december 2011

DISCLAIMER: Though enough care has been taken, and caution exercised, so that no one piece of writing in this issue would end up hurting anybody’s social, cultural or religious sentiments, yet it must be pointed out that neither The Four Quarters Magazine nor the printers (Hummingwords, Delhi, IND) accept any responsibility for the author’s opinions or views. The responsibility for that rests entirely with the author in case.

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EDITORIAL GROUP THE BROBDINGNAGIANS (DELHI, WEST BENGAL, ASSAM)

GUEST MEMBERS OF THE EDITORIAL GROUP: Gargi Talapatra (Kolkata) Vasundhara Chandra (London) Arjun Choudhuri (Silchar) Gaurav Deka (Guwahati) Asmita Boral (Kolkata).

EXECUTIVE EDITOR Shuvasish Sharma (New Delhi)

PRINTERS HUMMINGWORDS PUBLISHERS, NEW DELHI.

ISSN 2250-074X

2|Page The Four Quarters Magazine, December 2011

CONTENTS

POETRY Ananya S. Guha (Shillong, India) Kevin M. Hibshman (UK) Luke Prater (UK) Rini Barman (New Delhi, India) Baron James Ashanti (New York, USA) Arjun Choudhuri (Silchar, India) Ian Hall (UK)

FICTION Abantika Debray (Kolkata, India) Amit Shankar Saha (Kolkata, India) Chandana Purkayastha (Silchar, India) Gargi Talapatra (Kolkata, India) Mithun Mukherjee (New Delhi, India) David Rocklin (California, USA)

MEMOIRS - NON FICTION Samarpati Sanyal (Sibsagar, India) Rafiul A. Rahman (New Delhi, India) Debjani Sen (Silchar, India)

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EDITORIAL Dear readers, This is the first issue of The Four Quarters Magazine to see the light of the day, or to flash onto your computer screen, whichever the case might be.

Over the last few months, it has been a lot of work coordinating the numerous stages of submissions, peer reviews and drafting. In spite of the utter devotion that inspired us to start this project, it was quite difficult; it must be said, with our non-publisher lives interfering constantly with the flow of work at the editorial desk.

But, we did manage to put in the best of our efforts. The result, we hope, will be as pleasing to our readers as it has been lengthy and at times, unwieldy, for us.

For all who would be interested in knowing, The Four Quarters Magazine is just another magazine for serious creative writing. Published mainly as a print series publication, and partially as a digital series publication, it is funded by generous donations made by well meaning individuals who, we must confess, wish to remain unnamed here. We respect their desire to remain anonymous, but at the same time, we take this chance to voice our gratitude to them for helping us execute this well enough. We are also grateful for the many submissions we received in our email inbox since we first announced the launch of the magazine. It would be honest to admit that we had been a bit wary and skeptical about submissions initially. But the overwhelming response by writers from all over the world eased our worries about the possible dearth of submissions. Some of the work we have received is absolutely wonderful. But those we did not use in this issue simply because there was very little time to deal with the editing and drafting. We will be using most of that work in subsequent issues. And we are sure that we will receive more work from them in the future. And maybe then, if all things go well, we will be glad to host them, more than once, in the future issues of the magazine.

One thing important to know about The Four Quarters Magazine’s publication process is that the selection of the published work in each issue is facilitated initially by the editorial board, and then by the peer review group, which comprises eminent authors and poets from India as well as from different parts of the world like the USA and the European Union. Why do we have a peer review group? One

would naturally expect this question. The answer is very obvious. A peer review is a process of self- regulating, even when it comes to creative writing. In the academia, peer review plays a very important role in determining the suitability of publication when it comes to individual articles or research papers. Serious creative writing also involves a lot of research and analysis. A peer review ensures that the published work will meet the established standards of writing in this case. The peer reviewers for The Four Quarters Magazine have been most kind with their comments and suggestions in this issue. As we work to include more such accomplished authors in our peer group, we will update our readers about the peers in subsequent issues.

The present issue has an extract from a published novel by David Rocklin. We are grateful to David for letting us publish this extract from his very interesting novel The Luminist (released in October 2011). We do hope that our readers will find it interesting enough to make an attempt to read the whole novel. Details about the novel can be found on Amazon or Flipkart or on David’s own website. The link to the website can be found at the end of the extract a few pages further on. We are also grateful to our friends in the United States and in the United Kingdom for submitting their work and hope that they will find our efforts and this first issue pleasing enough.

We will welcome suggestions for further development of the magazine from all our readers, and also our contributors. Please let us know if you find anything that does not meet your reading standards in these following pages. We will be glad to incorporate your suggestions in subsequent issues. The next issue of the magazine will be released in April-May 2012.

Preparations are already on for that. Submissions are also being accepted. For more details, please visit our website at www.fourquartersmag.com or join our Facebook group, as well as our Facebook page.

On behalf of our entire team, we extend to you heartiest season’s greetings and best wishes for a happy New Year. May happiness pervade all hearts and minds.

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THE BROBDINGNAGIANS (Editorial group for The Four Quarters Magazine)

POETRY ANANYA S. GUHA ONLY WINTER Now it threatens to rain again leaving the cold destitute.

Winter's follies though accidental only makes it prone to lone unpredictability.

What safe haven winter is, even the water refuse to gurgle in streams. Frosty eyed they throw tantrums of sinister meaning.

Clouds envelop skies, wafer thin bodies.

We armed, jacketed, pilloried with clothes to catch a glimpse of a vanishing season.

Comparisons are odious, how many times O wintertime will you be subject to man made disasters? How many times will we blame you for freezing fruits of earth?

Your voices are sonorous.

Only your face betrays, time, place, history. You are forever.

Little child slipping shoes Murmur, spaces of sunshine, oranges, fireplace.

Only winter spurns one more wish.

AND ROADS There is a way to traverse roads.

Roads are uncanny. They lead you to paths strewn with rice, paddy fields and mud. This is in India. But home is here and roads reckon that and take you to abyss of myths: mosques and temples.

Forts and minarets. Somewhere the mast flies.

Somewhere it does not, but roads are omniscient with children as playthings and hutments as barriers.

Roads then, are forbidden.

They become loquacious and prattle.

The noise is incessant. Only when there is a storm are silent. And penurious.

Have you heard their lament or the snipers which assail them, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Egypt?

Mortgage these roads, but don't banish them into crusades( of war).

You will understand plenitude, volatile war, love and what takes to make a land, a country, a nation.

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RINI BARMAN

LUNAR STILL Wild unquenched clouds dripping dark sweat, As if changing sides on a lunar fantasy, One glistening terrace glimpse, Thousands of cracked slippers Severe unafraid, Near an untamed red orb, where silver swallows the virgin lips, Distant strangers fade United in tonight’s eclipse.

FALLEN TEA LEAVES Gusty eyes chase the morning beam, by a merchandise gas-stove flame, Essence of that insipid caffeine steam, phantom cobwebs puff in the window pane, I inhale abysmal and swim downstream, Sometimes two cups of tea do not taste the same, And sometimes I dream..

TEN MAGICAL FINGERS In the Central Park, with ten soft fingers, He steals a memory, For her solitary eyes.

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KEVIN M. HIBSHMAN

YOU AND ME AND GRAVITY Hold me like gravity holds the planets.

As the infinite arms of the universe cradle the stars.

I do not wish to wander, have no desire to be spirited away on an unsafe whim.

If my will is not enough to ground me, will you hold me as I turn?

MYTHS AND RELICS She came back, smelling of the river and all that gathers underneath.

Her hair was some form of wild vegetation that crackled with clean.

I wanted souvenirs from the murky floor and she did not disappoint: A child's sneaker, a chunk of wood and a new myth alive in her eyes.

EARTH MOTHER She smelled of burning things.

The earth seemed to kiss her steps as she walked.

The sky was a song she heard and repeated daily.

She cupped the rain in one hand, the wind in the other and froze the elements until he forgave her.

She offended the unpretty privileged and mocked the classless middle-class.

She stomped the vacuous flat and they gladly gave up their last breath.

She smiled like a mountain cat about to pounce.

She mothered fiercely and sobbed alone in dark chasms.

AUTUMN She smelled of untraceable herbs.

They seeped out of her pores, her gaze, her choice of words.

We drank tea by the imaginary fire.

It was always warm in her presence.

Upon taking my leave, she advised: “Autumn is soon coming. Time to harvest the wind and steal back the sky.�

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HAIKU 1.

We stood motionless High above the flooded plain.

Minarets poking up like arms for rescue from the inundated valley.

2.

Traipse the sodden hills.

Parapets to new landings?

Shall we wear the dawn?

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FICTION

ARUNABH SAIKIA

SHINY POLKA DOTS ON A RED RAG OF TREACHERY

You lead me into your deep dark alleys Where the beer and whiskey rallies Lead me into women; women Indifferent to preying men Carry on with their own business Washing down French toast with tea grown In the plains of Assam and jovially Plucked by women completely Of a different kind as they happily hum A song so merry that no amount of strong XXX rum And tolas of Nepali Ganja ever can Replace its place in the life of a man Like me fed by the loneliness of a faraway land Reluctantly taking to writing with an unskilled hand.

to drinking) and I am pretty sure the opposite type exists too.

Bloody Marys to Blue Sea Breeze If you say it loud with a geez The Screwdriver shall tighten all loose nuts All you need is a little bit of guts And in Sex on the Beach it will all culminate Only if you behave in a manner affectionate.

And that chance I took; asked her for a light.

And within the next ten minutes, Gorky’s Mother was what we were discussing; a book my father had given me once in hope to make me read something more literary than Sidney Sheldon, who back in those days of just achieved sexual ripeness could hold my attention for hours on end.

Out of place was my first reaction. Arresting, the second. There was something about her that I haven’t been able to place till today. However, I was drawn to her like a child to a candy. Come to think of it, the aura of a chain-smoking, good-looking woman male companion-less in a shady Graham Greene-ish place is too tough to just ignore for a twenty year old biologically anyway.

Smoking your Dunhills Without any frills Reading without any expression Nabokov I blame it not on the shots of Romanov That I lingered on that second extra To steal a glimpse of your eyes and etcetera.

I had had quite a lot to drink and was in a reasonably good mood as I usually am after alcohol. On that, I must say that conducts of people after alcohol is a subject that has always fascinated me and I personally believe it holds a lot of research potential for psychologists. My experiences over time has led me to categorizing people into two kinds viz. the mellow and the aggressive kinds (post drinking demeanour that is).

Interesting is the fact that post-drinking behavior is not necessarily in conformity with the general deportment of the person. I have come across people- normally nice, easygoing individuals who blowup after a few drinks (the kind I normally try to steer clear off when it comes

For brushing aside my hero Kafka I forgave you; for those silvery shiny polka Dots on your black -a –little- too -short flowing dress Of which you had made a complete mess Reminded of the stars I dream of every night And the borrowed cigarette I pulled on with all might For like this woman Suzy Q in the song by CCR I knew you to me could do things stellar.

BB King on the worn out speakers of the café lamented that the thrill was gone and for once I knew the old man was wrong. The way she lit her rollups in a laidback almost Huck Finn like fashion told me the night was nascent. Over extra sweet not so hot tea, conversation drifted from her favorite Fyodor Dostoevsky versus one of my favorites Franz Kafka to her Dhaulakuan Cantonment growing up years. With a fondness intense yet detached and eyes a little blurry, she spoke about growing up with doctor parents who worked for the Indian Army.

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Conceal hard as you may The pain always gives away Like the fistful of sand you try To clench on to without letting any of it by But the harder you try to clutch on to

The more easily it goes through.

The music changed to John Denver’s ‘Take me home, country roads’. I for a change didn’t want to go home that night and by the looks of it she didn’t too.

The owners of the café did, though, and go we had to.

Whose home remained to be seen. She paid the guy off and offered me to walk her back home, which she said was just a few blocks away. I accepted with all the gladness of my 20-year-old heart.

My heart was but one swollen mango With discovery exulted with a bingo That I too if I tried had my way with women No more an art was it exclusive to my good-looking brethren Marched I along hand in hand with her with much pride Singing a song all along about getting myself a beautiful bride.

and after a good five minutes of walking, we started to go inside into one of the cramped shadier lanes skirting the neon lit street. I wondered if the master himself – Graham Greene, had ever been there for the setting around was so much like the locales in his novels-shady yet enticing. And just as Greene came to my mind, she suddenly stopped to light herself another cigarette.

