If only a diamond cuts another,
why does noise encourage more?
In the revelry of the night-time song
my wedding became the patient's wrong.
Why are monasteries like meeting halls,
where women cackle like they were in malls?
As if this din ceases no way
one day it turns into a fray
of violent emotions burning a pyre,
And those who began it never retire.
"It's a jungle out there," they say
But the wild allows no jaywalking.
Priyanca Vaishnav
brown. browns. little greenish. steep, quite. quiet. the black; and red; deadly. beautiful yet. and that curve bending. khot. khot. everywhere. little less leather. even more dangerous. and frightening. and suckers, countless. countless. and suckers. nicotine resistant too. transition. glow-worms down there. all over. then alternative. rather the thought of it. and a much questioned quest. towards downfall. with success. with memories. in my heart. and memoirs. in my feet.
Syed Saurov
Govind Krishnan.V
Sing me a sonnet now, will you?
Bloody Prufrock
Your mermaids have gone
That hairline's just right
So are your legs,
Lovely and temperate
Now hurry up please,
It's time
Michelangelo can wait
There's world enough and time
I thought you've read Donne
And learnt a thing or two
About compasses.
Chintan Girish Modi
Agatha likes Mary
Mary likes snails
Who do snails like?
They’d tell us if they could.
But for now Mary will do.
First Law of Mary: All snails are loners
For man it’s his shadow
For Kenny it’s his shell
Second Law of Mary: Who said snails are lost?
Hansel and Gretel needed bread
Kenny uses metallic silver
Third Law of Mary: Snails like rain
They’re cleaner than most boys at school
Fourth Law of Mary: Snails are happy
When was the last time you heard of snails committing suicide?
Fifth Law of Mary: Snails believe in non-violence
Have they ever attempted genocide?
Kenny likes Mary
Unlike most humans she doesn’t try to eat him
Or piece him together after breaking him open
Agatha likes Mary
Unlike most humans she doesn’t care that she’s gay
And the rest of fifth grade
Like
Neither Agatha
Nor Mary
Nor snails.
Apeksha Harsh
Saturday comes, Sunday is holy.
"I'll wear the pink ruffles", she says
They kick their legs and sway their hips.
Gosh! Did you even see their feet in that blur?
Gypsy tunes and hardened rhythms.
Ribbons and suits melt and dance
There's a slight chill in the air
"Here, take my tweed jacket."
She never says no. She always returns it within the hour .
Crisp colours . Yellowed teeth.
Shiny straps.
It is a Saturday.
I leave my rosary at home.
Apeksha Harsh
1, பூà®®ியையுà®®் வானத்தையுà®®் தைக்குà®®் ஊசி மழைத்துளிகள்
தையல்க்காரனோ மறைக்கப்பட்ட சூà®°ியன்
Transliteration
buumiaiyum vaanaththaiyum thaikkum uusi mazhaiththuligal.
thaiyarkaarano maraikkapatta suuriyan.
Translation
the sky and the earth are stitched by rain drop needles!
the tailor is the hidden sun!
2, என் பூரணம் இனி இல்லை எனுà®®் தேய் நிலா
காய்ந்த சருகுகளாய் வானளாவுà®®் மரம்.
சீ! இது தான் வாà®´்க்கையா என à®…à®´ுதேன்.
இல்லை என சிà®°ிப்பொலி கண்டேன்.
வேà®®்பின் வெளிà®°் பூக்களில்.
Transliteration
en poornam ini illai enum they nilaa
kaayndha sarugugalaay vaanalaavum maram.
chee! idhu dhaan vaazhkkaiyaa ena azhudhen.
illai ena sirippoli kanden.
vembin velir pookkalil.
Translation
the moon wanes!
the gul mohur cries - leaf bereft!
yet the neem flowers whisper,
this is not the end!
