Hiuen Tsang
Temsula Ao When I was assigned to a regular House after about a week of my arrival, I was ‘appropriated’ by some seniors who were already in class X. As a result, I had to perform all kinds of errands for them, like fetching water for them, carrying books and messages to their friends. And sometimes they would make me run to the furthest House saying that someone wanted me there, only to laugh when I came back and reported that no one there had asked for me . Saturdays were the worst. Apart from washing and airing my own clothes and things, I had to take care of the needs of these seniors. Not satisfied with torturing me with these chores they would make fun of my appearance calling me Hiuen Tsang because of my Mongolian features and the fact that my hair was cut with a short fringe falling over my forehead. To add to my humiliation, they began to make fun of my metal bowl and plate too, (kahi and bati, in Assamese) which I had carried from home as instructed by the hostel authorities. Every hosteller had to bring a plate and cup for her use. The ragging continued for quite some time and I had to endure it because I was in the junior most class and had to do the bidding of the seniors. But things came to a head one Saturday and I seemed to have lost it. Being unable to take their harassment and taunting anymore, I hurled the ‘bati’ on the wall which broke into two pieces. The senior girls stopped in mid-laughter and fell silent. Encouraged by their shocked faces, I ripped the frock I was wearing down the middle shouting ‘You all are fit only to be step-mothers!’ and with the torn frock flapping on my naked front, I ran out. The senior girls gave chase and after making them huff and puff after me round the big compound several times, I came back to the House quite exhausted. When the tired girls reached the House, they pleaded and coaxed me to take off y torn frock and one senior hurriedly took out her sewing kit, mended the frock frantically and made me wear it again before anyone could report the matter to the Matron. From that day onwards I was left alone and the seniors treated me with some amount of grudging respect. That was perhaps the first incident in my life which taught me that the best way to cope with bullies is to stand up to them. But I still bear the scar from another incident from that period of my ‘apprentice-ship.’ I was ordered by one particularly aggressive senior to draw water from the hand pump and carry two buckets to the bathroom so that she could have a leisurely bath. I proceeded to do her bidding. The iron buckets were heavy and when filled with water, it became difficult for me to carry it to the bath-house by myself. But somehow the first bucket was safely deposited in one of the cubicles of the bath-house. By the time I filled the second bucket and tried to lift it I was exhausted but I had to deposit it somehow in the cubicle. So, I tried to half-drag and half-carry it; in the process some of the water had spilled and I finally managed to reach my destination with only half a bucket of water. But when I entered the cubicle, I slipped on a patch of melted soap and my right shin was caught in the rusty, jagged end of the corrugated tin partition between the cubicles. There was a searing pain and I screamed and screamed. The senior girls heard my scream and came rushing to the bath-house to investigate. When they saw my state, one of them picked me up to take me to the hostel infirmary. But the girl whose errand I was performing managed to warn me not to say anything to the Matron about her role in the accident. When the nurse asked me what happened I sobbed and timidly replied, ‘I slipped in the bathroom.” Luckily for me it was only a flesh wound but it was an ugly gash and took almost two weeks to even begin healing. It did heal eventually but to this day I bear the scar on my right shin. —————————————— [Temsula Ao is a poet, short story writer and ethnographer from Jorhat, Assam. This excerpt is from her memoir–Once Upon A Time, Burnt Curry and Bloody Rags.] adminhumanitiesunderground.org
The Wayfarer of Being
Manash Bhattacharjee [This obituary piece was written on the night of 19 April 1998, in Poorvanchal, JNU, on receiving the news of Octavio Paz’s death. It was handwritten in a ruled class register, and typed in a manual typewriter in Munirka by a vexed typewriter. He was placated by tea and cigarettes. The article, published in Literary Review of The Hindu, on 17 May 1998, has been retrieved from the physical archives of the newspaper, in Chennai. I would like to render my gratitude to Amit Sengupta, who had read this piece in the journal section of JNU’s library and encouraged me to send it to Nirmala Lakshman. I am also indebted to Kaustabh Deka, who currently works at The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, for retrieving the piece for me.] ———————————————————————————————— The Buddha did not teach me how to die. He tells us that faces dissolve, that names are empty sounds. But at death we have a face, and we die with a name. In the borderland of ashes, who will open my eyes? ~ ‘Remembrance’ For Octavio Paz, to die meant ‘to return / to the place we don’t know’. Like most experiences, death for Paz for also a paradoxical event: to leave a place and move into