“How far is it?” I asked starting to get a little impatient.

“What?” she snapped in an uncharacteristically hoarse voice It was just then that I felt something sharp on my neck behind me. I turned back impulsively. Two menacing looking men towered over me with one holding an ustra at my neck.

She smiled with those sad eyes of hers as she took one last large puff of her Dunhill.

On the way back, my head went overdrive contemplating what lay next. We walked on led by her

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Euphoria gave away to despair More so with no one to share Ripped of the little I ever had Not for the money though am I sad But that look in your sad smiling eyes From the curse of which I’ll never be able to rise.

ABANTIKA DEBRAY

THE LIVES OF THE PEOPLE

1.

She had been on the go since very early that morning, trying to get things ready for the dinner party that evening. It was important, it was. Everything had to be spick and span, the tablecloths, the silver on the table, the place settings, the settees, the jhaarbattis , the antlers of the long dead stag lording it over the living room entrance and her flower arrangement too. She pottered about, with Khetaru, her husband’s old retainer trying to keep up with her.

The weekly melee in most planters’ clubs in the tea estates in that region had become a thing of the past due to the insurgency that had overwhelmed almost the entire state. Not wanting to be cheated out of their share of fun, the tea executives fraternity had turned to more private affairs; mutton-ridden dinners and post-dinner drinks in the sheltered lawns of their sprawling bungalows, or late afternoon tea parties with no alcohol at all, except for the furtive peg behind of doors in the company of a few friends while the missus party and the bachha-log camped on the lawns in the dying light of the setting sun.

These parties were very private affairs. Only acknowledged members of the executive elite were invited. And it was all by rotation. One week the party would be held at one venue, the next week it would shift to another estate. Since there were nearly as many as twenty different estates quite close to each other in the immediate vicinity, the rotation was quite comfortable an arrangement. This week it was their turn to host, and Mrs. Gupta’s nerves already frayed to the point of her going hysteric.

Almost everything had been completed to near perfection. The managers with their families would begin piling into the compound of their bungalow just after dusk. But still, as the convener of today’s entertainment, Mrs. Gupta was not a little bit anxious about whether her hard work would pay off, and the dinner would go well, without any botch-ups.

She sat down on a cozy davenport which lay sprawled on the shady covered verandah. The somewhat bare but well maintained lawn stretched out into the distance, melding into the narrow gateway to the compound which, from this distance resembled nothing but a strangely shaped toy. A lonesome shrubbery crept across one side of the gateway, and the breeze blowing across the landscape seemed to impart the two parts of the metal gate with a life of their own.

Swinging gateways always made her nervous, much like those horror stories where the swinging of the doors and the creaking of the windows always heralded the appearance of some apparition or the other. Not that she believed in ghosts anyways. Mrs. Gupta shrugged off the nervous feeling that seemed to be trying to take hold of her, her neck going taut with a strange unease.

I need a break, Mrs. Gupta told herself, I’ve been working too hard.

“Memsaab, chaah,” Jhilmili, her maid announced, placing a cup of tea on the table to her right.

She nodded, but kept looking at the distant horizon which was just visible over the low-risen wall of the compound. It was a gloomy day and the sun was barely visible. The overcast sky ushered a sense of despondency. There was rain too, as the clouds shed their occasional, wayward drops on the leaves of the magnolia trees growing along the compound wall to her far left. This sort of weather was not pleasing to her. It either was a full blown shower with gusts of wind and thunder, or it was a sunny day for her. Gloomy days and swinging gates did not charm her.

Suddenly, she heard a rustle that made her turn around. A chameleon was scurrying past, across the banisters that lined the verandah. It ran away and hurriedly leapt from the shade of the verandah into the branches of the shefalika tree that grew just along the corner of the verandah, to her right.

Mr. Gupta was getting ready for office. He had a responsible post to maintain at the estate office, so an imminent party could be no reason to keep him indoors.

The road to the estate office and thence to the factories section of the baagaan was lined with young tea bushes and the refreshing fragrance of those bright green tea leaves lingered all along the way. It was so beautiful.

“Gaari aa gaya, madam, the car is here” said Khetaru.

“Baboo-saheb ko bol do, tell Baboo-saheb” she replied, without turning.

She had often insisted on being taken across that avenue of tea bushes and occasional towering banyans to where her husband worked throughout the day. She would take him his midday meal herself on most days, just to be able to see that beautiful span of greenery another time. But the sounds of the huge tea grinders irked her. Even from here in the shelter of the verandah, one could hear the distant mechanical sounds from the factories quite in contrast to the softness of the greenery that the welcoming sight of the avenue past the now opened gateway promised.

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Working in a tea garden was a dream job some thirty years back when her husband had joined as an accountant at this very estate. Many years had passed.

Their children, now grown up were settled in Kolkata, where both she and her husband had been born. They had first spoken to each other on a college picnic to Garjanhaat, a tea plantation in the famous Dooars of Bengal. Six months later they had been married. It had not been much of a love story, more of a sort of arrangement by interested families, though there had been enough on the part of her husband at the beginning.

But the years had hardened Mr. Gupta. And even more so recently. It was the workplace taking toll on his usually tacit nature. The crash in the international market, the onslaught of cheaper Sri Lankan and Kenyan tea had hit the Indian tea industry very badly.

Paying the weekly wages and the distribution of monthly rations to the workers on the payroll had become difficult. Even at the executive level, long pending salaries had become the order of the day.

The British tea planters had built their bungalows always away from the labourers’ hovels.

Theirs was no exception either. Mr. Gupta trod with his heavy shoes through the living room and into the verandah. “Everything ready, I hope?” he asked his wife. “Yes. Why not?” she replied. He nodded curtly and descended the short flight of steps into the compound. “I will send Khetaru for the food by 2 o’clock.” he said, turning to look at her, but without stopping, as he approached the gate.

Suddenly he heard a loud commotion from a part of the adjoining thicket that lined most of the compound wall. Mrs. Gupta could hardly ask the chowkider to find out what it was when a group of men banged open the gate and ran straight towards her husband. Realising that it was an ambush of sorts and that the men meant harm to him, Mr. Gupta tried to flee into the house. But how far could he run? The men grabbed and dragged him away mercilessly. Mrs. Gupta ran to her husband’s aid, shouting for help in vain.

Right in front of her eyes, the men lifted him into a truck which disappeared in no time. Still shouting, she collapsed on the lawn. She did not know what to do now. There was no one anywhere around. The news of a garden manager who had been burnt alive on a tea plantation in upper Assam a few days back began to come back to her and she swooned away.

2.

When she regained consciousness, Mrs. Gupta found herself being fanned by Jhilmili. Some of her other maids also sat by her. For a moment or two, she did not understand where she was. Finally it began to

come back to her mind. Her husband had been kidnapped. But who would do that to him? He was a very honest man, well loved by the labourers and the locals alike. But it had happened. Ever since the problems with the market had started, there had been news of such outrageous activities all around. Every time something of that sort was reported to them, she had felt a hand of terror seize her heart. But somehow she had never believed that her husband would also face the same situation ever. But now it had happened.

The first sensible thing she felt she must do would be to inform her brother about the matter, Mrs. Gupta thought. He was the assistant manager of the Kalamari tea plantation, which was about twenty kilometers away. She would leave it to him to notify the head office in Kolkata, she thought.

Suddenly, the phone rang. She answered, thinking that somehow the news of what had happened had spread to other quarters. “Hello” she said into the receiver. “Memsaab, we want our wages back. Your husband has them all. He cheated us. Our families are starving. We want them immediately, or we will kill him” a harsh, but clearly frazzled voice rushed the words into the phone. “Hello, hello. Please! Don’t hurt my husband! Please!” she tried to say, but they had hung up.

The phone rang again half an hour later to tell her that they would face serious consequences, if the money for the wages was not returned to the ‘rightful recipients’, the labourers, by that evening. They informed her, how Mr. Gupta had refused to take any food. During that second call from the kidnappers, a chameleon, like the one in the morning, appeared and crossed the floor of the room, disappearing out of the open window that looked out onto a dense wilderness just adjacent to the compound wall. And as it passed out into the dense undergrowth that covered the entire sky outside the window, Mrs. Gupta saw the pale skinned chameleon turn pitch black.

Her brother had arrived by early afternoon, as well as some friends and colleagues of her husband’s from all around the neighbourhood. Negotiations were begun through intermediaries. Half an hour later, the owner of the estate intervened too. The local MLA was also contacted. After much bargaining it was settled that labourers’ dues would be cleared. However, such assurances could do little to pacify Mrs. Gupta. An unnamed fear grasped her. She could not rest till her husband was safely back at home. But the worst, it seemed, was yet to arrive. When the labourers called the next time, they told them that Mr. Gupta would not be set free. The police and even the commandant from the local army cantonment opined that the labourers were probably acting under some sort of external instigation.

A search party was organised and a massive posse of policemen were summoned.

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3.

The day darkened with every passing hour. It had started pouring in fat droplets which made everything outside seem slimy and sinister. The search party had traced the tracks of the truck to a godown not far from the bungalow. There was no one around, and the truck whose tracks led to the godown was also significantly absent. One of the cops suddenly stumbled over a tree trunk and fell down, inadvertently letting loose a stream of curses.

Suddenly, there was a huge outcry. “They are here. Run!” somebody screamed from behind the godown. This was all that they could hear. The kidnappers were stubbornly guarding the place and would not free the hostage. But their resistance appeared weak and soon, in the face of the police’s aggressive incursion, they had to give in. A few of the kidnappers were arrested, but the ringleaders, it seemed, had made good their escape. It had started to rain heavily now, and it was almost night. Mr. Gupta was found tied to a chair in a pitiable state, bloodied and sore. Lack of food had made him weary and he looked close to fainting. When they brought him home, Mrs. Gupta felt as if she was seeing him anew. A surge

of warm affection and relief overwhelmed her, and she collapsed, shuddering and sobbing, in front of where her husband lay on the davenport in the verandah where they had brought and lodged him for the time being.

4.

That night, when everyone had left and only a small guard of policemen remained in the compound, the phone rang again. Mrs. Gupta grabbed the receiver, thinking that it was her son from Kolkata, or her daughter. But it wasn’t them. “Hello” she said into the receiver. A harsh voice was on the other end.

“Don’t be so happy, Memsaab. This is just the beginning. Your husband will face more. Tell him to return our money. And maybe we will spare him.”

“Wait! Listen to me.” she shouted. But they had already disconnected the phone.

Across the room, on the carpet near the fireplace, she could see the chameleon flicking its long black forked tongue, staring at her. As she watched, the chameleon turned red, trying to match the colour of the wall in that part of the room.

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POETRY KRISHNASHISH CHANDRA (1982 - 2011)

UNTITLED Of course God has not said a word this evening, this night, last night, and she will not, too tomorrow and ever after.

Until forever remains just that a word beyond tomorrows and a world beyond yesterdays, there will be this wordless life.

What did they say it was?

A tale told, sound, fury, nothing.

Of course God must not be heard since all that we want her to say is just a single word.

Error.

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AWAY FROM YOU - TISIPHONE My love of the seven seas, my heart of hearts, my love of loose shirts and stentorian smiles, my love, my lover, my all, a world away from you seems to me a world that is not dead but dying almost.

My heart numbs itself as you end the phone call with a soft laugh that is sweet-smelling, telling me of the hours that you wove into the venae of my offensive heart.

My love of the seven seas, my wind hover, my wealth, my books of love, my pain of sweetest death, you are my heart of hearts, my song. a world away from you seems to be a life too long.

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THE HISTORY OF OUR LOVE - MEGAERA I would write if it had been a certain day you, and I, began to be, and see togetherness as just you-and-I and not just you, or I. I would write that history, that fatal history.

I would sing and claim victory for us, my love if there had been such a day for certain.

For certain I would write that night I saw you blaze brighter than the twinkling stars that rush on and on in a ceaseless tide.

I would write your name in the recesses of Life, and let you be my name too for all ages to come.

But the history we know or want to know thus is not history as such but a self writing of sorts.

I will not write that history of love, I will not let you be a part of such conjecture, such rupture, I will only hold you, strong and redolent with the whiff that arises out of our love on this bed of white.

I will hold you strong against my beating heart and wait till the storm of joyous weeping passes across the sky above our joined hearts, our pieces going stale with the peace of this joined love’s mart.

My grand teaching ancestor, Plato Platonic he was, called for the hearts of heaven to assail the youth of this world, and his son the academician said that there is a “you” and an “I”, and that there is a joining of that eye to this.

