Fiction | ‘A Funeral of National Importance’ by Ciara Mandulee Mendis | Issue 42 (March, 2023)

A Funeral of National Importance

On the way back from the funeral of the Chief Incumbent of Bambalapitiya Maha Maya Viharaya, she asked the driver to stop at her favourite handloom saree shop. She ordered all the white sarees in the shop because she did not know which person of national importance might die in the coming month; she couldn’t possibly appear on national media in the same white saree over and over again.

Thankfully, a few weeks later, the Governor of the Capital Bank of Sri Lanka was killed by an accident and she was thrilled. As soon as she heard the news, she left all her files stacked up on the table and quickly got herself driven to his house because she really wanted to be there for his family in this time of need, giving instructions on organizing a funeral of national importance through her recent experience of being in a dozen State Funeral Committees.

A funeral was in the air and she felt the true funeral spirit. She showed them where the body should be placed and from which direction the people who would want to pay respect should come. Although at first the family wondered who she was, despite how responsible and relevant she looked, they later learned that this new Director General of Sri Lanka Rugatha Corporation (the official media for this event), only had their best interests at heart. She told them about the large number of Buddhist monks who would come to the house to pay respect to the body, pointing to the need of a large sofa with a white cloth laid over it. She saw that the photos and mirrors in the house were covered and the large wooden windows were open. She went to the son of the deceased and told him that there should be a table for all the awards his father had received because that was the highlight of a funeral. Then she stood in the middle of the living room and explained the roles she had played in other funerals of national importance. She made a sad but tired face when she said that although it was only March, this was the seventh important funeral she had to attend and see to, this year. However, it was difficult to run here and there in a Kandyan saree, and she was very tired in a few minutes. Though she almost slipped twice, once while helping a few men carry a cupboard, and once as she jumped up to see if someone tall could see the dust on the book shelf, she never really fell down and she was thankful. Since everyone was looking at her and up to her, it would have been such an embarrassment to fall down. She was sitting adjusting the headpiece of her saree when a servant came to her with a cup of tea. She looked up at everyone in the house looking at her, some with respect, some with wonder, some waiting for the next instruction and some waiting for her to just leave, and stood up.

“My driver needs tea as well, but you know what, let me take care of that” she said out loud. 

A second later, everyone was looking at the Director General walking to the kitchen, pouring half of her cup to another and coming back with two cups in hand. It was a small congested house in Colombo Seven with a very small living room. So everyone moved back and forth and gave her space to walk towards the driver, who was dazed, wondering if this is the same Director General who usually cannot even open the car door herself. 

After having tea, she went to the wife of the deceased. The wife, though grieving, was holding up quite well. She was discussing a possible Funeral Director with her daughter when the Director General came and sat close to her.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Alright,” the wife said with a forcefully drawn smile “so much to do, I’m trying not to miss anything.”

The Director General gave her a sympathetic smile and tilted her head to the left. Then she held the wife’s hand and said, “I know this is very very difficult for you, I understand this is the worst thing that can happen to a family, I mean it’s your husband who is dead! If it was you who is dead, it would have been kind of alright, but this is the father, the breadwinner, the backbone of the family!” she sighed. “And your children have lives of their own so you are the one who will feel this loss the most. You have to face life alone now. You will be lonely and sad, but, you have to be strong.” As she finished, the wife started bursting into tears which later turned into a ceaseless weep. Then the children hugged the mother and started crying. The Director General slowly walked towards the door with a satisfied face – her head, still tilted to the left. And as the driver drove her away from the funeral home, half of the people had joined the collective weep. Her work here was done.  

* * *

The next day, she wanted to wear a light coloured saree because she had to go to the funeral home after work. Since she expected to meet a lot of people from various walks of life, and she had her standards to maintain, she picked a rich-looking saree. No saree can look rich without a shining headpiece, she thought. So she wore the cream coloured one with a gold design in the headpiece. When she went to the funeral home, she took her crew with her. There, she pointed to the places which had be caught in the shoot – the award table, the certificate wall, the huge couch with a lot of Buddhist monks and the sofa with a few Cabinet Ministers. When the fall of her saree almost caught fire as she slinked out of the living room too close to the oil lamp by the body, she was startled. After that, she did not wander, but sat on the sofa next to the wife, nodding to everyone who entered through the main door. But she did not want to waste time just sitting there. So, she started guessing the prices of the sarees people at the funeral were wearing. She could not believe that the Chairman of The British Bank in Colombo chose to wear such a cheap saree to an event of national importance. She was sure it had nothing to do with money, she was the Chairman of a bank after all. And was it even a saree what that woman from that government thing which prepares the National Budget wearing? It looked more like a curtain from Yapahuwa period. Faded, rusted and almost torn. So stingy, she thought. Talk about National Budget.

On the way home, as she closed her eyes, she fell asleep within seconds. The car carefully drove her away from the traffic of Colombo. She dreamed that her saree was on fire. The pure white saree she was wearing was turning black; the blazing flames of the fire were crackling up the headpiece. As she touched her chest, she felt the saree jacket heating up and gradually turning brown. She was trying to put out the fire with pirith water from a little plastic bottle (which was one of the hundred thousand bottles chanted eighteen thousand times by the best monks in Colombo), but it only made the fiery flames that were roaring, come towards her face like a bat out of hell, shredding down smoldering irregular pieces of the hem one by one. In the air, soot had gathered into a cloud and had started singing. Then she saw a fireball dancer, a classic one from the Kandy perahera coming towards her, rhythmically swiveling a ring of fireballs to the melody of the soot cloud. She started to swing to the melody herself, but she suddenly saw that her feet were showing because the burnt pieces of the saree were falling to the ground. She almost had a fit; she could not show her bare feet to the world. Tensed, she looked around; the fireball dancer was getting closer. She saw a puddle in the middle of the road and quickly jumped into it. And her feet got stuck. Her heart was beating fast. The soot cloud was singing too loud and the fireball dancer was too close. She kept her hands on the ground and gained force to pull her feet, but her hands got glued to the lava on the ground. She could not breathe. The melody of the soot cloud was now deafening and it was burning. Suddenly, a crimson fireball came towards her face and she woke up. She was in Kadawatha. 

* * *

It was the day of the funeral. She came to the funeral home quite early in the morning. She had worn one of her new white sarees and everything; but not too high heels because she had a lot of walking to do. She was all ready to bid farewell to a man of national importance. First, she made calls to make sure the small small segments of the funeral were broadcast in her channel time to time. And when she discovered that they had done no special segment about the Governor, she demanded they immediately do a documentary about the service of this brave man who steered the economy of the country in the right direction. It was alright that they didn’t get the titles of some Reports he had written right, or, a few names of the Committees he had chaired, as long as they ran the feature before the funeral ceremony started. She also asked the designers to make a television banner just for him, with a few white frangipanis on the side and everything; and perhaps, play in the background Mala ira basina sande yaame, the classic song about death sung by Amaradeva. After all they were the official media for this event.

The State Funeral Committee had organized this prestigious event beautifully. She was proud she was a part of it. The body was brought from the funeral home to the cemetery in a procession of about thirty vehicles, under a canopy of sepalika flowers. There was a huge gok kola thorana at the entrance of the cemetery in the form of an arch. The either sides of the path that led from the thorana to the pavilion, were decorated with white gerberas, carnations and fern. The coffin was kept in the pavilion on a red carpet. Orchid petals were sprinkled on the coffin from time to time and the instrumental version of Mala ira basina sande yaame was played via loudspeakers. Drones were sent up to take shots of the bank-shaped funeral pyre. She could not expect anything less. A person of national importance was dead. 

She gave the signal to start the programme. As the best announcer of her channel came to the podium to begin, someone from the crowd started weeping aloud. It was a man. A middle aged man in a white shirt and a yellow sarong. 

“Aneeey Yasalalakathissa! Aiyoooo! Yasalalakathissa!” he wept in a shrill high-pitched voice, calling out the Governor’s name.

The Monks, the Politicians, the Government Officials, the Academics, the Bankers, the family, all looked around in panic. 

The weeping man slowly meandered towards the coffin and sat on the floor, sobbing. He never ever imagined the Governor would leave him this soon, he cried. Just as the wife and the children of the Governor were trying to get a better look at the man, another from the crowd started weeping aloud. This time it was a woman. Now who will tell her funny stories, the weeping woman asked from the coffin, wiping her snot off with her shoulders.

‘Did you hire these people?’ A member of the State Funeral Committee whispered to the Director General.

‘Hire?’ She was confused, ‘what?’.

‘Aren’t they hired mourners from Negombo?’ he whispered back to her. 

But the next second when the weeping woman said aloud how she would miss the way the Governor used English when scolding people at his workplace, the entire funeral crowd knew they were not hired mourners from Negombo. ‘Idiots…bloody idiots’ as the weeping woman imitated the Governor through tears, the staff of the Capital Bank of Sri Lanka looked at each other in bewilderment. They really did not know what to do. 

‘Yasalalakathissaaaa’ cried the weeping man again, emphasizing what a loss this is for the country. The Governor just knew so much, he said. Through his wail, when he said how the Governor asked them not to believe a word the media said about the pandemic, the Director General of Sri Lanka Rugatha Corporation was stupefied. In a millisecond she dashed towards her crew and made sure the event was not being broadcast live. She gave the signal to start the programme and asked the sound operators to amplify the sound of the compere’s microphone. She was sure that the nineteen to the dozen talk of her announcer would take care of this situation. In a few minutes, things were settled and she felt as if the monsoon season was over. From there onwards, the programme flowed with no interruption. During the ninth speech, she looked at the family. The wife was staring at the far away sky with swollen eyes. The daughter was looking down, clutching a handout about the service of the Governor distributed at the funeral. She ordered someone to give the family some Smak mixed fruit drinks. After all the fourteen speeches were given, the wife had to deliver the vote of thanks. She foresaw that the wife was not in a good condition to speak which is why she asked her announcer to deliver it for her. The wife started crying convulsively as the announcer started delivering the vote of thanks and she was proud she saw that coming. And when the Minister of Finance came towards the family with the Official Message of Condolence from the President, she saw that the family did not want to look at the cameras, but the event was then going live and this was expensive air time. 

A few minutes before the end of the programme, she hovered around the bank-shaped pyre once to make sure everything was alright. Since it had rained the previous night, the ground was a little muddy. She was thankful only one member of the State Funeral Committee was with her to see her slipping slightly and bumping her head against a wooden plank used to support the pyre. She pretended she didn’t even feel it but she literally saw half a dozen zodiacs in that clear bright sky. Once the programme eventually came to an end, when everyone was pushing everyone, trying to gather around the pyre, she made sure they did not get to the family. But in a second there was a barrier of men with cameras around the pyre. She looked calmly at the way a man in a white sarong came towards the family, twirling a stick with a fireball up and down. He then handed over the stick to Governor’s son. She watched the pyre being lit by the son. And in a few minutes, the entire pyre was in flames. Irregular white pieces of clothes were falling to the ground one by one. An important man was burning. A man. A father. Father. And she was twelve years again. The girl who helplessly watched her father burning. Unable to get even a little close. Burnt. Burnt by the State? He was brave, they said. That was the thought that always entered her mind every time she saw a burning pyre. Is being brave more important than being alive? He was a respectable man, they said. That was the thought which always followed the first one. Respect. She felt it was the most selfish word in the world. Is burning on the side of the road as respectable as a funeral of national importance? She did not know. 

It was hot, almost as if burning. And she could not stand the noise of the soot; it was louder than the loudspeakers. The State Funeral Committee had arranged a helicopter to shower chrysanthemum petals on the pyre over the flames. She looked up and then around. Amidst the heavy showers of white chrysanthemum petals, behind the flashes of the cameras, through the thick barrier of people speaking of the greatness of the respectable man who is dead, she saw his daughter, helplessly watching her father burning. Unable to get even a little close. Annoyed, she rushed towards the men with cameras. 

Ciara is currently reading for her MA in English Studies with a special focus on language and culture, and is employed as Assistant Director (Literature & Publications) at the Department of Cultural Affairs, Sri Lanka. Her debut short story collection ‘The Red Brick Wall’ (manuscript) is at the moment shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize 2020, the most coveted award given for Sri Lankan writing in English.

Essay | ‘The Art of the Essayist’ by A.C. Benson | Classical Archives

According to Benson in ‘Art of the Essayist,’ the essay has been a comfortable mixture of the personal and the subjective, and in fact has been the most personal of all genres.

There is a pleasant story of an itinerant sign-painter who in going his rounds came to a village inn upon whose sign-board he had had his eye for some months and had watched with increasing hope and delight its rapid progress to blurred and faded dimness. To his horror he found a brand-new varnished sign. He surveyed it with disgust, and said to the inn-keeper, who stood nervously by hoping for a professional compliment, “This looks as if someone had been doing it himself.”

That sentence holds within it the key to the whole mystery of essay-writing. An essay is a thing which someone does himself; and the point of the essay is not the subject, for any subject will suffice, but the charm of personality. It must concern itself with something “jolly,” as the school-boy says, something smelt, heard, seen, perceived, invented, thought; but the essential thing is that the writer shall have formed his own impression, and that it shall have taken shape in his own mind; and the charm of the essay depends upon the charm of the mind that has conceived and recorded the impression. It will be seen, then, that the essay need not concern itself with anything definite; it need not have an intellectual or a philosophical or a religious or a humorous motif; but equally none of these subjects are ruled out. The only thing necessary is that the thing or the thought should be vividly apprehended, enjoyed, felt to be beautiful, and expressed with a certain gusto. It need conform to no particular rules. All literature answers to something in life, some habitual form of human expression. The stage imitates life, calling in the services of the eye and the ear; there is the narrative of the teller of tales or the minstrel; the song, the letter, the talk—all forms of human expression and communication have their antitypes in literature. The essay is the reverie, the frame of mind in which a man says, in the words of the old song, “Says I to myself, says I.”

It is generally supposed that Montaigne is the first writer who wrote what may technically be called essays. His pieces are partly autobiographical, partly speculative, and to a great extent ethical. But the roots of his writing lie far back in literary history. He owed a great part of his inspiration to Cicero, who treated of abstract topics in a conversational way with a romantic background; and this he owed to Plato, whose dialogues undoubtedly contain the germ of both the novel and the essay. Plato is in truth far more the forerunner of the novelist than of the philosopher. He made a background of life, he peopled his scenes with bright boys and amiable elders—oh that all scenes were so peopled!—and he discussed ethical and speculative problems of life and character with a vital rather than with a philosophical interest. Plato’s dialogues would be essays but for the fact that they have a dramatic colouring, while the essence of the essay is soliloquy. But in the writings of Cicero, such as the De Senectute, the dramatic interest is but slight, and the whole thing approaches far more nearly to the essay than to the novel. Probably Cicero supplied to his readers the function both of the essayist and the preacher, and fed the needs of so-called thoughtful readers by dallying, in a fashion which it is hardly unjust to call twaddling, with familiar ethical problems of conduct and character. The charm of Montaigne is the charm of personality—frankness, gusto, acute observation, lively acquaintance with men and manners. He is ashamed of recording nothing that interested him; and a certain discreet shamelessness must always be the characteristic of the essayist, for the essence of his art is to say what has pleased him without too prudently considering whether it is worthy of the attention of the well-informed mind.

I doubt if the English temperament is wholly favourable to the development of the essayist. In the first place, an Anglo-Saxon likes doing things better than thinking about them; and in his memories, he is apt to recall how a thing was done rather than why it was done. In the next place, we are naturally rather prudent and secretive; we say that a man must not wear his heart upon his sleeve, and that is just what the essayist must do. We have a horror of giving ourselves away, and we like to keep ourselves to ourselves. “The Englishman’s home is his castle,” says another proverb. But the essayist must not have a castle, or if he does, both the grounds and the living-rooms must be open to the inspection of the public.

Lord Brougham, who reveled in advertisement, used to allow his house to be seen by visitors, and the butler had orders that if a party of people came to see the house, Lord Brougham was to be informed of the fact. He used to hurry to the library and take up a book, in order that the tourists might nudge each other and say in whispers, “There is the Lord Chancellor.” That is the right frame of mind for the essayist. He may enjoy privacy, but he is no less delighted that people should see him enjoying it.

The essay has taken very various forms in England. Sir Thomas Browne, in such books as Religio Medici and Urn-Burial, wrote essays of an elaborate rhetorical style, the long fine sentences winding themselves out in delicate weft-like trails of smoke on a still air, hanging in translucent veils. Addison, in the Spectator, treated with delicate humour of life and its problems, and created what was practically a new form in the essay of emotional sentiment evoked by solemn scenes and fine associations. Charles Lamb treated romantically the homeliest stuff of life, and showed how the simplest and commonest experiences were rich in emotion and humour. The beauty and dignity of common life were his theme. De Quincey wrote what may be called impassioned autobiography, and brought to his task a magical control of long-drawn and musical cadences. And then we come to such a writer as Pater, who used the essay for the expression of exquisite artistic sensation. These are only a few instances of the way in which the essay has been used in English literature. But the essence is throughout the same; it is personal sensation, personal impression, evoked by something strange or beautiful or curious or interesting or amusing. It has thus a good deal in common with the art of the lyrical poet and the writer of sonnets, but it has all the freedom of prose, its more extended range, its use of less strictly poetical effects, such as humour in particular. Humour is alien to poetical effect, because poetry demands a certain sacredness and solemnity of mood. The poet is emotional in a reverential way; he is thrilled, he loves, he worships, he sorrows; but it is all essentially grave, because he wishes to recognize the sublime and up-lifted elements of life; he wishes to free himself from all discordant, absurd, fantastic, undignified contrasts, as he would extrude laughter and chatter and comfortable ease from some stately act of ceremonial worship. It is quite true that the essayist has a full right to such a mood if he chooses; and such essays as Pater’s are all conceived in a sort of rapture of holiness, in a region from which all that is common and homely is carefully fenced out. But the essayist may have a larger range, and the strength of a writer like Charles Lamb is that he condescends to use the very commonest materials, and transfigures the simplest experiences with a fairy-like delicacy and a romantic glow. A poet who has more in common with the range of the essayist Robert Browning, and there are many of his poems, though not perhaps his best, where his frank amassing of grotesque detail, his desire to include rather than exclude the homelier sorts of emotion, of robust and not very humorous humour, make him an impressionist rather than a lyrist. As literature develops, the distinction between poetry and prose will no doubt become harder to maintain. Coleridge said in a very fruitful maxim: “The opposite of poetry is not prose but science; the opposite of prose is not poetry but verse.” That is to say poetry has as its object the kindling of emotion and science is its opposite, because science is the dispassionate statement of fact; but prose can equally be used as a vehicle for the kindling of emotion, and therefore may be in its essence poetical: but when it is a technical description of a certain kind of structure its opposite is verse—that is to say, language arranged in metrical and rhythmical form. We shall probably come to think that the essayist is more of a poet than the writer of epics, and that the divisions of literature will tend to be on the one hand the art of clear and logical statement, and on the other the art of emotional and imaginative expression.

