LET IT RAIN

Collins Justine Peter of II BA English Copy Editor

is back with another work of short fiction 

She stands by the window and  breathes the dark night. Wind blew unusually strong. All I can see are two things; the lady’s long hair and the window curtains, waving in the dark wind. I go near the lady and my footsteps signal to her my approach. 

She asked, “why are these clouds dark and heavy like never before?”.

Now I have her tremulous arms on mine. I reply, “Let it rain”. 

She looks at me and asks, “Did that hurt you?” 

This time the drizzles begin to touch us and spread a cold through our cloudy minds. I gently close the windows and make the lady lie on bed. I hide her under the blanket and thus from the lightening night. Her eyes weigh in tiredness and she slips into sleep repeating, “did that hurt….did that hurt….did that……."

I lock the door, separating me and the lady for a while and come to my office cabin. I take a patient’s record from among many others and enter the name of a hypnotic drug which I administered on the lady. I have three fresh bloody scars on my neck which had just ceased its cry. She lost her six year old daughter six months before and I failed to notice my daughter climbing the parapet while we were playing on the terrace. Guilt and pain woke me up when I saw height consume her body.

Now all I need is my sun to rise and to see my wife out of the clutches of drug. I am all alone without her. Let it rain inside her in this dark night.

Welcome Sunandan Roy Chowdhury - Talk And Creative Writing Workshop

Sunandan Roy Chowdhury, Editor-Publisher, 
Sampark Publications, Kolkata will deliver a talk on  
Continent of Love and Pain: 
Jibanananda Das and Post-Coloniality 
and lead a  Creative Writing Workshop 
on 4th February 2012 at the Postgraduate Library, 
Department of English, Sacred Heart College, Thevara. 
Registration is free, and it starts at 9.30 a.m. 
The programme will be from 10 a.m. to 1.30/2.00 p.m. 
Tea and light refreshments will be provided.

Sunandan Roy Chowdhury

And Then A Pilgrimage

Collins J Peter of II BA English Copy Editor 
asks what a pilgrimage means. 

Read and reflect!

                                                     

The train was moving from trashy scenes to surprises. I was in it. My mind moved much faster than the train. In the midst of fiction readers, I made a quick search in my pocket dictionary. My intention was to find the exact meaning of the word ‘pilgrim’ and an answer to the question whether I am on a pilgrimage.

The dictionary defines a pilgrim as a person who travels to a holy place for religious reasons. Life reveals its meaning through the course of one’s own lifetime, which is sometimes a matter of his/her meaningful existence in society. At certain phases of life we live to generate wealth, popularity, and self esteem. At certain other phases we live in order to dump those possessions which make for nothing but a barren life.

The probability for human beings to create unique spheres of life is higher than in other animals. Spheres of acquaintances are what we create mostly. It includes family, friends, colleagues, and all those intimate relationships. These spheres are a necessity because they produce meaning and worth to our social living. In families we share duties, love, bonds and friendships, where the exchange of our experiences become colourful and lively. But there is a strict law for all this to take place. If that law is violated, those social spheres get converted into a hellhole towards which we drag ourselves and stop living. The law is - never allow the worldly pursuits to creep into your intimate social spheres. If it does, families will have to move to family courts and friendships to break-up parties.

Now, where does the pilgrimage begin and where does it end? It begins when all our ignorance, mistakes, negligence, wrong choices evolve into deadly weapons against us and when refuge and shelter become mere question marks. We begin to reach out to where we went wrong, to the people to whom we did wrong , to the memories to which we were unfaithful ….all by ourselves. Reaching out in order to rectify and cleanse in places where we were mistaken and wasted; to live the rest of our life with the happiness of a thousand sunrises. And now, where does the pilgrimage end? Is there a clear answer to this question?

The happiness of a thousand sunrises never comes as a whole and thus we have to pursue it, through a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage that never ends.

The train is heading towards Maharashtra where I must go and reach out my hands to a destitute centre. A centre where I left my parents ten years ago just to cherish my marital life, which breathes no longer.

