatriate experience. They are, I suppose, NRIs with a difference—Newly Readable Indians.

Shashi Tharoor

Guest Editor

The assistance of Manu Pillai is gratefully acknowledged

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NON-FICTION

Why My Father Hated India

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Aatish Taseer

A son writes about the history and situation that lead to his father's assassination.

Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."

My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.

Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.

The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric nor a politician but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, addressing the All-India Muslim league, made the case for a state in which India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical essence." Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.

Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history.

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FICTION

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Lost

Mona Arshi

A woman observes as her family frantically searches.

When I returned home I went into the kitchen and my partner and my ex-father-in law were both looking for it. They’d emptied out the cutlery drawer and the cupboards to find this thing that must be found. In the bedroom a crew of Aunties were tearing open the lining in the drapes and pulling up the carpets and in the en suite my twin was underneath the boiler with a set of spanners though I don’t believe it was lost in any bathroom. In the hallway I pass my elderly neighbours in overalls carefully making their way down the steep cellar steps. In the kitchen even my infant son, who’s strapped into his high chair is leaning forward prodding his fingers into the cracks of the table. I think everyone seemed to be so wrapped up in the business of searching that they hardly seemed to notice me.

When I looked in the back garden, I noticed my nephew he was working up a sweat and had dug several wide holes, some as big as foxholes. I gave him a half-wave through the window.

I thought perhaps the least I could do was to feed all these people in my house or just proffer them some light refreshments but by now the baby had fallen asleep at the table. I lifted him up out of his high chair. His cheek bore the print of the weave from the cloth. I placed him in his cot and checked underneath it again, just in case.

By nightfall, everyone was slowing down, they came in from the lofts and the cellars and the shed and in from the garden. Some of them were shaking their heads, others were whispering to each other. They all convened in the kitchen. They looked exhausted and some were still panting with exertion. Uncle took a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and put on his reading glasses, someone else passed him the telephone.

The police liaison officer was a woman with kind blue eyes. She made me a cup of tea from my kitchen and offered me sugar and milk. She had a notebook and asked me gently questions about my day and where I had been.

Her questions stirred up a terrible confusion in my mind. She nodded understandably when I stumbled over an event or couldn’t quite reach the word I needed for certain parts of the day.

She used her mobile phone a couple of times in the middle of my story but I couldn’t make out most of what she was saying.

I could hear the sirens outside in my neighbourhood but I couldn’t imagine it had anything to do with my situation. When I put the TV on, I saw pictures of a woman who looked just like me she was opening the door of a house that looked very much like mine. The policewoman gently took the remote control out of my hands and turned the screen off.

When they had left the aunties took me to the bathroom and helped me out of my clothes and eased me into my bed. They asked me to open my mouth and placed two pills on the centre of my tongue and urged me to swallow them with a glass of water.

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FICTION

Diaspora

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Shehan Karunatilaka

What leads a person to plan a terrorist attack?

Forgive your country every once in a while.

If that is not possible, go to another one.

—Ron Padgett It’s a simple car bomb, and it’s rigged to a busload of schoolgirls. No one knows it is there except for me. The Ceylon Islands’ bomb squad were trained by Israelis, but have not had anything to defuse in 20 years. By the time they get here there will only be carcasses of young girls to sift through.

I have three daughters and I am far from a monster. Yet this mission was created on my recommendation. It has taken me 10 years to formulate this plan and I believe it to be the only viable option.

In an hour, thirty-five schoolgirls between the ages of 8 and 12 will die or be disfigured because of the length of the hem on their school uniform. After that, this country will burn for weeks and after that I will be there to put out the fire.

It all began with Chamara Jayawardena, esteemed Sri Lankan cricket captain, swearing live on the BBC. A leader resigning like a drama queen wasn’t unusual in this county, but an old boy of Trinity College dropping the f-bomb in public was something scandalous.

The story of Ceylon began not with King Wijeya or Queen Kuveni, but with a post-match press conference at Lords. Chamara Jay was usually well spoken and polite, but that day he looked ruffled and agitated.

He was responding not to the dull cricket match that he had wasted five days on, but to news that Buddhist monks had set fire to Tamil businesses in his hometown of Kandy.

