Novel
Ted Morrissey

                                                        Letter 4 – Part 4
                                                                  Shiloh
​
I faced a dilemma. I could not say with certainty that Robin had entered this alley. Pausing, I strained to see farther along the street, in hopes I may spy Robin and therefore have been mistaken about the objective of the fellow in green and his mate. But I spied nothing of my brother, which may have meant he in fact turned into this filthy alley, or I’d simply lost sight of him in the street and perhaps even then he was sitting down to a drink with Mr Andropov. How stupid and pointless it would be to be murdered or worse in this fetid alley if Robin were, in truth, nowhere about. That was my thinking as I proceeded forward, leaving behind the commotion and relative safety of Harrow Street. Immediately my eye found the green coat, standing apart like a garden oasis, an Eden in fact, amidst a region devastated by countless calamities: fire and famine, pestilence and plague, destitution and draught. The alley was narrow and not altogether straight, thus with the debris and its higgledy-piggledy course, I could not see what was before me more than a few yards, and even then it was consistently obfuscated by piles of wretched refuse. Therefore I only glimpsed the verdant coat two or three times before the melee began. It started with a dog barking, some sort of medium breed of hound perhaps, quite adamant in its protestations. Then there was human shouting—for want of a better word. I would perhaps write ‘screaming’ but I feel scream has a feminine connotation and these were definitely male vocalizations. I had quite frozen in my path, listening with my own sort of canine ferocity. Only for a moment or two, however, for it was interrupted by boisterous movement back toward my position. By instinct I stepped behind some festering crates and knelt near as I was able to the wall. I was now quite convinced that these fellows had nothing to do whatsoever with Rev Grayling but were rather a pair of ne’er-do-wells or even cut-throats who were of a mind to fall upon my unsuspecting brother for their own malignant purpose.
My musings were halted when the men ran past me in their haste to exit the alley. The somber-suited fellow knocked over a crate which was, I hoped, shielding me from view. It was no matter because their only aim was to reach the alley’s entrance and the relative calm of the street. I noted, almost matter-of-factly in the instant, that the green-coated man’s arm hung oddly angled at his side as he ran—severely broken without doubt. The hound had ceased its bellowing and once the pair had passed, all was weirdly quiet. My sisterly devotion returned with the end of the immediate danger, and I wondered at Robin’s well-being. Still kneeling at the alley’s brick wall I listened acutely. I detected the clicking scurry of vermin somewhere nearby, and there were the street sounds, more muffled than they ought to have been by the distance but the alley’s clutter also cut the noise, which was moving toward night in the city.
Perhaps I possess a more intrepid soul than I give myself credit, or perhaps it was due to the strength of my sororal instinct—but whichever the case I rose from my semi-exposed position near the wall and proceeded deeper into the bowel of the gloomy alley. I moved forward slowly and, yes, charily; but, indeed, forward. I therefore had ample time to consider my course. You will think me silly, my dear, or perhaps even touched when I say that I thought of Ulysses’ descent to the underworld. I recalled the sacrificial blood he spilled to call for the shades, and for the briefest of moments I believed I saw just such a mark at my feet in the alley: a dark patch of blood. It was in fact some other, equally loathsome fluid that lay in a puddle upon the grimy ground.
To conclude, I discovered no one else in the alley, not my brother nor even the dog I had heard—though my frayed imagination conjured a sort of presence: a feeling I was not alone, that there were eyes upon my back no matter which way I turned. I wondered that maybe some shades had been summoned forth after all. There were several doors scattered along the alley, and I conjectured that Robin, the dog, and whoever else the pair of ne’er-do-wells may have encountered had already absconded indoors somewhere. Satisfied that at least I did not find my brother mortally injured in some wretched corner, I removed myself from the ‘underworld’ and returned home without further incident. Once on the street, among clearly corporeal beings, I no longer felt the ghostly presence at my heel. I do not know what Mrs O or the children missed me at all.
I must conclude this tome, my love, and I shall do so with the assurance that I am quite well and that I will exercise more sense from now on. I realize that as wife and mother I have a duty to the children; and it is selfish to risk my safety except in the sole charge of protecting and preserving them (I write this so that you do not have to).
Your
            Devoted
                        Wife,
                                    M

Novel
Anna Sujatha Mathai

Previous Chapters

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Tent School and First Love 
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When they left the Presentation Convent, it was to join the Cathedral School in New Delhi. This meant they had to get up very early to catch the School Bus, as they had miles to travel from the College campus. The driver, Afzal, would horn thrice, and wait till the children had climbed in, laden with school satchels, lunch boxes and plastic water-carriers. Then he would drive like a madman, scattering tongas, cyclists and indifferent pedestrians, to right and left. The new school was altogether different from the Convent school - wild and chaotic, holding its vital existence together in a sprawling complex of tents, - randomly pitched in the compound of the Cathedral of the Redemption. It was as if a series of accidents had thrown these tents, this Cathedral, and these children all together. Presiding over the entire scene was a rather red-faced Englishman, who believed in old-fashioned discipline and chastisement to keep the children in good order. But how could  you keep any order in tents , which seemed like parables of the nomadic state, rather than firm buildings, proclaiming an ordered state of things? The children weren’t quite wild, but managed an unusual degree of freedom, because of the openness of the school. Principal Harrison’s attempts at discipline became almost a joke. Dhiren Roy or Atul Dhingra, the worst of all the boys, would turn up in class, boasting: “Got to get a caning from old Harrison today, yaar. Who cares, I say? Got three books to save my bum!” They had provided ample protection for themselves, in the form of books stuffed into the seat of their pants. The English Principal kept a series of canes, which were proudly displayed in his Office, and which landed unceremoniously on many a padded or unpadded bottom. The likes of Atul Dhingra always came out, grinning unashamedly. “Yaar, I didn’t feel a thing. Bottom was too well padded, yaar!” He would become, at least for the day, quite a hero to the girls, and the other boys would give him congratulatory slaps on the back. Benches were arranged in each of the tents, and the teacher sat at a desk in the middle. There was no segregation between the boys and girls, only the natural segregation of shyness and dislike that exists between boys and girls at that age.. When it rained, everyone stood on the table, as the compound got flooded, and the rain beat in. Children would be screaming, yelling with delight. Teachers would call out, half-heartedly: “Order. Order, boys and girls. BEHAVE yourselves!” With absolutely no effect.. If all this didn’t much aid the process of education, it certainly added to the excitement of growing up. There was one particular teacher whom the children liked to tease. Only years later, when Kartik was telling her of one of his teachers, who was a constant target for the boys, did Shueli, remembering those times, think that the fun had bordered on cruelty. Mrs. Wagle,  only 4ft.10” in her heels, taught them Indian History, and, as the saga of the Moghuls, and the romance of British India, was unfurled before them, the children did everything they could, to distract and disturb. “The very idea! I mean to say..” was Mrs. Wagle’s frequent and ineffective way of dealing with insurrection. The boys would pull up their chairs very close, asking question after question with feigned interest. “How many wives did Akbar have, Ma’am? Ma’am tell us about the Battle of Plassey again. Did Mumtaz Mahal really have 14 children, Ma’am?” The girls, Shueli included, would be in splits with giggling. Finally, in despair, Ma’am would yell at one or two of them:  “Shueli, go and stand OUTSIDE.  I mean to say!  The very idea! I don’t know what the world is coming to these days!” She had very few teeth left, and, chewing furiously on these, she would mumble: “The very IDEA. You don’t know a thing about Suttee and how Lord Bentinck abolished it. Of course, Raja Ram Mohan Roy and others were the Indian reformers who brought about the end of that terrible practice. Take out your note books at once, and write...”
Her sparse henna coloured hair would escape from the small rubber band in which she tied it. One of the boys who teased Ma’am most, had green eyes, and loved to scribble lines of poetry everywhere, while gazing enigmatically at the girls. Whether this was calculated or not, Shueli would never know. A strange shiver would run down her spine every time he fixed his limpid green eyes on her. His note-books, covered with lines of poetry were left carefully, carelessly all over the place. They seemed to deliver messages, unexpressed feelings... Sometimes in green ink.  Sometimes in red.
“O lift me from the grass! I die! I faint! I fall!
And let thy love in kisses rain
Upon my cheeks and eyelids pale.”
Or “The champak odours pine
Like sweet thoughts in a dream,
The nightingale’s complaint
It dies upon her heart
As I must die on Thine,
Beloved as Thou art!”