another. Loss and recovery. But to this world, for us who cannot travel with him to that unknown frontier of self-experience, his death can only mean a loss. Indeed, it is hard to believe that Paz (1914–1998) will now be addressed in the past tense. At 84, he was still referred to as ‘a youthful man’. As a poet and essayist he was, till recently, pouring out his enormous wealth of creativity with impatient regularity and a furious sense of life. For Paz, poetry itself was a suspension between two paradoxical statuses of being: a bridge between solitude and communion. Poetry is born in the womb of solitude, but to Paz, solitude is never absolute. It is always populated by the presence of the other, which can even be ‘our shadow’. ‘I am never alone’, he wrote, ‘I speak with you always / you speak with me always’. Paz glimpsed reality always through the paradoxical nature of time. The ‘present’ for Paz was both motionless and fleeting. It cannot be touched. It is real in its clarity and unreal in the excess of its apparitions. The present is also a ‘presence’: ‘a fountain of reality’. Through time, poetry becomes a search for presences where you lose what you receive and retrieve what you lose. The day is short, the hour immense hour without my I and its sorrow the hour goes by without going by and escapes within me and is enchained. ~ ‘Constraint’ The antimony of this experience reveals a ‘third-state’ between what passes and what stays. This, says Paz, is the state of ‘empty plenitude’. Here, being inhabits a transparency and poetry slips between the affirmation and negation of its impulses: a bridge in the interstices between the ‘tangible’ and the ‘intangible’. By interpreting reality, poetry, however, alters it and leaves behind a residue of beauty. This aesthetic quest in Paz’s case was surrealistic in nature. Contrary impulses and meanings collapsed into each other, and a subversive and playful interaction occurred between language and experience. A turbulent imagery resulted along with the slippage of being between dream (past) and vision (present). In this way, Paz fuses different levels of being and reality into a rich and complex unity of poetic experience. His long poems like ‘Sunstone’ and ‘A Draft of Shadows’ are expressions of such kinds. Paz’s long poems are like spiral staircases through which the soul passes through different states of emotions, bordering on ‘vertigo’, and at last descending to the tranquil emptiness of clarity. Paz’s poems reveal his mixed inheritance. He drew together the Spanish and Nahuatl strands of Mexican poetry. Wordsworth particularly influenced ‘The Draft of Shadows’. His love poems had the fury of Breton, and the intensity of Eluard. He was also influenced by Freud, Sade, Bataille, and the Tantric and Zen Buddhism. All these disparate influences make Paz an interesting poet. Philosophically, Paz, like Eliot, suffered the modern dilemmas of communion. To counter this despair, Paz searched for the moment of experience outside time, which is also Eliot’s preoccupation in ‘Four Quartets’. But through the maze of dream and vision, such an escape for Paz ended with an affirmative negation. Manuel Duran calls Paz a ‘philosophical poet’ like Eliot, but ‘more intimate, more erotic, warmer than Eliot’. He says this because Paz always probed the alienated relationships of life with lyricism and a profound sympathy. Also Paz, as Duran rightly points out, opened ‘the windows of Mexican culture to all influences’. He was as much at home in the Orient as he was in Paris, in America or in his native Mexico. It makes Paz a true pluralist. He believed that the ethical foundations of the ‘new civilization’ would be ‘the plurality of different times and the presence of the other’ where ‘we would live in the full freedom of our diversity and sensuality in the certain knowledge of death’. The politics of this new world would be ‘a dialogue of culture’. Yet, in order to avoid nihilism, Paz desired ‘a higher unity’ as a guide. To Octavio Paz, it was not possible in the modern era to disengage from politics. He felt is his duty to intervene in the moral conflicts and errors of present-day politics. Stalinist rule and the Russian totalitarian state disenchanted him from communism and he pressed for the necessity of liberal values within socialism. This caused him to be dubbed as a ‘traitor’ and a reactionary among Leftist intellectuals, and it distanced him from his famous friends like Marquez and Fuentes. But Paz refused to be silent on the crimes of the communist states. He called the Soviet state ‘the first soulless state in human history’, as he felt that the millions who died
Wild Donkey’s Bray