“Today I am deeply ashamed to be representing Sri Lanka. Thugs in robes claiming to uphold Buddhism have committed shameful acts in recent times. But none as disgraceful as the torching of property owned by Sri Lankan Tamils, people who are my brothers and sisters.”

“This may not be the forum, but it is the only one I have. I wish to announce my resignation as Captain, and my renunciation of my race and religion. Henceforth I no longer consider myself a Sinhalese or a Buddhist, as doing so implies complicity to these hate crimes, implies allegiance to these fucking arseholes.”

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FICTION

The Warehouse

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Nikesh Shukla

The attempt of a family to find opportunity in a different country.

To understand our family is to know about the warehouse. Magic things happened there. Our fortunes fluctuated. We ran a small international company by each of us occupying every single role, from managing director to warehouse staff to janitor. We gave it everything we had.

Each of us. And so our family survived.

On Sundays, we were a gang. My father, mother, two kakas and kaki, and a stack of theplas wrapped in tin foil. The radio was tuned to Sunrise. Junaid’s dad voiced the occasional advert. We mocked his Rothmans-deep voice. In Summer, we listened to test cricket, loudly if India was playing. Dad and the kaka drank lukewarm tins of Fosters and occasionally bellowed ‘ahl-roight bra-thaaaa’ to each other, and kaki and my mum took over the office at the back, licking their glitter-peppered fingertips and counting reams and reams of tissue paper into individual packs of three sheets.

We were the only ones on the industrial estate.

I heard and spoke Gujarati all day. We dipped thepla in a carrot and chilli seed pickle and ate them rolled up. Mum and I shared two or three cans of Diet Coke. Kaki banged the desk every time she made a mistake. She was, mum had once remarked, a typical Bombay-ite. Everything was fast and loud and dramatic and full of heart.

I helped to pack orders, count out reams of paper, pack them, tick them off on the order sheet, gee up my uncles with tales of my school and generally feel like an adult.

I did this willingly at first. I understood my burden. I was the one out of dad and kaka’s kids who got to go to private school. I was the eldest. It was important to them all that I went.

My parents didn’t come to the UK to assimilate. They came here to make money. But they understood that in order to make more money, you might have to assimilate. It was with this in mind that they focussed on my education, sending me to a private school, because private schools churned out future leaders, future business tycoons, and future lawyers. They afforded opportunity. Most importantly, my dad thought, they looped you into the old boy’s network he knew existed. By going to private school, I would be making connections that could pay off in my adult life. The irony was that all this opportunity private school afforded me, it turned me towards the arts.

By the time my sister was ready for school, by the time my cousins were ready for school, the business was floundering and so they all went to comprehensives. Meanwhile, I was left to excel at private school. Except, I was failing in maths and science, the subjects that meant everything to my dad and his brother, and the pressure of doing badly made me

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Firefly

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FICTION

Divya Ghelani

The intense heat and light of a love affair between a professor and student.

It was her. She was prettier in real life: svelte, slim-wristed, utterly feminine, utterly cosmopolitan Indian upper middle class. She was striding towards the Rare Books & Music Room in a tight-fitting purple top and blue jeans, her heeled boots looking more expensive than anything I had ever owned. She turned, momentarily, as if remembering something and I caught sight of her expression. It was as if she disapproved, as if she didn’t have any time for my nonsense. ‘Who was she?’ I asked myself. ‘What was her name again?’

I was seated at one of those big black tables on the first floor of the British Library, stuck between YouTubers and reluctant essayists, the majority of whom seemed keener on managing their Facebook accounts than finishing their work. I’d forgotten my Readers’ Pass and was cursing myself for having looked up because Wiggy Kenton (my eccentric boss at Oxford University Press) had me on a tight deadline for a big editing job: a German academic with bad English, writing on Shakespeare and the ‘Glocal’. Now I couldn’t stop staring at the Rare Books & Music Room, willing its walls to melt so that I might see Santosh Mukherjee’s wife again. I imagined her disdain when she caught me staring, my desire willing the entire building to de-materialise so that was just she and I. She was the unseen parts of Santosh, the world he’d stashed away. Intelligent, elegant, accomplished: Santosh Mukherjee’s beautiful wife. Who was she? What was her name again?