Though not the visionary Keats of the Bright Star that Shueli loved, but the seeping, rotten, decadent, sickly sweet, romantic love of the adolescent Percy Bysshe Shelley, it yet held great appeal for Shueli, just on the threshold of the teens. A kind of grief would seize her - the grief of a distant, hopeless, unattainable love, though it was an emotion she knew little or nothing of at the time. Young Arif’s green eyes seemed to open doors to that unknown country, and the poetry carried one into the heart of that forbidden world. She was so shielded, so sheltered in her life - she could only guess at that state of being, which seemed to cause so much pain and joy to adults. “Sometimes” she whispered to Gaya, “I feel like running through the streets at night, free as the wind..” But that was an impossibility. That desire to break the bars that held her prisoner, would come back, cruelly mocking, in Kavipuram. More  cruel, because there she seemed denied of even hope.
One of Shueli’s best friends in school seemed to her to have this kind of freedom. Her father was a diplomat, and it was only between schools in Washington, Rome or Amsterdam, that Shalini spent a term or two at the Delhi school. Shueli would feel the thrill of far away places, when the letters from Shalini, with bright stamps on them, reached her. Shalini’s handwriting was as flamboyant as her imagination. “I met Charles Boyer in the lift of the Hilton. He asked me if I was a Hindu..’ or “Was walking down the Via Veneto, and the Italian boys whistled and called ‘Bella. Bellisimma. Molto Bella.” Shueli believed every word of it, and was suitably impressed. Shalini’s letters, too, were covered with quotes from here and there, mostly lines of poetry: “Lips that are for others! O Death in Life! The days that are no more.” Alfred, Lord Tennyson, of course.
When Shalini came back to the Delhi school, she thought up a great many exploits that made life altogether more exciting. One of them was to slip out of class, and creep into the Cathedral. The two girls would climb the narrow stairs leading to the church belfry and up to where the great bell-metal bells of the church hung. There they would sit, looking down at the gardens below, and the tents of their school just beyond. Utterly happy in their rebel truancy, they quoted lines of poetry to each other, or repeated some of the further exploits of Green Eyes and the other boys, amidst giggles. The possibility of being caught and punished by Harrison made it even more thrilling!
Because of the great distance between the University campus and the school, Shueli and Gaya almost sleep-walked in the  early morning dark.  “Shueli, tie your shoe-laces. Gaya, brush your teeth. Stand still - let me comb your hair properly. Don’t forget your lunch dabba and water bottle.” The sleepy children would be hustled into the bus by Ram Singh, or maybe Papa. By the time they got home, late in the evening, exhausted by the long day, and being packed into the crowded bus, it was too late to do much else. Shueli would have loved to study music, - Ammy had played both the veena and the piano as a girl, - but the difficult timings kept music a distant possibility. Shueli had felt a passion for drama and the theatre at a very early stage. She and the other children of the campus staff would write short plays, and invite the college staff to be the audience. There would be a great flurry of bed-sheets and strings, and odd-looking costumes, and then the play would start, followed by polite clapping and murmurs of  “Clever girls! Aren’t they clever?” It was a passion that was to dominate Shueli in her coming years, fuelled by her winning the coveted award of Best Actress at the University several years later. She remembered the thrill of meeting an impressive old couple at a Theatre Group, and listening to their readings from English poetry. The lady had piercing blue eyes, and a voice that haunted Shueli for years...”She bade me take love easy,/ As the leaves grow on the trees, / But I, being young and foolish,/ With her would not agree.” Those words moved Shueli to tears, suggesting the tenuous and dangerous border between her own youthfulness, and the love and experience she thirsted for. At home, too, there was plenty of poetry. Often they would creep up on Papa, reading poetry aloud to himself. Tennyson, Shakespeare, Eliot, old Sanskrit poetry (he had studied Sanskrit in his little Honavar school, and later at Bombay University.) Once when  he found Shueli reading a rather silly romance, he suggested she should find something better to read, “But why not?’ she muttered rebelliously, “What’s wrong in reading romances?” “Nothing wrong” said Papa, “but suppose you had only one day by the sea, and never collected any of the beautiful shells, because you were so busy collecting stones, .. or sand? Mightn’t you regret it later? On one of their long, evening walks, he suggested to Shueli that she should keep a Diary. Fat note books were bought, much poetry scribbled in it, between comments on life and death and human misery. And, of course, a great deal about the boys in the class, especially Green Eyes and his scribblings and calculated stares.
One of the other teachers at school was an old Anglo-Indian lady, whose life was, perhaps, even more wretched and isolated than Ma’am’s.  Miss Metcalfe taught Mathematics, which Shueli detested, and no amount of teaching could get it across to her. Miss Metcalfe would walk into the class absent-mindedly, sometimes with the wrong shoe on each foot. She seemed to emerge from some hoary world where these things did not matter. She would struggle to teach maths, or, sometimes, the greater complexities of trignometry, algebra or geometry. but the class sat in stony-faced refusal to respond. Her grey, drab clothes, enlivened only by her eccentricities in sartorial taste, made Shueli feel grey within. She would come to life only to hear Miss Metcalfe, in despair, crying out: “You scholars! You are  Hopeless. Why can’t you Understand?  Here I am, telling you about the theories of Pythagoras and Euclid, and you don’t even care to listen... I shall Fly  away, out of this room, one day.” Shueli had visions of a witch on a broom-stick, with one red shoe and one blue shoe, flying off into the sky, waving and calling, “Goodbye, scholars! Goodbye!” One day the Principal informed the Class that Miss Metcalfe would no longer be taking their Maths class, which was cheered by them. A smart, young lady in a sari, recently returned from an English University, very firm and efficient, took Miss Metcalfe’s place. Miss Metcalfe never returned. She had, indeed, vanished on her broom to that other world, free of troublesome “scholars.” She had no relatives, no one to mourn her.  Quite unlike Mrs. Wagle. When Ma’am died, her son and daughter-in-law and grandchild were by her side. Her students, taken in a bus to the narrow ‘mohalla’ lane where she lived, filed in, in an orderly fashion, to pay their last respects. She lay on the wide bed, where she obviously slept alone. The sparse, mehndi-dyed red hair hung pathetically around the shrunken face. Her jaws had dropped, and the mouth which had so frequently dwelt on ‘the very idea” - had almost disappeared. No more History. No more Vedic Period. No more Moghuls.  Ended, the British Raj. Ma’am had always told Shueli that if she decided on History as her subject, she’d be “a First Class student throughout.” But Shueli couldn’t resist the lure of Literature, and besides, as everyone would say to her in ponderous tones: “So you’re going to follow in your father’s footsteps?” To which, she’d reply a shy, but joyous “Yes!”
Now Ma’am would never return to persuade Shueli to study History. They had teased and pestered Ma’am so much, but she had cared for them to the very end, and not given up. That, it seemed to Shueli, looking back, was what caring meant. Shueli wept uncomprehending, but real tears for her first ever death. They followed the little van, carrying Ma’am’s shrunken body in the last embrace of death, through the crowded, winding mohalla lane, for the final journey to the cremation grounds. There, her son would light the fire that would consume the remains of her wasted body, and release the spirit, a caged bird, within.
There was a quietness in the classroom for some days after, as if the children had been cowed by the appearance of that strict disciplinarian who had visited Ma’am, and carried her away. But, noisiness and chaos were soon back. Shueli decided she would not take History as her subject after all. History told you about events, studied the politics of power, but Literature took you within , to the mystery of the inner world. For instance, the sting of jealousy and possessiveness which Shueli felt for the first time - surely it was Literature that would help her understand. Shalini had just returned from Rome, very bouncy and full of stories, wearing a gorgeous pleated skirt, with a striking emerald green blazer. Shueli didn’t  have such pretty clothes, she and Gaya had to make do with things that Ammy could afford from her small household budget, as Papa still sent home money for one or other of his younger brothers and sisters. Just the other day, at a Sale organised in the College, Ammy had picked up a rich chocolate brown dress, with embroidery on it. Shueli wore it with a belt, and it looked quite good on her emerging young body, but it really was rather long and old-fashioned. The College Principal and his wife, smiled and said: “How sweet Shueli looks. Our sweet little missionary” - which threw Shueli into the very depths of gloom. To make things even more unbearable, that very week, in class, Green Eyes, staring at them in his hypnotic, other-worldly way, wrote in bold green ink on his notebook: Star of the Class! and left it, very conspicuously, close to Shalini. Shalini was filled with the pride of the preferred and outstanding, while Shueli felt an inexplicable dark abyss open up within her. She began to wonder if it was this - this Horrible Pain - that people referred to as Love. She lay on her bed and wept. She snapped at Ammy and Gaya. In her Diary, where she scratched dark, inscrutable images of the pain of living, she wrote: “How can I ever be happy with a Mother and a Sister like this, who don’t understand me one bit?” They would never understand! But when Green eyes asked her to act in the School Play, she touched the heights of heaven. She was like a girl on a swing.  Up, then down. Like when she was drawing water from the well at Tiruvella.