We must remember in all this that the nomenclature of literature, the attempt to classify the forms of literary expression, is a confusing and a bewildering thing unless it is used merely for convenience. It is the merest pedantry to say that literature must conform to established usages and types. The essence of it is that it is a large force flowing in any channel that it can, and the classification of art is a mere classification of channels. What lies behind all art is the principle of wonder and of arrested attention. It need not be only the sense of beauty; it may be the sense of fitness, of strangeness, of completeness, of effective effort. The amazement of the savage at the sight of a civilized town is not the sense of beauty, it is the sense of force, of mysterious resources, of incredible pro-ducts, of things unintelligibly and even magically made; and then too there is the instinct for perceiving all that is grotesque, absurd, amusing and jocose, which one sees exhibited in children at the sight of the parrot’s crafty and solemn eye and his exaggerated imitation of human speech, at the unusual dress and demeanour of the clown, at the grotesque simulation by the gnarled and contorted tree of something human or reptile. And then, too, there is the strange property in human beings which makes disaster amusing, if its effects are not prejudicial to oneself; that sense which makes the waiter on the pantomime stage, who falls headlong with a tray of crockery, an object to provoke the loudest and most spontaneous mirth of which the ordinary human being is capable. The moralist who would be sympathetically shocked at the rueful abrasions of the waiter, or mournful over the waste of human skill and endeavour involved in the breakage, would be felt by all human beings to have something priggish in his composition and to be too good, as they say, to live.

It is with these rudimentary and inexplicable emotions that the essayist may concern himself, even though the poet be forbidden to do so; and the appeal of the essayist to the world at large will depend upon the extent to which he experiences some common emotion, sees it in all its bearings, catches the salient features of the scene, and records it in vivid and impressive speech.

The essayist is therefore, to a certain extent, bound to be a spectator of life; he must be like the man in Browning’s fine poem “How it Strikes a Contemporary,” who walked about, took note of everything, looked at the new house building, poked his stick into the mortar.

He stood and watched the cobbler at his trade,
The man who slices lemons into drink,
The coffee-roaster’s brazier, and the boys
That volunteer to help him turn its winch;
He glanced o’er books on stalls with half an eye,
And fly-leaf ballads on the vendor’s string,
And broad-edge bold-print posters by the wall;
He took such cognizance of men and things!
If any beat a horse, you felt he saw;
If any cursed a woman, he took note,
Yet stared at nobody—they stared at him,
And found less to their pleasure than surprise,
He seemed to know them, and expect as much.

That is the essayist’s material; he may choose the scene, he may select the sort of life he is interested in, whether it is the street or the countryside or the sea-beach or the picture-gallery; but once there, wherever he may be, he must devote himself to seeing and realizing and getting it all by heart. The writer must not be too much interested in the action and conduct of life. If he is a politician, or a soldier, or an emperor, or a plough-boy, or a thief, and is absorbed in what he is doing, with a vital anxiety to make profit or position or influence out of it; if he hates his opponents and rewards his friends; if he condemns, despises, disapproves, he at once forfeits sympathy and largeness of view. He must believe with all his might in the interest of what he enjoys, to the extent at all events of believing it worth recording and representing, but he must not believe too solemnly or urgently in the importance and necessity of any one sort of business or occupation. The eminent banker, the social reformer, the forensic pleader, the fanatic, the crank, the puritan—these are not the stuff out of which the essayist is made; he may have ethical preferences, but he must not indulge in moral indignation; he must be essentially tolerant, and he must discern quality rather than solidity. He must be concerned with the pageant of life, as it weaves itself with a moving tapestry of scenes and figures rather than with the aims and purposes of life. He must, in fact, be preoccupied with things as they appear, rather than with their significance or their ethical example.

I have little doubt in my own mind that the charm of the familiar essayist depends upon his power of giving the sense of a good-humoured, gracious and reasonable personality and establishing a sort of pleasant friendship with his reader. One does not go to an essayist with a desire for information, or with an expectation of finding a clear statement of a complicated subject; that is not the mood in which one takes up a volume of essays. What one rather expects to find is a companionable treatment of that vast mass of little problems and floating ideas which are aroused and evoked by our passage through the world, our daily employment, our leisure hours, our amusements and diversions, and above all by our relations with other people—all the unexpected, inconsistent, various simple stuff of life; the essayist ought to be able to impart a certain beauty and order into it, to delineate, let us say, the vague emotions aroused in solitude or in company by the sight of scenery, the aspect of towns, the impressions of art and books, the interplay of human qualities and characteristics, the half-formed hopes and desires and fears and joys that form so large a part of our daily thoughts. The essayist ought to be able to indicate a case or a problem that is apt to occur in ordinary life and suggest the theory of it, to guess what it is that makes our moods resolute or fitful, why we act consistently or inconsistently, what it is that repels or attracts us in our dealings with other people, what our private fancies are. The good essayist is the man who makes a reader say: “Well, I have often thought all those things, but I never discerned before any connection between them, nor got so far as to put them into words.” And thus the essayist must have a great and far-reaching curiosity; he must be interested rather than displeased by the differences of human beings and by their varied theories. He must recognize the fact that most people’s convictions are not the result of reason, but a mass of associations, traditions, things half-understood, phrases, examples, loyalties, whims. He must care more about the inconsistency of humanity than about its dignity; and he must study more what people actually do think about than what they ought to think about. He must not be ashamed of human weaknesses or shocked by them, and still less disgusted by them; but at the same time he must keep in mind the flashes of fine idealism, the passionate visions, the irresponsible humours, the salient peculiarities, that shoot like sunrays through the dull cloudiness of so many human minds, and make one realize that humanity is at once above itself and in itself, and that we are greater than we know; for the interest of the world to the ardent student of it is that we most of us seem to have got hold of something that is bigger than we quite know how to deal with; something remote and far off, which we have seen in a distant vision, which we cannot always remember or keep clear in our minds. The supreme fact of human nature is its duality, its tendency to pull different ways, the tug-of-war between Devil and Baker which lies inside our restless brains. And the confessed aim of the essayist is to make people interested in life and in themselves and in the part they can take in life; and he does that best if he convinces men and women that life is a fine sort of a game, in which they can take a hand; and that every existence, however confined or restricted, is full of outlets and pulsing channels, and that the interest and joy of it is not confined to the politician or the millionaire, but is pretty fairly distributed, so long as one has time to attend to it, and is not preoccupied in some concrete aim or vulgar ambition.

Because the great secret which the true essayist whispers in our ears is that the worth of experience is not measured by what is called success, but rather resides in a fullness of life: that success tends rather to obscure and to diminish experience, and that we may miss the point of life by being too important, and that the end of it all is the degree in which we give rather than receive.

The poet perhaps is the man who sees the greatness of life best, because he lives most in its beauty and fineness. But my point is that the essayist is really a lesser kind of poet, working in simpler and humbler materials, more in the glow of life perhaps than in the glory of it, and not finding anything common or unclean.

The essayist is the opposite of the romancer, because his one and continuous aim is to keep the homely materials in view; to face actual conditions, not to fly from them. We think meanly of life if we believe that it has no sublime moments; but we think sentimentally of it if we believe that it has nothing but sublime moments. The essayist wants to hold the balance; and if he is apt to neglect the sublimities of life, it is because he is apt to think that they can take care of themselves; and that if there is the joy of adventure, the thrill of the start in the fresh air of the morning, the rapture of ardent companionship, the gladness of the arrival, yet there must be long spaces in between, when the pilgrim jogs steadily along, and seems to come no nearer to the spire on the horizon or to the shining embanked cloudland of the West. He has nothing then but his own thoughts to help him, unless he is alert to see what is happening in hedgerow and copse, and the work of the essayist is to make some-thing rich and strange of those seemingly monotonous spaces, those lengths of level road.

Is, then, the Essay in literature a thing which simply stands outside classification, like Argon among the elements, of which the only thing which can be predicated is that it is there? Or like Justice in Plato’s Republic, a thing which the talkers set out to define, and which ends by being the one thing left in a state when the definable qualities are taken away? No, it is not that. It is rather like what is called an organ prelude, a little piece with a theme, not very strict perhaps in form, but which can be fancifully treated, modulated from, and coloured at will. It is a little criticism of life at some one point clearly enough defined.

We may follow any mood, we may look at life in fifty different ways—the only thing we must not do is to despise or deride, out of ignorance or prejudice, the influences which affect others; because the essence of all experience is that we should perceive something which we do not begin by knowing, and learn that life has a fullness and a richness in all sorts of diverse ways which we do not at first even dream of suspecting.

The essayist, then, is in his particular fashion an interpreter of life, a critic of life. He does not see life as the historian, or as the philosopher, or as the poet, or as the novelist, and yet he has a touch of all these. He is not concerned with discovering a theory of it all, or fitting the various parts of it into each other. He works rather on what is called the analytic method, observing, recording, interpreting, just as things strike him, and letting his fancy play over their beauty and significance; the end of it all being this: that he is deeply concerned with the charm and quality of things, and desires to put it all in the clearest and gentlest light, so that at least he may make others love life a little better, and prepare them for its infinite variety and alike for its joyful and mournful surprises.

Top 25 LGBTQI+ Magazines and Zines from India/Asia

Authentic and alternate: LGBTQI+ Writing in india and the rest of asia
submit your creative writing, read proud, write proud

The pride movement took off in the 60s and 70s. With it, came forth magazines and publications that would come to archive voices, experiences, and the social change. Words poured here, insights shared, norms questioned — until the written word began a movement of its own. These glossy print editions or stuffed newsletters were building an informed consciousness, driving home one key idea: that LGBTQI+ rights were unequivocally human rights. 

It’s a different century, a different decade. What started as a dribble has emerged into a sea of change. Progress has varied across continents and socio-cultural discourse. Asian society, in particular, has been steeped in political dissent. Ideas about gender identity and sexual orientation continue to be misunderstood; fluidity and freedom to love treated with disdain; and religious/cultural doctrines misinterpreted.

Stray too far from binary gender standards and one would be treated as deviant, an anomaly deserving punishment. Nations like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia have a formidable record of homophobia and transphobia – where many activists have been jailed and worse, killed. 

But the movement towards equity and inclusivity hasn’t lost steam. In the last decade, magazines, zines, newsletters, and independent websites have emerged to shape the LGBTQI+ discourse in their own voices. These publications are cultivating a sense of community and safety, educating and informing the public consciousness, giving a platform to creative expression, and destigmatising a conversation that warrants a place in civil society. ‘Love is love is love’ becomes a rallying cry, a resilient beam, and the ultimate truth these publications swear by.

Here is a list of independent publications — zines, magazines, websites – that are representing the LGBTQI+ voice with luminosity and valiance. The idea of pride has never been more accessible, democratic, and inspired.

By Saumya K


The Bombay Review
Estd. 2014 | New York / Mumbai

Call for submissions! While not a dedicated queer magazine, The Bombay Review also publishes LGBTQ+ themed editions. 

Writers in Vol I (2020): Despy Boutris, J. Mueter, Geri Gale, S. Crystal Bacon, Amelia Brown, Shailee R, Robert Beveridge, among others.

We are now reading for Volume III: Fiction, Poetry, Essays, Art, Reviews. Solicited entries are paid $50 per contribution. Submission details here.


5Kadak Collective

What would the comic scene look like with female representation? How do you create heroines? Thus formed a platform to voice observations from South Asia through graphic storytelling by womxn, LGBTQ+ and queer communities. Its anthology, Bystander, features 50+ artists, illustrators, designers, and writers from 13 countries, and is the first splash as they make waves in graphic storytelling, inspiration, and creativity.

Founder: Aarthi Parthasarathy, Aindri Chakraborty, Akhila Krishnan, Garima Gupta, Janine Shroff, Kaveri Gopalakrishnan, Mira Malhotra and Pavithra Dikshit
Theme: Gender, geography and borders, identity, and inclusion
Social Media: Instagram, Website, Twitter, Kickstarter
Format: Multimedia, zines
Year launched: 2016

“An ever-expanding group of creators, we work on self-authored projects and zines. Kadak means strong, severe, sharp — like our tea.”


20Outrage Magazine

Launched in 2007, Outrage Magazine is the only LGBT webzine in the Philippines. It constructs a safe space for the Filipino queer community and LGBTQI allies to express and assert their voices. The publication also conducts workshops and researches concerning the community’s interests.

Pitch ideas to: editor@outragemag.com
Editor: Michael David C. Tan
Theme: Minority issues, gender and sexuality, identity politics
Genre: Features, profiles, personal essays
Social Media: Website, Twitter, Instagram
Format: Online
Year launched: 2007

“We believe that LGBTQI voices need to be heard, particularly when mainstream media does not treat our issues the right way. And so we bring these issues up.”


16Burnt Roti Magazine

The magazines delves into representations of young womxn, South Asian womxn and queer womxn. Its third issue will look at anti-blackness in South Asian communities and will feature five mixed ethnicity creatives. As an archive of experiences and stories, the magazine hopes to destigmatise conversation around sexuality, mental health, and issues relating to the self. It also curates a directory of South Asian creatives for hire to showcase and encourage talent.

Submission guidelines

Editor: Sharan Dhaliwal
Theme: Gender and sexuality, women’s rights, mental health, identity and representation, colourism, racism
Genre: Interviews, short fiction, essays, reviews
Social Media: Twitter, Website, Patreon, Instagram
Format: Online
Year launched: 2012

“We do not want to offend, we just want to give opportunities to those who are otherwise cast aside in the world of writing.”


7Gaylaxy Magazine

Galylaxy was born out of a need to fill the lacuna of queer voices showcasing their triumphs and stories in India. The e-magazine is an archive of stories that impact the diversity of voices and a platform to campaign for queer visibility.

Send ideas to: editor@gaylaxymag.com 
Editor: Sukhdeep Singh
Theme: Gender, sexuality, identity, civil rights, current affairs
Genre: Personal essays, features, news stories, more
Social Media: Twitter, Website
Format: Online
Year launched: 2010

“…we are still trying to bring out new facets, voice evolving concerns and simultaneously learn about the fascinating diversity of the queer community.”


18Gaysi Family

Gaysi is a portmanteau of ‘gay’ and ‘desi’, two things that are still blending in the broader culture. It regularly publishes stories online for, by, and of the South Asian queer community to nurture social expression. Anything from text, graphic to interactives. What started as an online forum turned into a print magazine, the Gaysi Zine, in 2011 in the hopes to expand the reach of the queer movement as widely as it can. The publication is a movement in itself — a melange of love, art, and resilience.

Submission guidelines

Editor: Sakshi & Jo
Theme: Gay rights, LGBTQ+ voices, queer perception and Indian cultural norms, pop culture, gender and identity
Genre: Opinion, personal essays, fiction, graphic novels and comics, poems, reviews, news stories
Social Media: Twitter, Website, Instagram
Format: Online blog and print
Year launched: 2008

“Our stories will be written for those who still believe that they are the ones who are different.”


17Fifty Shades of Gay

FSOG’s novelty lies in its mission: to destigmatise all that India hides in time-honoured taboos. It encourages conversation on the likes of family planning, safe-sex practices, LGBTQIA+ identity and stories — often treated as conversational pariahs in the social context. The website documents stories, encourages conversation by putting up factsheets and FAQs, and has a helpline for personal support.

Mail: getinvolved@fifityshadesofgay.co.in
Founder: Shubham Mehrotra
Theme: Sexual identity, safe-sex practice, family planning, gender
Genre: Personal essays, reviews, news, interviews
Social Media: Twitter, Website, Facebook
Format: Online blog
Year launched: 2016

“Fifty Shades of Gay believes in a fair and equal India where everyone can achieve their full potential, irrespective of sexual orientation or gender identity.”


14Varta 

The Varta webzine is a part of Varta Trust and was launched as a campaign to encourage dialogue around gender and sexuality. As a multilingual publication, it weaves together the diversity in the Indian landscape and helps them access stories of and from the LGBTQ+ community. The Trust conducts training, research, policy and media advocacy under its banner.

Submission guidelines

Board of Trustees: Pawan Dhall, Kaushik Gupta, Madhuja Nandi
Theme: Gender equity, sexual identity, diversity and inclusion, identity and expression, health, human rights, environmental issues
Genre: Personal essays, interviews, critical commentary, reviews, poems, fiction, travelogues
Social Media: Facebook, Website, Twitter
Format: Webzine and online blog
Year launched: 2012


4Queer Chennai Chronicles

QCC is imagining the queer community through a regional lens and distilling it through the world of literature. The literary forum held Chennai’s first queer literary festival, organises an independent film festival, published a book, and launched its bilingual e-zine, paalputhu pakkangkal. It is looking for voices that can help bring out a queer-centric narrative.