During those first weeks of my English Studies PhD, Professor Santosh Mukherjee had chased me so hard that I thought it was love. A fellow student had caught him looking at me in the lecture theatre and told me. That’s when I found myself dressing up for him, perfuming my hair, reading up. He was bright and attractive for his age, a welcome distraction from my true love, Sven, a Norwegian pilot who had left me for a Finnish girl. Once, when I spoke out at one his lectures, he described my question as ‘incandescent’. In our one-to-one tutorial, Santosh enthused about Derek Walcott’s poems before sidling up to me and saying, ‘You look so serious, Zainab. Where’s that lovely smile of yours?’ and later, ‘No need to leave.

Relax a bit. Why so formal?’ We soon got to the sex and lies. At first he told me he and his wife were in an ‘open relationship.’ Then he said he was torn between his obligation to wife and his desire for me. And then he told me the truth.

‘I feel like I can tell you anything, Zainab,’ he said, one afternoon in bed. ‘I love my wife. She is the mother of my child and she reads everything I write. I’d be nothing without her. But we’ve been together for fifteen years. Fifteen years...it’s a long time to be with someone. I get bored,’ he continued. ‘I get curious. Is there anything wrong with being curious?’

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FICTION

6am

Sharmini Subramaniam: name, unknown

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Selma Carvalho

Observations of a neighbour that one can't be bothered to get to know.

At 6 in the morning, with a weak winter sun just rising, I open the door to put my milk bottles out. Sharmini Subramaniam is already out on the street, hugging herself and wondering about aimlessly but I know what she is actually doing, is exercising. I don’t know Sharmini Subramaniam. In fact, I don’t even know her name. I call her Sharmini Subramaniam because that’s what I’ve named her. She looks like she could be one. She’s small and dark, and she wears an ill-fitting salwar-kameez which makes her already thin body look even more formless. Her face, I suppose, would be attractive at a Bharatanatyam dance contest; a red bindi on her large forehead, the kohl rimmed hard around her black fish-shaped eyes, a snub nose and a pointy chin. Her hair is slick with coconut oil which she parts with determined precision right at the centre and then braids into two thick plaits which fall on either side. I can tell she’s newly arrived from India. She has that smell which wraps itself around women and men and children newly arrived from India; of pickles and incense and sometimes of camphor balls as if their clothes have all been resting in a suitcase for a very long time. Every morning she walks to the end of the street and back again.

Last Wednesday, our paths crossed at the corner shop, which Ismail runs with the help of his ‘cousin-brother’. Ismail’s shop is so cluttered with things, there is hardly any space to walk and I wonder how he keeps an eye on it all; the sweeties and cigarettes and bottles of distilled vodka and refrigerated Pukka pies, and spreading onto the floor are the tin cans of beans and fruit in heavy syrup and sachets of pet food all gathering dust. Sometimes, he puts a cerealbox in front of a particularly offending pair of silicon breasts popping out from the cover of GQ magazine but mostly, he doesn’t care that it’s haram (sinful), in his religion, to stare at the candescent nakedness of a woman.

He’s always there at 6 in the morning, his skull cap a little off kilter, his beard droopy with long strands of grey, his summer coat which doubles as his winter coat stretched tightly over his large belly, pulling up the aluminium-grey shutters, nodding at pedestrians and ushering in the early morning commuters.

‘Why do you work so hard, Ismail?’ I ask him one morning.

‘Betti, in Pakistan you would call me baba, yeah? Here you can be disrespectful to me. Calling me Ismail. I am not your younger brother, yeah?’ Ismail pretends to be cross, but he’s glad for the conservation.

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FICTION

The Dragon Slayer

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Abha Iyengar

How adolescence changes a hero to a different type of character.

Jamie told a story that night to Marie. He talked of a boy named James, and she did not blink.

She knew his name was Jamie, and that he would have liked to be called James. He had told her once that he was too grown up, and should no longer be called Jamie. Marie had agreed.

His mother called him Jhoomar, which was a Hindu name, and he could not understand why. She had embraced Christianity ever since she came to the Tirinidad islands on the ship all the way from India.