CHAPTER NINE

Partitions
 
An unearthly yellow light hung over the city of Delhi. It was shrouded in a miasma of - what was it? - something that smelled like evil. Shueli had never known that light, that smell before.
“Ammy, Ammy, come out and see! What is this strange light - making the whole world frightening and ugly?” Everyone came running out, looking upwards apprehensively. “Locusts!” someone shrieked. And then they saw that the locusts had cut off the sun. They flew in great regiments of menace. Where to? To plunder the fields, leave famine in their wake. Ammy had told Shueli about the Bengal Famine, in which people had died of starvation all over Bengal. “People used to fall dead on the streets of Calcutta. Those fat, wicked banias and lallajees used to hoard food, and make money out of all that misery. You see all the ships that used to bring food there, had been taken off by the British, because they were afraid the Japanese would land there..” And now, as the locusts flew, a kind of darkness seemed to cover the land. The servant boy, gentle, handsome Rasheed, whose father was a cook in the College Mess, ran out, crying in a strangled kind of voice, “Bismillah, ya Allah! The night of slaughter is here!” The lawn glimmered with an iridescent glow, somewhat like snow in moonlight, as petals, or dying locusts  plummeted down. After the locusts had flown over, a deathly silence followed. This was broken by the cries of people from neighbouring houses, and Rasheed saying “The One Upstairs is angry. It is an ill omen!”
Shueli had heard of such omens and “auguries” when she read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which was her text play for the Junior Cambridge examination. Many evil omens had preceded the assassination of Julius Caesar by a coterie of his own senators.
“Beware the ides of March1” a sooth-sayer had warned. In the dramatic reading of the play, organised by Miss Crawford, Shueli’s favourite teacher, she had been asked to read the part of Mark Anthony: “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him..” she would read, with an elocutory flourish, while Miss Crawford admonished “Excellent, Shueli. But no need to get so carried away!” Miss Crawford often yelled at the class: “Don’t be Stoo-Pid” but never at Shueli! Actually, both Miss Crawford and Miss Carstairs, who both looked and spoke like Englishwomen, were thinking of leaving India. They were much younger than Miss Metcalfe who had vanished on her witch’s broom. They were Anglo-Indians, and spoke of “going Home” quite often, as talk of Indian Independence became more and more a reality. Home, of course, was  either England or Australia, and thousands of Anglo-Indians, dark or fair, depending on the degree of English blood they had inherited, left the shores of India, on the great P.&O. and Lloyd Triestino liners, for other shores. Meanwhile, cries of “Quit India!” and “Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai!” were often heard in the streets. Some of the girl students of the College had banded together, and were marching with a flag held upright by one of them. One of the girls jumped onto the College gate, shouting: “Hindustan hamara hai. Swatantra Bharat ki Jai!”  Many people were wearing khaadi, or homespun cloth, some rather ostentatiously. The Mahatma and other leaders used the spinning wheel as a symbol of their rejection of foreign cloth, foreign domination. “Gandhiji is on a fast again...Nehru is in prison once more.”  Over the shining possibility of freedom, the dark clouds of a separatist movement began to obtrude. As dark as the night of the locusts. Distrustful of both Nehru and Gandhi, eager for power, Jinnah was insisting on the country being divided. so that the Muslims could have their own land. Neither Nehru nor Jinnah was willing to sacrifice power. Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, (who was to stay on as the first Governor-General of independent India) yielded to the pressure. Perhaps he could not withstand the antagonism between the leaders, or perhaps it was a culmination of the Divide and Rule policy which the British had followed in India.. It was a tragedy for India that they did not wait for another year as Lord Wavell, the earlier Viceroy had suggested.. Jinnah died a year later. Could the great tragedy that struck the sub-continent have been averted?
Gandhi agonised over the separation. Once, Papa, with a visitor from abroad, deeply sympathetic to India, went to meet Gandhiji. When he came home, Papa told Ammy “We went to the Bhangi (sweeper) Colony today, to meet Gandhiji. The whole Colony has been converted into a Camp. There were hundreds of Congress ‘volunteers’ hanging around. One of them shouted ‘Quit India!’ into Dr. Jones’ face, as we were going in! He was very annoyed. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur was acting as a kind of secretary to Gandhiji, and was by his side on the platform where he sat cross-legged. While we were discussing Pakistan, I said to the Mahatma: ‘Gandhiji, isn’t this demand for Pakistan somewhat like the prodigal son in the Bible story, asking for his share of the father’s property? Would it not be best to concede the demand, and hope that the prodigal son will return?’  Gandhiji reacted with an emphatic: ‘Pakistan is sin.’”
“When we met Nehru,” Papa continued, “there was no crowd around him, in the quiet Hardinge Avenue house. But Nehru got truly agitated when the subject turned to the demand for Pakistan. He was really angry, and said: ‘If I could take a broom, and sweep out the Muslim League, I would do so..’”* 2
While most Muslims in India were getting ready to move to Pakistan, many just opted to stay on. “I’ve lived here all my life.. so many generations of my family - our roots are here - where shall I go to now, at this late age?” said their old friend, Ashraf Imam. “All our dearest friends are Hindus. How can we just leave those we have known and loved for so many years, and go away to strange places to live among strangers? The graves of my ancestors lie here, and, when my time comes, I want to be laid to rest with them, not in that strange land.” “But the children are going” said Mrs. Imam, in a choked voice, to Ammy. “who will look after us in our old age? Must we live without even seeing our grandchildren?”
“Allah is merciful.” her husband said, looking at her, not able to hide the pain in his eyes. “He will provide!”
The children asked Afzal, the school bus driver: “What, Afzalbhai, are you off to Pakistan too?” He replied with his usual toothy grin: “Inshah Allah! I will stay on, and drive you all to school until the day I die. That’s if Principal Sahib doesn’t send me away. I have three small children, and my old Ammyjaan lives with us. Where can we go?”  Shueli wondered why the politicians had drawn these lines across the country, dividing friends, brothers, parents, if ordinary people didn’t really want these changes. “Supposing some great politician comes along, and draws a line through our house, putting you and Ammy, and Graany and Rahel Aunty on one side, and I’m left on the other side, with Papa, Graandpaa, and Honavar Appacha ... how would we feel?” And what about Arif, Shueli silently wondered. Arif, with his enigmatic green eyes - would he go to far away Pakistan too, never to be seen again? A furious pain struck at Shueli’s young heart at the very thought. However, this pain was dispelled by all the lively activity in the school, in preparation for Independence Day. Shueli didn’t dare go straight up to Arif, and ask him, looking directly into his green eyes: “Arif, will you go far away, to Pakistan?” No, how could she, who hardly ever spoke to him? Besides, if he did confide in any of the girls, it would be Shalini, wouldn’t it, she being his favourite? Instead, she overheard Arif tell Dilip Kaushal, his friend: “Dilip yaar, I’m not going to Karachi now. Abba has already left, but Ammyjaan and I will go  later, only after my exams are over..”   Mr. Bannerjee, the Bengali teacher, was entrusted with the job of teaching them the national anthem. So they, who for years had been learning songs about bluebells and spring, found themselves moved to tears by the vastness of this country, now their own, at last: “Vindhya, Himachala, Yamuna, Ganga, Ucchala, Jala ditha ranga ..” they sang, filled with patriotic emotion. The great mountains and rivers of this land, the many peoples from the Himalayas to the Cape Comorin - so many people had come, as travellers, as conquerors, but India had absorbed them all, which made India the winner in a way. Shueli felt a thrill go through her at this thought. It was what Ma’am had always pointed out to them in her History classes. “Look at all the great architecture of the Moghuls - the Taj Mahal, the Jumma Masjid - it belongs to all of us now..” Every day, in the school bus, Shueli passed the Jama Masjid, a glowing pearl set against the fiery sky. Its passionate purity of mood, the aspiration of its dome and minarets touched a chord in her own being. This, though she knew women never worshipped there.
On Independence Day, there was going to be a great parade and procession down the wide street stretching between the Viceregal Lodge and the Statue of King George Vth, which stood at the heart of the city of New Delhi, that Lutyens had built. In the pageants or tableaux that were to be presented - moving slowly on trucks, converted into stages, there was to be one scene presented by the Cathedral School. Principal Harrison was very proud of the honour: “You’ll jolly well put up the best show ever, so that every one will say Shaabaash! So practise well, and don’t forget to be punctually on time for the flag hoisting.” Shueli was thrilled, almost dazed, when she was chosen to be Sujatha, the disciple of the Lord Buddha. The Buddha had left his sleeping wife and child, and all the glory of his palace and kingdom, to lead an austere and ascetic existence, seeking to understand the pain and suffering in this world. One day, worn out by his wanderings in the wilderness, he became thirsty, and it was Sujatha who ministered to him, bringing him food and drink. Ammy had a favourite teacher in her Madras school, who was a Ceylonese Buddhist called Sujatha Samaranayake, and she had often told Gaya and Shueli of the Buddha’s search for enlightenment; his life-long endeavour to decipher the meaning of existence and the endless cycle of human suffering. Who was going to play the part of the Lord Buddha, she wondered, and wished - impossible hope! - it could be Arif. But it wasn’t. In fact, Arif had been absent for some days now. Perhaps he was saying goodbye to his father, and other members of his family, who were leaving for Karachi. Shueli wondered whether he would stay on at his home in Curzon Road, or move elsewhere. She knew that his mother’s sister was married to Professor Shafeeque Baig, who taught at the college. But no, it was too much to hope that he might move there. And then, she got so caught up in the excitement of the preparations for Independence Day, that she almost forgot about it.
That night, on the radio, they heard Nehru’s voice, filled with the drama and poetry appropriate to such a historic occasion: “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom...”
“What a poet!” said Ammy, who often read out passages from Nehru’s Discovery of India to them. The next morning, they had to get up very early to get the school bus in time to be at the flag hoisting in school by 7a.m. And, for the first time, the Indian flag, with its three colours, and the Buddhist ‘Dharma-Chakra’ or wheel, taken from the Ashoka Pillar at Sarnath, flew over a free country. And Shueli and her classmates burst into the National Anthem, standing proudly at attention. Shueli felt the deep thrill which the word FREEDOM always gave her. Later, at home, when they talked about the happenings of the day, Papa told them about the flag hoisting he had attended on the ‘King’s Mile’ or Rajpath, as it was later named. As the flag went up, said Papa, “I looked up at the sky and saw this beautiful rainbow, and felt happy that this sign of a blessing had appeared. But then, when I looked again, there was a cloud  cutting the rainbow in two. I don’t believe in such things, of course, but I do hope it isn’t a bad omen.”
“Well, let’s see how our leaders - and all of us - handle freedom,” said Ammy, who was busy knitting a sweater, while their little kitten jumped up every now and then, to play with the wool.
After the flag had been unfurled, and fluttered proudly in the sky of a newly free nation, the children were led off to get ready for the pageant. “I say, yaar, what if my robe slips?” muttered Ramesh Goswami, an Assamese boy, who was going to be the Buddha. Shueli wore a simple white robe, with a garland of flowers round her neck, which she would lay before the Buddha, as the procession reached the ‘India Gate.’ Her long thick hair which came, as she often said, “right down to my bottom” - was coiled into a simple plait and wound into a chignon on top of her head. “Oh my!” said jealous Janaki, “Who thinks she’s just too la-di-da?” But Shueli was too happy even to retort. Shalini was away somewhere in Europe. She wished Arif could have seen her dressed as the Buddha’s devotee. Perhaps, if he had, he might have changed his mind about the star of the class!
  As they played out their innocent drama, no one  realised the terror that would sweep like a wild fire across their dreaming lives.
They knew nothing of the sleeping volcano, which would  erupt malevolently, with no warning at all, until  the bad news from the borders began to pour in. Terrible stories were emerging, like nightmares besieging a prisoner of the night. “People are fleeing from their homes in Lahore, and all over the Punjab. I wish we could get some news of the Suris and Rai Bahadur Om Prakash’s family,” said Papa anxiously to Ammy. But there was no news - none that was good. Even as Gandhiji’s song echoed through the streets: “Ishwara Allah there naam / Sabko sammathi de, Bhagwan!” (Your name is both Ishwar and  Allah. Give peace to all, O Lord!”) the molten lava of hate was pouring out. “They are stopping the trains from Pakistan, throwing people out, setting fire to the carriages. Women are being raped and their breasts being cut off. Small babies are being snatched from their mothers, and thrown into boiling oil..” the terrifying stories, told in hysterical tones, made the listeners shudder with horror. Was this a nightmare, a story twisted from a tortured soul, or was all this really happening? The Khannas, who had been their friends in Lahore, had managed to escape “just in time, before the lootings and burnings began.” But, Mrs. Khanna sobbingly told Ammy: “Maijee (her grandmother) was too old. She was 97 years old last birthday. Maijee began to cry and beat her breast when we told her to get ready to leave, as there was danger. Maijee fell before our household gods in the Puja Room. She lit a diya before Parvati and Ganesha, and begged to be spared the ordeal of moving from the only home she and her ancestors had ever known. Amaal, can you believe it?  Parvati heard Maijee’s cry! Just as we had decided to pick her up and carry her to the waiting car, we found her lying dead before the gods and goddesses, with all the flowers, and the diyas shining..”
“The Musalman log are burning all the villages.”..”Our old Muslim neighbours hid us and helped us escape, at great risk to their lives..”
Others told of how headless bodies lay in piles at the railway stations. As the stories of cruelty and horror poured in, like an evil virus, the epidemic of hatred spread. They heard how Gandhiji, in agony of spirit, had undertaken a ‘Fast unto death’ unless the senseless killings stopped. Shueli remembered the story of the first murder, of Cain and Abel, from the Bible, which Honavar Appacha had told her so many years ago. Cain, in jealousy and anger, murdered his brother Abel. When God asked Cain why he had done it, he denied it, asking angrily: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”


*

2. From An Autobiography by SAMUEL MATHAI (Unfinished.)

Anna Sujatha Mathai grew up in St. Stephen's College Delhi, where her father was Head of the English Department. It was an idyllic childhood, reading wonderful books, hearing poetry, seeing plays. She and her sister spent many sunny days exploring The Ridge, unimaginable now! Sujatha started writing Short Stories and Essays for The TREASURE CHEST, an All-India Children's Magazine edited by an American Editor, and translated into many Indian languages. At 14 she was chosen by Treasure Chest to be their youngest Special Correspondent! 
 What she loved most was the Theatre. She was selected, at age 14,  by the Shakespeare Society of St. Stephen's College, to be Viola in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Later, doing her B.A.{Honours} in English Literature at Miranda College, she won the College Drama Prize, and later, the Best Actress Award of the University of Delhi.
  Getting married at age 20, to a young surgeon, changed her life completely. In Edinburgh, she joined the University for a Post Graduate Course in Social Studies. She worked in that field for several years, in York, Sheffield, London. Leaving it all behind, coming back to small-town India, was traumatic for her. She used to write on scraps of paper, and throw them away. Her sister, in Bangalore, sent her a cutting in which American professor, Howard McCord of the Univ. of Seattle asked for poems by "avant-garde young Indian poets" for his Anthology. Her sister wrote "At the most, you'll lose a few stamps!" Prof McCord's warm response to her poems, made her start taking her writing more seriously! Her first poems were published in P. Lal's MODERN INDIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH. She continued to write, and, later, moving to Bangalore her dream of theatre was somewhat realised. She had roles in plays by Shaeffer, Ibsen, Sartre, Pinter, Tennessee Williams, Lorca and others. She was a co-founder,with friend Snehalata Reddy, of THE ABHINAYA POETRY/THEATRE GROUP.
Her poems have been published in The Commonwealth Journal; Indian Literature; The Little Magazine; The Times of India; Dialogue India; Chelsea (New York); The London Magazine; The Poetry Review (London), Two Plus Two (Switzerland.), Contemporary Asian Poetry Ed. Agnes Lam, Hong Kong/Singapore: Post-Independence Poetry in English ed. by Arundhathi Subramaniam She was among 4 poets "show-cased" on the 50th Anniversary of the Sahitya Akademi. She was an Associate Editor of the prestigious Literary Journal, Two Plus Two,based in Lausanne, Switzerland. She has 5 collections of Poetry in English, and her poems have been translated into several Indian and European languages.
She now lives in Delhi. ​