Rana Roychowdhury —————————————————————– Rage I Have Veiled Rage I have veiled Cranes fly I see with binoculars Their whites flutter in the skies This janasamaj, medicines, bandage Blazing flowers, window concealed All this he had jotted down—in notepad after notepad Everybody on the T.V. is saying killing someone is a sin He had written about such a sin in Notepad after notepad— The dog’s mute stare he had written about And about boiling rice. ***** Now He Hangs As the Moon In the Sky Moon in the sky—tonight. This news the pristine girl brings to me This news the shadow of the adjoining door sets free All of us the neighbourhood gang Climb up to the rooftop. And see Truly moonlit it is, this sky and that awash. Right then someone in the crowd said: But that is not the moon! Heck no, that is the land grabber little Khude! And we all see now, indeed It’s that ruffian Khude, for whom the police Was on the lookout; right now in the sky He hangs as the moon. ***** Adda When Ramachandra left for the forest You got emotional and howled and wailed Right from that day we had decided That if we have to visit the forest Let there be occasional jungle safaris Treetop houses and no less Manas sanctuary, Kaziranga, at the least Gorumara (via Lataguri), for travel cars please contact Bappa Ganguly: Phone 9433425179 And if one is looking for a good, healthy cottage On the forest outskirts It must be Mithu Banerjee’s Now the question is whether Mithu Banerjee is a man or a woman? If she is a woman, we may decide (with alcohol and dancing adivasis in tandem) To inhabit the forest for 14 years It is our long standing wish to see copulating wild elephants. ***** Water Water Fills up the bucket Filled up bucket Makes me happy Water From the bucket Goes far away In this manner, everyday I fill up and get drained A world of water Revolves Around me ***** Playing Carrom The way the professorial couple plays carrom Is still beyond my ken. Especially the red. From distant districts Hopping trains, skipping vendors Prancing past the splendour of chanachur-lipstick-peanuts The professorial couple will make sure to gobble up the red. I think: those of us from Kalyani, Basirhat—till date those who With upright tables, vertical minds, childlike, play carrom— Red is our cherry toy. Our claim and our due. Our clear-cut poetry magazine. Look! There’s Shajal, just crossed the bridge to hit the red straight into the net. But the professorial couple nets it obliquely At an angle—winding down the Sahitya Akademi path via Banga Sammelan The red makes its way to the net. As if a bride’s hibiscus got stolen from the garden. No one knows the thief—blurred, he’s the yellow river bank. But in anthologies they dazzle and on the dais too In tea cups and in editorials— But they are no robbers, no killers, no. Famed carrom players merely. ***** Words Snake Touring around the house. Dread Touring around the house Thus touring dread Gets into the hole But if words Surface again? Then where shall I keep the poison? Then where shall I keep the pain? ***** Dreadlocks Tables and chairs Garnish this universe Pranayam and party-diktats Dress up this sandy shore The Tamil mad-women gave me this bit of news Lights from group theatre delivered to me this news Madwoman with livid liced dreadlocks Love-dining-table garnishes In the conifer-island lights blaze. Illness And dreadlocks unravel. Such power truth wields So much light today such guest-speak Shall I not stand in the line too? Marvel at the sky, galaxies! ***** Wild Donkey’s Bray How shall I call out? Moo woo? Or Bande Mataram? Better Inquilab Zindabad? Whining ruff arff? Or growling bow-wow? Snarl and roar shall I? All’s hushed—sunsan, silent-empty. Falling leaves in the sunsan. No man, won’t needle no pricking His brother’s younger sibling just bought by sweat No man, won’t prod no pricking I swear I won’t Beacon Tagore up there And Joy in my quill This restraint sees me through Restraint, winning party’s restraint. Hey Abhik, let’s dive under the train? “Nope, Ma waits with warm rice.” Hey Abhik, let’s enlist our names in the Maoist centre? “Nope, Ma still waits with warm rice.” So what? Be a corpse at the dinner table Tell Ma I’m your flower in the pot And I am your almanac, anthem, chorale Moss on your broken staircase— Look some bloody mangled meat; like London bridge has smashed My skull and character. If one dies unnaturally, at the end of maya and desire The soul orbits, turns round for two years at least Yes, it’s written loud and clear in Abhayananda’s “Beyond Death” That after death the soul doesn’t grasp That he is no more a poet, He thinks there is rain in the fire still. See, Abhik and I Evil spirits after death now, spirits of infirmity Banging doors, running about Pirgachha road Spotting lovers shall scream “Let us live, please let us…” Fuck your English speaking habit we will yell Utpalbabu has gone the Bosebabu way now From tree to higher tree barking aloud: ‘Cocaine Cocaine.’ Bullshit, that is never to be, that dream. Tut! Wild donkey is shaky and shy Can run faster than a mule Our table used to house ten wild donkeys Abhik and I slipped and fell Into your… oh dear… into your misery— And remember, Gopal at home means hassle aplenty Ministerial treatment, three meals a day Bath, scrubbing the lazy organ And Gopal can’t be left alone Still Gopal’s a darling pet. Harmless Gopal, no sex, no craving for fame Harmless Gopal won’t enlist in the CPM, and no suicide attempts too Vegan dish vegan wish Just make sure to pray thrice a day. But see, crafty
Confessional Diary