Submission guidelines

Founders: Moulee C and Violet LJ  
Theme: Gender, sexuality, social and cultural expression, LGBTQ community, anti-caste values, racism
Genre: Fiction, poems, art, non-fiction, reported features
Social Media: Twitter, Website, Instagram
Format: E-zine
Year launched: 2017


21In Plainspeak

A digital magazine of NGO TARSHI, In Plainspeak is a dialogue between people in the global south about sexual and reproductive rights. It started as a print publication in 2005 and has since evolved into a webzine, with discussion and knowledge creation around socially-vetoed topics. The bilingual zine brings out two issues with a unifying theme each month. Like TARSHI, it is creating a safe, inclusive, and sexually-affirming discourse.

Submission guidelines

Founders: Anisha Dutt, Radhika Chandiramani, Shikha Aleya 
Theme: Sexuality, social stigma, awareness and perspective, reproductive rights, disability, sex work
Genre: Interviews, reviews, personal essays, non-fiction, fiction, poetry, short films, podcasts, artwork and illustrations
Social Media: Twitter, Website, Facebook
Format: E-zine
Year launched: 2005

“…highlighting how sexuality intersects with various aspects of our daily lives.”


23Scripts

As a queer zine, Scripts lives up to empowering the queer female voice and much more. The publication was launched as a campaign by Lesbians and Bisexuals in Action (Labia) Collective, a watershed organisation in LBT activism in India. The publication along with the autonomous, Bombay-based collective has weaved a space for cultural and creative expression. It cultivates multiple conversations around social justice and queer identity.

Submission guidelines

Editor: Unknown
Theme: Gender, sexuality, social justice
Genre: Fiction, poem, personal essays, comic strips, illustrations, social commentary
Social Media: Twitter, Website, Facebook
Format: E-zine
Year launched: 1998


15Orinam 

The website is the digital arm of a grassroots collective started by queer men in Tamil Nadu. Orinam is all about inclusivity, as the ‘o’ rounds in the luminous spectrum of gender and sexual orientations. The website is a one-stop shop for resources, advocacy material, archive of protests, and also houses the blog, Our Voices. It regularly publishes stories about the LGBTQIA+ community, their allies, and social interaction in Tamil Nadu.

Contact 

Theme: Human rights, LGBTQIA+ representation, gender and sexuality, South Indian diaspora 
Genre: Personal essays, poetry, fiction, articles, podcast, interviews
Social Media: Website, Twitter, Facebook
Format: Online
Year launched: 2006

“Hues may vary, but humanity does not: This line stresses the notion of sameness across difference, or unity in diversity, a cornerstone of India’s national aspiration and basis for the LGBTIQA+ struggle for equality.”


13Swakanthey

Sappho for Equality, an activist forum for lesbians, women, and trans rights, is inspired by the Greek lyric poet. It is of little wonder then that its bi-annual publication would be rightly titled Swakanthey, or “In her own voice”. The bilingual six-page newsletter is published in January and June every year, and is an articulation of LBT expression and advocacy of their rights. It is distributed across the hallowed halls of Kolkata International Book Fair each year.

For contribution, mail: sappho1999@gmail.com

Editor: Subhagata Ghosh
Theme: Sexuality, queer narratives, reproductive rights, sexual education, gender identity
Genre: Fiction, poems, academic articles, non-fiction, interviews, illustrations, comic strips
Social Media: Website
Format: Print
Year launched: 2004

“In Our Own Voice is a movement by itself both in the field of sexuality rights in India and little magazine in Kolkata.”


2Roopban

The Bangladeshi social discourse beams with strict gender roles and heteronormative ideals. As LGBTQ+ movements gain momentum at the grassroots, Roopban has cultivated a legacy of courage. It made history with its first-ever print magazine advancing their mission of “freedom to love”. The founders of the autonomous body were assassinated by extremists as they campaigned for gender diversity. Yet, the movement has been relentless in its struggle. The magazine has evolved into an online community blog that explores gender and sexuality in a society in transition. The archive published a queer poetry book in 2015, Roop Gonti, and a collection of letters from the LGBTQI+ community, Iti Roopban, is expected to be released soon. 

Submission guidelines

Theme: Gender and sexuality, violence, social oppression, identity politics, human rights
Genre: Essays, opinions, poems, personal narratives, photos
Social Media: Twitter, Website, Instagram
Format: Print and online
Year launched: 2014

“We believe that we must come together as a community, build strong networks, and create platforms to voice important issues relevant to the advancement of the Bangladeshi LGBT+ community.”


1Equality Magazine

Equality has been described as the first archive of LGBTQI+ lifestyle in Sri Lanka. Launched under the NGO banner of Equal Ground, the quarterly magazine furthers its mission of ensuring socio-cultural rights and political equity in Sri Lanka. 

Mail for contributions: media@equalgroundsrilanka.com

Founder: Rosanna Flamer-Caldera 
Theme: Human rights, LGBTQI+ representation, gender and sexuality, civil society, legal aid
Genre: Personal essays, interviews, reviews, poems, short stories
Social Media: Twitter, Website, Facebook
Format: Online blog
Year launched: 2016

“Our goals are to make the lives of LGBTIQ persons in Sri Lanka meaningful and free from stigma and discrimination.”


19Element Magazine

A bi-monthly in Singapore, Element is dubbed as the one-stop shop for the Asian LGBTQ+ community. It delves deeper into the gender diverse narrative — featuring stories about lifestyle and personhood of queer voices across Asia. It is also Singapore’s leading men’s magazine. 

Pitch ideas to: edit@elementmag.asia

Editor: Noel Ng
Theme: Asian LGBT community, lifestyle, fashion, LGBT rights, personal grooming
Genre: Features, interviews, news stories
Social Media: Website, Twitter
Format: Online
Year launched: 2013

“It brings the Asian gay community together with contents that are closely associated with their lives.”


3Mondro

The queer community in Bangladesh is in the midst of a menacing social movement. As a queer cultural organisation, Mondro describes itself is the first and largest queer archive in Bangladesh. It directs attention towards the spectrum of gender, non-conformity, and fluidity. The archive includes resource creation, online blog, and advocacy tools. In August this year, it launched its first webzine in Bangla titled Thahor, which translates to contemplation. 

Submission guidelines

Theme: Gender, sexuality, queer identity, conflict, social oppression, activism, violence, gender discrimination 
Genre: Personal essays, non-fiction, videos, illustrations, poems, short stories, translations, interviews, reviews
Social Media: Twitter, Website, Instagram
Format: E-zine and online blog
Year launched: 2019

“Recognize and give space to Bangladeshi queer lives that are forgotten and erased from dominant history.”


11South Asian Today

The autonomous organisation has one aim: to pass on the mic to South Asian women and non-binary individuals. And it does that with ingenuity and passion, using multimedia tools like videos and podcasts to create and engage. The inspired storytelling hopes to reflect the diversity of the South Asian subcontinent.

Submission guidelines

Editors: Dilpreet Kaur Taggar and Tanja JV Singh
Theme: Identity and gender, health, and reproductive rights, popular culture, South Asian diaspora, socio-political issues, racism and caste
Genre: Videos, podcast, personal essay, interview, social commentary, poetry, photo essays
Social Media: Twitter, Website, Facebook
Format: Blog and newsletter
Year launched: 2020

“As an inclusive space, our goal is to solidify diversity within our own communities and pass on the mic to those who have not been given enough chances to tell their stories.”


Some more web zines and magazines: Upcoming / Recently established

Theme: Perspectives of women, LGBTQ+, non-binary groups
Social Media: Website, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook
Format: Online
Year launched: 2020

Theme: Human rights, free expression, Ambedkarite values, politics…
Social Media: Twitter, Website, Facebook
Format: Online blog
Year launched: 2019

Theme: Perception and narratives of South Asian LGBTQ+ community
Social Media: Website, Instagram, Twitter
Format: E-zine 
Year launched: 2018


Theme: Queer identity, South Asian diaspora, coming-out experiences
Social Media: Instagram, Website
Format: Newsletter
Year launched: 2020

Theme: Womxn and non-binary people, South Asian diaspora, gender & identity
Social Media: Instagram, Website, Twitter
Format: E-zine and online blog
Year launched: 2019

Theme: Gender, sexuality, politics of non-conformity, self-identity, LGBTQ+ rights
Social Media: Instagram, Website
Format: E-zine
Year launched: 2018


Theme: Queer identity, South Asia
Social Media: Website
Format: E-Zine
Year launched: 2019

Theme: Trans, intersex and/or non-binary art and experiences
Social Media: Instagram, Website
Format: E-zine and online blog
Year launched: Unknown

The list is in no particular order. Do you know of more websites, magazines, or zine that could be on the list? Drop the names and link in comments below. 

20 + 1 Canadian Literary Magazines to submit your Creative Writing to.

20 Canadian Literary Magazines
Poetry, fiction, essays, creative non fiction, reviews, interviews, art and more.
 

 

Arc Poetry Magazine

Year established: 2004
Published from: Ottawa, Ontario
Genres: Poetry, Essays, Interviews
Submission period: April 1 to July 31; September 1 to December 31
Type: Digital
Website | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: $50 per page


Augur Magazine

Year established: 2017
Published from: Toronto, Ontario
Genres: Poetry, Short fiction
Submission period: Currently September 1–30; Opens periodically each season
Type: Digital
Website | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: $60.00 CAD per poem; $0.11 cents CAD per word for short fiction


Existere

Year established: 1978
Published from: York University, Toronto, Ontario
Genres: Poetry, Short plays, Short fiction, Critical essays, Interviews
Submission period: All year
Type: Digital
Website
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: $50 per accepted submission (maximum $250)


Screenshot 2020-08-11 at 10.08.11 PMMontréal Writes

Year established: 2018
Published from: Montréal, Québec
Genres: Short fiction (fiction and non-fiction), poetry
Submission period: July 27 – August 16 for the August Issue, August 27 – September 16 for the September Issue, and so on
Type: Digital
Website | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: Nil


Room MagazineRoom 43.3 Neurodivergence

Year established: 2002
Published from: Vancouver, British Columbia
Genres: Fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction
Submission period: All year
Type: Digital + Print
Website | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: $50 CAD for one page


cover for #85subTerrain Magazine

Year established: 2006
Published from: Vancouver, British Columbia
Genres: Fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, essays, commentary
Submission period: All year
Type: Digital + Print
Website | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: $50 per poem; $0.10 per word for prose


The Antigonish ReviewIssue # 190

Year established: 2001
Published from: Antigonish, Nova Scotia
Genres:  Poetry, fiction, essays, articles, book reviews
Submission period: All year
Type: Digital
Website | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: $5 per page of poetry; $50 per prose 


National Literary Magazine on Waterloo Campus |The New Quarterly

Year established: 1981
Published from: Waterloo, Ontario
Genres: Fiction, poetry, nonfiction
Submission period: All year
Type: Digital
Website | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: $275 for prose; $50 per poem


The Temz Review

Year established: 2017
Published from: Ontario
Genres: Fiction, poetry, reviews
Submission period: All year
Type: Digital
Website | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: $20


Vallum

Year established: 2000
Published from: Montréal, Québec
Genres: Poetry, essays, reviews
Submission period: All year
Type: Digital
Website | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: Nil


Taddle CreekTaddle Creek No. 44 (Winter, 2019–2020)

Year established: 1997
Published from: Toronto, Ontario
Genres: Fiction, poetry
Submission period: All year
Type: Digital + Print
Website | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: $50 per page


Understory Magazine

Year established: 2013
Published from: Lunenburg, Nova Scotia
Genres: Fiction, nonfiction, poetry
Submission period: All year
Type: Digital + Print
Website | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: $30-$60 honorarium


Untethered Magazineuntethered 5.1 (front cover)

Year established: 2014
Published from: Toronto, Ontario
Genres: Fiction, nonfiction, poetry
Submission period: All year
Type: Digital
Websiste | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: $10 honorarium


Screenshot 2020-08-12 at 2.54.35 PMThe Puritan

Year established: 2007
Published from: Ottawa, Ontario
Genres: Fiction, poetry, essays
Submission period: All year
Type: Digital
Website | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: $100


Into the Void

Year established: 2012
Published from: Toronto, Ontario
Genres: Fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, visual art
Submission period: All year
Type: Digital + Print
Website | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: $10 per poem, $20 per prose


filling Station Issue 74 - RitualFilling Station

Year established: 1993
Published from: Calgary, Alberta
Genres: Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, visual art
Submission period: All year
Type: Digital + Print
Website | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: $25 honorarium


Hamilton Review of Books

Year established: 2016
Published from: Hamilton, Ontario
Genres: Reviews, essays, interviews
Submission period: All year
Type: Digital
Website | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: $50 per review, $75 per essay or interview


PictureThe Mackinac

Year established: 2013
Published from: Canada
Genres: Poetry
Submission period: All year
Type: Digital
Website | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: Nil


Carousel

Year established: 1983
Published from: Canada
Genres: Fiction, poetry
Submission period: January and September (see dates)
Type: Digital + Print
Website | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: $55 for 1–4 pages


Image moduleDreamers Creative Writing

Year established: 2018
Published from: Hepworth, Ontario
Genres: Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, book reviews
Type: Digital + Print
Website | Facebook
Submission fee: Nil
Payment: $20 honorarium


Hello! We have another curated a list of our favorite literary magazines, this time of Canadian origin, publishing steadily for a couple of years. What about us, The Bombay Review? Well, New York is a couple of hundred miles away from Toronto, so Canada is as much a neighbor to us as Pakistan is to Mumbai. We have conducted literary events in a few cities in Canada, and also have a special themed issue coming up next year. To that end, we are always open to reading your work, publishing your work, and engaging with you. Details below.

By Team TBR

The Bombay Review
Year established: 2014
Published from: New York City & Mumbai
Genres: Fiction, Poetry, Essays, Art, Reviews, Interviews, Culture pieces
Submission period: All year
Type: Online + Print
Website | Instagram | Facebook
Submission fee: None
Payment: Ranges from Nil to $50

Top Indian/Asian Literary Magazines to submit your Creative Writing to.

Literary magazines are a catalyst to good publishing in any country, functioning as a parallel industry to traditional book publishing. A rich literary magazine landscape comments on writing being taken seriously, and also nurtures a reading market for aspiring writers. Stimulating intellectual conversations, niche catering, lending support to Creative Writing programs, and providing a platform to be heard, or well, read; surround the larger role of magazines.

In India, South Asia, Africa and certain parts of the world,  literary magazines may have another role to play. Support writing careers. The magazines are a pillar to graduates of literature, passionate readers, bibliophiles, hobbyists; lending them the shoulder to spring start a probable writing career. 

Here, today, we have curated a list of our favorite literary magazines of Indian/Asian origin, publishing steadily for a couple of years. Persons of words in this part of the world, or anywhere else, go ahead and submit your creative writing.

We, The Bombay Review, are also always open to reading your work, publishing your work, and commending your work. Details below.

By Team TBR

The Bombay Review
Year established: 2014
Published from: New York City & Mumbai
Genres: Fiction, Poetry, Essays, Art, Reviews, Interviews, Culture pieces
Submission period: All year
Type: Online + Print
Website | Instagram | Facebook
Submission fee: None
Payment: upto $50 for solicited entries
Editors: Kaartikeya Bajpai | Rochelle Potkar


30 
LITERARY MAGAZINES
(Established more than 5 years ago, as of 2020)
Short fiction, poetry, translations, reviews, screenplays, essays, and more.

Indian Literature: Sahitya Academy

  • Year established: 1954
  • Published from: New Delhi, India
  • Genres: Poetry, short fiction in English translation and English, critical articles
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Digital + print
  • Website
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Dr. A. J. Thomas

Asymptote Journal

  • Year established: 2015
  • Published from: Taiwan
  • Genres: Unpublished translated poetry, fiction, nonfiction and drama; original English-language nonfiction; visual art
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Digital
  • Website 
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Lee Yew Leong

Jaggery Lit

  • Year established: 2013
  • Published from: India
  • Genres: Fiction, poetry, essays, art, reviews
  • Submission period: May 1 to July 1
  • Type: Digital
  • Website 
  • Submission fee: $25/piece
  • Payment: $100 for fiction, $25 for nonfiction/poetry/art/reviews
  • Editor: Anu Mahadev

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (Could be defunct)

  • Year established: 2007
  • Published from: Hong Kong + London, UK
  • Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Creative Nonfiction
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Digital
  • Website
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Tammy Ho Lai-Ming

Spark Magazine

  • Year established: 2010
  • Published from: India
  • Genres: Short fiction, art
  • Submission period: On a break, currently not accepting submissions
  • Type: Digital
  • Website
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editors: Anupama Krishnakumar and Vani Viswanathan

The Indian Quarterly

  • Year established: 2013
  • Published from: Mumbai, India
  • Genres: Essays, features, essay-reviews, photo-essays, travelogue, poetry, fiction
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Print + Digital
  • Website 
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Unknown

Reading Hour

  • Year established: 2011
  • Published from: Bangalore, India
  • Genres: Short fiction, poetry, book reviews
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Print + Digital
  • Website 
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Unknown 

eFiction India

  • Year established: 2013
  • Published from: Gurgaon, India
  • Genres: Essays, fiction, poetry, art and criticism, interviews, book reviews
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Digital
  • Website
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Nikhil Sharda

The Bangalore Review

  • Year established: 2013
  • Published from: Bangalore, India
  • Genres: Fiction, creative non-fiction, translations, essays
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Digital
  • Website 
  • Submission fee: $3
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Suhail Rasheed

Himal South Asian Mag

  • Year established: 1987
  • Published from: Colombo, Sri Lanka
  • Genres: Long-form reportage, political analysis, essays and opinion, interviews, photo essays, reviews, fiction
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Digital
  • Website 
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: USD 100-150
  • Editors: Kanak Mani Dixit

 Muse India

  • Year established: 2004
  • Published from: Secunderabad, Telangana, India
  • Genres: Poetry, short fiction, essays, conversations with writers, book reviews
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Digital
  • Website
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Atreya Sarma U

Helter Skelter

  • Year established: 2010
  • Published from: Mumbai
  • Genres: Helter Skelter Anthology of New Writing: Short fiction, poetry
  • Submission period: Varies, usually November to January
  • Type: Digital
  • Website 
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Arun Kale