Short Story
Hanif Kureishi

​She was in a hotel waiting for him, a cheap place with a bad view. They were going to separate, that was the idea, after one last time together. It would be wild; the wildest.
She was in the hotel waiting for him and she had got there early to clear her head. She needed to keep her phone on for him, but the kids and Peter kept texting. She was with a friend who was ill, on his death bed. She giggled as she lied, but they never let her alone, the only people she had. Her family were like family, she liked to say. And him, Mr Goodbye, was on his way.
She was in the hotel waiting for him. After practising, she had come to appreciate aggression in the bedroom. Nor had she been an exhibitionist before. She'd never been far beyond the decent. What a difference that made to her life, with everything else having to be reorganised to recognise her, the new person.
Sex was everywhere, apparently. Enjoyment was what they gave you instead of justice. Not that sex had been like that for her; she had been with just five or six men and had kept her eyes closed. Nervous, anxious enough to float the world on her worry, she had run from the what she needed. She believed that this was how most people were. She was ashamed. She had been unwilling to accept the wound. She had been too good for her own good. Sometimes you have to let people hate you.
This man was the only one who liked to talk. He asked for her wishes; he explained what he wanted to do. 'Open your mouth for my fingers, bend over, open yourself. Show me. I must see.' He made her use words too. She used them back now. You see, they were the thing.
A fat, hairy and busy man, a pig, a salesman, a liar and show off, his voice more phallic than his cock.  Every time, with him was an assault on everything she knew. He made her so avant-garde she wanted to bite his face off, carry it away and make everyone she knew wear it.
She was standing in the hotel waiting for him, staring out, her hands flat against the window and there were jets crossing the sky. People were moving about more than you'd think. She took off her clothes, threw them down and paced in her shoes, a nude in a cube, feeling freer like this.
We are perverts in our imagination; she was what they call beside herself. This is when you know you can't master yourself. Eros shoved her beyond, and sex is not justice, she'd decided. Desire and disgust were ever-loving twins: she wanted to be violent and loathsome. She wrote lists of wishes to remind herself which sort of loathsome she had in mind. She still couldn't understand where in herself all this alteration originated, or who you could ask about this.
She was in the hotel waiting for him. At twenty years old someone said she wouldn't understand passion until she was forty, or be able to bear it until she was forty five. Even then it wouldn't be too late. Nevertheless: what a warning. It was true, she had had no idea what a body could do. You had to thank anyone who made you so irrational.
She was waiting for him and knew that even now her lust was too tempered by love. When she saw his face she was more tender than she'd intended, kissing him too much. He had stripped her to her bones. People say you should learn to live without leaning on others. But what if they are so good for you that you forget everything else?
She was in the hotel waiting for him, and thought she might roll under the bed so when he came in he'd get a shock. He would stand there with his baffled look on and begin to understand what it would be like to be without her, that beyond here there was no bliss. He might sit down. He could ruminate. 
She was in the hotel waiting for him. She didn't want to scare him. She wanted to smoke but the windows wouldn't open. She wondered if he liked her because she'd had breakdowns and been locked up for having a runaway mind. Maybe he thought people like her would do just anything.
She was in the hotel waiting for him, and soon that, as they say, would be that. They had done everything people could do together; she still wanted him, she could do it again, but she had a family. He wanted a girlfriend to share a croissant with, not a berserker to look around a room for.
She was in the hotel waiting to see the grey soles of his feet. Soon she would be giving up the thing she enjoyed most to rejoin the tribe of the Unfucked. He made her laugh but she was beginning to bore him. The mad were those who put others off. She feared loving him more than she feared death. Passion made ordinary life impossible and interfered with the groundzero of reality, thank god.
She was in the hotel waiting for him. She enjoyed her children; her duty was to take care of her ill husband. With him it was like trying to make love to your mother. Morality was where you gave up what you loved in order to satisfy someone you disliked. Now she'd discovered that this illusion of the ugly man was the best thing of all. But how did these ideas touch one another?
She was waiting for him and there was much she didn't want to know. After this she would fanatically try to forget the things that mattered most to her.
She was in the hotel waiting for him in the hours and minutes and seconds before he became a ghost and she would return to her senses. She was in the hotel waiting for him, and anyone anywhere waiting for anything is waiting for love.
​~

Also published in the first issue of The Amorist, UK. 

​Hanif Kureishi was born in Kent and read philosophy at King’s College, London. In 1981 he won the George Devine Award for his plays Outskirts and Borderline and the following year became writer in residence at the Royal Court Theatre, London.
His 1984 screenplay for the film My Beautiful Laundrette was nominated for an Oscar. He also wrote the screenplays of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) and London Kills Me (1991). His short story ‘My Son the Fanatic’ was adapted as a film in 1998. Kureishi’s screenplays for The Mother in 2003 and Venus (2006) were both directed by Roger Michell. A screenplay adapted from Kureishi's novel The Black Album was published in 2009. 
The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel and was produced as a four-part drama for the BBC in 1993. His second novel was The Black Album (1995). The next, Intimacy (1998), was adapted as a film in 2001, winning the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film festival. Gabriel’s Gift was published in 2001, Something to Tell You in 2008, The Last Word in 2014 and The Nothing in 2017
His first collection of short stories, Love in a Blue Time, appeared in 1997, followed by Midnight All Day (1999) and The Body (2002). These all appear in his Collected Stories (2010), together with eight new stories. His collection of stories and essays Love + Hate was published by Faber & Faber in 2015. 
He has also written non-fiction, including the essay collections Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics (2002) and The Word and the Bomb (2005). The memoir My Ear at his Heart: Reading my Father appeared in 2004.
Hanif Kureishi was awarded the C.B.E. for his services to literature, and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts des Lettres in France. His works have been translated into 36 languages.

Short Story
W. Jack Savage

​The Witness
  
          I woke up, having planned to go in a little late and had told my employer so the night before. My son’s birthday was coming up and I knew what he wanted. It was a T-shirt in black with either Harley-Davidson or something masculine and extroverted on it. He was of an age, you see, and well, Bill had been one of those boys who sort of kept a low profile to avoid confrontation. Not a wimp by any means, but he didn’t like the rites of passage as you might call them, and so he sort of stayed in the shadows through school.
 
            Now in his late teens, he was ready for something more, and I thought that was fine. But, I mean, Penney’s or Target…where do you find things like that? Finally, and it was on the way to work the previous day, I was in the drive-through at McDonalds picking up my coffee and a sausage and biscuit, when, right across the street, I saw a little shop. Not a head shop as they used to call them, but a place that could pass for one if you had a motorcycle. Outside, there were Rebel Flags and T-shirts with skulls on them and it looked perfect. So today I stopped there and went through the place. It was interesting, and were I Bill’s age, I would have liked something from there. They had all manner of motorcycle attire and lighters with military insignia on them, and knives and various military patches as well. Strangely though, among the clothing there was not one Harley-Davidson T-shirt. There was, however, a rather nice Jack Daniels Whisky T-shirt in black, orange and white. But for some reason I sort of balked and decided to walk over to the McDonalds to have a bite and think about it. The streetlight was twenty or so yards down the way and faced the entrance to a shopping center. I walked down and crossed over and headed over to McDonalds before I realized I’d left my wallet in the car. So I headed back to the streetlight, and by this time there were three people; two men and a woman, waiting to cross back over with me. That’s when it happened.
 
         As to who I am and why on earth you should listen to my account of what happened, I can’t see that that’s of any relevance other than to say that, of the three other official accounts, mine varied sharply from those and made me wonder what the hell was going on. I mean, we all experienced the same thing and yet their descriptions and observations were strangely different from mine but remarkably like each other. And so, either something is going on beyond which I can explain, or I’m delusional, or they are. A three to one ratio of one account versus the others would strongly suggest that perhaps I’m the one who is, well, mistaken at best, and crazy at the far end, but I assure you that I know what I saw and experienced and I thought they did too. I mean, it was horrible. A woman was killed, and she was killed right in front of us.
 
            She was running from something or someone, and turned in the street for just a moment, as if to look back and say something or see whoever or whatever it was that was
chasing her. She was terrified, I can tell you that. Then she turned and continued, but it was as if she never realized she’d run into the street in the first place. As she did, the car, which had started to steer around her, hit the brakes, but it was too late. He or  should I say she, as it was a woman driver, hit the woman, and at first it didn’t seem to me to be that hard. As I said, she was braking and not really going that fast when the actual contact
took place. I might have imagined a broken leg or even both legs, but, well, she kind of fell backwards and I’d swear she didn’t even hit her head, you know, on the pavement.
 
By the time we were questioned when not fifteen minutes had gone by, we heard she had died on the way to the hospital. I was the last to be interviewed, and having heard these other three, it was as if I’d seen a different accident.
 
         “Did you see the same thing?” the officer asked me.
         “No, I didn’t, and I don’t know why they’re saying that,” I said. “She acted to me like she was being chased and then stopped in the street to look behind her. Then, and it was like she didn’t realize she was in the street, she turned and continued to walk further
into the street, and that’s when she was hit.”
         “You say someone was chasing her?”
         “No,” I said. “But she was hurrying, as if someone was chasing her, and then she turned and looked back at where she had been. That is, as if there was something behind her.”
         “But you didn’t see anyone behind her?”
         “No.”
He went back to the other three and asked something, but I couldn’t hear what it was. They all shook their heads. He came back to me.
         “They didn’t see anyone else.”
         “I just said I didn’t see anyone. I said she was acting like someone was chasing her. That’s why she stopped and looked back. I don’t know. Maybe she was imagining someone after her, but that’s how she acted.”
         “You said she stopped in the street, and then started again?”
         “Yes.”
         “The others said she just walked out and was hit,” he said.
         “I don’t know where they were looking. But she stopped maybe five or six feet after she hurried into the street, turned around, and then turned back and continued.”
         “Did she, or could she have been checking for traffic?”
          “No,” I said. “She never looked for traffic. She looked back in the direction she
had come from. Can I ask you a question?”
He nodded.
           “Did they all say they saw what happened?”
            “Yes,” he said.           
            “So there’s four of us, right? Four of us standing there waiting for the light to change and we all happen to be looking in the same direction. Does that seem odd to you at all?”
               “A little, maybe. Yes,” he said.
               “Now, I’m not saying they’re lying or anything like that. But they all saw it, and have been hanging around for what, twenty minutes now, and telling you what they saw, when all they had to say was, no, I didn’t see it, and they can go on their way. Now, I did see it and I told you what I saw. I am going to be late for work. I called them and they said they understand. But these three others, I mean, what are they about? Are they all retired or independently wealthy, that they all say yes and hang around to tell you what happened? And, oh yeah, then get it wrong, and more than that get it exactly wrong; each exactly the same as the others. Is there something wrong with this or am I crazy?”
                “Where exactly was she looking when she stopped to turn around?” he asked.
 
The area I speak of sort of ran along the fence of a trailer-court park. My novelty store was the first business on the right, and as I said, about twenty yards from the light. It’s hard to tell what might have occupied this other hundred and fifty by, say, thirty yards from the street to the fence. I seem to remember them selling Christmas trees there, and also pumpkins at Halloween. There was some debris alongside the novelty store and as near as I could tell, she’d looked back that way, I told him.
 
                 “Toward the trailer park?” he asked.
                 “Well, yeah ,I guess so. Toward the fence of it, anyway.”
               “The driveway is right next to the biker shop,” he said. “People walking sometimes cut behind it and through the lot. She lived in that trailer park. Some guy was
staying with her. You're sure you didn’t see anyone?”
                  “Yes. I’m sure. I only saw her
                 “When she stopped,” he asked, “did you notice anything strange about her; how she looked, anything?”
                “Yeah, she looked scared, frightened, maybe even a little, I don’t know, dazed.”
                    “Where were you going when you were going across the street?”
                   “That biker shop as you called it,” I said. “My car's out front. I walked over to McDonalds and realized I had left my wallet in the car. I was picking up a T-shirt for my son. Can I ask you why, what possible reason those people would have to lie about, about this?”
The deputy sort of looked around for a moment and then looked back at me.
                   “If I asked you to break down what happened here today, sir, could you do it in one sentence?”
                   “Um, I... I’m not sure,” I said. “Ah, a woman... a woman was hit by a car as she crossed a street, possibly being chased by something or someone.”
                    “But without the speculation,” he said, “a woman was hit by a car and killed
crossing the street, right?”
                   “I guess so, yes.”   
                   “The woman who was killed,” he said. “Can you describe her?”
I shrugged. “Dark hair, maybe in her mid-thirties, maybe older. Pants down to her calves; pedal pushers, I think they call them; a blouse.”
                   “Ethnicity?
                   “I, ah, white, maybe Hispanic.”
                   “And these other three witnesses,” he continued, “can you describe them?”
                   “Ah, Hispanic maybe, I guess.”
                   “And the woman who hit the victim with her car? Can you describe her?”
                   “A white woman, in her forties, I’d say.”
                   “A white woman, you say. Are you sure of that, sir?”
                   “Yes, yes, I’m pretty sure.”
                   “Would you say that a white woman was likely to have insurance?”
                   “I... I would think so, yes.”
                   “Have you got it yet, sir?”
 
            He never said any more than that. He didn’t go 'wink, wink', or anything like that. He just kind of acted very matter of fact about four witnesses and a dead woman who’d been hit by a car. Three of the witnesses and the victim were the same; Hispanic. I’m white. If I hadn't been there, a woman walked into the street and was hit by a car driven by a white woman and killed. Even with my statement, it wasn’t much more than that. But the implication was that three Hispanics hung around, inconveniencing themselves to some degree, to testify to the only essential fact they felt needed to be addressed. One of theirs had been killed by one of mine and any other speculation to the contrary was not relevant. I’ll confess the whole thing had me pretty upset, and by the time I got to work it hadn’t gotten much better.
 