I plead the morning sun, and the dumpster outside, and the linen on this bed, and the joys of the dawn, and the riverside, and the wind of the down, the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars overhead and the stars in your eyes, the moon of your smile, the sun of your heart, the sun that you are, Amaterasu of the gentlest night, I pray to these and everything that I have seen and all that you have seen and all that even God has not seen.

Let me be your heart, let me be your heart.

And this is the history of our love.

Our love which is not to be part of any history.

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A VALEDICTION, AT HEATHROW, APRIL 2010 - ALECTO It is not a day I would be afraid of.

It is only your birthday.

Songs descend in the shower of the sun, and the laughter of the clouds above Heathrow.

If I had been you, I would not have even deigned to give me any semblance of control over you.

If I had been all that you wanted, and all that I wanted, and all that nobody wanted us to be, I would, and I say so that I would, love you with all my heart, endlessly.

I would call you “my love�, every inch and every square mile of this life that I would walk with you, my friend.

I would be the flower of the end and the blooming bud of the origin.

If I had been a true hero, and not the god, you have sketched me as, your weak eyes detailing every curve of my eyes in the night, last night, and today and every night to come, I would have kept you, my sunshine, close to me.

But the world is too much with you, my love.

And you wait for me in your dreams, as I walk away into yesterday and tomorrow, today.

And this, your day of birth, your juventus and our toga virilis, is a day that tells me that you I shall never ever see again in this life, except in these dreams that I have of you, warm and naked as me.

This is your birthday, my love, and it is not a day I fear.

For it is your birth, you who I love and will love even when all things have ended their ties with me.

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FICTION CHANDANA PURKAYASTHA

A BIRD IN A CAGE 1.

It was the month of December in the year 1979.

The place where this all happens is Assam’s Brahmaputra Valley.

Almost the entire state of Assam is rife with the fires of the ‘anti-foreigner’, bidesi-hatao agitation spreading out everywhere, into every nook and cranny.

Bidesi. Foreigner.

Who is a foreigner? I do not really understand.

It baffles me. It really does.

The Assam Chhatra Sangsthha wants the government of Assam to give in to its outrageous demands. They have therefore made every possible attempt to suspend the regular daily lives of the people as well as all administrative activities in the state with their picketing and their strikes. Even the oil refineries and correctional facilities in the state have not escaped the disruption that seems to have shadowed all of Assam. Most schools and colleges have been closed down. And their students are now on the streets fighting tooth and claw to protect their motherland against the onslaught of the ‘foreigner’, the ‘bidesi’.

Bidesi hatao. Expel the foreigner.

The houses of academe have now become ‘bastions of the resistance’, with the self-proclaimed leaders of the agitation holding court in those buildings where once would have resounded the voices of kindergarten children reciting the alphabet by rote, or the din of the camaraderie of young collegiate students.

And those who would have been the ones expounding the laws of physics, or the intricate mysteries of symbolic logic to their flocks of students have now become leaders of this ‘resistance’.

The very air of this Brahmaputra Valley now resounds with strident cries that punctuate the throbbing heart of the agitating masses Joy Aai Ahom.

Victory to Ahom, the Motherland.

Joy Aai Ahom.

Long live Mother Ahom Two sisters, siblings they are. The newlywed elder one is a Master’s degree student at the university.

The younger sister studies at a local college. But at the present moment, there is barely any scope for studies at

all. Classes have been postponed indefinitely due to the ongoing agitation. Since that is the case, their father has sent off the elder sister to Calcutta. Maybe later onwards she will return to her husband in the City of Industries.

The younger sister is very lonely at home, now that her sister has left. All day long she waits for any news of the agitation that might trickle in. Whatever she has been told about the agitation makes her heart throb with a nameless fear. Insecurity besets her, even though she knows that her family is not bidesi. Subodhbabu, who lives in the house diagonally opposite the young girl’s, stands beneath the flower tree in front of his gate looking at the young girl as she passes him on the way to her house. He wonders at the young girl’s apparent fearlessness as he remembers that incident.

2.

That evening, he was sipping contentedly at a cup of tea after his arduous day long hours at the office when he had suddenly heard loud noises coming from the direction of that young girl’s house. Peeping out of his kitchen window, he could espy a huge mob comprising mainly young men carrying lit torches and various crude weapons, mostly farming implements, enter the gate to the compound of the house where that girl lived. He had rushed out immediately and what he had seen then made him go cold with fear.

He had heard the young girl’s voice over the din of the mob. She had been speaking to the leaders of the mob in a calm, unshaken voice. As he crossed the road, he had caught a glimpse of the girl herself, standing on the verandah with her back firmly pressed to the door of the house, entreating the mobsters to calm down. The mob had wanted to settle scores with some young male member of the young girl’s household who, some days earlier, so they had been told, had made rude comments about the women in a passing picketing group. The young girl had appeared totally calm and composed as Subodhbabu had seen her explain to the mob that no one matching the description of provided by the mob lived in their house. In fact, the only male member of their house was her father who was not quite young, and who at that time was away on a tour. As the verbal exchange between the mob leaders and the young girl had continued, some enthusiastic young men in the crowd had broken out every now and then in

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loud outcry. But the young girl had maintained her cool exterior all the time, while trying to reason her way through the awkward situation. Subodhbabu had wondered at the way in which she had handled the entire matter.

After some time, seeing no way out, the mob had calmed down to a considerable extent. But still, they had not spared the girl a few choice expressions of anger and outrage. As they had left the compound, they had crossed Subodhbabu who had been standing all this while at the entrance to the house. They had told him about the whole misunderstanding, and had also praised the girl for her calm manners. No harm would befall the girl’s house; they had assured him before leaving. Entering the girl’s house after the leaving mob of young men had exited the compound; Subodhbabu had informed the girl’s family of what had transpired between him and the mob leaders. But the family had not been quite reassured of their safety. All the people in that neighbourhood had a lot of respect for Subodhbabu who was in his advanced years. And he had vouchsafed the family’s security basing on that. They would listen to him, he had told them, and would leave them in peace. But the girl’s family, in spite of their graceful acceptance of his repeated assurances of security, had not been at ease. Who would, after such an assault upon their dignity?

As his thoughts stumble back and forth between that day and the present, Subodhbabu glimpses a reddish glow resembling the aura of the sunset far across the field to his left, where the row of areca nut trees line his peripheral vision. But that was not the westerly glow of the sunset, was it? It was the east that was aglow, and it was evening. The east glowed only during the sunrise.

There had been reports of properties being torched by angry mobs over the last few days, he remembered. A distinct shudder runs down his spine.

Why did that easterly glow seem so sinister?

Loud outcries of Joy Aai Ahom fill his ears. And he hastily shambles back into the house.

3.

Pakhi is restless all through the night. She is barely able to sleep. Her mind is full of the images from that encounter of hers with that huge mob of angry, reddened-eyed young brawling men. Why had the mob carried torches with them? Had they wanted to set fire to her beloved home? Or had they wanted something else as well?

Long years of living in the lap of a culture different from the one to which her family belonged had not been a difficult time for her. She had, like others in her family, accepted the trappings of that different culture as her very own. Linguistic differences had not

kept her away from her friends whom she had met and loved and cared for, in spite of their cultural and linguistic differences.

But now, so it seemed to Pakhi, the divide caused by differences in language and culture was widening.

And she did not understand it at all. It baffled her. And she was afraid of it all.

4.

After Didi’s wedding, she has been sleeping all alone, every night. But what is it about this night that keeps her awake, shivering and quaking in spite of the warm quilt that covers her. The glass window next to the bed looks out onto the road that passes by the house.

There is another house just opposite the window. In between that house and theirs runs the street which caves into a broad area before the gate of that neighbouring house compound. Every night, a young boy of eighteen returns to that compound with the auto rickshaw he plies all day on the streets of the town. This is where he parks his vehicle for the night.

On most nights it so happens that she is rudely awakened by the sounds of that young boy parking his vehicle in that compound just opposite the window next to her bed, or by the sounds of the vehicles that sometimes pass their house, by the sounds of a random brawl, or by the sounds of some baby’s shrill, hungry cries.

But this night is different, Pakhi thinks. This night does not bring sleep to her. Nor does it bring her those familiar breaks in her slumber.

Suddenly she hears the usual thud and crank of the gate in the neighbouring house compound open and close. And she hears the sound of the young boy, the auto rickshaw driver who has had, it seems to her, a tad bit too many sips of country liquor. He thinks he is in control of himself, and speaks about something that apparently has left him in a tizzy. Pakhi listens attentively.

“That Bongaal boy! So tragic, boss! So young!

They killed him because he would not say what they wanted him to say. And in the college too!” The young auto rickshaw driver’s voice was slurring with drink.

There is a sound of a body hitting the pavement just near her window. Pakhi leans forward towards the window. She cannot open it. Because her mother has expressly forbidden her to leave windows, and doors open after sunset. The auto rickshaw driver has stumbled onto the pavement, she can guess.

Suddenly she hears a weak voice laced with a heavy alcoholic slurring speak. It is the auto rickshaw driver speaking, supine on the pavement.

Joy Aai Ahom.

Victory to Ahom, the Motherland.

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From somewhere in the dark night there is a distant shout, as if in answer.

Joy Aai Ahom.

Long live Mother Ahom 5.

Next morning, Pakhi learns from her mother about the lynching at the college hostel of a Bengali boy from Karimnagar by an angry mob of patriotic young men. His roommate at the college hostel who was Pakhi’s cousin by a distant series of relations had also been beaten up very badly. Pakhi’s father had already left for the hospital where her cousin had been admitted with grievous injuries.

As she sits at the table with her cup of sweet tea, the drunken auto rickshaw’s driver’s words from the previous night seem to resound in her ears. Was it a coincidence that the drunken boy had been speaking about the murder of a Bengali boy in the college? Or was it another Bengali boy who had been murdered in the same manner as her cousin’s roommate?

That afternoon, Pakhi’s parents tell her that she will leave along with her mother for their ancestral home in Silchar the very next day. Her father has already appealed the office for an immediate transfer to Calcutta. Pakhi is not surprised. She knew that the place she had known as home for so many years had turned its back towards her. It was no longer her home.

6.

The plane lands at Kumbhirgram airport. The airport has been newly constructed. Everything is shiny new inside. Outside of the building, the bright sunshine seems to spread a welcoming carpet for one Pakhi who, it would seem to some, has at last returned home.

The Ambassador car winds its slow pace towards the bridge looming ahead in the distance. Just

across the bridge, across the river Barak that flows beneath that bridge of many names, and no names lies her home for now, the town of Silchar. She loves coming here during her holidays. Every time she enters the portals of this city, she feels a vague surge of excitement ebb around her, and within her. But that surge of joy is strangely absent today. Instead there is a deep sense of regret, and agony. A sense of loss.

She remembers her friends from that nowdistant town of her childhood. She remembers Subodhbabu. She remembers her college. She remembers the angry faces of the young men whom she had confronted that fateful day on the verandah of her house. She wants to weep for the loss of her friends whom she may not ever meet again. She wants to mourn for the loss of known things, the loss of her past which has now been firmly entrenched in the realm of memory. She wants to weep. But she does not. She is baffled by the sudden turn things have taken. And she ruminates. Time passes with the blink of an eye. One day has seen her face the world in its violent fury. She is now a tamed bird. A bird in a cage.

The torch lit faces of the angry mobsters. The drunken slurring voice of the young auto rickshaw driver. The shouts on the road of passing picketers. The sounds of the whirring palne engines. The loud honk of the Ambassador. All these converge onto her as she tries to shut them out. She presses the heel of her hand against her ears, screwing her eyes shut. She hears somebody say in her ears, quite loudly.

Joy Aai Ahom.

Victory to Ahom, the Motherland.

Joy Aai Ahom.

Long live Mother Ahom

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MEMOIRS - NON FICTION

DEBJANI SEN

A HOME YET TO BE The other evening I was sitting with my husband discussing the various columns that had to be filled in for creating a new Facebook account. There was no difficulty while filling up the ‘current location’ space, but when it came to the part where I was asked to fill in the name of my hometown, I was in a fix. My husband obviously wanted it to be Silchar; the place where I live now with my family, but a silent wave of protest spiraled in my heart then, and I managed to mumble that I wanted to write ‘Shillong’, and not ‘Silchar’, as my hometown.