The Alipore Post

  • Year established: 2015
  • Published from: Unknown
  • Genres: Poetry, art, photography, comics, interviews, prose
  • Submission period: Check website
  • Type: Digital
  • Website
  • Submission fee:
  • Payment:
  • Editor: Rohini Kejriwal

Open Road Review: (To be verified)

  • Year established: 2011
  • Published from: New Delhi, India
  • Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Creative Nonfiction
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Digital
  • Website
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Kulpreet Yadav

Cafe Dissensus

  • Year established: 2013
  • Published from: New York City, USA
  • Genres: Audio-visual (interviews, conversations), Political articles/essays, Photo essays
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Online
  • Website
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editors: Mary Ann Chacko, Mosarrap Hossain Khan

Kitaab

  • Year established: 2013
  • Published from: Singapore
  • Genres: Short Stories, Essays on literary criticism, Poetry, Non-fiction – Travelogues, Memoirs, Personal essays, Book Reviews, Author Interviews
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Digital
  • Website
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Zafar Anjum

Wasafiri

  • Year established: 1984
  • Published from: London, UK
  • Genres: Articles, essays, journalistic prose, short fiction and poetry 
  • Submission period: October onwards
  • Type: Digital + print
  • Website
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Malachi McIntosh

The Bombay Literary Magazine

  • Year established: 2013
  • Published from: Unknown
  • Genres: Fiction, poetry
  • Submission period: Varies, currently closed
  • Type: Digital
  • Website
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: Nil
  • Editor – Tanuj Solanki

The Mithila Review

  • Year established: 2016
  • Published from: Delhi, India
  • Genres: Fiction, poetry, non-fiction
  • Submission period: Varies, updates on website. Currently open for poetry, closed for fiction (opens August 2020)
  • Type: Digital + print
  • Website
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: Nil to $10 for original poetry, essays, flash stories; $50 for original stories
  • Editor: Salik Shah

Nether (To be verified)

  • Year established: 2009
  • Published from: India
  • Genres: Fiction, poetry, art, photography
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Digital (quarterly) + Print (annual)
  • Website 
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Avinab Datta-Areng

Vayavya (To be verified)

  • Year established: 2011, first published in 2013
  • Published from: India
  • Genres: Poetry, prose on poetry, interviews
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Digital
  • Website
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Mihir Vatsa

The Little Magazine (To be verified)

  • Year established: 2001
  • Published from: India
  • Genres: Essays, fiction, poetry, novellas, film and theatre scripts
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Digital
  • Website
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Antara Dev Sen, Pratik Kanjilal

Setu Billingual

  • Year established: 2016
  • Published from: Pittsburgh, USA
  • Genres: Research articles, book reviews, interviews, poems and short fiction
  • Submission period:
  • Type: Digital
  • Website
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Anurag Sharma, Sunil Sharma

The Punch Magazine (formerly Byword)

  • Year established: 2016 (formerly Byword)
  • Published from: India
  • Genres: Articles (Non-fiction, Poetry, Interviews), Reviews, Photos, Videos, Fiction
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Online
  • Website 
  • Submission fee: Small donations are welcome
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Shireen Quadri

The Aleph Review

  • Year established: 2017
  • Published from: Pakistan
  • Genres: Prose, poetry
  • Submission period: January to July
  • Type: Digital + print
  • Website 
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Mehvash Amin

The Missing Slate:

  • Year established: 2010
  • Published from: Pakistan
  • Genres: Poetry, fiction, non-fiction, photography, visual arts
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Digital + print
  • Website 
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Moeed Tariq, Noah Klein

Out of Print

  • Year established: 2010
  • Published from: Mumbai, India
  • Genres: Fiction
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Digital
  • Website
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Indira Chandrasekhar

Anak Sastra

  • Year established: 2010
  • Published from: Florida, USA
  • Genres: Short fiction, creative nonfiction, comics, poems, book reviews 
  • Submission period: All year
  • Type: Digital
  • Website
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: None
  • Editor: Kris Williamson

The Asian American Literary Review (Under construction)

  • Year established: 2009
  • Published from: USA
  • Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Creative Nonfiction
  • Submission period: Jun 1 to Aug 31
  • Type: Digital
  • Website Currently under construction
  • Submission fee: None
  • Payment: Contributor copies only
  • Editor: Lawrence-Minh Bὺi Davis and Gerald Maa

If we have missed out any literary magazine, which we surely have, please comment below with details and we will take a look. Do note, that we are not considering literary magazines/journals which are less than 3-5 years old.

The above list in not in any particular order.

Student Writing

A new section showcasing young voices in fiction, poetry and non fiction; featuring writing from students in schools and universities aged 19 or below.


Student Writing | Latest Pieces

Featured

Poetry | ‘It’ by Rachel Deyis (18) | Student Writing

I feel it shift inside me, this wild, furred thing that has uncurled itself from the slumberous warmth of my belly  and climbed the rungs of my ribcage to settle within my chest. For weeks it has been still, all flickering eyelids and gentle prodding, but today its eyes blink wide open, awake- silvered claws…

Poetry | ‘Dauntless Dreams’ by Subhanjali Saraswati (18) | Student Writing

Paranoia glared through the windows,She started melting under the heatInch by inch,She lost pounds, sterlings, dollars.The counties were long gone,It was now time for the countries.Perhaps,Gone were the days the ice melted.It was frozen still today,The roads, the ravages, the restless pace.Crossed by a bullet would have been easierSimpler even.Wrath ran through the veins,Just as…

Poetry | ‘Fate of the Forgotten’ by Chandana. D (15) | School Student Writing

There goes the isolated fishermanIn his desolate wooden boat,Trying his best to be restrained fromAll the misery that poverty connotes. The sun has set,The incessant time goes.Lost in the sea of the forgotten,The abandoned fisherman rows. Maybe if it was not him,That hope had parted so badly within,He would have probably been laughing,With his beloved…

Poetry | ‘Glass Grows’ & Other Poems by U. Sai Sruti | School Student Writing

Glass Grows we live in a glass worldglass dolls and glass mindsgrowing out of glass junglesglass bodies cracking and greenthis glass shatters in this glowing streamof green blood and green heartsbleeding blackening greasegreen governments eyeing the glass greenand piercing glass into these bodiesthat spew their spleen of earth-shattering greenglass breaking, burning, brewingglass minds that grow…

Poetry | ‘Clueless Nights’ by Ashaani Taneja (15) | School Student Writing

I sat on the muddy brown boulders,to watch the sun go down,to see the beautiful night,I felt the calmness as my hair swayed with wind,and my wings, which were collapsed earlier,rose and flapped in the wind,cutting the current with its black feathers,which came out of my wings,blew towards the setting sun.Through the cracks in the…



Fiction | Cats, Murakami and a mystery encounter – Sunil Sharma

Sunil Sharma tries to create a Murakami-laced moment by outlining a late afternoon conversation between strangers. The protagonist, a filmmaker find a subject of instant interest in a coconut-seller who seems unnaturally knowledgable about Haruki Murakami. He tells an inspiring story of triumphing over evil and disappears completely (with his coconut stall) the next day. Sharma catcher his reader off-guard, drawing them in, warming their hearts and leaving them with a bewildered look on their faces. – Shreya, The Bombay Review

“Is that Murakami?”

The query is least anticipated and comes as a surprise, especially in a public beach.

The place is almost deserted. Only sounds that persist: the restive sea breaking into the ceaseless waves and the chattering birds that circle in the grey vault. The skyline of Alibaugh is blurred in the background—series of jagged lines across a vast canvas, dull and grey. It is early afternoon but alredy looks like late evening. The wind is rough and salty. The sky threatens rain, heavy rain, any minute. I watch the desolate shore stretched out to infinity; it is like a noir-film scene—somber and dark, in shadows and menacing; a stranger about to walk into a life, or a mysterious development that will turn everything topsy-turvy.

An upturned boat is under the three bent- and-intertwined palm trees, a famous landmark. Secluded partially from the popular beach, this particular patch evokes curiosity due to this bizarre natural creation. Whenever in the town, I come to this spot—to spend a few hours to gaze at the horizon, the sky and the sea, and, read a good book or listen to the classical music. Like carrying your own portable world, while in transit, on the move. Always, a fun activity. My way of relaxing in the din of the public places. And watching people and changing moods of the eternal sea heaving with an inexhaustible energy.

Rain excites me. Getting drenched brings back early-childhood memories of the lively holidays spent in the grandma’s village, where kids and adults alike were not afraid of the elements and enjoyed a good sun or rain.

All that is over in Mumbai. Folks avoid the rain or sun there. Forgotten the pleasures nature can give to its children. I am not the indoors type. Love the outside air and open spaces. And the sea that beckons always. Must have been a sailor or a captain in one of the previous births!

Normally, while outdoors, I plug into the ear phones and listen to jazz or some audio stories. In touristy places, part of the crowds, yet detached; enclosed in your own mobile sanctuary, transported into higher realms seen by the blessed only.

Today is no exception. Alternately, I sit on that boat, walk down few meters, sit and read—and compose thoughts on the current assignment or ponder over the complexities of the universe.

Meditation by the sea! I call this exercise that detoxes the urban mind and body.

Books, a water bottle, mat and red umbrella—my handy travel kit.

This time, Murakami is with me. I slow-read a passage from him and enjoy each word, the way you cherish good wine by sipping it leisurely, on a lonely table, in the evening, while it rains outside; occasionally, scan the gloomy horizon, and, like the thrill of being solitary, after a long time, on a beach.

Or almost alone—as this sudden question confirms another lurking presence. Might sound invasive but not this time. The reason: You do not expect someone asking about Murakami in the interiors, that too, in fluent English. Comes as pleasant shock. And a conversation opener on this wet day, unwinding gradually.

I turn around. A man in 30s; keenly peering at Norwegian Wood with the rapture of a hard-core devotee, over bifocals on a hooked nose.

Strange!

I say a yes. He further beams, eyeing the novel as if it were a sacred artifact, found by accident in an unlikely location.

I do a counter query, “You know Murakami?”

“To some extent only.” The alien answers, a smile hovering on a thin face.

“Good to have a fellow admirer in this part of the world.” I say with a chuckle.

“Indeed.” He continues: “Fascinating personality!  Fond of the game of baseball, cats, undergrounds, wells, music, Kafka, Carver and Cheever, among many other passions.  Unusual guy, this Murakami. Runs for ten miles and works for five-six hours daily. Unspooling strange worlds for the explorers of such possible regions. Most important, makes the implausible plausible. Few people have such an uncanny ability.”

Impressive summing up of a rich career!

This mysterious encounter looks promising now.

I am intrigued by the stranger and his knowledge and ask: “You, a Murakami scholar?”

“No. I am not that intelligent.”

“A professor?”

He grins: “Not that smart, either.”

“Who are you then?” The bafflement shows.

He answers, “A simple seller of coconuts. I own that shack. Let us move there, it has started raining.”

We stroll down to the tiny hut, crammed with few plastic chairs, tables and assortment of coconuts on the counter, supervised by a sleepy lad in half-pants. We sit down and face the sea. The rain has started falling in fine sheets; its music rhythmic on the tin roof; the sea and sky fuse in a single instant…surreal feel.

The boy yawns and scratches his head. He is cross-eyed.

“Peter Cat.” The young man says. “Cats brought us together—Murakami and me. Our geographies collided, mental and physical and became one seamless land and unlocked a gate for an exciting journey over imagined lands.”

Not heard this type of articulation in recent memory. Real intriguing figure, this man! Fated to meet.

 “Same here. I, too, love cats. Beloved of the ancient Egyptians. Bit puzzling as well. Especially the Murakami cats. They have their own volition.” I state.

He agrees: “Like Murakami’s cats, mine act weird; keep on disappearing—and re-appearing—on their own free will. The only striking difference: So far the fish have not tumbled down from my sky.”

“Maybe one day, you can expect that also to happen.” I say with a loud laugh. His familiarity with the story-teller is indeed exceptional.

He observes in a soft tone, “Maybe. Who knows? Reality can turn out to be equally unreal these days. Not sure where one ends and the other starts. Times are turbulent. Post-truth, anything is possible. What matters is what one tends to believe.”

We become quiet. The rain drums the sheets and rattles off the tiles. The beach is covered in a mist.

“What do you do?” he asks me suddenly.

“A film-maker. Here, on an assignment, to film this coastal city on a monsoon morning. Searching for a good location and a theme for the half-an-hour shoot.”

“Have you found both? You can have plenty in this area. Good locations and ample talent.”

“Not yet. The search is on,” I say and add, “I might find both soon.”

“Want some coconut water, mister?” He asks me in a friendly tone, voice raspy.

 “Yes, sure. Thanks.”

He signals the boy for two big ones.

On a tray, the lad brings us coconuts with pink straws. We drink and watch the beach turn a shade darker.

A brown cat appears, out of the blue, rubs its back against the young man’s legs, purrs and then settles down, near the plastic table, eyes closed. Its owner is mightily pleased by the feline appearance.

“This documentary I am doing for a reputed travel channel. They want beaches in and around Mumbai covered for a global audience. A human-interest story.”

“Thrilling! You come to visit new places and talk to the people—and make money as well.”

“Yes. I enjoy meeting strangers and discovering new places. Love my job.”

He is easy-going and unpretentious, eager to talk. A bond starts developing between us, thanks to Murakami.

 “Are you from these parts?” I ask.

“Yes. A village nearby.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr…?”

“Prakash.” He offers his hand.

“Salim.”  We shake hands. The cat peers at us and purrs, expressing delight, then shuts eyes.

“Found a subject for my next documentary, just now.” I tell Prakash.

“What is that?”

“You.”

“Me!”

“Yes. The theme will be Talking Murakami in Alibaugh. The highlight will be a coconut vendor talking shop on camera for the fans and scholars of the writer. Is it not interesting?”

Prakash laughs. “My gawd! You will make me a hero! By the way, how did you run into the author?”

“Well, I studied him for my paper on Fictionists and Cinema as part of my PG course on mass media. You? How did you find him in a village?”

“Through translation. My mother read a lot. She recommended him to me many years ago. She admired him for producing unseen lands.”

“Oh! I see. What is she?”

“A home-maker and an avid reader who would read in the afternoons and the nights, in the kitchen, when the household slept. Villagers retire very early. She wanted to know about other cultures via reading books written in other languages. Kept a small library at home and encouraged everybody to borrow from her. Passed on the same genes to me. I keep on reading a lot.”

“Great!” I say. “What is your father?”

“He was a farmer. Simple man. A Gandhian, a lost tribe now in India.”
“Oh!”

“Pa was also inspiring like Ma. One of the trustees who built a school for the girls of the area. Was against early marriage of girls. Stood for the brick-kiln workers and their rights. A strong and well-built man loved by the poor and farmers. He would talk to the block development officer or the revenue officers on their behalf.”

“Real crusader!”

“Lucky to have such parents. Not much educated but always encouraging.”

“Hmm.”

We grow silent. One more cat appears and curls around Prakash’s side of the table. The wind brings in a strong gust of rain inside the shack. The sky is overcast. The sea hisses.

“Are you college-educated? Curious to know my new hero.”

“I am an electrical engineer.”

“A what?” my jaws drop.

He laughs loudly, amused by the expression of disbelief. “Most people react like that. Ha ha ha! They take a shack-owner to be illiterate, poor and ignorant brute.”

“Partially true, of course. You will hardly find an engineer selling coconuts at a public beach! Is it not unbelievable?” I ask him in a bantering tone.

“And quoting Haruki Murakami! Or discussing Coppola with an American tourist here. Yes, unbelievable, for some.” He says, eyes twinkling.

This time, I am not surprised by his wide range of cultural references. The slim man, although unremarkable in appearance, is indeed remarkable in his intellectual pursuits.

“You are real globalist, my friend, in your tastes.” I comment. He smiles but says nothing.

“Real pleasure meeting you, Prakash. In fact, never met someone like you in my short life of forty-five years, although I have met hundreds of interesting people, in my line of work so far. Most are one-dimensional. And mass-produced specimen only for the job market. Not very intelligent. Only skilled labour programmed to do certain tasks, to obey certain commands. You are a rare combination.” I say with genuine affection.

“Same here. I find you equally captivating. A film maker soliloquizing on an empty beach…”

“And talking to the airy nothings, wind and the sea. A crazy fellow! Not the usual 9-5 guy.” I add.

He laughs and takes out a cigarette packet, offering me one. I decline. He lights up and emits rings of smoke into the humid air outside. The rain increases in intensity. The cats purr in unison. The boy yawns. The wind rattles more tiles. Rain is getting furious.

.

After half-an-hour, harsh rain stops and we decide to go out for a walk. The sky clears. The sun peeps in. We listen to the sounds of the waves in the general quiet. “The music from the sea heals. Therapy, kind of, for troubled minds.” He observes.

We stand there for long, listening to the rustle of the waves. The sun light casts its magic on the dappled sea—looks lovely!

“How Murakami entered your life so deeply? I mean, how did he affect your life, the way only few thinkers can do?” I ask Prakash.

“Long story. Interested?” He asks, watching the gulls above, mind far off.

“I am listening. Please. Tell me your truth.”

He glances at my face, “Are you sure to know about an obscure engineer selling coconuts on a popular beach-resort? Few guys are. We all are busy doing instagam moments of our own life rather than engaging with a fellow human being.”

“Yes, as said earlier, I am truly interested in such a colourful character. You are now my present subject of inquiry.”

He becomes silent, starts walking at a brisk pace, on the sand. I follow him on the shore where waves are singing and I can see a mermaid sitting on a boulder, middle of the sea, on this afternoon, as strange as a Borges or Dali work. Few minutes later, he slows down and strats, “On certain moments of disjunctions, mostly unpredicted, your favouraite writer or text enters your life through these voids, crevices and guides you onwards.”

“Indeed. I agree with this interpretation of life and art, this interface between the two.”