Subrota Dasgupta [ This short story first appeared in the blog Aainanagar (aainanagar.com) in November 2013. Translation by HUG.] ——————————————– Indulging Bhanu was the sole impetus behind my story telling spree. But every story cannot be told to a six year old. So here it is. –Subrota Dasgupta Morning. Diya was using bits of newspaper to scour her ear. It’s Diya’s habit of cleaning and scrubbing her face and teeth, at times poking her ear with such stuff. Especially when she is thinking. Today, she is thinking about Baba. About Baba means about Baba’s twenty-third girlfriend. Shefali-di. Shefali-di is one of the earliest of Baba’s students. Used to be a regular at their place. After her college days, she worked as a proof-reader in a local press. Baba was instrumental in getting her this job. She stays at a rented place near Barasat with her mother. Shefali-di’s father is no more. This, baba’s prem-rog, his obsession with falling in love, is an old condition. He has fallen in love with a lot of women at various points in his life. Sometimes when people felt that he was in love, actually he was not. There used to be a lot of unrest at home, Diya recalls. But Diya was more or less at peace with herself. The reason: Baba’s confessional diary, where every detail of Baba’s love life got jotted down. For instance, during the time when Ma was raising hell about Moushumi-di’s falling for Baba, Diya came to know from the diary that Baba was not at all interested in Moushumi-di. He had merely offered a ride to her one day—that was all. Shushovan-kaku had spied that one odd incident and had promptly sneaked in a word to Ma and to Santosh-kaku. Now Santosh-kaku is the younger sibling of Akashvani Radio and then, naturally, the gossip mills worked overtime. But then again when Baba was head over heels with Trina Bose, things were quite sedate at home since only Diya knew about it. It is a mystery how this fateful diary would unfailingly reach Diya during such times. But in this manner, Diya could solve twenty-two love-stories. The places Baba would go with his dates, the kinds of gifts he bought, the reasons for his falling in love and also how and why each affair would come to an end—Diya knew all. But this time, the mystery about Shefali-di is getting curiouser and curiouser. The pages of the diary are clean! The very idea that such a love affair can bloom between the two is such a fabulous notion; leads to a greater mystery actually. At this point let the many attributes of Shafali-di be quickly described. Shefali Ghosh is in her early thirties. Height: 4 feet 2 inches. Weight 80 kgs. Pale dark in complexion. A bizarre, uneven set of teeth. A fast receding hairline leading to a short-cropped style. One may easily be confused about her gender because of her ambiguous, uneven voice. Middling in studies, she was. It was thanks to Baba’s notes that she had passed with honours in her BA exam. There is no doubt that she is extremely hardworking. Can carry books in gunny bags from Barasat to Behala to Sodepur to Baruipur with complete nonchalance. Suppose the household maid makes herself scarce for a month without any prior notice, no issues: Shefali-di to the rescue. About five thousand books in fifteen huge almirahs can be dusted in two hours flat. And most importantly: Shefali-di is a terrific cook. She is especially good with patients, those who might need some special attention. When Baba was bedridden with jaundice, Shefali-di would make sure to send all kinds of yummy food almost every other day. Certainly Baba can fall in love with someone with such stellar qualities. No harm there—it is his prerogative after all! But why the heck is the diary staring blankly at Diya this time? Diya is restless. She just got to hear that Baba has actually booked an apartment for Shefali-di near Barasat. Strange tidings. Until now, Baba would buy books, pens, key rings, photo frames, cheap perfumes, soft toys and suchlike for his girls. But a whole new apartment! Every morning with Minoti-di, Ma is going hysterical about Baba. And Minoti-di, as she kneads maida, moulding the dough into those perfectly round luchis, consoles Ma, “What can one do Boudi. Steel yourself; things will get better.” And as Baba sits at the table, Ma, in her divine snivelling avatar, would pack his tiffin with fruits and sweets and luchi-tarkari. Just can’t take this any-more—inane and pathetic! Such a scene used to be pretty common earlier too but Diya took no heed of these things then. She would know exactly what the situation was. This time it is different. And to top it all, Jayanta-kaku, who is an accountant himself, casually informs them that Baba had transferred half the money that he had recently acquired by selling off Dadu’s property to Shefali Ghosh’s account. Jayanta-kaku is a man of integrity—so there is no question of distrusting him. Something must be done. Shall Diya make an effort to confront Shefali-di herself? Shefali-di works in the College Street area, she knows. Every day at 2 o’clock Shefali-di comes out of her press to have toast and ghugni. Diya sure can accost her at that time. But the funny thing is that when Diya did actually encounter her, Shefali-di herself made some queries, like: How is Baba doing? How is Ma’s health these days? Are Diya’s classes going on well? Said that there was a lot of pressure in her work-place as the book-fair was round the corner, and regretted that she had not come to their place of late. All this means that she had not met Baba recently. What kind of love-story is this? Thanks to the dairy, Diya never ever had any urge to get one on one with Baba about their personal lives. With Baba it is