I wonder how justified I am in wanting to do that, in wanting to name Shillong as my hometown, since for the last two decades it has technically ceased to be that for me. I have been living in a different town in an altogether different state for that many years. I live in a house built step by step on my husband’s lean state government salary. Moreover, I am what my friends call ‘house-proud’, so a lot of my time and efforts got into trying to make this house more cozy and ‘home-like’. Is it not a bit of irony that in spite of all these factors, I hesitate to call this house my home, or the town in which this house is my hometown?

I can never overcome the deep seated temptation of calling Shillong my hometown. My attachment goes way back into the depth of little less than several decades, when Meghalaya became a separate state, and my father drove his car with us in it from the valley into the hill-town. I was probably just a year old then. Since then it has been a whole lot of journeys to and fro from the valley to the hill-town, but whenever it has been an entry into that place, I would always breathe in deep the fragrance of the pine that wafted lazily in the air. It would mostly be nighttime when my father’s car would enter Shillong, making its way through the winding roads of the town after a long journey across many boundaries and differing climes. I would snuggle against my father while my mother and my brother would be fast asleep. The scent of the pines in the air would persist even after the car would enter the government campus where we lived. We would have a lot to carry, our personal things, our playthings, our books, especially the Tintin comics that we used to lug all the way back from our long winter’s sojourn at our maternal grandparents’.

It was a five room bungalow with a couple of verandahs and several gardens surrounding it. A solitary tree with yellow spring blossoms stood just outside of it. There was an extensive field just outside the house that can work up a lot of envy in the children of today. It was the first platform for a lot of our childhood exploits, and a fitting playground for most of the childhood games that we played. There were many games, I remember, but the one which used to be my favourite then, and the one which I remember even now was the game of the ‘seven-stones’. It would usually be my brother and myself, along with some other children whose families also lived on the campus. Occasionally, some other children from the locality would join in the fun. Our toys, the ones we used in these games, were crude, and rudimentary, just a few steps ahead of the Neolithic child’s playthings, I suppose. For the game of the ‘seven-stones’, we would use seven almost flat stones and they would be placed in descending order with the biggest one at the bottom of the arrangement.

A cigar shaped twig, or piece of wood, or a very small bit of wooden planking would be placed just at the top of the arranged stones. Just a little before sunset, our mother used to appear at the verandah which opened out to the playground. It would be the signal for us to conclude our games and enter the shelter of the house.

Those winters, we would make a cozy picture in our home, in front of the fireplace, my father in his huge overcoat, sitting and reading religiously the newspapers like the Statesman and the Assam Tribune. I would leave my work and wonder deeply, with the usual precocity of a young woman barely past her tens, as what sense it actually made to read the Assam Tribune while living in Meghalaya. My mother would be busy knitting away a colourful sequence of woolens and my brother with his over-sized spectacles would be lost as usual in a world of books. In the evening, otherwise, or usual chores would be riyaz, which was something I hated absolutely, and then it would be schoolwork. The news bulletin, read either by Surajit Sengupta or by Latika Ratnam, would follow the dinner and finally we would sink into comfortable slumber for the night, something which I have lost ever since my descent from my home in the hills, much like the river Ganga, which muddies itself after it reaches the plains, descending

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from its home in the eternal snows of the Himalayan mountains.

There was comfort in every corner of my home.

When my mother used to take me to task for any misdoing, I would flee away, and hang around the daisies, the chrysanthemums, and the many marigolds in the garden. There was a vegetable plot, a kind of sloping bit of land on which there was a raised mesh wall for the climbing squash plant. The green vegetables would peek through the gaps in the curtain that the mesh resembled when the plant was in full bloom. I would often lead my brother, bows and arrows in our hands, singing hunting songs, in a juvenile pretense of Robin Hood and his Merrie men of Olde Englande, aiming and shooting at the hapless green squash that were for us the enemy soldiers of the notorious Sheriff of Nottingham. But, these innocent games of childhood came to a sudden halt when violence rocked my home in the clouds.

During that period of crisis, both of us, my brother and I, were whisked away to the relative safety of our maternal grandparents’ home. We spent a longer vacation there, but with a storm of mixed feelings and emotions clouding our young hearts and minds, oblivious to the displacement that had silently seeped into our lives. When we returned to our hometown after that interlude, I felt a surge of joy rush through me. I experienced the same ecstasy as I would often feel at returning. But this one time, it was very different. The green Ambassador made its way into the sleepy hilltown as it would do on such occasions earlier, but instead of making its way into the campus we lived in, it drove past that familiar homely point and entered deep into the heart of the town. Leaving the shelter of the only home I had known so closely, where my brother had been birthed, the place where his umbilical cord had been buried somewhere on the huge grounds, we had found ourselves cooped in another closeted locality.

We lived there for several months. And the confined space where we were housed in made it impossible for my father to walk about without knocking down a piece of furniture or two which would be in his way. The mistrust, the violence, and the resultant displacement that had begun, continued. And though I missed my home a lot, I found that it did not really matter much, for the obvious fact that I still lived in my hometown, or maybe it was my tender age then that had pulled the wool over my thoughts, concealing from me the disharmony that had entered our lives. I took immense pride in helping the picketers outside my school, believing their cause to be my cause, the cause of the inhabitants of the town, of that region. The locals who wanted a ‘migrant’ like me out of their town were dearer, as it was, to me than the Bengalis. I never blamed the people who wanted us to leave our home just because we were Bengali. Those days, we frequently

journeyed into the valley where my paternal grandparents and uncles lived. But those visits left little impression on my young mind. Even the pond where my father and I used to spend a lot of time fishing to our hearts’ content failed to attract me back to the valley.

And after each visit to that place, the return back to the hills seemed more attractive. The chicken coop-like house I lived in did not diminish my ardour for my hometown.

In a way, there was not much to complain when we had shifted to our new home on Kench’s Trace, near the Zigzag Road. My father’s room overlooked a tree that would be heavy with white blossoms in the month of April as if it were announcing the arrival of spring. On the far end of the tree, the road that led away from the house bent away in a winding curve. I spent four years of my adolescence in that house. There was some talk about the possibility that my father would be able to occupy another official bungalow in the same locality where we lived, provided the other occupants vacated it. The bungalow was of the same type as our previous home, but it was slightly bigger. Its colour was a kind of ochre yellow and rusty red, which was something I did not like, for the entire effect suggested a paling of standards compared to the home I had lived in all my childhood which, on the other hand, was a brilliant variety of emerald green and shone resplendent on a sunny day. The other occupants of that prospective house never vacated the premises and we never got to live there. And I did not have to adjust myself another time to a new home in that town. I was relieved, as only a child would be, since relocation to that horrid looking house would mean my having to adjust with the colours till the next paint-job. It was in that new, chicken-coop house on Zigzag Road that I was married off. And I continued identifying it as my home.

In fact, it would have continued that way had it not been for the new land acquisition laws which forbade ‘migrants’ from buying land in Meghalaya. My father was barred from doing that in that very town by the very people whom he had served and pampered like a doting parent. After his retirement, he voiced his desire to settle down there, and build a house for his parents and his family, for us. But by then it was too late. He would not be allowed to possess any landed property, they said. And for a straightforward and honest man like my father, there was no way around this impossible dictum by the powers that be.

I imagine that it was this rejection that burrowed into his silent dreams and worked havoc on his mind and body, till it became impossible and impractical to continue living in a rented house while on a pension. Thereafter the displacement progressed swiftly, like a cold breath of winter air that numbs most senses, like a surgeon’s precise movements during an amputation. It was first to the valley that it turned, and

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then it was to one of the most populous metros in India, after having failed to make a home in the valley. This metro city was a place where my father had graduated from and it had, during his professional life, become an important junction during his travels to and from the capital and many other places.

My home was displaced. It is not that I, or others, did not try hard enough to not let this happen.

The house in the valley, so calmly nestled among the coconut and the betel nut groves, simply could not inspire in me the same emotions I had reserved exclusively for my home, though not consciously.

Nowadays, I visit the house in the city quite frequently, but neither the lights, nor the sound, nor the dĂŠcor in that house can kindle in me the same emotions, because in neither of these two places, that city and this town where I live in now even, can I breathe and take in the fragrances of the pine now lost to me forever in those hills among the clouds.

Whenever, during a journey to Guwahati by NH 54, I pass those familiar hills, the landscape, the monoliths before Smith, I cannot but help taking in as much of the beauty, the chilling mountain air, the fragrance of the pines and those wild roses, and the scenery as I can, hungrily almost. I point out to whoever

will look, almost with childish glee my school, the familiar pathways where I can never walk another morning, the small road to the lake, the campus where my home had been, and there it still does stand, that bungalow with the emerald green paint, though now it is some other colour one cannot identify almost.

Sometimes, I ask whoever is driving to stop for a moment near the lake. I managed to finagle a broken twig or a branch of the pine tree nearest to where we stop and bring it back carefully. Once I am in my house, I arrange it in a vase or a bowl or anything that adds to the wild pine’s beauty and place it in a corner of my room. Why do I do this? Just because that small broken branch of the pine tree gives me the feel of my lost home in the clouded hills of memory.

I look at the pine branch I’d brought back during the trip to Guwahati last week. The needles are droopy, sad, as if they are morose at being parted from their wild hills. And I wonder how right it is to pine for something which is no longer mine, so to say. But I cannot say goodbye to it, while the shelter I live in now, its walls bound with mortar and concrete, is yet to become my home, and this town where we came to in search of a home, my hometown.

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SAMARPATI SANYAL

CHAKRA (THE WHEEL) - AN EXTRACT FROM A GAMUT OF UNSEALED MEMOIRS

The narrator of this set of memory-stories is not the author. The stories told here are dedicated to the goddess Kali, Mother of Time, whom the Khans deserted in times of desolation in order to save their skin.

(These lines are from the roughly drafted introduction/ dedication appended to Mr Samarpati Sanyal’s set of memoirs - Editors) 1.

This is a village station. The village after which the station has been named is three miles away.

Ramnagar is the name of the village. Our family, the Khans, have been strong and imperious zamindars here until now. And that too with a family tree that reached back three hundred years only, and before that, into the distant mists of time.

There are so many familiar faces about. And yet, we are leaving them. The train is about to steam off, bound for Calcutta. We are leaving the village to go to the city of Calcutta to build a new life among unfamiliar people. Those strangers whom we have never met have been decreed to be closer to us than these familiar faces we have always known.Such is the efficacy of the lines that have been drawn recently across our lives and lands by the powers that be.

Some volunteers dart into the Compartment we have boarded and pounce upon the fugitives. Their mission is to confiscate the valuables that the ill-fated passengers are carrying with them. The hooligans who are looting us are supreme in their power to loot, and berate, and curse, and insult. They are the de facto rulers of the new land, East Pakistan.

2.

Mahtabuddin, who was once my classmate, came to see me the previous day under the cover of darkness, to bid me farewell. We parted ruefully, without tears, knowing full well that we who were fleeing our homesteads would never return again. He knew he was the native of the land, a son of the soil. I was a son of the soil too. But at that moment I felt that I was an outsider who had occupied their territory. In

Mahtabuddin’s sympathy there was despair, no doubt.

In my meek silence, there was a mute apology. I, and others like me, stood on our own with the badge of the refugee branding us into estrangement.

3.

The marauders are relentless. A faux love for ‘freedom’, some twisted sense of patriotism, and a seeming aversion to spongers have made them too stubborn to relent and be kind to these people who, having lost all their all, are now fleeing into the unknown. To us they are looters; to them we are thieves, pests.

I am wearing a pair of shorts secured at my waist with a length of cotton string. In the hollow hem, a few notes of the highest denomination have been hidden to dupe the vigilant Ansar Bahini volunteers, since they are making it a point to deprive the fleeing Hindus of all their wealth. My frail child’s frame is successful in eluding the muggers. The flimsy urchin that I look like does not seem to be anybody of importance to them, and the folded, hidden currency safely travels through all the hurdles on our way, one after another.

Father has with him the jewels of my dead mother. Besides being the daughter of an opulent landowner, she had been the niece of the Raibahadur of Kachimpur, a large village-district in Rajshahi. As a newly wedded bride, she had been gifted with a lot of gold, though I hardly recall her having worn her jewels ever, except for during very important family and social functions. She believed that gold was of great value when it came to financial security, but she did not seem to consider wearing jewels a matter of dignity.