He pauses for long, reflecting. The gulls circle over a watery patch in an agitated sea. He comes back from a dim past: “Certain moments—when you feel abandoned, let down, alone—can be very unsettling. Those testing moments open up as a portal for the inspiration to enter the individual life, almost unbidden and give you insights and strength to endure the sudden crisis or an unseen reversal. In my life, things went downhill quite quickly…and Murakami helped me out eventually. He showed me the light and made me emerge from the long tunnel as a whole.”

“Interesting!” I exclaim. “Go on.”

His face clouds over. “Painful to recall those events that ruined my life…or almost! I never thought it will happen the way it did. But you can never see future unfold clearly…in advance.”

I wait patiently for the story to unfold. We keep on walking on the shore, waves tingling naked feet. His cats follow for some time and then vanish.

“Well, it is an ordinary story full of struggles.”

“Carry on, please.”

“OK. It so happened that my farmer father asked me to return to the ancestral village and do farming on our small piece of land. I agreed to the idea. Sons do not question fathers in rural India. He told me, ‘You are not getting any decent salary anyway in the city. Come here. The land can feed all of us. We have a big house and we all will live as joint family.” I returned with my wife and kids and started working on the land. My brother and I worked hard. The results showed. We went for the organic farming and sold the yield directly to the city superstores through a startup called “village Greens”. Applied the best techniques of farming. Cultivated flowers in a nursery as well. After a few years, we did well and saved enough. We all were together and happy tilling our ancestral land, living with Mother Nature, in a house built by our forefathers. The joy was immense.”

“Hmm. Good to hear that in an age when farm distress continues to haunt our farmers the most.”  I say pensively.

“Our village is no different. Many farmers committed suicide over the last many years.”
“So sad to hear that! Huge loss to the nation.”

“Yes. They could not repay the heavy loans. Unseasonal rains ruined the crops. There is no support system for these hard-working people, still attached to farming existence and old values.”
“Yes. Extreme climate changes have destroyed many precious lives in the villages. Government must do something for them.”

He continues: “Everything was looking good. Then the storm hit us. Without any warning. It knocked us off.”

He stops. I wait.

After another painful pause, he reflects, “We never saw them coming, the tragedies, as a series. In one single sweep, the storm destroyed us.”

“The storm?”

“Yes. It destroyed us completely. My father got murdered. Ma grew quiet and faded away. My brother was assaulted badly. I lost my anchors. The entire village abandoned us during that dark time. Avoided contacts with us. Forgot us totally. We were left alone—so painful still!”

“Sad! How did it all happen?”

“Well, one fine morning, dad was returning from the local market, late morning, when he was accosted by a few brazen men who opened fire on a defenseless person in his early sixties and left him dead on the main street of the bustling village, yelling obscenities. Many villagers saw the killers but did not stop them from fleeing. Nobody dared step out of their comfort zone. The killers slowly walked into the forest, laughing and chatting as a bunch of carefree men returning from a picnic. Fired into the air repeatedly to put scare. It was a murder most foul. In the open and day light. Within an hour, our destiny changed. I became fatherless.”

“Who were these brutes?”

“The hired goons of a local politician-cum-moneylender who did not like my father speaking on behalf of the poor farmers, victim of his greed and lust. The village wanted father to contest the upcoming elections to the village council. The politician, a don, did not like challenges. Being low-cast further aggravated the situation. He felt insulted by the rising star coming from the other side. A subaltern speaking of rights and justice and law. The don was furious by the competition.”

“Oh! I see. So the don got him killed.”

“Yes.”

“No action was taken?”

“No, nothing. At least, in the initial months.”
“Why? How can it happen? We are not living in a banana republic. It is a lawful country. A country where system works.”

“The rural scene is different, dear Salim. You know that. The system works…but for the rich. Not for the poor. The gangster owns the place. His writ runs large here. You are nothing. A zero. The cops were in his pockets. No witnesses to the murder. He terrorized the village further. Friends stopped talking to us. We were the new outcasts. The grocers would deny provisions. The neighbours turned their faces away. The doctor would not treat us. Excommunicated. Victimized again and again.”

“So bad it was! I am shocked! Thought badlands existed in some other place.”

He takes a long pause. Then recalls: “Hell! Things were getting worst. The goons began harassing the women of the family. When I complained, the cops threatened action against me. Horrible, it became!”

“My God! Terrifying!”

“Yes, Salim. It was. I went to the sessions court. A weak case was registered against unknown men by the police. The lawyers would not take our case except a young idealist who refused to be cowed down by the open threats.”

“Oh! What did you do then?”

“I went to the national media. There was huge clamour. One night, the cops picked up my younger brother and thrashed him in the lockup. Later, booked him for possessing drugs in the house…then, they came for the cousins and booked them in a murder case. The torture was becoming unbearable. The cops were out for our blood. The thugs were out for our blood. The village did not have the courage to stand up against the don. His henchmen openly boasted, ‘Those who oppose our leader will get killed.’ It was very frustrating. The darkest hour for us. We were in a sinking ship.”

“Real outrageous! Nobody supported you in your quest for justice?”

“No. That is real face of the rural India! The countryside is largely ruled by the mafia and criminals posing as politicians. If you oppose them, they are after you. One evening, goons attacked my brother, almost killing him, outside our home. My mother could no longer take it anymore. She stopped talking, withdrew into a shell and died of grief and sadness, few days later. Her loss was too much. We felt overwhelmingly crushed.”
“I can understand that overpowering pain and  crippling helplessness, bro.” I tell him and hold his hand.

He is quiet. The cat—the fat one with yellow-white stripes— re-appears and purrs. Prakash picks up the creature and strokes her arched back. Then deposits her on the sand. The sea gulls are again circling in the air. We keep on moving slowly. The wind feels refreshing.

Prakash resumes: “The final blow came when they tried to kidnap my younger sister in broad day light from her degree college. Somehow, the other girls came out and beat the goons badly with shoes and sticks; the entire degree college for women came out in support for my hapless sister that day, some ten kilometers from our village, it was so reassuring. But my sister was scared. My wife, too, wanted to go away from this daily torment, violence and abuse. All of us were getting deeply affected. Disillusioned, dejected, we gave up the cause for bringing justice to my slain father. Gave up our fight. Principles. Conscience—everything. Our survival was more crucial than the sustained fight. We decided to leave.”

“How did you plan that?”

“We were firm to settle down in distant Mumbai—forever.  There, among the millions, we would be just another statistics. Anonymity promised safety and survival. The village, anyway, had become an unbearable prison, a burning hell. Not much money left. No future in that oppressive system, feudal in outlook. Losers we became. Without dignity, value or respect, hounded by the thugs, jeered by the cops.”

“Is it? So terrible there in the countryside? How did you leave the stinking place?”

“Lot of planning was done. In the middle of the night, we decided to escape the swamp. A friend came down to pick us up in his van. We left stealthily. Locked the house.  With few valuables and clothes…and degrees. That was all we took on that journey.”

“So sad! What happened afterwards?”

He pauses. I wait.

“Well, Murakami enters our life at that precise time.”

“What?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“In a most strange way.”

“Tell me fast, please.”

He smiles. “Salim, you are an impatient listener.”

“Sorry, Prakash! No offense meant. Curious for the end.”

Prakash is mum for long. Then he recollects the sequence of the flight: “Well, Salim, it so happens, our van gets stuck in the thick forest bordering our village and a most solid storm hits there in that pitch-dark forest. Never thought of getting caught in a storm in the jungle. Odd!”

“Oh! Typically Murakami!”

“Storms teach.”

“It was a mid-summer storm. A violent one. Like the one faced by King Lear. Or the storm in the Tempest. Physical events of great intensity compelling you to change perspectives by re-appraising priorities and previous lessons. Natural occurrences but full of profound insights.”

“Oh, great!” I murmur. “How apt is your reading of the phenomena!”

He recounts: “We got stranded in the forest. Nothing was visible. We sat there, waiting for the fierce storm to get over. All huddled together. Frightened.  It was a dirt trail in the heart of the wilderness. The friend knew the topography well but even he felt lost there. The thunder cleaved the sky into fiery splinters. The wind was a ferocious beast. It was most terrifying experience! The wind uprooted strong trees, flattening them in seconds. The van was parked near a stream in a clearing but the fear of getting crushed by the trees was real. The jungle was filled with the sounds of the panicked animals. The lightning struck. We prayed for riding it out. It was like end of the world. We were ready to die. And then…”

“Then?”

“A most strange thing happens.”

“What is that?” I am hooked.

Prakash unspools memories, in measured tones, of the terror of that existential crisis undergone by the family, deep in the hostile forest; a bunch of folks, away from the civilization, in the womb of the deciduous forest, preparing to die any minute: “Here, I am cowering in fear. Totally distraught. Fleeing from my farms and ancestral home for good. Broken down.  Battered.  And trapped in that inaccessible woodland with deep ravines and whispering shadows and lurking predators and a killer storm…Suddenly my cell phone beeps and a message gets eerily delivered on the WhatsApp. It is striking in its immediate impact on my consciousness…almost electrifying.”

“What was that, pray?” I ask.

“I quote: ‘And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about’. It was almost supernatural, this edifying message coming as manna.”

“My God! That is classic Murakami! How come it got into your box?”

“Even I do not know. Somebody forwards that to me precisely at the moment when I am feeling very low and vulnerable, cooped up in that van, surrounded by darkness and an unexplained storm of severe intensity. All the truths taught by the democratic system turning out as lies for me at that depressing hour. No way out. Just running away from a brutal and cruel society. Then this inspiring insight pops up on my cell. Is it not weird?”

“It is.”

“I read it. Re-read it hundreds of time. And come out of my underground. After the storm subsides, at dawn, I ask my friend to return us to our village. ‘But why?’ he asks, bewildered. ‘Simple. I can run away from the goons but I cannot run away from fear. Let me return and confront the fear.’ He reluctantly agrees. We come back to that hell again.”

“Act of courage or foolishness?”

Prakash smiles. “I was no longer the same person who had walked into the storm. I was substantially altered, walking out of it. Radicalised. Scarred but changed forever! I called up few media friends and ran a campaign against the don. Social media helped galvanize that movement. The public anger started building up and soon became a national narrative of rage against the corrupt cops and don-politicians that terrorize simple folks in the third-world countries…with utter impunity. The media pressure worked. International outcry was there. Human rights agencies stepped in. People in the adjoining area, gradually, stood up against the tyrant and his thugs. The government woke up finally to the charged public opinion. The don got arrested. He is in jail. The goons were also caught. Another trial is on, in another court, in Mumbai, due to these combined developments.”

“That is so stirring! A man turning the tide, a lone man.” I say in admiration.

“You see, Salim, the most difficult part is getting up and walking out into the light.”

“How is that, Prakash?”

“Mentally and physically defeated, you tend to often give up. Then rise up again. Take unsteady steps. Sit dazed. Then, alone, you tend to re-purpose your new life, re-think a new mission, by giving the struggle, a fresh goal, a new destination.”

“Yes, you are right.” I agree.

“I wanted to revive my failing spirits. I was determined to fight for justice for father in that indifferent system. Litigation is costly and protracted process. I mortgaged my land for this cause. Hired top lawyers. Keen to fight till the end now. For me, the received truths proved to be tissue of lies. I want to prove lies as truths again and will not tolerate, in true democracy, the utter mocking of a common man by the powerful and the corrupt. Message from me, a dispossessed man can fight the corrupt system by its own weapons, and ultimately win, if not totally dismantle the citadel. Although the costs are too high, the satisfaction for standing up for truth and higher values is truly uplifting feeling. You feel vindicated by your conviction and courage to stare tyranny and injustice in the eyes. And defeat the hydra.”

My reverence grows by seconds for this slim man, taking on the thugs and the don and the rogue cops, “Yours is a real rousing story. I salute you for your innate heroism—one man standing for certain fundamental principles and not caving in to fear and terror, muscle-n-money power. Proving that democracy works.”

We become silent for few minutes. I mull over the extraordinary saga of this ordinary man and feel elevated by it.

“I learnt a life lesson from this trial by fire.” Prakash says, tone low.
“What is that, please? Want to learn.”

“When God fails, the system fails, you have to generate resources within. There is no easy way out. We have to confront the devil…and fight till finish, like the boxers in a ring. Period. But never run away.”

I say, “Absolutely correct, buddy. Very motivating, your story that mirrors thousands of such stories in a system tilting towards the rich and powerful…and the corrupt. It generates hopes in a hopeless system.”

He smiles. After few minutes, continues the thread: “Life is often full of surprises. It is not like math. Things do not turn out the way as planned. In such situations, during such deepening darkness, you have to find the internal well from where primeval life instinct leaps up in spring- torrents and animates your whole being and soul. Re-discover your centre, your anchors. Those who fail doing that often commit suicide or run away—to die incognito, in some distant place, disheartened. Another way out is drugs and early death. Not acceptable to a soldier of life.”

“Very appealing wisdom! You sound like a life coach now. A real guru.” I exclaim with pride, “I have found my real hero for the documentary.

He smiles and goes on: “Another experience. Some situations, crises, they are physical for some, metaphorical for others. Sometimes, they are both physical and metaphorical for select ones. For others, they are neither. The resigned ones. The passive.  For the active, the focal point is coming out into the light.”

“True. Very philosophical, indeed!”

“Also, there comes the most trying time when you fall silent as there are no answers to your questions from God. That is the most difficult time—the faith under trial. Prayers unheard. Certainties crashing down. And a desperate struggle to cling to some solid belief-system. For me, the most challenging phase of life.”

I absorb each word delivered with anguish by this sensitive survivor of a war unleashed by the unscrupulous men of power. The feeling of being rejected and forgotten, stripped of worth as a human and self-respect. Orbiting solo in the universe. Searching for stability, order and normalcy in a world gone mad! Traumatic!

He seems to be reading my mind and offers: “Shipwrecked. Searching for moorings in a choppy sea.”

“Very true!” I concur. He is superb in analysis and critical observations. “You have earned my respect for being so brave. A life in shambles. A man adrift. Then reassembling all the pieces! Incredible!”

We shake hands. My idea of doing a documentary on Prakash is final. Such an uplifting narrative of stoicism and optimism, in a bleak scenario!

We decide to part.

“One more interesting tid-bit, Salim.”

“What is that?”

 “You know,” Prakash says with a mischievous smile, “whenever one of my cats disappears for long, there is some crisis hitting us for sure.  Sure sign of coming tragedy!”

“Is it so? Odd, is it not?”

“Yes. And once the crisis is over, they re-appear. Strange but true!’

I am astonished by this coincidence. We linger on. Clouds begin gathering again. We then say goodbyes and decide to meet tomorrow at 1 pm, same spot. I have to film him in another three days. For that work to begin, have to write the script. My small crew is waiting in the hotel. They would be happy with this development.

.

At the appointed hour, next day, I reach there but find no shack, near the bent three palm trees.

Unsettling!

How can it happen?

Where has it gone?

I get disoriented by the unreality of the thing.

Have I dreamt up the whole thing?

I search for the hut but there is no trace!

It has vanished. That spot has got only sand and some cacti.

Weird!

I scout the long stretch—no coconut seller. Nothing except the expanse of sand and a beach glittering in the lazy sun of July, 2019.

Disappointed, I walk back, dragging my feet.

“Are you looking for someone special?”

Startled, I look sideways—a bespectacled man, selling tea on a wooden table in a makeshift stall, asks me in a friendly tone.

I tell him about the last-day’s encounter with the engineer turned vendor of coconuts. He says there is no such hut or such a person— for last many months.

Something about the tea-seller is intriguing. Yes. It is his voice that is very familiar.

Where have I heard this voice?

As I am about to leave for my hotel, a sudden purring sound alerts me to a brown-white cat lying curled up on the table, near the cash box.

It is the same cat I had seen the previous day! The cat of Prakash!

The fat one—with the startling streaks of yellow and white—and big eyes and whiskers.

I stand still in my tracks. And look at the unassuming tea vendor, in his early 30s, who, concerned, asks me in that familiar tone, that raspy voice: “Want some tea, mister?”

Stunned, I look at the cat. She grins and winks at me, reminding me of Alice and the Cheshire cat, in another age.

I look at the tea seller. He is reading Kafka on the Shore. The same bifocals. Over a hooked nose.

The cat meows.

The unreality of the reality can be baffling!

I am left speechless by this turn of the events; events in a freefall.

Sometimes, something cannot be rationalized.

Intuitively experienced.

Dazed, I start moving.

It starts raining suddenly, without any warning or earlier sign, in slanting torrents. Thunder claps. Massive clouds cover the sky. A heavy curtain falls. And complete darkness engulfs immediately, obscuring the beach. The whole thing looks like Rembrandt coming alive there, in real-time.

Sunil Sharma, a senior academic and author-freelance journalist from the suburban Mumbai, India. He has published 21 books so far, some of which are solo effors and some joint. He edits Setu: http://www.setumag.com/p/setu-home.html

Fiction | Sahai Sahib goes for a ‘Delhi’ party – Avantika Mehta

Jagmohan Sahai, a man born in poverty and clawing his way to riches must deal with a business partner born into ancestral wealth. When Sahai is invited to a party at his partner’s mansion, he suffers painful anxiety at the thought of being considered “provincial” by Delhi’s high society. The part becomes a minefield for Jagmohan and his wife and culminates with a hilarious disaster. In the process of becoming nouveau-riche, Jagmohan’s desperation is perfectly penned – desperation to make money, fit in, and, of course, show women their place. – Shreya, The Bombay Review.

Holding a crisp one Rupee note just acquired from the bank, Jagmohan Prasanna Sahai was tickled pink. A tall-ish, stocky man, body and face the colour of desiccated hay, pink wasn’t a colour he’d often associate with himself. Today, however, was an exciting day for him and his.

“Hurry, you fool. I’ll give you the whole thing if you do.”

Bhaiya, traffic hai. Airplane nahin, Auto hai.”

Jagmohan tapped his foot against the steel floor of the auto rickshaw, which was navigating through Yamuna Nagar’s zigzagging lanes at an excruciatingly slow pace. He’d taken the auto to avoid looking disheveled when he met his business partner Sohaib. He could’ve walked the distance from his house. It seemed to him that would’ve been quicker.