Janush Promo Video, Brochure, Poster

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Writers' Forum Poetry Contest (December): Winning Entries

Winner: Naina Dey, Assistant Professor (Dept. of English) at Maharaja Manindra Chandra College, Kolkata under the University of Calcutta. She is a critic, translator, reviewer and creative writer and her works appear in esteemed newspapers, books and academic journals. She has authored books of critical essays on Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second. She regularly writes for The Statesman. She was awarded the “Excellence in World Poetry Award, 2009” by the International Poets Academy, Chennai. She was invited to be a member of a team of Indian writers (below 45) to be felicitated jointly by Sahitya Akademi and Visva-Bharati University on the occasion of the 150^th birth centenary of Rabindranath Tagore in December, 2010. 

 

Shantipura

This is Shantipura.

Our quaint old Shantipura

With roads unpaved

An inconspicuous speck on your frayed maps

Our Shantipura of dim lights and long power cuts

Where the jackal’s howl mingles with the parrot’s long ti-ti-ti even at midday

Where you hear the rustle of bamboo leaves as you curl up beside your hearths

Like a baby in its mother’s womb

Our Shantipura wakes up to the crows’ call

We too wake up to the whiff of our mother’s steaming rice-pot

As milk-white Mangala fidgets impatiently in her shed

We skip down to the pool where the buffaloes bathe

Grey-black giant rocks that wallow in the sun while a heron balances itself

My little brother tries to catch tadpoles that stare blank-eyed among the reeds

With a shallow dish smuggled out

Eager to enjoy our weekend’s holiday to the hilt

Look how he at first impatiently then playfully flings the limpid water

Making it rise like a wave semi-circular

Droplets of wave sprinkling me as well

As I stand almost knee-deep

Anxious lest he falls

We scamper and shout all day long

Till we hear our mother call

The sunset resounds with the twitter of the sparrows

Bare-bodied shepherd boys whistle for the stray calf

As the shadows grow thicker and darker over our quaint old Shantipura.

 *****

Honourable Mention

Archana Kurup, an employee of Indian Overseas Bank. She is a bilingual writer who has won various prizes in creative writing for her essays, stories and poems in English and Hindi.

Silver Recollections

A spray of silver

Leaping in an arc

Sprinkling sunshine

In rainbow sparkles

Soaking the skin

Drenching the soul…..

Teasing the heart

Into remembering

An era long gone….

Buried under a heap

Of new memories

And experiences….

Struggling to surface

Evoking recollections

Of an age of innocence

Freedom and harmony…

An age of beauty

And joy in simple things….

A moment frozen in time

Still…. and fluid

Lost… but within reach

Happy…. tinged with sadness

In another lifetime….

Another existence…..

***** 

Rosemary Tom, I Year MA English

 

Airy Hope

The river sparkled then.
Trees stooped low in greeting.
Joyous, unadulterated creatures.
Delighting in all things.
Besprinkling arcs of happiness,
they trot, unceasing.
Powerless, yet powerful;
unaccountable to convention.
Owners of nothing, yet of everything-
Unabused trust, untarnished innocence.
Searching for this flowery meadow,
I walk, hoping to retrieve
In a world of stumps and blight,
unaware of having lost it on the way.

*****

Aishwarya Nair, III BA English Copy Editor 

Heading for the Hills



Droplets falling from heaven;
My thoughts are heading for the hills,
They have come to a halt at my childhood,
Oh, that's a sudden stop.

Woven by my brother, childhood was the prettiest time.
Butter-flying with him was my best loved pastime,
Hunting for new places always resulted in the same stamping ground.
But river always fascinated me with her cuddling ways,
She offered me her petals of water.

To make me happy, brother flipped little waves; springing as colored images.
Tiny sprinkles touched my innocent cheeks,
gave me a breezy essence,
Imprinted in my mind those sparkling drops,
forming the shape of a crescent.

My little skirt hugged the wavy rhythm of life,
Swaying like a flower which was thrown up by the breeze,
I grabbed his hands
and walked through the itinerary of happiness.

Mind and body suffused in the chillness of age,
I lost my sense somewhere between the pebbles.
Regaining it, I stood at the bank of memories,
Staring at the black and white memories flowing through the river,
I found that nothing was left.
Petrified by the years of grief, I dropped off my innocence
And merged with the rest,
Fleeing with time, those tiny waves waved goodbye to me forever...