The volunteers of the Bahini will soon reach my father at his place near the window. They are advancing in a furore. The village watchman Charan is standing on the platform. Charan is an honest watchman. He is very tall. He is also a very simple man who lives on meager wages, supporting a large family tended by his discontent wife. His children do not go to school for want of money as well as due to the fact that they are born of a low caste father.

We are going away forever. Charan and I shall never meet again. Father passes the ornament box to Charan who is standing close to the window. He hides it under his ragged wrap and disappears into the thickness of the tumultuous crowd.

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The engine incessantly expels gloomy smoke.

And the Bahini’s search operation runs riot ignoring the insistent hooting of the train’s whistle. The goons also have women with them. Hindu ladies are taken into the toilet and made to disrobe. Their ornaments are seized.

Any wealth they have hidden on their persons is also seized.

Charan seems to have vanished behind the smoke that billows onto the platform. In that smoke, the people in the crowd who are not passengers look like black stumps of trees after a thunderbolt has hit them.

My eyes peer through the dark gullies that form themselves between the milling sea of human heads. We are unable to spot the tall figure of Charan.

4.

Charan has my dead mother’s jewels. He may grow rich on that. My mother used to be very affectionate to him. But there is every chance that he does not remember that.

I do not see any trace of anxiety on Father’s face. He is leaving his hearth and home. But he retains his faith in Charan.

In the village, to the elites, Charan is an untouchable. Much like the dogs who are loved and pampered but are never treated equally as human beings. The dishes that are used to serve the domestic dogs their meals are kept separate from those which the masters use to take their meals in. The animals never take this discrimination to heart. They are constant to their master.

Charan too is faithful to his masters. He has remained faithful always. He lives with the conviction what he does not own is not his own. This creed is not

grafted upon him. This is part of his being, part of what he is. Neither his discontent wife nor his children not going to school for poverty and caste makes him swerve from what he considers his path of duty.

Charan is a Hindu. Does my father trust him because he is a Hindu? Father retains a hope in the midst of mistrust that Charan will not fail him. The Ansar Bahini rogues would have surely robbed him of his wealth. Is Charan inured to slavery? Is his honesty an enlightened one? Can he hold fast against all odds?

For all we know, he might give up the jewels to save his own wife and children. Or he might not give them up at all.

Charan is not coming with us. We shall not see one another again. He stays behind to watch the village.

There is every chance that he may join a mosque for his family’s safety.

Father is calm and quiet. The marauders have not discovered anything of value on him. The search operation is over and the train begins to move. The wheels make a din that drowns all other sounds. And then it is that I suddenly see Charan’s hand dart inside Father’s chador from outside the window. Charan is a tall man, and his hands are also very long, so to say.

The train moves on, and I am left trying to look at Charan standing there on the platform. There is something very tall in that tall man notwithstanding the spectre of looters, and the huge flood of fears, and uncertainties in the midst of which all the carefully shored up walls of trust have collapsed making the world before us a vast tract of rugged time to be a measured in trots or gallops. I do not know what to think. Leaving that tall man, we dwarves make our way to an unknown kingdom of freedom and honour.

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RAFIUL A. RAHMAN

AN IDENTITY CALLED 'BANGLADESHI' I wrote this piece during the elections this year, but left it somewhere on my shelf, for I was almost sure that, if not for newspaper readers, it could make an engaging meal for the silverfish that subsist on my books!

Before you begin reading, let me tell you - this is entirely a personal narrative and I do not intend to hurt anybody's sentiments.

It is election time, and so, you will find most of the private buses in Guwahati reserved for political campaigns. If you are one of those people who do not possess a personal vehicle like me, you may not have an option other than taking a rickshaw from Dighalipukhuri to Santipur at 9 pm in the night. So I embarked on a rickshaw, and on a conversation with the rickshaw-puller, but only to know of his misery.

"We are three brothers. Our father died in an accident when we were kids. My mother, who worked hard all these years to manage our meals, is on the sickbed now. I've no way left other than looking after the family with whatever meagre income I can manage”, said Abdul, who also confirmed his age at being eighteen years when I asked him. ''I thought of sending my youngest brother, Salim, who is now 7 years old, to school - the ones run by the Government - but you know what - there is no such school in my village. We live in the chawr area of Dhubri, where you cannot hope for any sort of development."

Dhubri is the district I hail from as well. There are many places in this part of Assam, especially the chawr areas, that are looked down upon by the powers that be. The remotest of the chawrs are not even included in the Census. Though most political parties make big promises during the elections, but all those promises go empty. For they are aware of the fact that no harm could possibly come to them from the illiterate, poor chawr dwellers until the next election, when they would do a few monetary favours or provide tin-roofs or handpumps to the villagers. For sixty years, these people have been looked down upon. Their hearts have cried from the apathy they face, yet they have always remained the faceless, nameless ‘janta’ - merely a vote bank factor for some and an enemy for a few others.

Although we have settled down in Meghalaya because of my father's job there, most of my kith and kin, including my grandparents, live in Dhubri and Goalpara. However, I did my schooling from Dhubri. I remember how I used to love the Assamese classes at school, especially, in my 9th and 10th standards.

Assamese was (and still is) one of my favourite subjects,

and so were the teachers who taught the subject. For rapid reading, we had Bhabendranath Saikia’s book Mur Xoikhob, Mur Koikhor, where he speaks of his childhood, his youth and the memories of the past. It was always a fascinating experience to sit in class and listen with rapt attention as the teacher spoke about the life of this great man. As I look back today, while writing this piece, I ask myself, how many of us have actually followed his path and his ideals in the truest spirit?

The majority of the people in Dhubri do not speak Assamese, although they have adopted Assamese as the medium in schools and colleges, unlike the way it is in Barak Valley. The people there take pride in Assamese culture and celebrate the Bihu festivals with as much élan. They take pride in the historical and cultural diversity that Dhubri has to offer. So many youngsters from the region come to Gauhati University to study in the Masters programme in the Assamese department. Many go back as teachers to teach in their own schools. All this stems from the fact that they have accepted the Assamese tongue as their language of expression; they have internalized the feelings of being an Assamese. Then, what sense does it make when a certain faction of people from Dhubri are called ‘Bangladeshis’, despite their loyalty towards the state they live in?

When I was at Happy Convent School, I was completely unaware of all these dynamics. It was after I came to Guwahati for pursuing my 11th and 12th standard education at the Army School in Basistha that I became acquainted with the harsh truth. It was not at school but outside of the school that I realised how Bengali speaking Muslims in Assam are often generalised as 'Miyaan' (a term signifying a Bangladeshi identity, and not so respectable too, as its connotation in Urdu is) by many of the Assamese people. These selfappointed cultural vigilantes have a belief that since a large number of people in Dhubri do not speak Assamese as their first language, therefore many of them have their origins in Bangladesh. What they fail to realise is the fact that many of these people also come from the chawr areas. Over the past few decades, so much of the chawr area has been eroded away by the Brahmaputra. And the dwellers have had to leave for greener pastures. But then, does it mean that they are not denizens of this state? Doesn’t this state owe as much to their blood and sweat as to it does to others’?

I will tell you a strange, but a true fact. One of my closest friends, a top triathlete in the state, was criticised as a 'Bangladeshi' by a reputed media person in Guwahati just because my friend acknowledged the

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fact that he is a Bengali. That apart, it is a thing to be understood that the worst victims of this sort of discrimination are the poor rickshaw-pullers like Abdul and the poor day labourers who struggle hard to earn their bread in the city without being bothered about the so-called 'identity crisis' and the 'grand Bangladeshi agenda to conquer Assam' set forth with so much ‘patriotic’ fervour by a certain group of cultural vigilantes.

Let it be clear to you that neither am I a supporter of illegal immigration nor do I think that immigrants should be harboured. I do not also keep track of people crossing the country’s borders illegally.

But what I know and care about is the fact that neither I nor my non-Assamese speaking friends are Bangladeshis. Then why are we harassed as 'Bangladeshis' just because we don't speak Assamese?

Don't we have the right to a dignified living? Does the fact that we speak a different language make us naturally ‘eligible’ for being looked down upon? How should people, who face being called such insulting names like 'Miyaan' react? Should they form another militant group to fight for their rights? No. They shouldn’t, of course. But is there any solution other than those described in but also limited to political manifestos?

I know I am being what many would call ‘politically incorrect’. But this is what my conscience has

compelled me to write, for I love the rich heritage of Pratima Pandey Baruah as much as I admire Bhupen Hazarika, but I find it tough to tolerate when some guys from Dibrugarh say that the Goalparia dialect is a ‘filthy language’ and that only ‘Bangladeshis speak in that language’.

Many of you may not like what you are reading here, but I am sure certain rational readers will those to whom humanity matters more, who see Assam as a great land where people live together, irrespective of caste, creed, language and religion and idolize the motto - manuhe manuhor baabe (“One human being for another”).

I walk to the bank of the Brahmaputra at Bharalumukh, and realise how the mighty Luit has been flowing through these regions, which we now know as the state of Assam, for ages unknown, serving-feedingsheltering diverse races and communities without any consideration for what their identities are. We all need to learn a great lesson perhaps from the noble Brahmaputra.

(This brief memoir by Rafiul Rahman has been published previously. The present piece is an edited version of the same.)

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POETRY

LUKE PRATER

VILLANELLE REWRITE They shoot the breeze with big and small (but mainly small); "It never came to any good", self-satisfied.

As ever, then it was forgotten, ditched by all.

It might have been worth all that spit, they can't recall, though some wore truth and some wore coloured shades of lie; they shoot the breeze with big and small (but mainly small).

Agreeable or inclement, to face a squall as endings come, is irrefutable. Deny, as ever; then it is forgotten, ditched by all.

A cynics ceremony, protocol of pall; these senseless seething spirals gathered in goodbyes.

They shoot the breeze with big and small (but mainly small).

What to wear tonight? Might have to spree the mall.

That clothing, cotton worked by swarthy hands, untie when time is done, and flesh forgotten, ditched by all.

Still breathing and still chattering, can't face the fall; emancipated higher selves will fin'lly fly.

They shot the breeze with big and small (but mainly small) forever, now they are forgotten, ditched by all.

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CIRCLES OF SISTERS There was a time when sex was a capricious portcullis and platonic playmates were few; those I knew were bent, or bent the rules and fools we felt when we lost the love, not that I dug the push and shove, but guys were vastly less complicated for a hormonally elated-unelated semi-obscene and masturbated hetero teen.

The portcullis guard was put in the stocks and pelted with boxes of rancid tomatoes for being a toxic incompetent sot; his successor took the task seriously.

Mishandled once or twice, but the emotional intellect of Circles of Sisters buried a derelict teenage libido, swiftly short-shifting potential fowl-play of an inner turkey, and chickens were made of single-night Braves, limping lacklustrehungover.

After Custer’s last one-night stand with ten beers in one hand, I opened my arms to Plato.

WHITE LIE legs align, bent, three-way weft paths wend lie, chestnut, copper, ash blond knit-knotting coiffure lie, looselanguid in diaphanous-swathe bond lie, soft, hush; sleep with us lie to me, lie to you: naïveté new, though it won’t last past the white-witch moon on her peering arc we’ve shed neophyte this night

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SHELL Flaxen ringlets, eyes precariously close to powder-blue; lithe flesh and edible complexion pleasantly festooning a stretch of summer grass, lazily embracing a manifest juvenescence.

She will die.

Before that, she will witness, inexorably, bodily attributes fading, warping, sagging, being bent earthwards by gravity, age, emotion, vicissitudes.

She will be erased, living out the rigmarole infinitesimal unrelenting moments, until pallbearers are the last to carry the burden of her shell.

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FICTION

MITHUN MUKHERJEE

DISTURBED

Everyone has a vent. It’s always about finding it.

I knew mine was writing. All I needed to do was find a corner and sit down with a pen and paper. The vents for various people are equally varied. You see, there are people who want to take a walk in the park, or go for a jog when the sun is shining brightly upon their backs. They collect all sorts of useless junk and love showing off to people. They would pick up a strange hobby, like playing an instrument or blowing whistle or tending to their gardens. They would call this a vent.

I have just one word for them; hogwash.

The sun had been streaming brightly through the window, when the fancy to write took him over in the morning. He got up and did what was usual in such cases; he pulled the curtains and made sure not a speck of sunlight entered. Since the urge was larger than usual today, it called for desperate measures. He decided to bring the planks of wood that he had so painstakingly carried home last weekend, to good use. He climbed on a chair and boarded the windows. He knew the neighbours wouldn’t complain; they mostly were under the impression that he was weird. He had no problem with that, as long as nobody disturbed him. He was a recluse, but when the urge to write seized him, it was a bad a thing to cross ways with him. “You don’t become a great writer just by fluke! You put in your flesh, every bit of it, and then reap it in the form of words! That’s how the greatest novels are written!” he had said at an interview.