Geetha Durairajan
(translated by the author)
The festival of Puthiangadi was over. The elephants were back to the landowners; the green and red flags with inscriptions of divinity on them, after having fulfilled their mission of proclaiming the dynastic greatness of its bearers, will now be folded and be kept secure in the wedges of wooden blocks that roofed the aristocratic houses. Ayisha, however, was refusing to go home. The sight of the hawkers packing the remains did not subdue her resolve. She wants a balloon, an air-filled balloon, that goes up and up to the seventh sky.
“Why do you want that now? Haven’t you got all that?” her father Abdu was clear enough as he pointed to the ensemble of wooden dolls, glass bangles, a polka dotted faded red skirt and two pieces of aaraam number sweets, all that an eleven year old girl should be happy with.
“But I want that.” There is not much you can do when an eleven year old is unyielding.
“But it will fly away in a minute.”
“I want to see it fly away.”
“Want to see it fly away. What else did you see till now?”
Silence.
No answer.
Push. Won’t move.
Scold. Pretend to not hear.
Abdu took her in his arm. Ayisha was violent with her legs, but her father’s hands, though delicate even by the standards of those who made their living by writing, as he did, was strong enough to control her vehemence. For the last twenty one years the labour, he knew, confined to chronicling the ownership of land—…amsham…desam…taluk. Geography spun relations around it, land changed hands, sons killed father, neighbours fought over one-metre roads, roads turned plantain groves overnight, wells partitioned into septic tanks and malice which fed generations to come—twenty-one years of writing down lives, ending dynasties and changing borders, draining waters and unforeseen landslides. This vocation required a resolve to be indefatigable, be detached and credulous, depict the movement of time as well as be its guardian. To record the times, you had to be outside it. With seven children, six males and one, the youngest, female, Abdu didn’t show much of the years that lay behind him. His sun-burnt face featured loose skin below small and wide eyes, his thick glasses rested on his high cheekbones, but his jetty hair hid those features under a blanket of paused time.
Ayisha was familiar of her father’s persistence in his decisions, and she had inherited it too. But there are moments you let go, like this eleven-year-old knew too well. It was already dark and they had to cross the plains, trace the bridges—made by laying a single bamboo—over numerous canals, and they also had to be on the look out for swamps and snakes. Ayisha often wondered why they still had to fear snakes though they never failed to contribute to the sarpapooja held to appease the snakes in the sacred mangroves. Resigning herself to the situation, Ayisha decided to postpone her demand for the balloon for a further occasion and instead made allies with her father for the journey ahead. She made her way to his shoulders from his tight grip, and surveyed the surroundings.
“There, there!” She extended her hands to beyond what she could express.
Far away, perched on an electric post on the mountain, she saw iblees, the devil, one of the henchmen of satan. It had the body of a vulture, the head of a cretin, and had beaks instead of lips, long and curving upwards. Electric posts were then a novelty, and her uncle, Maimu, had told her some days earlier that these long poles with metal wires were devices of satan in his bid to outmaneuver the mighty Azraeel, the angel in charge of lightning, thunder and rain. They are instruments of the infidels; they are defying the Mightiest of all powers; they are the imposters of the final days.
“Who asked you to look there? Look down”
“Ppa, call them, call the warriors of heaven.” Maybe this was her sought-after occasion to witness the three hundred and thirteen mighty warriors riding on their swift and elegant white luminous horses as they battle the forces of evil of this world.
“Shut up, Ayisha, there‘s nothing there. Your mother, oh that woman! That woman has taught you all her folks’ ignorant ways.”
“I can see it.”
“Shut up, will you?”
Ayisha was desperate. She could see it. Her father’s obstinacy won’t wish it away. She tried to remember the prayers. Blank. The ninety nine names of God. Blank. The song of birth. Blank. The opening chapter… In the name of Allah, Praise be to him…
All the stories of iblees flashed through her, all the incidents of madness, the wailing ponds of the noon, the laughing kids who were turned into stones, the chained man of their place whom she has only heard of, the demon who stretched his legs from one river to the other and rained shit on all the houses between….
And then they heard the muezzin calling out for prayer. It was dark, the last prayer of the day. The voice of an old man crackling through the demonic plains. Away, a small dot of brightness testified to the known world. Ayisha saw the iblees fading away, first its toes, then its wings, then its body and finally the beak. Her father hurried to the lamp. On the mountain, the cross of the electric post stood as the lone witness.