“If you don’t hurry then you’ll get nothing. I’m telling you now.”

The driver floored the accelerator on his rickshaw, making the rickety vehicle speed up to all of twenty kilometers an hour. It wasn’t much, but it got him to his destination in time, just as Sohaib was pulling up in his shiny new ’87 model Ambassador.

As he hurriedly disembarked Jagmohan deposited a few paisas into the hands of the auto driver. “Where’s the rest?” cried the driver. “If you actually thought I was going to give you a whole rupee, you’re mad.” said Jagmohan, already distracted by the site before him. “But you said…”

Tearing his eyes away from the large vacant lot he’d come to assess, Jagmohan turned towards the driver. “You’re crazy to believe what everyone says, I can say I want to go to the moon and back if I want. Now fuck off or I’ll take my money back!” He took a step towards the driver, a man quarter his size in both length and breadth. Just as he expected, the driver backed down.

The driver got back into his auto rickshaw, cursing under his breath as he started up the motor. Jagmohan turned around once more, “What did you say you low life? What did you call me?” If he had been annoyed before, now he was flat out furious.

“Oye, J.P.” shouted Sohaib, distracting Jagmohan and affording the rickshaw driver an opportunity for escape. The little box on wheels backfired several times as it rushed down the road. Jagmohan watched the hasty departure disdainfully, and thought, ‘If the jerk had moved that fast on the way here, I might have given him the whole rupee!’

“Still sweating small change I see,” Sohaib said while shaking his head. “Why didn’t you just drive here? Just bought yourself the 800 haven’t you?”  And when Jagmohan didn’t answer, Sohaib added, “Didn’t want to spend the 8 rupees on fuel?” Jagmohan’s economic piety seemed to be a constant source of amusement for Sohaib.

It bothered Jagmohan when Sohaib made light of his spending — no, his saving habits. He wasn’t from an old and respected city family like Sohaib’s, whose family had settled in Delhi much before 1947. Jagmohan hadn’t lived comfortably through and after the partition in one of the huge bungalows near respected localities like Aurangzeb Road. Jagmohan’s family had been uprooted and migrated to Kurukshetra where his father had spent the last of his days tending to the small plot of land the government had given them, in lieu of the thousand Multani acres they’d been forced to abandon. Jagmohan’s inheritance had been scraped-together money, just enough to pay for engineering college in Delhi. He knew what it was like to start from scratch.

Given his circumstances, Jagmohan thought himself rather generous.

“The bloody fool was trying to cheat me,” he said defensively, “Everyone is always trying to cheat you in this city!”

Sohaib shrugged, that grin still spread over his whole face, only just camouflaged by a thick beard that covered half of it.

“What’s the point of buying a car if you’re going to break your head with auto drivers everyday, I ask!”

Jagmohan didn’t really care to answer anything Sohaib asked, he could never understand. His father had probably bought him his first car, which was definitely long forgotten by now. Sohaib’s fresh white Ambassador was parked by the side of the road; the driver, in his perfectly starched white uniform, was leaning carelessly on the hood as he waited for his master. Jagmohan wanted to shout at the driver to stand up straight, mind that he didn’t scratch the polish but Sohaib didn’t even seem to notice. Sohaib didn’t blink twice while forking out five lakhs — the amount he’d paid to buy into what was now, much to Jagmohan’s dejection, their construction company.

In front of them, was a vast flat land covering practically the whole block. Jagmohan imagined the rows of flats that would cover it soon enough and the pile of contracts such a project would bring. As if reading his mind Sohaib said, “This is just the beginning bhai. My friends in the government have promised that many such projects will come to our company.” He laid stress on the word our, which was the exact word that Jagmohan liked to blur out.

“But before all that,” said Sohaib, “for this project they’re offering thirty lakhs.” When Jagmohan opened his mouth in ready protest, Sohaib quickly added, “Out of which you’ll get to keep six, give or take expenses.”

‘Six lakhs could go far right now’, he thought. It could mean a nicer house in a more respectable locality, savings for future marriages, education. “I’ll have

to think about this… Thirty lakhs for a project as big as this one….” he spoke slowly, letting his voice taper off as if wholly dismayed.

“Well, we will have to tell them soon. We’re not the only company in the running for this. Most of them would jump on it so we can’t dilly-dally about it. Honestly I don’t even know what you’re thinking about. Seize the day J.P! Carpe Diem, my man.”

“What sort of deadline have they given?” asked Jagmohan cautiously eyeing the land; he didn’t give a shit about Carp or Ediem, and knew not what they stood for together. Then came the kicker. “Well yes, they do want the whole thing up and running by next year.”

“Next year!” cried Jagmohan whipping around to face his partner. “No bloody way we can do this in one year. Did you tell them that we could? Sohaib?” He watched his partner’s confidence crumble; it always started with a furrow by the forehead, then a sagging of the cheeks. “Just think of the labour cost alone. Sixty. At least. You tell your friend — if he is, even, your friend. Sounds to me like he’s taken you for a bloody fool”

And there it was. Sohaib’s whole face had collapsed. The man was soft, unaccustomed to standing out in the summer heat, or fighting to get his way. “Fine. Sixty lakhs then.” said Sohaib.

Jagmohan’s eyes narrowed into near slits. “That was quick. Don’t you want to talk to your friend first? Or are you keeping something from me?”

Sweat was now trickling down from under Sohaib’s turban and snaking down past his proud Ludhiayanvi nose. “Don’t be silly man!” cried Sohaib slapping one hand unto Jagmohan’s shoulder. “I just see your point.” When Jagmohan continued to glower at him, he added, “Isn’t that what my part is in our company. To take care of these little things? You focus on how to build these apartments and I’ll make sure we get paid for it.”

“Sixty lakhs is not a small thing,” muttered Jagmohan under his breath but he relaxed his stance. “Fine, fine. Tell them we’ll do it — If, and only if, they agree to our price. Tell your friend I’m not running a charity here.”

Sohaib chuckled as if he’d heard some sort of joke, “Then it’s settled. I’ll come into office with you right now and make the call.”

“You’re coming to office today? Wah!” Jagmohan had his sources of amusement too.

“You know as well as I do, JP. Business deals don’t take place in an office.”

With that, they left the site and started back towards the office. There were other matters on Jagmohan’s mind. For one, he couldn’t help but wonder if Sohaib was shorting him on the deal. Such thoughts were the reason he remained quiet during the car ride. The same could not be said of Sohaib, who prattled on about the project and how much money it would make for them in the future.

“I want to meet these officials,” said Jagmohan. “It seems only fair since we’re partners that I should meet them as well,” he added when Sohaib’s eyebrows shot up. If this demand — and indeed Jagmohan’s tone made it clear that it was more a demand than a request — bothered Sohaib in any manner, neither his face nor mannerisms betrayed it. He suggested that Jagmohan come over to his house for a dinner party his wife was throwing this Friday, which was in two days time. The official in charge of the tender was an old friend of the family’s and would also be there. It seemed as good an excuse as any and they could all meet in a sort of cordial atmosphere. “Delhi is all about being social my dear man!” was how Sohaib ended that conversation.

Jagmohan couldn’t help but wonder at the last minute invite. Surely if there was going to be a party at Sohaib’s house, Jagmohan, his business-partner, should have been one of the first to be invited. This not being the case, he wondered if Sohaib was slightly ashamed of him.

This liquid thought was made all the more concrete when Sohaib came into Jagmohan’s room in their offices later in the evening. “I spoke with Leela, she’s said yes.” Why was there any need to ask his wife?

 

“Will you be bringing the Mrs. and your son?” Sohaib asked him in a manner Jagmohan thought was guarded. Was he afraid that Jagmohan’s family would embarrass themselves in whatever eminent company Sohaib’s party was catering to?

 

“Yes. Of course. I don’t know about Shashwat, you know how children are these days. Kalavati will come with me, I’m sure.” He replied while barely looking up from the building plans he was studying. It was his way of diminishing some of the higher ground he felt Sohaib had over him at this point. After all, if the man was ever going to be a success in this business, he would need Jagmohan and he should know that.

“Good…Good…” Sohaib said distractedly, “Bring Shashwat as well, my son Bonny will be there too. They can keep each other company amongst all the old men.” Jagmohan made a noise with his throat that could be taken for affirmation and with that, Sohaib went home for the day.

As was his habit after his partner left the office, Jagmohan pattered about the small space for a few hours by himself. Usually, he checked the work sheets, the accounts, some days he even checked Sohaib’s papers, as the man never locked the door to his room. Today he walked back and forth the two hundred square feet in agitation.

He felt consumed with irritation at Sohaib’s last minute invite. If he thought about it, Jagmohan could not remember ever visiting Sohaib’s home or meeting his wife. Had he been younger he would have imagined such small details did not matter but these last years in the city had taught him better. Sohaib’s words haunted him — “Business deals aren’t made in offices.”

 

Before going home, Jagmohan decided to take a detour to Chandini Chowk market. The familiar smell of cow dung, sweat, and sugary jalebees calmed his mind a little, but not entirely. Usually he would have stopped to indulge in a deep-fried radish-stuffed parantha, or some pomegranate juice. There was no dearth of delicious food stalls in the nimble lanes that snake through the market. But today his goal was different. He looked around for what seemed to be the largest and most expensive clothing store. He immediately knew which one to go into from the displays outside — the one with the most gold ornaments and zari work on their saris. Such was the opulence of this shop that it seemed to yell that whoever bought its wares had declared themselves to have ‘arrived’. This was exactly the sort of message Jagmohan wanted to convey.

It was late when he finally reached home. Shashwat, who at his father’s insistence was preparing for medical school entrance exams, had already gone to bed. Only Kalavati was waiting, sitting crossed legged on a sofa in the small living room that also doubled as their dining room and kitchen. For the first time Jagmohan felt as if his house were suffocating.

She had probably been watching for him through the window. Even as Jagmohan came through the door, Kalavati got up to ready dinner for him. “You’re late today,” she said rather than asked. Women like Kalavati would never ask anything of their spouses, or so Jagmohan thought.

They had been together twenty years now. Twenty years, in which time her body had filled out from the slender pear shape it used to be to resemble the over ripe mango it now was. He nodded and grunted at her, no explanations were needed. He glanced towards dinner. Yellow lentils, oily cauliflower soaked in turmeric, and a stack of thick rotis; same as any other day and on any other day it would satisfy him. Tonight it left him wanting. If someone had asked him, what for? Jagmohan, whose only dietary variation was that some days Kalavati switched the cauliflower for potatoes,  would not be able to answer. So perhaps it was a good thing that Kalavati hadn’t yet developed the habit of asking questions.

As he sank down on a dining chair and the packages slipped out of his hand and fell to the floor. He picked them up carefully but then threw the packages on the dining table and toward Kalavati. He watched as she merely shoved them aside and went about her usual supervision of his every bite, filling his glass with water, giving him that look she gave whenever he came home late, half approbation — at him, half pity — at herself. Nevertheless, she’d been raised properly; she kept spooning thickly cut slices of cucumber and onions onto his plate, her mother had taught her that it helped aid a man’s digestion.

But was she stupid? She couldn’t really think that the package, tied with a golden gauze bow that had taken the shopkeeper almost five minutes to perfect, was meant for him. He brought back gifts for her often enough — thread so she could mend his shirt, plums and guavas when he could get them cheap.

Arrey, look at least, they’re for you, silly woman!” cried Jagmohan, only after his hunger was satisfied and not before. He enjoyed this time with his wife. Not that he’d ever admit it to her. “Or should I take it back? I guess you don’t want new clothes.”

Kalavati’s lips spread out into a toothy smile. “For me?” she said with no little amount of incredulity. Immediately she grabbed the bags, as if terrified that he would act upon his threat to return them.

“Of course for you. You see any other women around here?” he replied and then said somewhat grudgingly, “Be careful. Don’t lose or tear anything. I don’t have money for replacements.”

Kalavati was barely listening. Her hands were greedily tugging the ribbon loose, tearing at the brown paper packaging, and her eyes wide with excitement. When she unfolded the length of the sari, however, she did so judiciously.

“It’s beautiful! I love it!” She stood up, and held the clothe against her body. The sari Jagmohan chose, after no small amount of thought and convincing by the shopkeeper, was made of chiffon; burgundy just like his 800; with tiny gold, tinsel stars embroidered on the paper-thin fabric. Against Kalavati’s olive complexion, its colour took on an intense hue. He was pleased with his good taste and so beamed as much as his wife.

“Careful!” he warned her again and so gently Kalavati placed it back unto the brown paper packaging, though most of it was torn now. Silently, and with undying dimpled cheeks, she filled his empty glass with water.

“You’ll need a blouse and all that to go with it,” he said and she nodded excitedly. “That Mrs. Gonde, she knows a good tailor, she’s always saying. I’ll go over the weekend.”

Jagmohan shook his head, “No, No. You have to wear it on Friday, this Friday,” and then to answer Kalavati’s questioning eyes he told her as little about Sohaib’s party as he possibly could. He left out the parts about the contract and his thoughts of the day. Those were not matters to be discussed with wives.

“Just get something made quickly. But look nice. I don’t want people wondering who this villager is, who’s walked in with me!” Kalavati’s smile dwindled ever so slightly but she remained, as she was taught to be, soundless. She stroked the featherweight material of the sari and played with the gold star embroidery.

Over the next two days Jagmohan prepared himself on dual fronts. Arrangements had to be made for the project Sohaib and him were about to embark on. He spent a great deal of time crunching numbers and familiarising himself with the ins-and-outs of the deal. This didn’t stop him from fretting about the party. So high-strung was he on the subject that Shashwat commented that he was behaving like a woman. This earned him a good boxing on the ears, for Jagmohan wasn’t averse to doling out corporal punishment as and when he deemed it necessary.

For his part, Shashwat was not wrong. Jagmohan harangued his family on the proper protocol for such high-class affairs, as he put it. Kalavati was told to speak as little as possible since she knew no English and Jagmohan had the presentiment that speaking in any other language would make them seem provincial. Shashwat was taken to the market to fit him for a proper collared shirt and a pair of new black shoes.

So it happened that Friday came before Jagmohan even realized, and as his family got ready that night, for all his planning and plotting, he felt unprepared and thus tremendously insecure. Even as he turned the ignition of his Maruti, which had been washed and polished by Shashwat for the occasion, he reminded Kalavati to stay near him and checked to see if their clothes were in order. His wife and son underwent his inspections with little complaint, at least none that were voiced.

Jagmohan’s fretting only gained traction when they reached Sohaib’s home — which was less of a house and more of a mansion. An old but straight-backed guard in a primly starched uniform let them through the mammoth wrought-iron gates. A white Ambassador had arrived just before them. The government plates on it suggested that it belonged to Sohaib’s contact, whom he was supposed to meet that night.

Excited to see whom he was to deal with, Jagmohan followed the car through the driveway and till the front entryway. The man who alighted from it looked to be well over-sixty, balding, and dressed in white kurtapajamas. There was little adornment to him, which comforted Jagmohan temporarily till he noticed the fat diamond gleaming audaciously on the man’s petite pinky finger.

Another uniform clad guard approached Jagmohan’s car. He held the door open for Jagmohan and then held out his hand for the car-keys. No servant was going to park his precious car, and no amount of insistence could convince Jagmohan otherwise. The guard told him how to reach the back of the house where all the other cars were parked. In the driveway stood several imported cars, all of them with drivers waiting by their side. The Maruti now seemed not so impressive. As they trudged to the front of the house, which was built to resemble a Mughal palace, Kalavati clung to Jagmohan’s hand.

Sohaib’s house was even more impressive from within. The three of them were led through the long corridor, their footsteps echoing on the pristine marble flooring. On either side the walls were covered with oil paintings of proud, tall Sikhs in full battle garb. Jagmohan guessed they were ancestral portraits. If the haughty stares frozen in these frames weren’t enough to make him feel small, entering the living room where the entire party had gathered convinced him that they were not ready for Delhi society in the least.

There were ten people standing about the living room in total. Men and women in equal number and the party seemed divided by gender. Men standing by the mahogany bar or sitting on the plush leather stools placed by it and the women perched daintily on sofas by the raw silk curtains. The room spoke of luxury without screaming it. The framed art on the wall, an elegant black-marble fireplace (which in these moments of summer heat was not being used) Kashmiri carpets, filigree lace table runners – all whispered about it.

With the exception of the older man that Jagmohan had seen entering before him, the rest of the men were dressed in their weekend best; shirts with crisp collars and satin scarves tucked into them. He could not see Sohaib but almost as soon as they entered, a pretty woman in a pastel apricot coloured sari approached them.

Her smile was malleable and her eyes almost as hard as the diamonds that dripped from her wrists and ears. Jagmohan held Kalavati’s hand to stop her from self-consciously playing with the gold bangles she had on. These were the very best that Jagmohan could afford but now they looked nugatory. He squeezed her hand to show support as she pressed herself closer to him, almost hiding behind him. The room fell into a momentary silence when they entered as if everyone was accessing the newcomers.

Out of nowhere came Sohaib and greeted them with exaggerated gusto. Introductions were made. Leela looked at Kalavati from head to toe in a disconcerted manner. “What a lovely sari!” she exclaimed in a way that suggested she was too polite to say otherwise. When Kalavati’s blank expression gave away her ignorance of the Queen’s language, Leela repeated the same in Hindi. Taking the hand that Kalavati wasn’t using to hang onto Jagmohan, Leela led her, like one would lead a child, toward the rest of the women who all looked at her with the same, muted disdain.

Kalavati, looking very much the sacrificial lamb smiled bravely at Jagmohan who found that he felt surprisingly lost without a wife’s hand to hold unto. “You should have told me it was such a big party, we didn’t realise and have come quite casually dressed,” he said. Laughing, Sohaib threw his arms around both Jagmohan and Shashwat to drag them towards the bar.