Apparently, the critics who received it lauded it as one of the greatest words spoken in the decade.

He walked around in the darkness for a while, letting the atmosphere seep into his flesh. There was a smile playing on his lips, as he walked around the house, completely sure of where he was going. He brought out a fat candle and lit it. The room was flooded in a pale glow, candlelight creeping up every nook and cranny like a secret fear. Everything was set. He set down with his ink pen, ready to inscribe words which he knew would stir every human mind that would come across them. The chair creaked under his bed once, and then decided to contribute to the quiet that now seized every corner of the room in its vice like grip.

Man is like an insect, he scribbled furiously. All he does through his life is try to go back to his roots. He...he is like an ant who has found a grain of sugar too big to handle.

He struggles to keep his balance, all the time trying to make sure that no other ant gets it. While he is trying to balance this grain, he totters madly and finally loses his way. The grain is too big to carry; it realises, and drops it. Now it doesn’t have the grain of sugar or the direction towards his home. Hundreds upon thousands of men, skittering madly like a colony of ants, let loose on an upturned sack of sugar.

Shameful!

The sweating was just about begun. Beads of sweat had started gathering on his wrinkled brow, turning into large bulbous drops, salty with anticipation, waiting patiently to trickle down his face.

The candle flickered, making the shadows quiver over words which were forming under his knotted face. He was satisfied in the moment; it was just the way he liked it.

Writing is the perfect escapade, he wrote, wiping the sweat of his brow with the other hand. It is the unlived moment haunting a deserted oasis on quiet winter nights; so discreet and unique, that few ever become witness to its beckoning charms. It is a select few that ride on glorious steeds and lay their sights on such a sight of unimaginable beauty. The rest only look at paintings and imaginative interpretations of what the oasis would look like if someone ever managed to reach it. They remain ignorant of the satisfied and exhausted traveller, who now sits by the glistening emerald pool of water, his thirst quenched, and dreaming of exotic dancers and beautiful harems filled with every beguiling charm. I am he, the traveller who has walked through miles of burning sun and parched deserts and arrived at the oasis. I now become a painter, for the likes of you, so you could get but a hapless glimpse of the golden moments I have lived. But alas! You are not to see what I have seen; but only devious illusions that I create to make you feel wretched about yourselves. I am the conqueror true, for I create magic with words! Don’t you see you are nothing but a mere spectator, caught in the staging of cheap theatrics? Don’t you...

That was when the ink ran out. He sat there, unmoving for a while, trying to recollect his thoughts.

This was not good. The ink bottle stared back at him, filled with a transparent pride and exhausted vanity.

Empty. The sweat was starting to come back in beads.

His shirt lay soaked as he tried to look in the faint light

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of the candle. There had to be ink. The doorbell rang noisily, cutting through the darkness and quietude.

He was visibly shaking now. It had all gone wrong. The sunlight had been forbidden from entering the room, the words were behaving themselves; all he needed was the ink to run out now. And then someone was outside the door, trying to steal the moment. To let sunlight stream back into the sanctified space and pollute it. Seek and destroy. The doorbell went on ringing unattended. He looked at the candle, flickering in the shadows of his written word. Then he smiled. For the first time since morning.

Distractions will come pouring in, he now wrote with renewed vigour. It only needs to be dealt with, the way you would with an unruly kid. Distractions only follow one language; the one used during a conversation between the

cane and an unruly kid. Distraction could come in the form of an incessant telephone ring or an irritating doorbell; the trick is to conquer it. The words reflected black and glistening in the eerie light of the candle, making sure no other colours could be made out. What one needs to understand, the words now pouring thick and sluggish from his pen, is that the worst of distractions can be turned into the best of resources. No one notices when people of no consequence are erased from an already floundering memory. The reader never truly minds the colour of your ink; especially if the words ring true. His eyes now glinted as he let the crimson from his pen form words on the paper.

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Even if they are red...

AMIT SHANKAR SAHA

AN APRIL AFTERNOON

Afternoon.

I like to spend my afternoons in my mother-inlaw’s house now. I take the Metro. Get down at Rabindra Sarovar. Take an auto rickshaw. Get down near South City mall. Walk. Afternoon in this Jodhpur Park residence and in the neighbourhood is siesta time.

The streets, the balconies, the verandas are all empty.

The iron grille gate that leads to the couple of steps towards the door is ajar and if a dog has a mind to do so, it can get in and rest awhile in a corner undisturbed. I sit in the veranda with the iron grille and watch nothing in particular. The street outside is asphalt and only half bathed in the rays of the setting sun.

Sometimes I hear a cycle bell ring and see an old man on a bicycle racing past me quite nonchalantly.

It is twenty years ago. Afternoon. The old man is young. The bicycle is new. He goes past that same house and sees a young girl in a frock behind the grilles of the veranda. The girl has a Marie biscuit in her hand and she has been gnawing at it for quite a long time, it seems. She has come back from school and has changed her white and blue school dress for a yellow and red frock. Her mother had served her rice and hilsa fish for lunch. Now she is in the veranda while her mother sleeps. The neighbours sleep as well.

The corner stationery shop is closed. She is trying to slide her feet on the slippery red-cemented floor of the veranda with black borders. She hears the ring of the cycle bell and stares outside. A young man who will be old in twenty years’ time cycles past her staring eyes. The man is perhaps an errand boy of a factory or a peon of a company. He runs his errands on his bicycle. The little girl stares at the passing figure. It is not just today, but almost every day that this happens, barring Sundays and holidays. Once the man passes by, the girl resumes sliding her feet on the slippery redcemented floor with black borders.

One day there are guests in the house. The little girl is busy playing inside with her cousins. The veranda remains empty and the cycle bell does not ring. Then one day it so happens that a friend of hers stays the afternoon at her house, since the friend’s parents have to go out on an invitation. They leave her behind at the girl’s house in the afternoon since she has to study for her exams. Both the girls sit in the veranda with their books. The girl’s mother asks them to sit inside and study. She scolds them: “You cannot concentrate on your studies by looking at the road.”

But the girls remain adamant. They say:

“The road is empty in the afternoon.”

That day both the girls hear the cycle bell and see the man cycling past. They study history. And they also manage to score good marks in the exam.

One day the girl sees a Buddhist monk in saffron robes passing by. It seems to her as if a Fa-hein or a Huien Tsang has leapt out of her history book and crossed her sight. Years later that girl, grown up into a beautiful woman would recall that sighting of a Buddhist monk on a halt in Bhalukpong on the TezpurBomdila-Tawang circuit. She would insist on a visit to the Buddhist monastery in Tawang even though the ULFA militants’ activities were on a rise in the Northeast of India at that time. I would try to reason with her but she would insist.

There is the ringing of the bell once again. This time, it is a cycle-rickshaw. Did the girl see any cyclerickshaws during all those afternoons of her childhood from this veranda? She may have seen hand-pulled rickshaws instead, tintinnabulating past her.

We had taken such a hand-pulled rickshaw from outside Calcutta University the day when I saw her last. We had gone to Central Metro Station and taken the same train. I got down at Esplanade and she went on to either Rabindra Sarovar or Tollygunge. She was very quiet that day. I had thought it was one of her many ways to cause me a little pain, and gain for herself some sort of sadistic pleasure. The next day I got the divorce notice from her lawyer.

It seems strange that the Metro stations have become the witnesses of our first and last meetings. That day I was in the queue at the exit turnstile of Rabindra Sadan Metro Station and had forgotten to insert my ticket into the machine. But the stiles revolved and I got out because she, standing behind me, had inserted her ticket, and then seeing me absent-mindedly going away leaving her stuck, had shouted, “Give me your ticket.” I had apologized, “Sorry, I thought the gate was out of order and open for anyone to pass through.” That was our first meeting. I exited with her ticket and she on mine. And our lives had begun entwining.

We ran into each other a number of times after that: on the stairs around the lift in Ashutosh Building, in the reading room of the Central Library, at the screening of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet at the British Council, at a book exhibition held at the Academy of Fine Arts, and so on. Until we decided to plan our meetings. The name Mala became a word that nearly always was on the tip of my tongue. She took me to the National Library where I discovered an out-of-print Terry Eagleton book.

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I wanted to photocopy the full book but the library officials would allow each member to get only one-third of the document photocopied. Mala got onethird photocopied in her name and even convinced a complete stranger to get the remaining one-third photocopied in his name. Mala took me to seminars in Jadavpur University and showed me her article in Essays and Studies. She took me to Gol Bari and showed me how the statue of Netaji stares at the eatery from the five-point crossing. She took me to the Birla Industrial Museum and showed me the models of colliery workers just after I had read Sons and Lovers. And then to book fairs, book launches, film festivals and theatre festivals, concerts and conferences, and even to discos and parties. One day, we went to Digha, secretly. After coming back from the seaside town, we married on a rainy day. Her mother, relatives, and friends were shocked.

That little girl in red and yellow frock must have watched the rains too from this veranda. Twenty years ago did she wish to get married on a rainy day? A day of unseasonal rains. In April. All those years ago on a rainy April afternoon when the man on the bicycle passed by cloaked in a raincoat and ringing his cycle bell to no one in particular in that empty road.

She had cried out to his apparition like presence in the drizzle - “Pagol, mad” - and hidden behind the curtains of the door leading to the veranda.

Did the man go home and tell his family of being teased by a little girl? And did that girl had in that moment of wickedness aroused the spite of some malevolent spirit?

This April afternoon, as I imagine that childhood of that girl who grew up to marry me, I realize that it was not sadism that made her say that I was out of depth as a writer because I was too happy.

Near the lake in Tawang she had surmised that if she jumped in and drowned herself, then it would perhaps provide some substance to my writing. I had reprimanded her. And then she had confessed that at the last party that we had attended she had been taunted with the question - “Has your genius husband written anything of substance till now?”

It was perhaps then that she decided to divorce me. For she realized that her presence in my life was a distraction. Too much happiness it was. She wanted to separate from me. But why did she have to die? Some said that it was an accident. Others imagined it to be a

suicide. Or was it the vengeful spirit which had taken advantage of her state of mind?

Soon the afternoon begins breaking. I hear the sound of shutters being opened. The sound of air being coughed out of taps before the water arrived in an increasingly growing stream. The sound of pedestrians’ feet increasing in volume. Human speech growing louder but still remaining indistinct like the sound of the approaching tide of the sea. I want to join the tide before it enters the house.

I go to wake up my mother-in-law but find her already awake. I take her leave for the day. She does not stop me for tea as she used to do when I first started my afternoon haunts in this house. She has stopped thinking that I come for her. I leave, walking down the loneliest of lanes. Until I come to Prince Anwar Shah Road. I get engulfed by the traffic and the commuters. I hail a taxi and hurriedly get in. Esplanade, I say. Inside the nook of the taxi I try to collect my thoughts. But I fail.

I am taken away. Away from Jodhpur Park.

Away from Prince Anwar Shah Road. I close my eyes. A thought comes to my mind. The ideal is not the world where we both exist but the world where we both do not exist. There is no fear of separation then. That world.

That world. Far away in remote time. Taken away.

Further. Further. When I open my eyes again I am near Park Mansions at the crossing of Park Street and Free School Street. Further away. I enter Chowringhee Road.

I look out at the White Town. I am so far away. So far back.

I get down at the crossing of Corporation Street, which will in time be rechristened after Sir Surendranath Banerjee, and walk east up the street.

Keith lamps light the street . I cross the Corporation Building and go further back.

I walk past a palanquin near Rani Rashmani’s house. Gas lights adorn the street now. I go still further back. I walk in Jaun Bazaar Street. It is a dirty, filthy, narrow sort of lane with irregularly built houses.

In that disreputable corner of the city, in the past, when we did not exist, I stumble at the asymmetry.

I feel the poet’s despair and melancholy. In that mood I write of her childhood as I imagine it. In time I am accused of being melodramatic.

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DAVID ROCKLIN

THE CANALS AND THE SEA

In the morning, she made Eligius a part of it.

First, the water. Three full buckets brought from the sea. After the water, the silver nitrate crystals.