                      “Hi Greg,” said Andrew, my boss. “Can you tell me about it?”
Of course, I’d have rather not, but I was even later then I said I would be, and what mattered was, he was the boss, and he wanted to hear about it. I told him and said I thought it was very strange, but I didn’t include the part where the Sheriff’s deputy gave me his little 'twenty questions' reality check.
                      “These other witnesses,” he said. “What were they like?”
                      “It’s funny you should mention that.”
                      “Why?”
                      “Well, I was very upset,” I began. “I’d never seen anything like that; the last moments in someone’s life, as it turned out. I was a witness. I saw it and remembered
it in detail. In retrospect there was nothing I could have done. Anyway, I wondered and I asked the deputy why they, the witnesses, would not be more forthcoming, as I thought I had been. He told me; I mean, in a way he talked down to me. He asked me questions that
were meant to show me what was really happening.. I’m not naïve, after all, but he suggested that the other witnesses were only trying to streamline the process in some way. A woman, he said, or rather got me to say through his questions, ran out in the street
where she was hit by a car and died a short time later. The victim was Hispanic and I hadn’t really noticed, but the other three witnesses were too. It was; I mean I never suggested it wasn’t an accident except to say she was maybe being chased or something. But for the next step in the process to go forward, that speculation on my part was not only unnecessary, but could be harmful in some way. He seemed to suggest that maybe for insurance purposes; so the woman’s family could benefit in a timely manner, the details I offered were, I don’t know, could muck up the works. Oh, and the fact that the driver was a white woman was significant. That she probably had insurance and well, you know. I’m sorry, but I don’t think in those terms.”
                     “I see,” Andrew said. “Sounds like you’ve had quite a day and it hasn’t even really got started.”
                     “What do you think?” I asked.
He paused for a moment and said,
                   “I understand how you feel because I believe you’re reacting to what you saw; what you witnessed. It must have been horrible to see that. In the end though, I’m afraid your deputy is right. And as far as talking down to you goes, he may now, even as we speak, be involved in some other accident or incident where someone is hurt or killed and so while he’s become somewhat jaded, I suppose, desensitized by the world he deals with, your reaction also seems appropriate. So much of what passes for the life going on around us is taken for granted; compartmentalized into things we can’t understand or more specifically do anything about, that when they land on us like this, we look for answers to questions we wouldn’t ordinarily ask.”
I nodded and then shook my head.
                      “Are you going to be okay?” he asked. “Do you want to take the rest of the day off?”
                      “No,” I said, getting up. “God, no. I... I need to push on; get busy. Thanks
anyway.”
                      “That T-shirt?” he asked. “Did you pick it up for your son?”
                      “No. I’ll give him a gift card.”
He shook his head.
                      “What?”
                      “You went there to be a good dad,” he said. “You wound up being a good citizen. That your effort won’t mean any more than it will, shouldn’t cheat your son. You’re a good man, Greg, and too good to give into this 'world weariness' around you.
There’s already been one victim in your day so far. Let me do some checking. I’ll find that Harley-Davidson T-shirt for you.”
                       “Thanks, Andrew,” I said.
As I walked back to my desk, I thought what a nice gesture it was for him to say and do that. And he was right; all I had meant to do was to get Bill what he wanted and then all this happened. I hadn’t been at my desk two minutes when the phone rang. It was Andrew.
                      “What size, Greg?”
                      “Well, I’d say large, because I believe that’s what he is, but they’re wearing them big these days so I’d say, extra large at least. Maybe two times extra large.”
He put me on hold, and after a few seconds picked up again and said,
                      “There’s a place not far from you. It’s on Route 66 near Grand; two blocks west of Grand. It’s called Biker Heaven. They’re open until six.”
                       “Thank you, Andrew. I appreciate this.”
 
            That evening, driving home, I stopped and picked up the shirt and of course continued thinking about my strange day. The deputy was just being expeditious, I decided. I hadn’t seen anyone or anything that might have been chasing her. She did stop and look back, but at what I don’t know. She did look scared. Maybe, somehow, she was running from death and just looked back in the wrong direction. That would be just like death; to scare you from one direction and be waiting from another; that poor woman. I’d never been at that crossing without my car, and providing a detailed description of what I saw did no good at all. I wondered what possible casting call I got picked out of to be there just then?  By the time I got home I had worked it out to be some kind of message. In doing something specific and special for my son, rather than send him my usual gift card, I was reminded that my absence in his life these last few years was as if I was never there at all. I know that’s bullshit but I picked up a gift card to go with the T-shirt and mailed it off the next day anyway.     
​                  

​
​W. Jack Savage is a retired broadcaster and educator. He is the author of seven books including Imagination: The Art of W. Jack Savage (wjacksavage.com).  To date, more than fifty of Jack’s short stories and over four-hundred of his paintings and drawings have been published worldwide. Jack and his wife Kathy live in Monrovia, California.

Novel
Ted Morrissey

                                                        Letter 4 – Part 3
                                                                  Pithom
​
Several hours have passed. Where to begin? Robin descended from his room about midday and read the note from his Russian mate; it must have been as I surmised for a bit later, at about four o’clock, Robin ventured out to meet Mr Andropov—or so I presumed, for he did not say a word regarding it. Rather, he ate then returned to his room to read. He considered taking his book to the alley, but the weather was not conducive to outdoor reading: not raining per se but there is a distinct nip in the air, a coolness that is deceptively penetrating. I wondered that the wrap I secreted away in the washroom would be adequate. I lingered in the kitchen throughout the afternoon, waiting and wondering if in fact Robin would leave the house—until finally he came downstairs and left via the front door, still without a word. I stepped into the washroom, dressed with haste, then entered the alley. I said nothing to Mrs O, who was resting in her room off the kitchen; nor the children, who were contentedly engaged in the parlor.
I knew in which direction Robin would turn on the street if he were going to Mr A’s boarding house, which is also in the neighborhood of some dubious establishments where he may have been rendezvousing with his friend. When I first entered the street, rushing but not running, I did not see Robin (and I half hoped I’d lost him already so that I could abandon the plan of which I’d already grown wary). Soon, however, I picked up his trail, spying him before the tobacconist’s just before turning onto Taviton. The streets were of course bustling, which made it more difficult to keep track of Robin but at the same time it helped to obscure me, a solitary woman on the walk. Our district seems filled with such women—poor widows, perhaps, scraping by, and women with families who must labor to provide roof and table for their children. I count myself fortunate, my dear, to only be among them in the crowded street and not in sorrowful circumstance. I had distracted myself and nearly forgotten my primary object: to spy those who are spying my brother. To do so I was required to retreat to a position which made it exceedingly difficult to keep Robin in view. However, there was no remedy for the conundrum; I fell back. (Is that not the term generals use to describe the battlefield maneuver? Perhaps I shall ask Mr Smythe). Fortunately Robin did not appear to be of a mind to make haste, gazing from time to time in shop windows and generally effecting the pace of one out for a leisurely stroll. Even still, I would lose sight of him in the busy thoroughfare, especially at cross streets, and at times believe I had lost him altogether. Then I would catch a glimpse at this window or that, or once pausing to listen to a beggar street musician sawing at a ragtag viola.
My watching was of course complicated by my also watching for those who may be watching Robin. There was no shortage of candidates. I tried to think what Rev Grayling’s good Christians would look like on the streets. I could not form a definite picture. They may be man or woman, old or young—a child even, only Agatha’s age, but a boy, an acolyte on Rev G’s altar. I imagined the Reverand’s congregants, convinced as I was that his informants were members of his church—though likely as it was, it was still only surmise.
Suddenly a new thought came to me: What if I cannot observe the observers because they are already observing me observing Robin? My imagination then fired a new tableau, and I saw myself walking along the busy street: A woman of medium height, narrow of shoulder but perhaps that defect is somewhat hidden beneath the woolen wrap; brown hair gathered in a bun beneath my hat but with some stray strands falling down (I could feel them against my neck); long-fingered hands at the ends of my dress-sleeves, cadaverously pale save for the stains of ink, the dark marks of these compulsively written epistles; and a face whose narrowness complements her shoulders—but what its expression? Probably a trace of worry just now, in the set of the jaw and a gathering of horizontal lines at the eyes; yet also a spark of determination fired from the maternal instinct; and I would hope an overall intelligence, largely communicated via the eyes and brow, sea green and wide set, respectively. And should my hat blow off in a forceful breeze, an all but impossible occurrence due to its black ribbon being tied in a bow beneath my chin, one may note the early grey at the temples, like hoarfrost selectively formed, or (better) ash fired by fret and clinging fast.
Yet there was nothing to be done about the observational situation—other than to keep Robin in view and hope that in some way I may discover those surveilling him. The streets were darkening, and I had no wish to be out, an unescorted woman, at full night. Besides, it would become increasingly difficult to maintain my brother’s track, even with the efforts of the lantern-lighters. Fortunately Robin had not taken such a circuitous path that I had lost my orientation. I knew precisely where I was and how to return home. Robin paused at the cart of a vendor who was selling some sort of broiled and heavily spiced meat, mutton perhaps. Robin purchased some of the meat in brown paper, conically formed; then continued his amble, eating with his fingers as he walked. The outing had stoked my appetite and I did have a few pennies in the pocket of my dress, but I found the smell of the greasy and exotically spiced mutton rather nauseating. I nodded to the black-bearded, swarthy-skinned vendor as I passed by his aromatic cart.
Robin turned into a narrow street that was of a decidedly darker character. I hesitated to follow; however, there was no visible danger—only silly womanly fears—so I stayed the course. Before I could enter, a pair of fellows hurried into the ancient street ahead of me. There was something about their tempo and intensity that suggested they may be following my brother. Even as I drew the conclusion I knew it may just be the result of my overly energetic imagination. But whether genuine or fanciful, my belief about their intent spurred me onward regardless of the street’s shabbiness. The differences between Taviton and Harrow Street were abundantly clear, especially in regards to the latter’s squalidness. The sheer population marked it as a street of especial meanness—it seemed thousands had been lodged in a space meant for just a fraction that number. And every age was represented out of doors, from infants to the elderly, and each exuded its unique brand of want and woe, from the wailing of babes to the cursing of the mature and the moaning of the agedly infirm. The facades of the squat buildings were near black with grime, and boards or tattered blankets covered the majority of the windows, the panes of glass shattered, no doubt, through a long history of hostile domestic frays.
Seeing all the various manifestations of want it came to me that maybe the fellows following Robin were not agents of Rev Grayling (now, suddenly, it seemed a ridiculous premise), but rather ruffians who may believe Robin a somewhat prosperous person. He was, after all, attired in your older garments, cleverly tailored by Mrs O’Hair; thus he was costumed as a gentleman in comparison to the throngs on the street, this street in particular. (I know that it must be worrisome to think of me there as well, but I obviously came to no harm as I am telling the tale—the curse of the first-person narrator, if this were a mere story spun to amuse of a winter’s evening.) One of the fellows following Robin, as I interpreted their intention, wore a coat of vivid green, worn, patched and soiled but still an unusual hue in this dun-tinted street. As such, I was able to keep track of him more easily, while Robin himself was fully obscured among the unwashed multitude. People were bumping into me, or I was bumping into them; indeed, there were so many milling pedestrians, like cattle in a crowded market, it was difficult to say which. Throughout, I kept a sharp eye on the green coat. Hence I was fully aware when the vividly appareled fellow and his more somberly dressed companion disappeared between dilapidating buildings down a narrow alley, lined, I soon discovered, with all manner of cast aside crates and other less wholesome refuse.