Shafeeq Valanchery
Introduction: An excerpt from a novel that I may never write.
I was, till recently, thinking about how to manage my multiple lives. I wish to see my life though a mediated sheet of white paper or a computer monitor where it can be unraveled investigated and brought under control. Many of us have this uncanny ability to seamlessly tread between different roles that we have to routinely act out. Every morning many of us go to the office or to the library, do office work or research or do whatever we generally do and manage not to notice that life is gently caressing past us. Evening we come back, act out various roles assigned to us before going to bed. I have seen writers treading different roles—for example one has to act out the role of writing oneself out on a page, empathizing with the characters whose secret lives one has the power to unmake, and, as if nothing happened, has to suddenly switch back to one's day-to-day life written by some other invisible hand on some invisible parchment. Believe me, my life was getting muddled and it started buzzing past me leaving only a faint blur behind.
These were the circumstances during which you decided to come and knock on my door. I remember I was unable to get up from my mattress which was spread out on my floor. Before you knocked I was trying to get up and was unable to do so. All I could do was to stand in all fours like a dog and try and sniff out the world. Don’t think, by any means, that this is the first time that I am feeling alienated from the world. Not in the least. In my deliriums I have tried to eat the flowers printed on my bed spread. In the darkness of the night I have felt that my arms are tied from behind and have got into some dead lock. In an audacious attempt to regain a sense of the world I remember jumping at the switch board from my bed, with my arms locked behind, in a vain attempt to switch on the light with my head. This feeling is something akin to what one feels when one is ill. A general weakness of the body coupled with severe exhaustion. I think that, in this condition, if I cut of my veins wasps would fly out of it in vengeance.
Anyways, I felt great when I knew that you could push open the door and come inside to find me all naked and dry. You couldn’t exactly figure out why I couldn’t react or didn’t want to react even when you tickled me. I remember you sitting on my hips and wondering at the monstrosity of my growing tummy.
“A girl or a boy”—you had asked then taking my rotund tummy in the umbrage of your hands.
“What?”
“You expect to have a girl or a boy?”
I looked at your face, which was twinkling with the prospect of me getting irritated and answered—“A mother fucking bastard.”
I don’t know whether you remember the time when you first saw me. But let me go back to the first day, an evening in the month of January, when I actually noticed you. The sky was overcast and a wind was trying to escape the entanglements of a deodar tree when I saw you talking to a couple of friends in front of the university hostel. The moment is still etched in my memory and I constantly go back to it, like a wound that has to be constantly visited to see that it still exists, to only realize that the sanctity of the moment has survived to this day. Yes, that was the day when you came to my life like a shower of dewdrops from the deodar trees…
James Michael.
Introduction:
"I started writing the piece below (and gave up in my characteristic style) to possibly flesh out a screenplay from it. But instead of being able to make any headway in terms of plot, I ended up getting stuck on the characterization, my worst indulgence. Since I most likely won't go back to it, I guess you can just call this an excessive character sketch of a story that I barely began."
As it clattered its way up the sloping road in seeming aimlessness but at breakneck speed, the voice of a child piped up amidst the sleepy hush of the loaded ST bus. "Look at the stars daddy! So many..." Not one prone to reminisces, nor one to delight in them, A tried to brush aside a strong image from his past elicited by the child's excited remark. He glanced out his window and up at the sky as the bus hurtled down a precariously lit turning.