Eligius sifted the glistening sand. He listened to the names for these things. The sand, the glass, the beast itself. Camera. The memsa’ab called out the words from Holland’s correspondence; each piece took its place.

Reading from Sir John’s letter, she instructed Eligius through the process. She showed him how to immerse the paper in sea water, dry it over candles, then brush it on one side with the silver nitrate. All was completed in shadow, which she thought ironic. This man who lectured her from across the sea, hadn’t he been the one to warn her against holding shadows for too long?

Lifting the paper to the light, she pronounced it accept- able, then slid it into a wooden frame. “Julia, come sit. It’s time.”

Julia watched their progress from Holland House’s doorway. Her lace dress gathered in the air, then settled around her porcelain legs. The chair was no more than a few steps from her, yet she eyed it as if it were a distant point she’d been ordered to.

“No more of this baseless fear,” Catherine told her daughter. “This is science, and a little faith. There is nothing of the devil at work. I will explain each thing I do. Will that finally calm you?”

“This nameless pursuit shouldn’t be yours,” Julia said. “It is a man’s avocation. If father isn’t taking it up, it’s not for us to do so.”

“If it suits you to bow quietly, then do so. I see what Charles does not. I pray, where Charles considers and reasons. We differ. Perhaps you are more his child than mine. All the more reason for you to sit.”

Julia did as she was told, grudgingly. She arranged her dress over her legs and stared vacantly at the wall behind the camera.

“When I’m ready, you will look as I require.

Until then, have your sulk. Eligius, we place the paper into its frame, and the frame in turn into the camera. She lifted the cloak for him.

“Come look.”

He slipped under, entering darkness. Her hand joined him. It opened a small sliding door. “The aperture,” she said. “Press your eye to it.”

He did, and Julia was instantly in the dark with him. A familiarly arrogant girl with an imperious tilt to

her head. It was as if she’d been made a sunlit painting of flesh.

Her eyes misted. Her hands fluttered every few seconds. She could not sit still as her mother told her.

She is afraid of becoming a shadow, he thought.

He took the bauble from around his neck, left the camera’s cloak and let the bauble’s string coil into her upturned palm. The glass momentarily shot through with veins of sun, passing them onto the skin of her arm in an emulsion of light. Its touch calmed her.

“Smile or don’t smile,” Catherine told Julia.

“But don’t move.

Hold yourself still until I say otherwise. This will be a while.”

“Yes, mother.”

“Begin.”

For an interminable time, Julia kept herself composed. Her hands folded demurely in her lap with the bauble for company. Its surface dangled bells of light onto her skin that moved with the sun.

While she sat, Catherine read from the letter.

She spoke with wonderment of the circuitous path her daughter’s image might follow. If all was well and ordained, Julia would rest as a second skin upon the paper.

“Talbot and Daguerre have failed thus far to reproduce the images as anything but faded stains on paper,” she read from Holland’s account. “They can take a moment – a tree, a cathedral – and oddly invert it.

Turn its natural light inside out, as it were. But to truly hold it for all time? Paper to paper, we lose what we hold immediately, and what we are left with is faint, vaporous, dying. No, something is capricious in this process and won’t be tamed with mere paper. I’ve tried it myself. Once I saw my assistant George as black Elgin marble on the treated sheet. But I could not slow the crystals’ reactions. Instantly, he was no more.”

In the afternoon, she withdrew the plate from the camera while Julia wept frustrated tears. She daubed at the paper with tufts of gauze she dipped gingerly into a small beaker of rust-colored liquid. Boils of silvery air rose from the surface, then burst.

Eligius came to her side. In thirty breaths, they saw it stir.

Waves of silver slowly spread through the paper’s fibers to form a cloudy streak. No more than an inch, the patch disgorged mercurial edges in either direction, then became dissolute.

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Seizing a second sheet, she pressed the papers together. “Eligius, help me!”

He reluctantly put his hands on the sheets next to hers and pressed as hard as he could. Something like warmth passed into his skin.

“Stop, stop!” she cried, as a blaze raged in her palms. She threw the papers down and upended the bucket. Water twinned with silver and flecks of something else, the fleeting essence of pale skin, splashed over Eligius’ hands.

“It’s gone,” she moaned. “Only the merest moment of her. But you saw.”

“It was water catching light,” he murmured.

“Nothing more.”

“You saw her breathe.” She crumpled Holland’s letter. “Salt prints. Daguerreotypes. It is not enough! I will make these moments draw themselves, and I will not watch them fade. God can strike me down if I don’t.”

She threw the wooden frame against the wall and stalked out.

“What did you see?” Ewen whispered.

Eligius closed his eyes, and it was there. A hazy patch the hue of milky coffee. The bauble. Next to it, a hint of Julia’s hand.

“I see only a mess to be cleaned up,” he said, but the boy’s eyes spoke of his disbelief.

A small spot of black formed on the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger. He wiped it against his tunic. It remained. In its center was a point of lighter pigment. A curvature he’d learned by heart. He shook his hand until he felt his bones rattle, but the bauble’s shape did not leave his skin.

My Dear John, I fear it is no better with me than with you in the matter of the camera.

I can neither raise nor hold more than a vestige. I lose hope by the day. I cannot afford to continue throwing heart and soul into paper and silver and iodide. For what? Failures. Shadows. Do I ask too much to beseech you for more of these precious commodities? Yet I do. Please send what you can, and should the Lord in His boundless goodness see fit to raise Charles from his worries over matters of state and health, I will repay you. Our crops fail. Charles’ standing and pride fails with them. I remind him of his place on the Court and all its prestiges. Why, just the other day the entire Court was here, and the Governor himself! But he is gripped by worries I cannot reach. I fear for our future, which grows as dark as

these terrible windows I fashion from paper. The worst kind of black, John. It takes my hope. Yet I persist. You steam to Ceylon as I write, and what do I have to show you? Nothing. I fear I burden you with my soul’s contents. For that, I beg your pardon. I wish I could end this cursed need of mine to see more. I wish I could be content with what I have. Things would be easier. Sadly, I have never been a contented woman, but why should I be?

Women keep nothing of themselves.

Nothing lasts in the end, eh?

Write to me, even if it is harsh. Send what you can, but if not, send at least your words. It grows quieter here.

Catherine Eligius returned the letter to its envelope when he heard footsteps approaching. Catherine came from her husband’s study into the dining room. She held out his rupees and told him to post her correspondence.

“But he is at sea, memsa’ab.”

“I’ve written the name of his ship. It will find its way, through ports of call. What matters is that I send these words somewhere. They cannot remain here.”

“Will you try again, memsa’ab?”

He saw her eyes fill before she turned away.

“The feather shadow is still under my mat,” he told her.

“It came. Maybe we cannot be held. Only small things.”

“Are you still afraid of it?”

He nodded. “But I will bring more casks, if you want me to.”“Have the missionary bring you back by cart if they’re too heavy to carry.”

He took the memsa’ab’s sad letter. She had written it on her special paper.

It had only been a week since he was last in the jungle, yet it felt like seasons had gone by. The sensations he loved – the dewy lushness under his bare feet, the wind cutting between leaves and bringing faint hints of spice and rain, the low mewlings of unseen animals – filled him with a fresh appreciation for his country.

On the outskirts of Rahatungode, he heard a sound behind Ceylon’s green curtain. It began as a murmur that at first he thought he was imagining. Only the subtly cocked heads of the field hands at the plantations he passed told him he wasn’t alone in hearing it. By the time he reached the village of Devampiya, four hours’ walk away from Dimbola, the sound became a rain of screams. Women’s lamentations.

The only men’s voices he heard belonged to colonials.

He dropped to the ground when he spotted the soldiers. They had taken positions before a grove of teak

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trees ringing Devampiya. Three of them stood over a weeping woman. Her children clung to her as she pled for their compassion. Other soldiers took the last of her meager belongings and tossed them into the street. Two glistening servants hefting sharp-bladed shovels began cracking her home open. Wailing rose. There was still someone inside.

Part of the hut wall crumpled inward. An old woman screamed that they were killing her.

Two children brought Ault from the far side of the village road. “Why are you doing this?” he cried.

“Their land is forfeited,” one of the soldiers told him. “It’s mandated by the governor’s law.

Devampiya’s men are missing and presumed to have abandoned their village to the tax assessor. Old woman, I won’t ask again. You can stay and let the walls bury you for all I care!”

Ault came to her door, pleading in his ragged Tamil. “Please come out. There is nothing more we can do.”

From his hiding place between the root coils of a fig tree, Eligius watched the rest of the old woman’s home bow to the insistent blades. It was over in minutes. When the soldiers were done and a safe distance away, he went to the missionary.

“What are you doing here?” Ault demanded.

“It’s dangerous.”

Eligius pressed his rupees into Ault’s hand.

“Give these to my mother. Whatever she needs for tax. I swear I will pay you back. I will work it off. Do not let this happen to her.”

“Are you going to join these men, Eligius? The ones from your village, and this one, and all the others?

Will you kill me in my sleep?”

Eligius turned and ran. Dimbola was hours away. Behind him, a village very much like his own fell into memory.

He pounded the servant’s side door until Mary opened it. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“I know it’s late.”

“No one is asleep.” She stepped aside to let him pass.

He found the Colebrooks gathered in the study. Only Ewen was missing, likely in his bed.

Charles sat in his chair. His legs and arms were swaddled in blankets that radiated the last of the hearthstones’ heat. His snowy beard rose and fell with his coughing.

“Forgive me,” Eligius said. They were all staring at him. “The hour, and your Sunday. But I have been to Devampiya. The governor’s law has already started, sa’ab. He is not waiting for you to tell him anything. The village has been destroyed.”

“On what basis does a servant accuse the governor of destroying whole villages?” His voice shook.

“Sa’ab. I was there –” “How dare you accuse an Englishman?”

“Father.” Julia looked up at Charles from her seat on a blanketed duvet. “He’s trying to help you.”

“He is a thief! Is it not true? Have we not heard enough tonight to know that?” He pounded the armrest of his chair. “Was it my friend the governor who came into my study in the dead of night to steal from me? Tell me, boy. Did you find something that would fetch a good price in here? Were you going to buy a gun with it? Would you lead your men through our doors after all we’ve done for you?”

Mary quietly stepped away from the study door. Eligius hadn’t noticed her until just now, and with her silent retreat, he understood. “I took nothing.”

Catherine’s eyes were on him and he couldn’t simply stand there, damned before her.

“Yes, I thought about it. But I didn’t. I left it where I found it. Please. I have done nothing wrong.”

“What was it to be?”

He pointed to the map of Ceylon.

“Fitting,” Charles said.

“My husband, I cannot be quiet.” Catherine tucked Charles’ blanket around his legs. “If this boy was a thief and a seditionist, the bauble around his neck that your daughter made a gift of would already have been sold for guns or butter.”

Julia’s face reddened.

“There is a place for forgiveness, husband. The Christian thing to do –‘’ “Who is master of this house?” Charles’ words pulled him up from his chair. “The time has come to resolve this question, which is on the lips of our neighbors and the men of the Court.

“Who is master of this house?”

“You,” Julia said.

“Yes,” Catherine said.

“And do you take the word of a servant you don’t know over the word of a maid who has served my predecessor, and now us, for years? An English girl?”

“I place you above all,” Catherine said.

“Do you, Catherine? Do you place me above your own ambition? Is it me you think of in the guest house? Or am I found further down your list, behind that contraption and the written attentions of Sir John Holland and God knows who else? And all of these efforts are to what end? You make a pathetic figure.”

“I cannot bear this.” Catherine left the room. In a moment she was crossing the yard toward Holland House.

“Eligius. Look at me.” The old man’s eyes were rimmed with red. “You must leave us now. I wish

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it weren’t so, but I have done what I can. You reject your father’s path, it seems.”

“You’re wrong,” Eligius said.

“Nevertheless.”

“His family will starve,” Julia said.

“They are a resourceful people.”

“If he were to apologize –” “I cannot.” Eligius walked to the door. “I stole nothing. I have given you more than you had a right to.

It is you who took from me.”

Julia ran after him and caught him in the yard, just below the porch where he had first seen her in the slanting rain. “I’ll talk to him,” she said breathlessly.

“Tomorrow, without my mother to kindle his feelings.

He’ll see nothing is missing.”

“I’m a servant. It shouldn’t matter to you.”

“Nevertheless.” She composed herself. Her head tilted as if she looked down at him from a great height. “A wrong has been done. That is all.”

He removed the bauble.

“No,” she said.