Novel
~ Anna Sujatha Mathai

Previous Chapters

CHAPTER SIX

Trains
 
Shueli knew that the first time Ammy and Papa had left Honavar after their marriage, to travel so far away, right across the country, to North India, they too, must have experienced some of the fear and sense of wonder she always felt in the presence of the sea. In their case, it was the journey into the unknown, crossing boundaries they had never crossed before. They had to spend three days, travelling by bus and train, away from the lush beauty of the West Coast and the Ghats, to hot, dusty North India, to Lahore, their first home. Trains, rushing across that vast sub-continent seemed to embody a wild, unknown mystery, tinged with fear. As the trains went grinding and shrieking along into that dark night, languages began to change, people began to look different. Food changed from the rice and fish, and lightly steamed vegetable ‘thorans’ of Honavar, to chapaatis and daal, with kababs and salads of raw onions and tomato. The young couple, despite their sense of delighted adventure, were tense and nervous, and were glad to be taken charge of by a kindly old gentleman who called himself Rai Bahadur. When Papa took out his purse to pay, Rai Bahadur ordered him : “Put that purse away, young man. You have now entered the Punjab. You are my guests from this point on.” And so, they reached Lahore, where they were met by someone from the Forman Christian College, where Papa was to become a Lecturer. All their baggage was piled onto a fine tonga, and off they went. Lahore, where Anarkali, the slave-maid who had been loved by the young Prince Salim (later Jahangir), had been buried alive by Emperor Akbar, his father, in the walls of the old palace. Shueli, who had been born in Nagpur (“right in the heart of India”) where her mother’s parents had been at the time, remembered little of this frontier city later. This was where Gaya was born, so it was hard for them to accept, years later, when the leaders, Jinnah, Nehru, Gandhi, Mountbatten, allowed the country to be carved up, so  it became separate countries. “How can it become separate, when it’s written in your heart? When your child was born there?” Ammy would ask. When Gaya was born, and Shueli was taken to the hospital to meet her newly born sister, Shueli couldn’t say her name - Gayatri - properly. Only two herself, she kept saying “Gaya - Gaya” which was why she became Gaya rather than Gayatri to everyone.
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Journeys, journeys - from that time on - across the country - from Lahore to Honavar to Nagpur to Tiruvella in the Travancore State, and then to Delhi. Journeys, creating maps of the hearts, diminishing distances, separating people, bringing them together. To Shueli and Gaya, the train journey from the North, right down to Alwaye, where they caught another connecting train, to Tiruvella, was like the unfolding of a mystery, an extended geography lesson, or the village dramas behind coloured sheets, in which all sorts of strange characters kept appearing. Here, the different faces of India, grotesque, sad, funny, afraid,  took the stage. Trains were so crowded at that time. People used to jump in through windows, or travel holding on to the foot-board, or even cling perilously to the roof of the train! Mostly poor people, escaping from the villages where there were no opportunities, to escape the hunger, disease, oppression there, to look for work, and maybe hit the big time in those frightening large cities they had never seen. Shueli could hear people running up and down the station shouting “Hindu water” and “Muslim water.” Both girls found this very strange. “How can water be Hindu, Ammy?” “That’s because Hindus won’t drink water polluted by others.” It seemed to Shueli that even water had lines drawn across it, separating people from one another. But how could that be? Water was God’s miracle, for all to share. In the Women’s Compartments, Muslim women, huddled in burqas, sat with Hindu women.. Some of the North Indian women covered their heads with odhanis, when the men came by, to ask if they needed anything. But how could women in burqas bear to stay covered up in black, only peering out at the world through slits, like horses? “Why, Papa?” Shueli would ask, and be told that the Muslims wanted to protect their women from lewd gazes, and keep them safe. “But why don’t the men cover their eyes with a bit of cloth instead, if their look is so dangerous?” asked Shueli. She’d been told that the poor Muslim women often got T.B. and other such diseases, because they were shut away from sunlight and fresh air. To be free, thought Shueli, even then,  that was God’s greatest gift. Anyway, on those long train journeys, stuck in the same compartment together for as long as three days, people forgot about their differences, became friends, exchanged confidences, helped one another. Strangers told each other the deepest secrets or problems of their hearts. Once, just as they were getting into the train at the crowded Old Delhi station,, an Englishman, very red-faced, in khakhi shorts and shirt, slapped a coolie who was rather persistent in demanding a little bit more money., The Englishman had a small leather-covered stick in his hand, and was threatening the coolie with that. Shueli was shocked, angry and upset that no one did anything, just looked away. “The English can do anything they like here. After all, the whole country belongs to them. So why can’t they hit a poor coolie?” Childish anger and fear would fill Shueli’s heart. But the Englishman at the station was so different from some of the other English people they met, who came to build schools and colleges and hospitals in small run-down district towns, and never seemed to mind the heat, dust or squalour, because they saw it as their duty. “We do it all for Jesus Christ.” But Jesus seemed very far from this crowded train, speeding along the great rail-tracks - which the British had laid - which held that vast sub-continent together. The heat and dust and flies, the flat-roofed mud houses, the open drains, with buffaloes and pigs rooting around in filthy puddles of water, would soon give way to the lush greenness of Malabar. Shueli and Gaya would run from window to window as the train swept over great bridges and rivers, to the backwaters, and then the ocean. Now they knew the long, tiring journey would soon be over, and they’d be home with Ammy’s parents in Tiruvella.
Despite all the fears and bitterness sparked off by Papa’s marriage, the family at Honavar held together. Papa took tuitions, apart from his lectures, and marked exam papers, and sent every extra bit home. He had acquired a fine reputation as a brilliant young lecturer, and also as someone with a rare integrity. A young  princeling, with no interest in study, whose family had forced into getting a tutor, suggested he be allowed to slip out. “Of course, Professor Sahib, you will get your tuition money.” He was taken aback when Papa said “Nothing doing! I get paid for putting something into your head. And that I shall certainly do!” With the money sent home, many of the younger ones at home got on their feet, and began to help out. Each and every one of the children went to school, and then on to University. Papa’s younger brother, Johannan, came to stay with them at Lahore, with a heart full of hope and expectation. He joined the college where Papa was a lecturer. Shueli and Gaya loved the handsome young uncle, who took them to Nicholson Bagh for walks, and told them stories. But, shortly after, Papa got a scholarship to Oxford. Ammy couldn’t stay on alone in Lahore with two small children. So, she went off to Madras, to enrol for a Degree in Education at St. Christopher’s College. Shueli and Gaya were sent to Tiruvella to be with Ammy’s  parents. Johannan stayed on alone, in the College Hostel. With no one to care what he ate or drank, he came down with the deadly typhoid fever, raging across the parched and dusty plains of North India just then.  Shueli imagined how he must have felt.  Sick, afraid, with no one to hold his hand, the eighteen year old boy died in that far away Northern city. Distances were so great at that time. A telegram reached the Honavar home late one evening, simply stating that P. Johannan was dead. They felt so helpless and heart broken, knowing they were too late even to reach him as he lay dead.. The first death in the family left them all stricken. It was so hard, they thought in their terrible grief, to bow their heads in acceptance of “God’s will.” Shueli, in later years, faced by the deaths of Ammachy and others, more rebellious in spirit, felt that it was too cruel to be acceptable. She didn’t see much evidence of a personal, loving God, who would not let “a single hair” on our head be harmed. A few years later, when Rahel Aunty went to Lahore, she searched young brother’s grave, but there was no sign of it. Perhaps there was a simple cross or headstone put up for him, but it seemed to have vanished - like that young life, so full of promise, put out so cruelly. Only the hostile winds from the North West Frontier knew where that boy, who came with such youthful hope from Honavar, lay.
 
 
 
CHAPTER SEVEN

Hauntings on the Ridge and Dreaming Spires
 
When Papa came back from Oxford, the girls, shy and distant, hanging coyly behind curtains, surveyed their stranger father, who managed, very gradually, to win their hearts back with chocolates and two dolls called Margaret and Toinette.  Gaya, who often conducted long conversations with plants, spoke to her doll alot. But Shueli  was not too keen on dolls, though she did feel very protective to her Toinette, and hoped she wasn’t getting suffocated when she put her to sleep in the cupboard. Graany told everyone proudly that her “Oxford returned son-in-law” was back, and stuffed him with appams, chicken stoo and payasam. Ammy glowed with pride over her young husband’s achievement. Appa had shone at Oxford, but with no financial backing, and his small family far away in India, it was a struggle.. At one stage, he found he just didn’t have the money to pay his tuition and other expenses. “What did Papa do?” the girls would ask Ammy again and again, as it was a story they loved. “Aiyo, girls. Think of that young Appa of yours, all alone in that cold, far away country, worrying about how he could see it through. And then, do you know what happened?” “No. Tell us. Tell us” the girls would chorus, though they’d probably heard that story a hundred times already.  In the same way, many years later, the little boy who didn’t like sad stories would ask Shueli again and again, “Ma, tell me that story once  more, about how you found me.”
And Shueli would tell, once more, how she had gone to the hospital with Kuri, her husband. She had been most unwilling, sure that all those years of misery would end in her carrying a baby of her own. But when Mother Jocelyn took them to the Ward, and showed them the round little baby sleeping there, she was startled. The baby opened his eyes wide, with a start, and looked straight at her. “Then Amma knew that she had been waiting for you all those years, and you  had been waiting for her and Dadu, and she picked you up, and from that moment, till the end of time, you were her very own  baby...”   Once more, once  more, tell me again, Kartik would plead, his eyes shining with the joy of that story.
In the same way, Ammy would tell the girls the story of Papa at Oxford just one more time. Years later, when these stories were retold, some of the details differed from the original. “That’s just the spice Ammy added,” they would laugh! “Papa was in dark despair, because he thought he’d have to drop his Oxford degree, and return to India half-way through, for lack of funds. Just then, he and another Indian student, Arvind Damle, were invited for lunch by a Mrs. Armitage, an elderly English lady they knew, who liked to be kind to these young students in a foreign land. Mrs. Armitage had terrible arthritis, and sometimes, even her jaw had to be bandaged up.. After lunch, Mrs. A. asked our Papa: ‘You do seem a bit down at heart  today, Philipose. Anything the matter?’ So poor Papa told her how worried he was, and that he might have to give up Oxford and return without the degree he had hoped to get. You know what English people are like -“ said Ammy, - “they never make a promise if they can’t keep it. So Mrs. Armitage just listened quietly, and Papa and Damle went home. Just imagine, girls, what a surprise Papa had, when he got a letter, a few days later, from an unknown English woman.. ’Dear Mr. Philipose,’ the letter read, ‘I heard from my dear friend,  Rosamund Armitage last week, about the unhappy plight you find yourself in. Something tells me you need a helping hand. I shall be glad to lend you £200/- which, I hope, will enable you to complete your degree at Oxford.’ Papa just couldn’t believe it - it was like a direct gift from the heavens above. Shueli, hand me that tray, and put the shelled peas in that bowl. - £200 was a lot of money in those days, and saw Papa through the whole of his remaining year at Oxford.”  “Ammy, is that what they call a miracle?” asked Shueli, and Ammy said, with a smile, “Yes. That’s God’s way of working - through people.”  “And what happened then? Did Papa have to repay that money?” Gaya wanted to know. “Well- after so many years, when Papa returned to England for a conference, he searched a great deal, and found that lady. He told her he had never forgotten her generosity, and wanted to repay that money. She just said ‘Oh dearie me! I am so dreadfully absent minded, and can’t seem to recall that at all. There were a great many foreign students I lent a helping hand to. Instead of returning that money to me , why don’t you just give it back - to some other young student who might need your help?’ And that’s how we moved to St. Stephen’s in Delhi, where Papa became Head of the English Department.”  That was when they moved to the beautiful new Campus of St. Stephen’s at the University, just below the Ridge.
St.Stephens had been set up by, and was closely related to the Cambridge Mission, and had a system based on the Oxford and Cambridge Halls of residence; the Tutorial system; a great deal of extra-curricular activity, and strong inter-relationships between students and professors. If Ammy occasionally tired of the rather cut-off life of the college staff, she was told by the College Principal to “Look at the roses, Mrs. Philipose. Just look at our roses, and let them make your heart glad!”  And indeed, they were perfect roses, which even included  the legendary Black Prince among them.  “Can we live on roses?” Ammy would ask Piloo rather bitterly sometimes. Papa loved his work, and was completely involved with his students, who adored him for his challenging, intellectually stimulating approach, and for the way he opened up their horizons. The College was close to the old Coronation grounds, where King George V had come, at the height of the British Empire, for the Durbar. Sometimes, on full moon nights, the College principal and his wife would invite all the staff for a moonlight picnic. They would set off, in their old Morris Minor started with a lot of cranking and revving, followed by the servants, carrying big vessels full of biriyani and chicken curry and puris, crisply fried ladies finger, and raita. How magical was that long ago Delhi moonlight, and those tumbling stars. Where had they all vanished to? Even the skies had changed. For Shueli, who always loved poetry, the discovery of a few lines by the Greek poetess, Sappho, seemed to grasp, most exquisitely, the aching loneliness of moonlight on a dark landscape:
“The moon is gone  / And the Pleiads set, /
Midnight is nigh;  / Time passes on, /
And passes, yet  /  Alone I lie.”
The pain of those lines were to haunt her in the lonely years before, and after the break-up of her marriage, and were only dispelled by her coming together with the love of her life, Mitran.
But the young Shueli, overwhelmed by the moon’s pure radiance, listened with faint comprehension to the tinkling laughter of “the young people” or teenagers, who were allowed to be a bit apart, and flirt discreetly. Someone would sing - old nostalgic English ballads: Danny Boy, or Drink to me Only, or Clementine. Sometimes these songs were sung at the Principal’s parties. The Principal’s wife, a gracious and Westernised woman, generally played the piano, while one of her five sons sang. She was tiny, diminutive and dainty, while her husband and sons were all very tall. They all admired her, and she would refer to them as “My six handsome men!” The “young people” at these parties, too, were permitted a bit of mild flirtation. There were some “love seats” scattered  across the drawing room. The boys generally sat on cushions in front of the girls, who would bend over them, whispering, or the boys would lean back, talking affectionately, ardently. It all seemed very grown-up and exciting to Shueli and Gaya, who were far too young to be included in this subdued world of romance. They hardly understood the meaningful glances across the room, or the haunting and disturbing songs, which hinted at a world of love and loss and parting. Every evening, Ammy, Papa, Shueli and Gaya would set off for a ramble across the Ridge, which had hidden horse-paths, and secret ways winding through the woods. There were many memories of the British here. Not just the well tended bridle paths, but the Flagstaff Memorial tower, still pervaded by an aura of terror. During the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, the rebel sepoys had held Delhi for nearly a month. “Imagine, molle” said Ammy, who loved history, and always added that little bit of extra ‘masala’ to her recountings. “Imagine what the British ladies of the Cantonment must have gone through. They dreaded the ‘natives’ as they called all Indians, but were totally unprepared for the fierce attack by the sepoys, and the Native Infantry. Meerut was set ablaze;  the entire Civil Lines, where the British lived;  and then the sepoys rode towards Delhi, determined to destroy every British person living there.” * “News never reached the British in Delhi till the morning of May 11th. One of the officers, and his wife, were eating melons for breakfast on that hot summer morning, listening to the sounds of vendors, the cry of  the ‘bistee’  (who carried water slung across his shoulder, in a large, leather bag), and the squawking of crows, or the distant sound of a cuckoo at the end of the garden. Outside sat the tailor (durzie) and his assistant, working on a gown for the Memsahib .. Suddenly, the darzie dropped the clothes, and rushed in, shouting: ‘Sahib, Sahib, the army is here.’ Only after the officer had rushed off to join his commanding officer at the barracks, did the news reach his wife, pacing the verandah in a frenzy of anxiety. She was told she should immediately head for the Flag Tower, with the children. There they found other terrified women, some in a state of collapse, who agitatedly told her that all was practically over. All English people in Meerut had been massacred and two thousand rebel Sepoys had taken Delhi. The British Resident and some other families had been slaughtered. ‘Oh, what shall we do/ There’s no hope for us,’ moaned one woman. But that night, crowded into a small buggy, the women -(two of them were pregnant), their children, fled on the Karnal Road to Ambala. But later, the First Officer’s wife, Harriet Tytler, had to return to Delhi, where in that burned out cantonment, she gave birth to a child!” Later, after the Mutiny had been put down at the Kashmere Gate battle, the British proudly hoisted their flag on the Flagstaff Tower. And there it would stay for the next ninety years! * (This account is from The MemSahibs by Pat Barr.)
                                         