“Ma, you are now a Christian. You should give up all thoughts of the old country and its faith,” Jamie often told her, but she clung to both with a nostalgia Jamie did not support. She had left his father and come away here with Jamie in her womb, and was now working on the sugar plantation, where Jamie worked as well. There was no other choice. They were ‘coolies’, cheap Indian labour who worked on the fields for the white masters.

That night he told Marie a story of a boy with blue eyes and straight blond hair that fell across his forehead so fair that the light could shine through it and legs long and thin and hairless that ran like the wind amidst the green grass, and arms that flailed in the sun with joy and abandonment, and skin that bruised so easy that a red blob formed fresh on the surface almost before the hunter was laid on it.

“What hunter being laid?” she asked, her eyes innocent but her mind knowing. “No hunter lays across such skin, Jamie, you should know it.”

He told her to listen and not interrupt because it stopped the flow of his words. It also stopped the flow of his dreams where he was this white-skinned James whom Marie would definitely want to get married to at the end of the story. He felt that the real Jamie would never be the man she craved as a partner, given his brown-skin and black hair that curled unkempt around his ears despite all the oil he put to keep it in place. He watched as she closed her eyes and listened to the rest of his story. Her eyelashes curled upwards, forming a semi-circular fan. Her hair fell in two long plaits down her back. Small gold earrings glinted in her ears, a gift from her now dead grandmother. Jamie was fifteen and had been working from a very young age, his hands calloused and hard. She had similar hands. They both worked the fields like the rest of their family. But her face was soft like the night breeze that sweetened the air now.

In Search of Equatorial Roots

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FICTION

Vivek Santhosh

An exploration of the homeland to get a closer connection with family lost.

I imagined how my father must feel to return to the land of his birth after fifty-two years.

More than the physical aspect of travelling long and far it was an adventure of the mind, as the mind tried to match every sight and sound to memories stored in its deepest reserves. As it tried to belong.

In his hand, he held two letters from his father: a one-page handwritten note describing locations and general directions and a barely legible scribble from when he had been terminally ill on the ventilator—a plea to be brought home to die. A wish we did not fulfil.

Yesterday, after a year of planning and coordination, Dad, Mom and I had converged at Singapore’s Changi Airport from Oman, India and the United States. From Singapore, the first leg had been a choppy seventy-minute ride over the South China Sea to Kuching. We were now airborne over East Malaysia to our final destination Miri in the island of Borneo.

Below, a river meandered through thick rainforest and balding farmland like a python sprawled across a green rug, not a care in the world for its deep curves. The occasional patch of white and burgundy sloping roofs seemed alien—almost hostile—to the lush equatorial wilderness.

Much of Borneo’s hinterland had remained unexplored and inaccessible until the discovery of oil in the early twentieth century and an increased demand for timber brought roads, navigable river routes and airways to the world’s oldest rainforest. In the fifties, my grandfather had been employed at the Sarawak Shell Oil Corporation. My grandmother, a math graduate, taught algebra at a local elementary school. When my father was six years old, a civil war broke out in the region forcing the family to return to India. The provinces of Sabah and Sarawak where they had lived went on to join Malaysia, breaking up the island into parts of three nations: Indonesia, with the five Kalimantan provinces comprising three-fourths the area, the minute Kingdom of Brunei comprising about a percent of oil-rich land, and Malaysia, the rest. We were the first members of our family to visit the region after 1962.

“Isn’t this the same steward who served us in the first leg?” my father asked as the meal cart came our way.

I said no, because the crew had changed at Kuching.

“But I’m sure,” he insisted.

“No, Dad, they didn’t leave one behind.”

His mind had already embarked on its adventure. ***

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NON-FICTION

Excerpt from My Own Country

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Abraham Verghese, with the permission of the author.

A doctor's story during the AIDS epidemic.