“Take it or they will take it from me. Then there will be another gun.” He held it out and waited.

“I’ll send word through the missionary,” Julia said. “About your return.”

“If you wish.”

“What made you decide not to take father’s map?”

He stood quietly, wondering the same thing.

“Taking it from you,” he finally said, “is not something my father would have done. I am a man like my father.”

Her hand opened. He let the bauble fall through black space.

She stood back from the cottage doorway so she would not be seen. So she would see no more of this, the drift of her life. Out there, Eligius returned Julia’s gifted bauble. He turned and left Dimbola.

Behind her, the Court image fluttered in the breeze leaking in, to become trapped between the walls of Holland House.

She’d said nothing.

Ault would know how to get word to Eligius.

In time there would be softening. Charles would relent.

This would pass into the dustbin of memory with the other regretted words of a marriage.

The terrible shaking began in her faint-stained hands. In Paris she’d learned of the far flung canals of the heart. How they traversed the breadth of the body like streams in search of the sea. The shaking took her at the shoulders, traversed her, found her heart and washed her away.

She sobbed until her chest burned. She’d said nothing to stop this.

Dimbola was quiet where Eligius had been.

She remained where she was. Movement felt like the will of someone else. Standing there, halfway in, halfway out, she thought that this was the first time she’d found refuge in the cottage, yet it was something outside that remained with her.

________________________________________________________________________________________ This piece titled “The Canals and the Sea” is an extract from David Rocklin’s recently published novel named The Luminist. The novel was published in the United States, Italy and Israel in October 2011. For details about David’s book, please visit his website at http://www.davidrocklin.com/

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POETRY

IAN HALL CALM Breeze blew in wearing your skin Wafting by my ear, brushing brow Coursed down my throat as wordly weft Turned lightly east within my chest Settled light beneath my breast Fulsome winged I sought to grasp Ligtly held your wispy strings Yet too adept you float away So I pin your words to glassy eye Feign belief I too can fly Soar a while, up there with you

SKY 9 Twenty seven shades of grey Seven seasons came today Nine wives waved goodbye For unmet children I have yet to cry ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ And two daughters long unseen ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A skein of geese will later pass Now two swallows twist and kiss Chirping courtship too late in day For trees turn to autumnal shade ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Born of she, a little of me ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A third lone swallow passes my eye Broiling greys on curt horizon fly A chasm torn is lightened white Earth's sky of emboldened might ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Held them as their breath began ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Sky awaiting history to be writ Skein of geese has now passed by Seven sisters shine so bright A voice of love says do not fret ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 2 girls, 27 greys, 7 seasons pass today ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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BARON JAMES ASHANTI MUD FLOWERS For the Dalit Women of India

any country’s greatness can be measured by how the least of its citizens is treated 1.

There is a country free to choose its fate where women are jewels befouled by tradition mangled beneath a caste system’s weight Forward and backward backward and forward a vapid dance where prejudice is hatred but the first shall be last and the last shall be first a “forward caste’s” glower creates fear in a “backward caste’s” cowering Some women in-country India are suppressed beneath a cudgel of a thumb weighed & measured by ignorance & illiteracy On cosmic scales “Women hold up half the Sky” women as chattel cannot cherish the levee of an eye breached by teary flood where pride derived from thousands of years devolves into foot on neck and comes down to heartbreak one soul at a time KoKo skinned wide hipped woman as open mystery

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that falls like gentle rain: it is the open hand that captures rain drops not the clenched fist Faced with dire circumstance sometimes a lotus walks away from mud because a woman is sacred gift whose touch is blessing any woman every woman A naked raindrop falls to caress the earth so common and yet so magnificent: a woman is a glory before God! 2.

Walking with nervous tension a Dalit Bride allows devotion to swallow her fear tabla shock the heart thump tambura & harmonium to trend trembling voice Even as she bears the cruel weight of caste upon her back as it tries to break the spirit becomes Goddess Lakshmi’s incarnation of wealth & prosperity a bride comes from the empire of the moon she is good luck crimson cloud of silk that floats on the wedding day bathed in elaborate & beautiful ceremony that promises much between husband & wife The process of marriage offers prayers to ward off evil spirits known and unknown The bride and groom stand under the parasol of Havan together they take the seven phera woman following man

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while dowry as unwritten codicil to marital happiness is the elephant in the room dowry as greed’s aggression the dire syncopation inside an ellipsis where grains of sand in the hour-glass fall like rocks pitched at the new bride The Dowry as bad punch-line to festive farce curried by marriage when dowry installments are slow or stop a new bride can be a lamb passively led to slaughter A dowry primes the pump to a new bride’s happiness if the dowry is small or trickle of dowry installments slows down to a drop at a time The day may come when a new bride prepares a meal a bucket of kerosene is thrown on her her bondage made from dancing flames in a “kitchen incident” caused by the lack of dowry payment There are places in India where some women are singed blossoms that swim in a whirlwind of pin wheeling flames as transfixed and obdurate heiresses of Sita Where pride and false honour’s rancid masala spills over and splatters like hot grease that churns into cloying conflagration

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readily sacrificing female living flesh A “Burning Bride” be an abomination and living shame to India on the move in the twenty first century and yet barbaric 3.

A little girl is a tiny light forced to such struggle to be born in India gender based abortions occur because boys are preferred where the law & custom gives tacit approval with a wink & nod Being a girl has a hard road to hoe in India’s countryside fraught with pitfalls and roving terrors In most of India an infant daughter is chattel who cries in shadows of future dowry As she grows a little girl’s tiny voice has music in it that pours sacred wine thrown into the gutter where eyesight’s colubrine shift finds starving little girls every which way in hospitals and orphanages Little girls are haunted by eyes that capture terrible knowledge about the tough road to hoe stretched out before them their nascent cries wish for dreams Any promise for honest work can tempt the poor where carnivorous greed abducts girls

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for brothels that teem with disease sex traffickers search to steal their innocence of worse gobbling up adolescent humanity by rupees weight aided and abetted by the big business of official corruption Because little girls are killed starved and neglected in India in the future there might be entire towns and villages that have a feminine void.

Even if a little girl grows up in India her life expectancy is less than a man’s in an industrial country this is unheard of common sense must find common ground in India without a queen bee there can be no honey!

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ARJUN CHOUDHURI

THE SEXTAN SEXTAINS - IN AMO COMMEMORATIONEM - K.C.

Il migliore amico, the better friend Mors dilectus amicus noster Death will be our beloved friend And we shall fly by day and night, in dreams and boats till all things end Mors dilectus amicus noster Death will be our beloved friend

SEXTAIN I (i) Good natured earth, good natured mother, of good natured love a worthy another I weep ceaseless once the rains are done.

And you I love when our time is gone, that time of the day when sleep-coloured lights morph as a haze made of many dream-flights.

SEXTAIN I (ii) The dreams that I wrote when all was true, now creep like ants all over the blue the blue of messed up rooms, those sheets which now are blue, and the ravaged receipts of an island night that was too blue.

Dreams are eyes that do not see true.

SEXTAIN I (iii) The river that in this land flows overruns its lives, its waters stilled; these waters blue are always still.

This land of birth was a land of love, its love is lost to the waters far, those waters far in far-off seas.

And those even furthering far-off trees are all that float in this riverine land, this rising earth at all land’s end.

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SEXTAIN II (i)

And I know you will stare at my carcass.

I know you will say, this was a dog I’d seen sometime ago, in the park, when names died away into the deepening darkness of the loosed air, and into the softened light of that night.

Your words, my friend! But why do I still so care?

SEXTAIN II (ii) Tonight it will all be a memory replayed like the old, old His Master’s Voice you made a whatnot of; tonight, these dark hours shall be the root of togetherness in well-chosen re-membering.

Tonight, the rose that is black, but black in name only, shall blacken its apt rosiness and remember its past beauties.

SEXTAIN II (iii) Have you tasted my laughter, my friend?

My laughter smells of a rank deceit.

Have you ever said what remains to be said?

My words tumble like lovers in bed after a night of togetherness, and yet you wait for me to say words that mean what you want them to mean.

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FICTION

GARGI TALAPATRA

TOWARDS A LATE AFTERNOON Towards a late winter afternoon, just when yellow and orange patches filled the fading blue of the sky, the ayah buzzed in, ‘Your tea is served.’

Mrs Bose gathered the pieces scattered beneath the blanket under the loose wrinkled skin and slowly turned her head to look out of the window.

‘Minati, could I please take my tea in the veranda today? Just for today, I promise…’

The ayah frowned sharp, ‘And what will happen if your congestion worsens?’

‘What else but a few more days with you by my side! Do you really dislike me that much as to think of depriving me of that pleasure?’

‘You forget what people will say. That’s the way ayahs are. Kept the poor old woman outside to ensure her service there for a longer duration..’

‘Yes, I forget people. And they forget me.’

Minati helped Mrs. Bose out of her blanket and gradually led the uncertain steps towards the veranda, and just as she arranged the cushions carefully for maximizing the comfort, the old voice whistled in a distinctly kindergarten-tone, ‘I’ll sit in the swing today!’

Knowing explanation of any sort to be useless, Minati submitted and carefully seated the little one in the desired place.

‘Will you be able to take tea like this?’

‘You know Minati, this is a motion I always loved as a child, and my child always loved as a child, and her child always…here in this motion, our childhoods unite’, she murmured closing her eyes and holding on to the rope as the swing swayed on softly.

‘There was a letter for this address in the afternoon, for someone named Billoo Bose. Wonder who that might be. No one related to you, for sure. The postman himself was quite puzzled. He said in the last thirty years of his career here he had never seen such a name before.’

Mrs Bose sprang up with a jerk, almost like a teenaged girl, her eyes glittering – ‘Where is it? You haven’t returned or thrown it, have you?’

Minati handed over the envelope to her – worn-out light blue with the name written on it in an uncertain English, and the postal address in stylized letters. Mrs. Bose took it in her hands, looked at it for

some time and then caressed it in a manner as if it were her most prized possession.

‘Do you know who this is?’, asked Minati.

‘Yes. The one you love and care for so much.’

‘Now what does that mean?’

‘The one according to whose wish you brought me here for tea today.’

‘You mean…but…you are Nupur Bose, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, but that is Mrs. Bose. The pragmatic, the wise, the old, polished, educated, refined, urbane – manufactured post-marriage…this is the name by which my sister would call me in childhood. Funny, isn’t it?’

Minati giggled. ‘So, there you are! From Nupur Bose to Mrs. Bose and nobody therefore knew Billoo at all! Your sister is your elder? Her handwriting shows shaky hands.’

‘Yes, my elder. But this one was written long back, this name on the envelope,’ replied Mrs. Bose while feeling the carvings of the forceful pen on paper somewhat like the notes of a long-forgotten song. ‘This was after her marriage, when she had come to stay with us for a few days. Her husband had taught her how to write English alphabets. The teacher of our primary school had come to see my father, and I had somehow managed to get his pen from the pocket of his kurta without his knowledge.’

‘And then?’

‘Then she took out an unaddressed envelope she had managed to steal from her husband’s study and we ran towards the backyard. That was where she proudly wrote my name here and tried to explain to me that’s how letters were sent to people staying away from you. She was thirteen then, and I nine. As I demanded a letter to be put inside the envelope, she told me that though addressed she would send it to me later.’

‘And that arrives today? After so many years?’

‘Yes, that was the last time we saw each other. I later came to know she had borne many children, and raised a family worth mention!’

‘The last time? You didn’t even see her on social occasions?’

‘In those days, social occasions were not our choice, my dear. We decided on a unique way to communicate, and this was it. Ever since then, every

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time the postman came, I rushed to see if this had arrived…and so long as it didn’t, I knew she was alright. She kept her promise. She arranged to get it to me…’ ‘Won’t you open it?’

‘No, I leave that to you.’ Mrs. Bose rose and turned towards her room. ‘I’d like to be left alone for some time, Minati, please if you don’t mind?’

Minati sat there in a chair and saw Mrs. Bose gradually disappearing down the passage. She tore open the envelope as carefully as possible to discover a

piece of blank paper, yellow on sides and cutting apart along the lines of the fold, as if the content too had been kept ready a long time back for urgent dispatch, as and when required. Minati looked towards the busy street.

The footpath swarmed with heart-shaped balloons, commemorating Valentine’s Day. From the inner chambers of the house the sound of Mrs. Bose’s chappals could be heard…somewhat like children’s squeaky shoes….

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