Ammy, Papa, and the girls would sit for a while below the Tower, enjoying the cool evening breeze, and look at the graves of young English soldiers nearby. People said the Ridge was haunted by the ghosts of these dead soldiers. Papa would quote from Wilfred Owen, the British war-poet, who died young on a foreign battle-field:
“If I should die, think only this of me / That there’s some corner of a foreign field, / that is forever England.” The whisperings of young British soldiers seemed to fill the air of the Ridge. Hyenas wailed over the graves at night, howling to the moon. Peacocks joined in the nocturnal dirge, with their cat-like voices. When Shueli joined the new women’s college a few years later, she heard more such stories. One of the Hostel residents, Sita Chhabra said she’d left her notes behind in the Library, and went back to get it. “ There was only the light from the stairs, so I climbed in, and was about to grab my notes, when, guess what? I saw a young English boy standing there! I froze, yaar!”  “How did you know he was English?” the sceptical girls asked.  “Well how do you know, yaar, in the middle of the night? By the dim light from the stairs I could see he had very blue eyes and golden hair!”  All the girls burst out laughing, and teased poor Sita so much that she ended up agreeing she might have imagined it! But, a few months later, Shueli had reason to wonder if Sita hadn’t been right after all. Ammy and Papa were going to England for a month. As Shueli had some exams coming up, they arranged for her to stay in the Hostel while they were away. It was a lovely change for Shueli, who enjoyed the late-night “feasts” – toast made over the small electric stoves which the girls kept hidden in their rooms. With hot tea, and maybe a little sabzee saved from the dining room, or a bit of breakfast omelette saved up, it tasted divine. Shueli’s room had a wide verandah running along the front. On the other side, inside, there was a corridor, along which the other girls had rooms. That particular night, there was a full moon, and Shueli, lying awake in her bed, watched the moonlight flooding through the closed skylight above. She felt very much at peace…The College Chowkidaar could be heard making his nightly rounds. He carried a huge, thick stick, which he periodically banged on the floor, shouting in a threatening voice: “Khabardaar!” Drenched in the magic atmosphere created by the moonlight, listening to his cry, Shueli remembered how she and Shalini used to love the lines from Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga: “Only the cry of the nightwatchman: How long? How long?”  As she was musing on that, the skylight flew open with a loud sound. She didn’t feel a bit afraid. Perhaps the chowkidaar’s bangings had made the skylight fly open? And then, she had a strange sensation. She couldn’t move. Not at all. She tried to shake herself free, but something, or someone, very strong had pinned her down! She just lay there, totally motionless, unable to move an inch. It was like a nightmare – except she knew she was definitely wide awake. And she was not a bit scared. A little later, she drifted into a deep and dreamless sleep. By morning, she had forgotten the strange happening of the night before, and the incident might have faded from her memory, had there not been some strange coincidences. Brushing her teeth in the communal bathroom next morning, she heard Jyoti say: “Don’t know who was walking in the Corridor so late at night.. I was mugging away for today’s Maths Test. I heard someone come towards my room. I thought it was you, Shueli, and even called out to you. But there was no answer, and I heard the footsteps go away.”
“Well, guess what – something mahaa awful happened to me,” Rita burst in, “ I was also cramming hard, and then I got really fed up, like, you know. So I said, what the hell, yaar, I’m going to get some neend. I’d just about shut my eyes, when I got an awful shock! Something hit me hard on the hip, I was thrown clear out of the bed, I swear!”
Shueli suddenly remembered her eerie experience of the night before, and a chill ran down her spine. “How on earth could we all have had these weird experiences in the same night? We couldn’t all have imagined those things at the same time….!” Exams and other activities soon claimed their attention, and diverted them from the hysteria that might have spread like wild fire otherwise. Once or twice, Shueli saw a young English boy appear in her dreams.. He had blonde hair, and blue-grey eyes. He looked remarkably like the picture of the poet, Rupert Brooke which appeared in her father’s copy. He had found it in a second-hand bookshop in Oxford, along with many other precious and rare books. There was also a very old edition, in three volumes, of Addison’s Tatler – which was a kind of newspaper. The volumes had been rescued from a ship that had sunk, actually rescued from a library under the sea! But it was Rupert Brooke that she loved best. She had shown the precious old copy to Shalini, smuggling it out of the house one day, and they had sat up in the Church belfry, reading from it:  “Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill, - Day that I loved, day that I loved,/ The  night is here.”  Well, Shueli thought, if you had to be haunted by someone, who better than the handsome poet, Rupert Brooke, who had been killed in the First World War! Perhaps that, too, was a gift of the stars!
 