My mother and father arrived in Addis Ababa a week apart. They were among four hundred other Indian teachers—most of them Christians from Kerala—who would spread out over Ethiopia and teach math, physics, biology or English in the newly built high schools in Ethiopia. Why were all these teachers recruited from one state in India? Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, shortly after his county was liberated from Mussolini’s hold, went on a state visit to India. He travelled to the south of India to see the churches of St. Thomas. He had seen in the early morning, as you can still see today, legions of schoolboys and schoolgirls in uniform making their way to classes. Kerala was then and still is the stat with the highest literacy rate in India. This sight had impressed the emperor so much that he had decided to hire teachers from this Christian state to man the new schools he was starting across his country.

On the matter of how my parents met, how they courted, I dare not ask my father. And my mother, though seemingly willing, parts with no significant details. My brothers and I always thought it had something to do with physics.

When my parents tell me the story of their arrival in Ethiopia—the tough times in India, the struggle to get a college education, the word of mouth from friends about jobs overseas, he letters of inquiry to “relatives” abroad, the establishment of a base, the accumulation of a nest egg, the consolidation of resources by marriage, the help and support extended to their younger cousins and more distant “relatives” who wrote asking for advice—I understand the migration of Indians to South Africa, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Mauritius, Aden, Ethiopia. And the next wave on to Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, London and Toronto. And to Flushing, Jersey City, Chicago, San Jose, Houston and even Johnson City, Tennessee.

In their herald migration, my parents individually and then together reenacted the peregrination of an entire race. Like ontogeny repeating phylogeny—the gills and one-chamber heart of a human fetus in the first trimester reenacting man’s evolution from amphibians—they presaged their own subsequent wanderings and those of their children. *** During the hiatus in my medical education, while I worked as an orderly in America and before I went to India to finish medical school, I had seen the vantage of a hospital worker the signs of urban rot in Newark, Elizabeth, Jersey City, Trenton and New York. The (insured) middle class continued to flee farther out to the suburbs where chic, glass-fronted hospitals complete with birthing suites and nouvelle cuisine popped up on the freeway like Scandinavian furniture franchises.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

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Photo Essay William Dalrymple

This issue's photo essay is taken from the exhibition entitled The Writer’s Eye, which is part of a travelling exhibition of photographs which has already been exhibited at Sunaparanta: Goa Centre for the Arts and Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi in March 2016.

In a suite of black and white photographs, shot over two years, William Dalrymple brings elegance, inquiry and grace to the photographic form. Powerful and precise, the pictures in The Writer’s Eye are documents of landscape, conveying potent solitude and brooding strokes.

The exhibition is curated by bestselling writer and Sensorium Festival co-founder, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi.

Untitled / Digital print on photo rag bright white 26.5" x 15"/ Edition - 8 + 2AP

The Bhavan, London’s home of Indian Arts & Culture is the largest institute of its kind outside India.

The Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, The Bhavan’s full name, was set up in Mumbai, India in 1938 as a centre to promote Indian arts and heritage; there are currently over 100 branches world-wide. The Bhavan London opened in 1972 and was the first independent branch outside of India. In 1978 the institute moved from New Oxford Street to its current location in West Kensington.

The venue is a beautifully converted church, refurbished in 1978 to its current state. Featuring skills studios, classrooms, professional theatre, art gallery and bookshop, the centre hosts over 900 students who study Classical Indian Music, Dance, Yoga and Languages. Other events year-round include cultural performances, lectures, workshops and exhibitions.

The Mountbatten Hall, The Bhavan’s 300 capacity theatre, boasts intricate wooden architecture and is used to showcase hundreds of arts & culture events year-round. The MP Birla Millennium Art Gallery was added to the centre in 2002 and exhibits local and visiting artists.

Featured classical dance subjects include Bharatnatyam (South Indian), Kathak (North Indian), Odissi (Odisha) and our newest edition, Kuchipudi (Andhra Pradesh). Classical music subjects include Sitar (North Indian stringed instrument played by Pandit Ravi Shankar), Karnatic (South Indian) Violin, Hindustani, Karnatic & Bengali Vocals, Tabla (North Indian drum), Mridangam (South Indian drum) and Bansuri (Flute). Yoga styles include Iyengar, Ashtanga and Hatha and languages taught are Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Sanskrit. The curriculum is designed for beginner to advanced levels and the teachers are highly trained and gifted in their fields.

4a Castletown Road, West Kensington London W14 9HE www.bhavan.net 020 7381 3086/4608