Standing at the bar, Jagmohan assessed the pack of men that had congregated around it. Each holding a highball filled with amber liquid in one hand and several with lit cigarettes in the other. When offered a drink — “Have a Scotch, man.” — Jagmohan confessed to being a teetotaler and pointed to the recent deaths in Karnataka in support of his choice. Ascending chimes of laughter let him know what an unheard of idea that was, “That was Karnataka!” said one portly man, “This is Delhi and this is Sohaib’s house. It’s all imported yaar. I can bet my life on it.” He took a generous swig from his glass to prove his point.

The conversation amongst the men ranged from the latest sporting activities to the upheavals in politics. After a while, Shashwat and Bonny disappeared, no doubt similarly bored of the company of old men. Jagmohan hoped that his son wouldn’t try and surreptitiously smoke the cigarettes, which he thought his father was clueless about.

Meanwhile growing impatient to speak to the official as Sohaib had promised, more than once Jagmohan tried to nudge his business partner and each time he was rebuffed, “Arrey J.P., later, later. This isn’t how one does business. Let the man enjoy himself. Enjoy yourself, have a drink. The business will take care of itself.” Any attempt of Jagmohan’s to speak privately with the official, who had been introduced to him as Patelji, was also negated by Sohaib who seemed to be watching his partner with hawk’s eyes.

It then occurred to Jagmohan that if he wasn’t going to get some work out Patelji then he might try to find productive means elsewhere, or amongst the other men at the party. He knew from his introductions that these were all men of means. Not that he needed such preambles or knowledge of family trees to make that out. He had right before his eyes, (and he was the sort of man who saw everything when it suited him) evidence in the form of heavy bejeweled watches and the cavalier manner in which they discussed the collapse of the Rupee. “Anyone who’s smart has invested in gold by now,” sneered the same portly man, whose name Jagmohan had learnt was Surjeevan Rai. He was the owner of several woodwork showrooms and residential plots around Delhi.

Jagmohan’s ears perked up, and immediately he began to press Rai for a good contact from where to procure gold. “The best are the Saudis,” he was told in a way that also informed him that this was not confidential information; it was something everyone knew. Certainly everyone gathered at this party seemed to know for they nodded in ready agreement. “I have my man in Dubai, I don’t know how he does it but you can call on him for any amount you need or want, he sends it through the hawala system. Prompt too!”

Upon hearing this, Jagmohan started to work on Rai. Where did he find this man? Was there any way for Jagmohan to contact him? Of course, there was, but Rai wasn’t particularly helpful. In fact, his information grew shadowy once intruded by Jagmohan’s probing, which wasn’t light or casual by any stretch of imagination. Eventually Sohaib had to interject the twosome’s conversation and thus it was steered towards the latest movies. Jagmohan hadn’t seen Lawaaris yet, though everyone else seemed to have. When questioned as to why and still stinging from what he considered Sohaib’s untimely interjection he said, “I just haven’t found the time. Some of us have to work for a living you see.”

The pointed and bitter accusation bought him a few minutes of joy, if only because it allowed him to vent for that time. The party lapsed into a brief silence at his comment, everyone watched him with displeasure as they sipped from their heavy crystal glasses. This was when Shashwat and Bonny returned from the garden.

“Have you seen Lawaaris my boy?” Rai asked him as he approached. To this Shashwat, with no idea of what had unfolded in his absence, nodded delightedly, “It’s a wonderful film isn’t it? I saw it just a few days ago, with a friend.”

“Oh, a friend. Do you mean a lady friend?” inquired Sohaib gleefully. Jagmohan pursed his lips and crossed his arms over his chest. “Shashwat doesn’t have time for lady friends at this age. He’s in medical school, I’m going to make him a surgeon.” That his son was not entirely comfortable with these plans was obvious to everyone surrounding them but for Jagmohan, Shashwat’s education and future potential were a matter of deep pride- As evident from the twinkle in his eyes as Shashwat’s reluctance to participate was from his silence.

“Oh but everyone needs a lady in their life,” interjected, rather suddenly, the voice of Leela. Her voice sounded as amused as she looked, it seemed she’d been listening to the discussion for some time. “Surely you wouldn’t deny your son some happiness in his life.” Turning to Shashwat she continued, “Who is this lady friend? Tell us about her, Dear. Is she pretty?”

That there was indeed an illicit friendship hidden in the folds of Shashwat’s life and away from his father’s eyes was confirmed by the sudden onslaught of ruddy colour on the young man’s cheeks. “Well…” he began nervously though smiling, but he wasn’t allowed to complete the sentence. “Not meaning to disrespect madam,” interrupted Jagmohan, “but it’s not any of your business how I raise my son.” He gave Shashwat a look daring him to defy, which the boy didn’t. Then pointing towards Bonny, who was helping himself to some Scotch, Jagmohan added, “Anyway I hardly think your son is the best example.”

Once again the group fell into an uncomfortable silence. Only the giggling of the women on the sofas by the corner of the room, who were neither in ear-shot of what was being said nor did they care to participate, was audible. Leela looked as if she had more to say. Jagmohan prepared for a standoff, though he would have been surprised to be in one. He had, after all, correctly informed this woman of her place.

Then as quickly as the tension had arisen it was broken by Sohaib’s laughing voice, “My, my, I must watch it. Let me not have to choose between my business partner and my wife. Come now dear man, she was only joking. Wasn’t she?” He said this last question while staring meaningfully at Leela, who immediately transformed the expression of irritation on her face into one of complacency.

“Of course, I didn’t mean to interfere Jagmohanji. I was just thinking it’d be a shame for your boy to be alone. He is after all, so handsome. I just came here to tell you men that dinner is served. Please, come to the dining table.” she said gesturing towards a built-in enclave from where the smell of roasted meats and fresh bread wafted towards them.

Jagmohan didn’t reply in kind, he was still annoyed. The husbands made their way towards their respective wives, to escort them to the table. Sohaib hung back with Leela while Jagmohan walked to where Kalavati was sitting by herself.

It had been no more than an hour since they had arrived at the party but from Kalavati’s haggard face one might have thought decades had passed. Jagmohan knew the expression well —she was famished. He, too, been nervous the whole day and as a result of that, neither had eaten a bite. The aroma coming from the dining area played havoc on Jagmohan’s senses; his mouth watered, his stomach thundered and a maelstrom of hunger threatened to sweep him off his feet. With a gentle nod, he helped her up from the sofa and took her towards the round dining table, also made from mahogany.

Everyone sat in pairs, as god and the hostess had intended. The latter’s design made apparent by dainty name cards nestled in the swan shaped napkins. Jagmohan sat next to Kalavati, opposite Sohaib and Leela. Shashwat was placed next to his father. Much to Jagmohan’s chagrin, Patelji sat by Sohaib’s left and Rai by Kalavati’s. How could he talk business to them now?

It was this thought that was racing like mice through Jagmohan’s mind when a delicate china plate topped with an equally delicate, charred carcass of a small bird was placed before him. Other sides such as potatoes that had been creamed out of any discernible shape and green salad with large, uncut and oily leaves were already sitting on the table. Presumably the sides were for communal use while everyone got individual plates with a dead bird on it.

Kalavati was delighted. “Titar!” she whispered excitedly to Jagmohan. “Ah! roasted Pheasant!” came another happy sigh from right next to her. Mr. Rai’s eyes were sparkling with an extra voltage now. Leela smiled in a gratified manner as if she could not have wished for more apposite praise. “Sohaib hunted them himself Mr. Rai. There’s hundreds at our farm you know.”

Everyone on the table made suitable sounds to indicate how impressed they were. Jagmohan would have too, but he was busy giving Kalavati a look of pointed admonition. She’d picked up the pheasant with her hands, as she had so many times in her village. She was just about to sink her teeth into a muscle-filled area that she knew would be sweet and soft, when Jagmohan’s elbow poked her hard in the ribs! “OW!” she yelped, unceremoniously dropping the bird back into her plate.

She gave her husband a questioning look and also, he saw, a silent entreaty — ‘Let me eat in peace.’ This was not to be the case however. Silver forks and knives had been laid out next to every place setting. Jagmohan was holding up his pair so she’d see the proper way to eat here. The cutlery was heavy; silver with ornate carvings around the handles. Kalavati turned the fork over to admire the work. These were larger and infinitely more beautiful than the steel set she’d bought with her dowry, used still in the Sahai house.

Jagmohan felt the weight of Leela’s horror at Kalavati’s blatant obliviousness. Beautiful or not, she had no idea what to do with this cutlery; she’d never used either before to cut through meat on the bone and Jagmohan was painfully aware of this. With the deliberate and slow actions of a mime, he showed his wife how to place the knife in her left hand and the fork in her right. She watched as he made exaggerated gestures of securing the bird with his fork and cut a bite for himself with the knife. He jerked his head to indicate that she should follow suit. She did as was expected of her but it was clearly a struggle.

The bird was roasted to a much tougher consistency that either was accustomed to, and Kalavati miscalculated the precise pressure point at which to start. Jagmohan watched, mortified, as the dead bird flew right out of his wife’s plate, did a brief pirouette in the air and plopped loudly into the bowl of mashed potatoes. Leela’s delicate sari was ignobly splattered with a generous helping. Much more than the tiny toothsome of buttery purée that she’d daintily served herself.

The entire incidence must have taken seconds but for the Jagmohan, it lasted a lifetime. Silence followed. Kalavati’s eyes grew saucer-like with horror; Jagmohan remained speechless, all the while looking to and fro between Kalavati and Leela. The latter could have dissipated the tension with the smallest of smiles but none seemed forthcoming. The quiet was finally broken when some of the mash, which had landed on Leela’s neat and shiny hair, fell onto the table, and leaving a trail of potato pulp on the left side of her face. Then, a loud booming laughter was heard.

Jagmohan turned towards the sound to see that it was Mr. Rai who was convulsing over, holding his belly. His mouth stretched out in an expression of uncontrollable mirth and his eyes flashing more than ever. Sohaib hastily joined in and shortly after the entire party mimicked these two men.

“Please don’t worry about it!” Leela assured Kalavati who was already mid-profuse-apologies; only a hint of half-heartedness could be heard in her tone as she got up from the table to clean herself up. Mr. Rai wiped the tears rolling down his face as he turned towards Jagmohan, whose heart was filled with the nauseating feeling of humiliation.

“Please madam, don’t worry too much about it. I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen.” When he noticed Leela’s annoyed expression, he laughed some more and continued talking to Kalavati, “It’s not your fault at all. The cutlery set here is all wrong, too big for such a small bird! Leela, of all people, should know!”

As if the irony was too heavy for him, Rai doubled over in another fit of laughter. This time Sohaib didn’t join in, but he didn’t venture a defense for his wife’s service sensibilities either.  The little respect Jagmohan had for Sohaib was eroded by this tactical muteness.  Yet, when Leela came back from cleaning herself up, face washed spotless and hair made slick by water; Jagmohan found himself taking on a similar role. “I’m so sorry about my wife!” said he, before Leela had so much as a chance to sit herself back on the table. Shashwat glared at his father, but Jagmohan knew not why.

After that, dinner was eaten in near silence, only occasional small talk was made. For all his previously raging appetite, Jagmohan barely touched his plate. Fearing repercussions and a repetition of her misadventure, Kalavati followed suit. Only Shashwat ate hurriedly — appetites of young men are barely affected by brief embarrassments. Once the last of the dessert, an extremely English trifle, was polished off, Sohaib invited the men into the garden for cigars. “Genuine Havanas boys!” Jagmohan and Shashwat were the only ones who declined.

The women returned to their sofa seating and gossip, accompanied this time, with some coffee and mini-chocolates and Jagmohan. Shashwat tottered around his mother, who wore a morose expression as she watched Jagmohan’s continued apologies to Leela. Yet, he thought, what else could he do?

When Jagmohan saw Shashwat sneak out, he knew instantly it was to smoke a cigarette behind his father’s back. Another one who would humiliate him? Unable to stomach anymore, he quickly excused himself to follow his son.

He’d only just exited from the drawing room door that led into the grounds; he could see Shashwat’s back slightly ahead of him. Shashwat, too, was still hidden from the group of men by lack of lighting at the entrance of the lawn. “Really Sohaib, where do you find these guys?” Jagmohan heard a male voice, which he could not yet identify, say.

He knew Sohaib’s deep chuckle though and heard his partner say, “Arrey he’s an excellent worker Patelji. You’ll see. Those apartments will be made in less than a year and for half the estimated cost. Good for you and good for us! They’re new, raised on that desi ghee. They’ll grow into Delhi, you’ll see.”

“Still,” replied the voice he now knew as the government official he’d wanted to impress. “His wife and son are okay but what a boorish, obnoxious man he is!” All the men broke into a gale of laughter. Jagmohan’s cheeks burned, stinging as much as his pride. Before Shashwat could turn around and see him standing there, Jagmohan quickly retreated back inside.

Later when the party broke up, and during the entire ride back home, Jagmohan lectured Kalavati. Pontificating about the importance of table manners he said to her, “You embarrassed me tonight! Just like I was afraid you would.” There was nothing Jagmohan could say to drown out the memory of the condescending laughter he’d heard coming from Sohaib’s garden. In the rearview mirror, he caught sight of Shashwat’s expression — disappointed for and by his father.

~ The End ~

Avantika is the founder of ‘The Ladies Compartment’ (TLC); and a Winner of Women’s Economic Forum 2019 Iconic Woman Making the World Better Award. Her bylines have appeared or is forthcoming in: Hindustan Times, Scroll.in, IndiaSpends, QZ, Business Standard, Vogue India, Bennett- Coleman, The Sunday Guardian, Tehelka Magazine, Legally India, Live Law, Brown Paper Bag etc. Fiction published in Asia Literary Review, Out of Print Magazine.

Fiction | Befriending the Scum of the Earth – Joshua Britton

Britton’s story is a conundrum come to life. A legally convicted pedophile moves next door to the protagonist, and the latter finds himself drawn into a somewhat reluctant friendship with him. As the friend of a child molester, he understandably finds himself being shunned by the rest of the world, and yet does not quite manage to abandon his new-found friend. The reason is for the reader to decipher. – Shreya, The Bombay Review.

I believe in forgiveness. I want to give people the benefit of the doubt. In theory, I have faith in the justice and rehabilitation system. I do not, however, want to be friends with a pedophile.

Vince bought the house between the nuns and me. On moving day, the neighborhood residents formed a receiving line and Vince shook hands with each of the parents from across the street, the middle-aged divorcees, the nuns, and the Elder Statesman. The Elder Statesman gathered everyone and gave a speech, not only to offer Vince his gracious hospitality, but also to speak of the long-standing tradition of high character and moral fiber exuded by the residents of his beloved street.

Perhaps Vince should simply have taken advantage of the gathering to make one announcement and get it over with. Instead, he shook everybody’s hand, told jokes, laughed at theirs, and accepted fruit baskets and plates of brownies. Not until the following week did he go door-to-door to inform everybody of his record.

I was slow to react, having had zero prior experience listening to a man found guilty of diddling little boys. When he finished his court-mandated speech, he stuck out his hand. I hesitated, as if his arms and hands were covered in slime or crawling with parasites. But I resisted the urge to back away, and, because social convention says so, I shook it. “Welcome to the neighborhood,” I said.

Compared to the reaction of the rest of the neighborhood, I might as well have said, “You and I are going to be best friends.”

At first, I was one with the neighborhood. Neighbors complained to me as much as to anyone. “There ought to be a law.” “How can someone like that be allowed back into civilized society?” “We should send them all to an island where they can rape each other to death.” “If nothing else, we need to pray for him.” That last was from one of the nuns. The nuns and I were showered with pity for having to live on either side of the offender.

The Elder Statesman had inherited his home when his own parents died thirty years earlier, decades after he was born in that same house, in the same bedroom he slept in now. He polled interest in holding a neighborhood meeting to discuss how to oust Vince from the zip code, but the general feeling was that nothing legal could be done. And, because of the moral fiber of the neighborhood’s residents, nothing illegal was even suggested.

I happened to be on my porch, reading, when Timmy lost control of his soccer ball and it bounced into Vince’s front yard. Vince wasn’t outside; I don’t think he was even home. Timmy ran across the street to retrieve his ball. From inside the house his mother glanced out the window and screamed at the top of her lungs, “Timmy, get out of that yard right now! Timmy, do you hear me?! Come inside! Now!!!”

In less than a week Timmy’s house was on the market. The family moved not long after, before the house was even sold.

Our only other family couldn’t risk taking on a second mortgage. They installed a full-perimeter fence instead.

“I’m grilling burgers,” Vince said to me on Saturday. I was still half-asleep and didn’t have a shirt on. “Come on over!”

“Uh, ok.”

In his backyard the charcoal grill was already fired up. He threw on two patties as I walked through the gate. He gave me the choice of several cheeses, recommending the Gruyere. I sat in front of one of two placemats set on his new patio furniture. I was either the only person invited or the only one who had accepted. Also on the table was every condiment I’d ever heard of and a half-dozen flavors of Lays potato chips. I loaded up and took a bite. With blood dripping down my chin, I gave the chef my compliments.

I spotted the nuns sitting in their sun porch next door. I waved, and after several seconds one of them reluctantly waved back. Mrs. Hafenrichter, my next-door neighbor in the other direction, stepped outside to refill her bird feeder. She glared. For a moment I felt bad for Vince before I realized she was glaring at me.

About this time in my life, Maria and I had the awkward but ultimately pleasant conversation in which we agreed to date each other exclusively. This was exciting since she was my first serious girlfriend since my ex-fiancée had ended our relationship a while back following our miscarriage. Suddenly, Maria was coming over several times a week, and it was inevitable that she and Vince would meet.

“This is a heck of a spread, Vincenzo,” I remember saying. When he had suggested we come over to watch the playoff game and “get something to eat,” I had assumed he meant ordering a pizza. But, no, his entire dining room table was filled with sandwiches, salsa, queso, chips, veggies, microbrews, and cocktail wieners.

“Thanks for having us,” Maria said, giving him a half-hug and kissing him on the cheek.

“Is anyone else coming?” I asked.

Nobody else was coming.