Perhaps the biggest curse of parenthood is one's inability to deny its entrenching influence on every subsequent moment of one's life. Such that, even when the very reason and proof of that privileged position is long gone, either through passive acceptance or rude interruption, one is left only with those cruel pangs of inerasable nostalgia and worse yet, an unremitting, selfless love. A could never have claimed an intimate relationship with his son, but believed they had shared an unspoken trust in their irrefutable presence in the other's life and an affinity for the infinite, the uncountable. The two spent many nights on the terrace of their apartment building in a musty suburb of Bombay, lying on straw mats laid out on the cement water tank and looking up at the stars, contemplating their barely graspable infinitude. In the summer especially, the regular power outages that darkened the city skies for hours provided the most conducive environment for star-gazing and even before the first teasing hoots of local ruffians and the exasperated cries of housewives left stranded midway preparing the night's dinner had died down, father and son would have grabbed their mats, a torch to negotiate their way up the flight of stairs and headed for the cooling summer breeze of an open roof. A would indulge his little boy (or was it the other way round) and they would begin counting the stars until one of them lost count or burst out laughing in good-humored frustration. While A, an official record-keeper with the Limca Book of Records considered this sometimes compulsive pastime an enjoyable professional hazard, he secretly delighted in his son's obvious pleasure in their little counting game.
In his career, A had won his indispensable place in the Collections and Numbers department of the organization with his almost superhuman patience when it came to counting thousands of minute objects at a time which ranged from stamps to rice grains to sugar particles to sewing needles lodged painfully on the squirming back of a deranged sadhu. He could, even in the most disorderly of arrangements, superimpose imaginary rows and columns on the entire mass to be grappled with, giving it a superficial sense of structure and unity before he went into the nitty-gritty of counting each and every single item that made up this mass.
For A was no mathematical savant- numbers didn't dance before his eyes in abstract brilliance before they magically fused into one single number, one categorical solution. A would probably have found such a unique gift unnerving, given the absence of the very deliberateness of purpose that he sought immense comfort in. For no matter how trivial or redundant the object of his calculations, A believed there was little else in human experience that so blatantly forced one to contend with the very gravity of existence symbolized in every infinitesimal creation of God.
A woke to the monotone chanting of sleepy-eyed tea sellers as they hauled their mobile tea containers over their shoulders, steaming with hot, milky tea meant to sweeten nauseous mouths and revive lost appetites. The bus station was just beginning to gain the ambience of disarray and confusion that would envelope it by late morning. A loosened his clutch over the suitcase that he had pressed to his chest all night long. As he made his way through the bus station, A was once again reminded of the significance of this trip. Having only a few months left before he was to retire from service, this was most likely the last excursion he was to ever make as an official record-keeper for the Limca Book of Records.
Uttarika Kumaran
When my vague visions start taking their shapes, my fingers start moving in search of letters. When those letters strive to express my subtle but strong images, the very limited vocabulary that I have acquired in these years start recurring, and eventually they all disappear in the inability to reflect my undecorated thoughts. My marriage with life is adorned with retrospections and reveries. Though my past was dry and future will be a void, there is usually a spark that gives flames to those dim candles of imagination. My weak expressions come out of those fragile untight feelings. But I love those faint fantasies, because I am fostered by them.
That was a beautiful sight. It was heart breaking though. Only images and suddenly they became living creatures. Sun is on his way to bed. Slowly, darkness started hiding you from me. Me, on the top of a hill, and you, without even giving me a parting glance, moving forward. The distance increased with each step of yours. I watched. My eyes were clear of tears. But they were stretching at you as you moved slowly. At some unknown point, when your faded shadow was about to reach beyond my eyes, on the top of my voice I shouted your name, I flew from the top of that hill as my voice echoed in the air. No one would have heard me; no one would have recognized me. Even you…
Reem. S
He arrives in a tenor’s baritone,
Eclipses piddling noises,
Uproots all resistance,
And enthralls him who surrenders.
“Oh! Bother my hair!” I said,
He abided by my command.
Ruffled my sense of calm;
My mercuric irritability,
And raised a tempest to elevate
My task to impossibility.
All oaks fell.
It prods incense’s children
To the glee of a praying mother.
Directs southern winds
To wet the farmer’s attire.
Appreciate the strength of soul:
What is thy arm’s ability?
How insipid movement
Rises to uncanny storm:
No display of moulded iron,
Or the archer’s skill.
Just random musings these,
Spurting into passionate streams.
Priyanca Vaishnav
Shana Ninan
The Blurb:
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