Later, when I was home alone, I googled him. He’d been accused and found guilty of molesting two boys, brothers age six and eight. He adamantly denied the charges throughout the trial and into his incarceration. Actually seeing this in print made my heart flutter. He looked horrible in the pictures, too, as twisted as the descriptions made him out to be, like a real-life monster. But he did his time and was even released early. Not long after, those same two brothers were in the news again. This time, though, it was their father who was found guilty of molestation and sent to jail.

#

Vince talked me into going out to lunch one day. He came to pick me up from work, but he was early and I had a few things to finish up, so he sat nearby hobnobbing with my co-worker, really hitting it off. Then my co-worker’s wife and four-year-old son arrived for his lunch. Vince stopped joking long enough to say, “Ma’am, when knowingly in the vicinity of a child I am legally obligated to inform you that…” It was downhill from there.

When I got back to work after lunch, my boss approached me. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it was Bring a Pervert to Work Day. Did y’all realize it’s Bring a Pervert to Work Day? If I’d known it was Bring a Pervert to Work Day, I would’ve gone over to the penitentiary and picked me up a pervert so he could mingle with these fine people and their families. But I didn’t know! Why didn’t somebody tell me it was Bring a Pervert to Work Day?”

It took some doing, but finally I was able to convince him that it was not Bring a Pervert to Work Day.

“Don’t you be bringing a pervert here, man. I don’t want no perverts in this office. Nobody else wants no perverts in this office. You want to hang out with perverts, you do it on your own time. But keep your pervert away from here.”

Ever since then people have been keeping their distance.

#

I come home and Vince is outside, and he waves hello so I wave back, but I’m really thinking, “go away, man, you disgust me”. He calls for me to come over but it’s windy, the leaves are rustling, and a car drives by, so I pretend not to hear him and I go inside.

But he comes over and suggests we “watch a movie or something”, so I tell him I have plans and I have to get ready to leave. I don’t actually have plans, though, and Maria is busy, so I go to Barnes & Noble and read until it’s time to go to bed.

But Maria likes Vince, and she invites Kristen over to meet him. Kristen likes him, too, and next thing I know the three of them plan and rope me into double dates. Vince makes elaborate three-course meals, spending entire days on prep work, refusing Kristen’s and Maria’s help, though unofficially appointing me sous chef. Sometimes he makes name cards so we don’t sit at the same places every week: men on one side, women on the other; Maria and me on one side, Vince and Kristen on the other; or pairing himself with Maria, and me with Kristen.

In the living room we sit around and play games, talking late into the evening, until Kristen and Vince hint that they’re ready to be alone, leaving Maria and me to walk the twenty feet from Vince’s front door to mine.

The Elder Statesman knocks on my door and invites himself in. Along with the rest of the neighborhood he is concerned with my budding friendship with Vince, when “What we want to do is make him feel unwanted. We want to be hostile. We want to drive him away.”

The Elder Statesman is a nice man, but with his long white beard he resembles an ancient Greek philosopher and I feel inferior in his presence.

“I don’t know,” I mumble. “I try to treat others the way I’d like to be treated.”

“That’s admirable, son, and you have fine character. But a monster should be treated like a monster.”

“But he’s a nice guy, if you get to know him.”

“No, son, he’s not a nice guy. He’s the lowest of the low. Less than dirt. I hate to think of what he’s doing to that poor girl he’s brainwashed into coming over all the time. Please don’t trap yourself into defending the scum of the earth.”

“But he didn’t do it. It was the father. Vince was framed; I’m sure of it. He always denied it. But he did the time, and now the father is doing his.”

“Is that what he’s been feeding you? You’re a good boy, son, but you’re naïve, and I’m sorry you fell for his tricks.”

“But it’s in the papers.”

In truth, Vince has never once talked about it, and I sure never brought it up. Even when he went door-to-door when he first moved in, instead of saying “I’m a child molester,” he said, “I was accused and found guilty of –” which is not actually a confession. And if little boys really do turn him on, what’s he doing with Kristin all the time? I generally choose to have faith in the legal system, but if what they say is true, then I am friends with a pervert.

I hear Maria pull up to the curb but several minutes pass and she still hasn’t come inside. I go outside to investigate and I see her two doors down, out of earshot, but having what looks like a serious conversation with the nuns. One of the nuns notices me first. Then Maria turns around, wide-eyed and in shock.

“Is Vince a pedophile?” she demands. She won’t come inside, and the nuns are watching. “They said he raped all these kids and went to prison for it. They said there was a family across the street that moved away because he was preying on their children.”

“Vince never touched the kids across the street.”

“But you knew and didn’t tell me?”

I put my head down and stare at the ground. Lying never does any good.

“I knew, yes.”

“And you let me go inside his house?”

I shrug and softly nod.

“You let me hug him? Kiss him on the cheek? You left the two of us alone in the same room?”

“It was little boys, not grown women,” I mumble.

“Ew! Gross!” She shudders. “You’re his friend!” she accuses. “Why wouldn’t you tell me? You even let me set him up with Kristen. Oh my God, Kristen!”

She backs away from me as if I’m infected by pedophilia by association. She rushes for her car, dialing Kristen as she goes. I know this will be the end of Vince and Kristen. And a phone call the next day finishes off Maria and me.

“Maria left me,” I tell Vince.

“I too am single again,” Vince replies matter-of-factly.

I buy the beer, he the rib eyes, and we console each other.

“Did I ever tell you I was engaged?” I say to Vince.

“No, I didn’t know that. What happened?”

“It shouldn’t’ve happened, really. This was a few years ago. We started dating in college, and after graduation she got a job down here and moved. We kept it going, long-distance, but to be honest it wasn’t going that well. But then she got pregnant so we decided to get married. I got a job down here real easily, and we made an offer on a house. But then she miscarried. Everything happened so fast. She was twelve weeks in, maybe only ten. So we decided there was no need to rush into marriage anymore. But I’d already started my new job, and I liked the house, so even though she broke up with me pretty soon after that, I bought this house anyway.”

Vince puts a hand on my shoulder, caresses it with his pinky, and squeezes. “Sorry to hear that.”

“I still like this house, “ I say. “And I like this neighborhood. I plan on staying here for a long time. I’m glad you moved in.”

“You’re a good friend,” he agrees.

“So that’s my story,” I say. “What about you? Do you have any long-ago tales of sorrow and woe? Any deep dark secrets?”

This is as blunt as I can be. He stares off into the distance, as if he’s thinking really hard, before turning to me with a smile. “Can’t say that I do,” he says. “Life’s been ok to me.”

“Huh,” I say.

That’s it. We finish our steaks. Later, I go home.

A graduate of Florida State University and Roberts Wesleyan College, Joshua Britton has published fiction and non-fiction in Tethered By Letters, Cobalt Review, Bodega Magazine, Steam Ticket, Typehouse Literary, The Tarantino Chronicles, and Spank the Carp. A native of Rochester, NY, Joshua now lives in Evansville, IN, where he is a freelance trombonist and teacher. Contact Joshua at Joshua_ britton@yahoo.com.

Fiction | Procrastination – Alok A. Khorana

Exhaustion drives a surgical resident to what many would consider criminal behavior. In a bid to avoid reprimand and unsavory consequences, Aamir convinces a homeless patient to cover for his negligence, leave a wound uncleaned for a week, and tries to make his patient disappear. This story promises to raise eyebrows and leaves the reader with some confusion about who to blame. – Shreya, The Bombay Review

            You – you, Aamir, no-not-the-movie-star-just-named-after-him, lowest person on the surgical residency totem pole, lackey of the surgical unit, drudge, grunt, lickspittle, slothful ignoramus– you, on only the twenty-second day of the first year of your surgical residency, begin this succession of screw-ups.

            You can’t claim that you didn’t know better. Even a medical student on first surgical rotation knows you have to be error-free on Monday morning rounds with your senior residents and Unit Professor: every overnight problem has to have a solution, every preoperative workup has to be complete, every wound has to be debrided, every dressing has to be done perfectly. If you fail at even one task, your senior residents lose face. And if your seniors lose face, they’ll make sure you don’t scrub in on the next several major surgeries. And if you don’t scrub in during those first few months, you’re labeled inexperienced and who wants an inexperienced first-year to assist on the “real” operations? You might as well commit to a lifetime of hernia repairs now and leave all the “real” surgeries to the “real” surgeons.

You know all this. Yet, on only the twenty-first night of your training, tired and post-call, you give in and sneak in an hour of sleep. You don’t just fall asleep, tired – you deliberately, consciously, decide that you are tired, find an empty patient bed, set an alarm for one hour on your cheap imitation black Casio wristwatch and fall into a restful sleep for that amount of time.

It hits you, of course, when you wake up in a daze to the low-key beep-beep sounds emanating from your left wrist. Your heart swells with an impending sense of doom as you mentally catalog how much is still left to do: write all your notes, incise and drain two patients with particularly pregnant abscesses, and, worst of all, debride and re-apply dressings on all the chronic wound patients under your care.

            As the early hours of morning tick-tock into dawn and you re-run your mental checklist, your desperation mounts. You have managed to scribble half-hearted notes- you’ll get into trouble for the quality later, but at least they are done. You’ve drained the two abscesses – it took up more time than you had originally budgeted for, but your seniors won’t know or care as long as the tasks are accomplished. But as the sun starts to peek from behind the tops of the century-old banyan trees outside your government-run hospital and the morning-shift nurses begin to cheerfully stream in, you realize exactly how costly that one-hour error has been: you now have less than thirty minutes to remove dressings on, debride and re-bandage five chronic wound patients. Impossible, you whisper to yourself. A feeling of irrevocable blunder makes it hard to breathe- in less than a month into your first-year training, you will have missed making the deadline for wound dressings by rounding time. Why, just one of them – Syedbhai, the homeless pavement-dwelling beggar with a massive cricket-ball size ulcer on his forearm, gooey with resistant bacterial pus – will take at least twenty minutes.

            Unless. Unless you buy yourself time by simply wrapping a fresh set of bandages over the original, and save the actual cleaning and debridement for later. (You will claim later, when you are safely a senior and able to brag in front of obsequious juniors hanging onto your every word that this was your own idea but rumors of such “shortcuts” have circulated for years). If you do it just for the worst wound, you get an extra twenty minutes to do the other wound debridments properly. And Syedbhai – homeless, family-less and grateful for a bed to sleep in – is the least likely to get you in trouble. You tell yourself that there is no real harm done here- you’ll get to it later in the day and he will be simply delayed by a few hours in getting his wound cleaned. Of course, this plan needs the patient’s active cooperation – one slip of his tongue and you will be exiled for longer than your Hindu colleagues’ favorite Lord Rama himself.

You adopt the swaggering, bullying gait of your seniors as you walk over to Syedbhai’s cot in the verandah of your ward. Your tired but healthy frame towering over him as he looks up at you, simultaneously fearful and pleased at the attention. He pauses mid-breakfast, scrawny body scrunched over the chipped plate. His head is bigger than his ribbed torso as he ingratiatingly looks up at you. You find yourself adept at persuasion that first day- telling him how you want to do a really, really good job and today’s dressing will just have to wait until later, but if he insists you will do it now. Syedbhai agrees, as he knows he must, although he manages to win an extra meal in his negotiations. You hold your breath during rounds as the group pauses at his bed but the patient doesn’t complain and neither your seniors nor your Professor ask to look at the wound.

            This could still have been a one-time mistake, a temporary blip in your efficiency. But you compound the error by letting the day pass without cleaning Syed’s wound. Procrastination always was your weakness, you were well-known as a student for turning in projects at the last minute although somehow you managed to always pull it off. Looking back, you know that afternoon was your one chance to get back on track but you passed on it. Syed reminds you, of course, but you placate him with a cup of chai and win another reprieve – this one for twelve hours, before tomorrow’s rounds. The next morning, however, a perforated appendicitis upsets the schedule and rounds are canceled- you put off wound cleaning again, now into Tuesday afternoon. A “VIP” patient’s urgent admission for an incarcerated hernia alters your day once more, and you end up putting off cleaning and again simply re-bandage the wound Wednesday morning. By Thursday you are actively avoiding Syed, sneaking him off to unnecessary X-rays right in the middle of rounds so none of your seniors see him. The long week runs into Friday, then Saturday, when he starts up with high fevers – the infected ulcer, now buried under two inches of “fresh” bandages, is likely gushing antibiotic-resistant bacteria into his bloodstream, You catch your senior resident at Syed’s bedside in the middle of the day, looking at him worryingly. He asks if you’ve been diligent in cleaning his wound through the week. Luckily for you, the exchange is in English so Syed is unable to understand. Although even if he had understood, by now he is too sick – frail body shaken by chills and rigors and drenched in sweats – to really participate in a conversation. You reply in the affirmative, obviously, but it takes all the limited acting skills you can muster to hide your panic when you’re told to prepare him for surgery “first thing Monday”.

            This is when you realize that you’ve gotten in over your head, and seek advice. The only person you can trust is another first-year, a former classmate of yours. He listens patiently, then shoots down your admittedly desperate idea of a stealth operation on Sunday. A week without wound care – you sisterfucker, there are probably maggots crawling under those layers of bandages. You swallow hard, silently cursing yourself for basically committing career suicide, imagining your parents’ reaction if you get kicked out of residency – the shame, the ignominy. Your friend offers the only way out. Get rid of him. If there’s no patient Monday morning and he didn’t die, it can’t be your fault. Patients come and go all the time. Bursts of practical advice lead to a plan. Put him on the train to the next city, he can go to the hospital there. They’re better equipped than we are, its best for him. Make sure you use a goods train, not a passenger train. The passengers will smell the infected wound and not let him on. Ask the ward boy for help, he’s done worse things for residents before. Don’t give him too much, you’ll raise his fees for all of us.

            You approach the “ward boy” – really, a balding middle-aged government employee with a paunch and a scraggly mustache, but old British terms die hard – with the plan. You are hesitant at first, but the ward boy doesn’t bat an eyelash at what you are asking him to do. He is more interested in negotiating his “fee”. He asks for two hundred and fifty rupees but, mindful of your friend’s advice, you negotiate it down to two hundred. The ward boy goes over the train schedule and the two of you settle on the train departing early Sunday morning at six o’clock – you should be out by five o’clock, when most patients and their families are asleep and there are far fewer nurses.

            The plan goes well early that Sunday. The ward boy loads Syed onto a stretcher and brings him down to a waiting rickshaw, driven by a “friend”. Another seventy-five rupees for the friend, negotiated up from fifty after the driver smells the wound, but you are too nervous to argue. You follow them on your scooter. At the railway station, the rickshaw driver and the ward boy magically procure a wheeled rusty metal stretcher, placing an uncomfortable and weakly protesting Syed onto it. You had placed another fresh bandage over the last one before you left the hospital, but the stench from his wound is nauseatingly unmistakable. You shush the patient as you walk alongside, telling him how you’re arranging for him to be transferred to a different hospital for better treatment. Syed resignedly accepts your words at face value, his sickly body shivering on the cold metal stretcher as the two men push it up the incline and onto the open air platform.

            The three of you walk alongside the stretcher toward the sloped end of the concrete platform. The rust-colored goods train is already there, carriages extending past the edge of the concrete down the tracks. You and the ward boy had planned this final step last night – deciding to place Syed in one of the half-empty goods carriages after the train starts to leave so he doesn’t scream and draw attention to himself until it’s too late. The last thing you want is for Syed to be discovered. Someone this sick would be sent right to your government hospital and, if he recovered, would he have a story to tell.

            It’s been a while since you were at the railway station but little seems to have changed.  Your gaze runs over the familiar sights as you wait for the engine driver to signal departure – the same old open tracks, large rats scurrying between them, the paan-stained walls, hawkers selling chai to early morning travelers. The television sets appear new – large, dusty sets enclosed in rusted black cages, hanging from the ceiling along the length of the platform. Just as you hear the clocks chime six, the screen closest to you flickers to life. In most public spaces, morning programming is confined to classical morning raagas, but the railway employee running the show this morning seems to have other ideas. Madhuri Dixit’s ethereal beauty graces the soot-smudged screen as the familiar opening tremolo from her hit new song Mera dil bhi kitna paagal hai, my heart is so mad interrupts the quietness of daybreak. The stretcher comes to a complete halt, as all three of you look upward, transfixed watching the disabled poet played by Sanjay Dutt limp on crutches next to Madhuri in the morning mists of the Himalayan foothills. Too shy to tell her character how much he loves her, wishing she knew him to be the anonymous poet whose verses she adores and sings. My heart is so mad, even as it loves you, Sanjay Dutt mouths, whenever you come in front of me, it fears to tell the truth. Even Syed feebly props himself up on the stretcher with his rigoring good arm to get a better look, empathizing with the handicapped hero silently in love with the heroine the whole country is in love with. No matter how much I tell my heart, no matter how much I try to make it understand, it’s naïve, it’s innocent, it doesn’t comprehend, all day and night it sighs in anguish…

            The horn from the engine rudely interrupts the music as the train driver signals pedestrians and hawkers to clear the tracks. Slowly, majestically, ponderously, the carriages start to roll forward. The rhythmic clanking of metal wheels on metal tracks is your starting whistle. You nod quickly at the ward boy and the rickshaw driver. The three of you get the stretcher rolling down the slope at the end of the platform, parallel to the slow-moving carriages on the tracks just as Syed finally realizes what is going on and opens his mouth to protest. Ignoring his cries for help, you grab Syed by the shoulders while the ward boy yanks him up by his feet and the rickshaw driver keeps the stretcher moving – a makeshift relay team of sorts. You swing his body between the three of you, picking up momentum with each swing, getting ready to launch him through the half-open side-door of the carriage.

It’s only the twenty-eighth day of the first year of your surgical residency and, yes, you have screwed up, but you didn’t get this far by accident – you are smart, you are resourceful, you are hard-working, and by God you will fix this procrastination problem right now.

Alok is a physician currently based in Cleveland, Ohio, USA  but originally from Gujarat, India. His prior narrative works have been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Annals of Internal Medicine and Health Affairs, anthologized in Narrative Matters and included in the Best American Medical Writing 2009.