“Let’s go back through the University grounds” Papa would say. The University was the old Viceregal Lodge, where the Viceroys of India had lived, until the Capital was moved to New Delhi, which Lutyens had built. Shueli and Gaya could run about in the great verandahs of the old Viceregal Lodge, peer through the splendid old doors and dormer windows to the grand rooms with wood paneling and floors, where the University senate meetings were held, presided over by the authoritarian and paternalistic Vice-Chancellor, Sir Maurice Gwyer. These were also the very same rooms where Lord Louis Mountbatten proposed to his future wife, Edwina. How romantic, thought Shueli, and imagined Edwina dressed in a sylph-like white dress,
with a rose in her hand, as Lord Louis placed his hand upon his heart, and asked her to be his wife. A few years later, Shueli’s admiration of Edwina Mountbatten increased.. There was a big meeting at the College. Shamianas had been erected, and all the important guests were seated. Shueli, who had a precious autograph book in which were inscribed verses of such profundity as:    Roses are red, my love,  /Violets are blue. /Sugar is sweet, my love, /And so are you…..armed herself with the little book, which Aunt Rahel had given her for her last birthday, and slipped through, and approached one of the severe looking ladies sitting there, next to an English lady, who wore a colourful printed dress, and a lovely little hat. Shueli said shyly to the severe lady (who happened to be India’s Health Minister, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur,): “Please may I have your autograph?” The lady turned haughtily, and said, in an annoyed voice: “Go away at once. Don’t disturb us.” Shueli was shattered, almost in tears, until she felt an arm come round her, drawing her close. “Will you promise me something, little girl?” asked the English lady. Shy and tongue-tied, Shueli didn’t even look up, just murmuring “Yes.”  The English lady said “Promise me that when you grow up, you will do something for your country.” Shueli nodded fervently. The lady, with a dramatic flourish, signed across the page of the little pink autograph book:  EDWINA, COUNTESS MOUNTBATTEN OF BURMA!
Walking on the Ridge, Shueli and Gaya loved to gather the small red berries, which hung in tight profusion on the bushes, especially in winter. Often they would hear the harsh, mewing cry of the peacock, or catch a glimpse of it, as it spread out its gorgeous wings like a fan, and danced for the extraordinarily plain pea-hen! They would try smuggling some of the fallen peacock feathers into the house though superstitious Ammy warned them it was unlucky to keep them in the house. Papa teased them when they asked why the peacock was so beautiful, while the peahen was so plain and dowdy:  “In the bird and animal world it’s always the male who is beautiful, and attracts the female by displaying its splendour and strength!” This seemed strange to Shueli, because people always referred to the beauty of women, rather than of men. She did sometimes think, though, that men were actually the beautiful ones, and did their own secret dance to attract a woman. Weren’t some of the College boys, playing cricket, walking laughingly down the corridors, utterly beautiful? Sometimes, from their hidden shelter up on the roof, looking across the green lawns and gracious brick buildings, Shueli would find herself looking into one of the students’ rooms. The boy, with a towel wrapped around his middle, would move hastily away from the window, embarrassed by the fixed gaze of a little girl.
Little though she was, Shueli knew that one day, not too far off, she would “become a woman”, which seemed an exceedingly exciting and important destiny. Ammy had told her that “some blood” would come, and Shueli understood that this happening would usher in the important state of being adult, and being a Woman. One evening, she felt some odd sensations pass through her body. The whole family was out.. Shueli walked up and down the lawn, filled with self-importance, sure that the mystery of womanhood was at last upon her. This state of exaltation soon vanished, however, when absolutely nothing happened, and when Ammy got back home, she squashed Shueli further by saying: “Don’t be silly. Not yet. You have to wait a few more years.” When it did happen, it was most unexpected. At school, in the Athletics class, under the strict green-eyed supervision of Miss O’Rourke, forced to do high jumps over hideous hurdles named Horses. “Now come along Shueli. You can do that better. One. Two. Three. Ready, Steady, Start, GO!” And that was when Shueli “became a woman” at last. She didn’t know what was wrong, till she felt something sticky, and saw that her panty, under the divided skirt she wore for sports, was stained a bright red. “Oh God! Now I really have to be grown up,” thought Shueli, going home to tell Ammy the momentous news. Ammy deflated her, by telling her it was “quite normal” and that she would have this bleeding for three or four days every month. Shueli was utterly shocked: “But I thought you meant that it came once in your lifetime, as a sign of womanhood. You mean I have to go through all this every month, for the rest of my life?” Overwhelmed by the sudden realisation that being a woman was not just a glory, but quite a burden, Shueli sat and wept alone. Gaya didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, and tried to comfort her, which made Shueli say: “You won’t understand yet, Gaya. You’re too young. And you’re not yet a WOMAN!” This was the summer of the shooting stars, when Shueli began to wish for so many undefinable things.. Lightning passed through her body. Unexplained storms, like the dust storms outside, swept through her. After the long, hot summer, the parched earth would be shaken by monsoon winds, and the first drops of rain would fall. A cool fragrance of wet earth would seize them. The girls and the servant boy, Ram Singh, would run out shouting excitedly “Rain, Rain.”  Shueli wanted to lie on the grass and roll about, but Ammy forbade her with “What will the neighbours say?” But when they were a bit younger, the two sisters were allowed to go up to the terrace, and bathe in that fragrant, cool, first rain - with only their underslips on. If they thought no one was looking, they’d throw off those wretched undergarments, and dance naked, in the monsoon rain, screaming excitedly.
When Shueli wished upon the shooting stars, and asked for love and fame, she knew nothing, actually, about either of these, except as words she’d come across here and there. As when Ammy found out that she was reading Forever Amber in the bathroom! Papa was in charge of the College Library, and interesting books of all kinds passed regularly through their house. That’s how Shueli managed to get hold of the original Arabian Nights, and pored, in secrecy, over the erotic stories. Never before had she heard of such things. Boys and girls who caressed one another so thoroughly, and melted into one another - this was spine-tingling stuff, even though devoured in haste, for fear of discovery! Shueli’s insights into the hidden, magical world of men and women, was heightened considerably by these forays into forbidden books. Anyway, Papa and Ammy soon found out what Shueli was up to, and the books were hastily returned to the Library. Of course, they read alot of different kinds of books. The sisters spent long, magic hours on the roofs of the college, reading for hours on end - Les Miserables, Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare was a favourite, Pilgrim’s Progress, Little Women was the one American classic they read till it was almost a part of their lives. How they loved Marmee and Joe and all the four sisters. Joe’s literary ambitions especially inspired Shueli. Then there was The Old Curiosity Shop, The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan and Wendy, David Copperfield, Pride and Prejudice - they loved them all, read and reread them. The somnolent cooing of the pigeons on the roof, the chatter of the occasional parrot on the spreading branches of the trees surrounding them, and the benevolent buzz of the huge bees, made the long days magic they would treasure for ever. Not for a moment could Shueli envisage the storms and dark skies that loomed in her future. It was only through her books that Shueli gathered there was a very dark side to life. The first time she read a  really sad book was Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. She realised how cruel and capricious fate could be - how life defeated, humiliated and broke so many people - and she sat and wept over the book.  Shueli and Gaya loved sad and dramatic stories, -unlike ‘the little boy who didn’t like sad stories’ - of later years.   Kartik, Shueli’s young son, was just the opposite. Every time she wanted to tell him a sad story - especially the one beginning  Once upon a Time, where the sea was as blue as the bluest cornflower, there lived a little mermaid - would cover his ears with his hannds and say ‘No, don’t - don’t. I don’t WANT to hear any sad stories. I wont hear them . Tell me happy ones.’ But sad stories and happy ones always get mixed up, Shueli tells him. Sad-happy. Isn’t that LIFE?  ‘No’ he would reply, determined in his four year old wisdom -‘I can’t bear sad stories.’ But then, if you didn’t bear the sadness, wouldn’t it creep out on you some day, and destroy you utterly. Wouldn’t it be better to make friends with sadness, and let it be a part of your life, so that it wouldn’t shock you when it appeared as a stranger one day at your door? Make sadness a familiar, don’t close your door on grief, but laugh - laugh when you can, fully and with deep breaths. Kartik’s eyes would crinkle up so delightfully when he laughed. Joy was his way of being, and he always kept sadness at bay.
    Papa’s study was a treasure house of books. Shueli loved the old Victorian rotating book shelf, and the musty, timeless smell of the books.. Here she found a blue leather bound book, with gold lettering, one of the prizes Papa had won for his Essay on Thomas Hardy.. The title was strange, and intrigued Shueli:   Jude, the Obscure. Why was he obscure? Well, he was only an unknown lad from a small village. But he had a dream. He yearned, with all his heart and soul, to reach some day, the ‘city of dreaming spires’ - the ancient University town of Oxford. It represented all the wisdom, knowledge and grace, so beyond his reach, that he most ardently longed for. Soon Jude’s dream city became Shueli’s. With her  eyes smarting, she would creep into the study, even in the dark, to read and reread that book. Beyond all beauty of imagining, the dreaming spires, the ancient city, beckoned to her. Those ‘dreaming spires’, she was sure, were like filigree points of light, many faceted, like the shooting stars that so magically enlivened the night sky over Delhi.


[1]* (From Pat Barr: The MemSahibs.)
 

Novel
Ted Morrissey

Previous Chapters
                           
                                                      Letter 4 – Part 2
                                                             Nebo
​
I am not retracting my earlier judgement that Robin is harmless toward the children and me. Not at all, my dear! But I have been worried, I realized, that Robin may be harmful to himself. I did not want to believe it so I didn’t dare utter it, even to myself, not fully anyway. It was a thought which loitered about a dark corner of my mind, and I had been doing all that I could to prevent its stepping into the light; or, as if a player in the wings, now in full view of the anticipating audience.
In some ways it was a relief to acknowledge the thought, if only to myself. However, the relief of that idea instantly surrendered to a disquieting one: who were Rev Grayling’s informants? I recalled the agents who Mrs Shelley said watched her home to apprehend her debt-burdened husband, or at least to apprehend a clue regarding his whereabouts. Could similar agents be spying on hour home? Taking note of Robin’s comings and goings? Watching the children as they play in the alley? Recording my visits to Mr Smythe and Mrs Shelley?
Of course not. It was a nonsensical notion, born of my disturbing dialogue with old Rev Grayling.
As exasperating and unsettling as his line of inquiry was, after a time I discovered that beneath my irritation was a current of relief that he had not broached the subject of my truancy from services. There is a piece of me, buried well deep, which feels a spasm of guilt at not taking the children to church, a product of my own upbringing planted by my father and watered and fertilized by the Church itself; but instantly I recalled the charade of it all: of a benevolent, paternal God who watches over His flock, especially His little children, and Whose stern guidance helps us to avoid falling into the Pit of Eternal Flames. He certainly did not bestow His benevolence upon our Maurice; nor for that matter, it seems, half the children of London; nor their shattered, bereaved parents left to carry on in their little ones’ constant and conspicuous absence.
I’m sorry, my dear—I know . . . I know . . . I mustn’t go on with this bitter and spiteful blasphemy. But where may I give voice to it other than here, in these private pages intended only for my husband, who already knows the mind and shattered heart of his wife? For surely we know that at which we can easily guess, as one knows the forever sun blazes in the heavens even when it is fully obscured behind a dense curtain of clouds (as it is today). Its light filters through, diffused and dulled but evidence of the star’s distant ferocity nevertheless.
Listen to me, waxing philosophic, poetic even. Perhaps it is the influence of Mr Shelley’s book, which I had some opportunity to peruse prior to Rev Grayling’s visit. The poet’s voice and words, in all their eloquent impact, give mine agency, a permission of sorts to flower forth. Bold and embittered.
No doubt I have flowered forth quite enough—a veritable jungle of philosophic flora—and I shall cease, especially since I must see to the children and the progress of their lessons. Due to Felix’s infatuation with the book of German folk stories, for his geography lesson I charged him with trying his hand at map-making by drawing a likeness of Deutschland. One of Uncle’s books has a map of central Europe as its end-papers. Though probably somewhat out-of-date, it served reasonably well as Felix’s model. I shall report as to the success (or not) of his cartographical efforts.
I woke this morning realizing that the thought of Rev Grayling’s informants had been weighing upon my mind. Also: Where had Robin been on his rambles that he should encounter those who report to the Reverend? For the past twenty-four hours he has been keeping to his little room like a monk to his cell. Mrs O delivered him tea twice yesterday, without his requesting it, or for that matter passing any sort of word to any of this house’s inhabitants. She said both times he was lying abed, though her sense was that he wasn’t sleeping. When she took him the second pot of tea, the first was empty, so at least he took some nourishment. The same was true of his other teapot when she retrieved it this morning, she said. At that time Robin did appear fast asleep. No doubt his body needs an excess of repose to fully recover. His body and his spirit. Mrs O is determined that he should consume something more than tea, however. She took him up a bit of boiled brisket from yesterday’s dinner and a poached egg, along with a pair of biscuits with her currant jam.
As I have been writing, my dear, the morning post arrived and there is a letter for Robin from the Russian, Mr Andropov (his hand is distinct—you know what I mean). I can only imagine that it is an invitation to accompany him on another excursion in the city. It occurs to me that perhaps the most expedient way to discover Rev Grayling’s informants would be to follow Robin and Mr A to see who may be spying them. Even as I write these words I know the foolishness of the proposal—yet I find the idea of it intriguing. To be at once out in the world and yet also apart from it—at least as far as Robin would be concerned. In his mind his sister would be safely stowed at home (working at her stitches or tending to the children or, most likely, writing a letter to her husband!) but at the same time I would be occupying his world, at least the edges of it: one mustn’t be too close if one hopes to observe the observers, that is, Rev G’s ‘good Christians,’ his eyes and ears.
I shall make preparations by placing my wrap and hat and shoes in the washroom, where they will be unnoticed but quickly accessible whenever Robin departs for his appointment with Mr A. I must acknowledge that I feel the exhilaration of adventure, the thrill of subterfuge, yet also the guilt of deception and the naggings of common sense. Nevertheless I am resolved to follow Robin when he exits the house. I shall leave off for now to put my plan into place.

Ted Morrissey is the author of four books of fiction as well as two books of scholarship. His works of fiction include the novels An Untimely Frost and Men of Winter, and the novella Weeping with an Ancient God, which was named a Best Book of 2015 by Chicago Book Review. His stories, essays and reviews have appeared in more than forty publications. He teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Lindenwood University. He lives near Springfield, Illinois, where he and his wife Melissa, an educator and children’s author, direct Twelve Winters ​​​Press. ​

Review
Jose Varghese

​If Alfred Hitchcock were still alive and challenged to outdo his film noir oeuvre with a new work that’s more menacing than ever, he would have been tempted to adapt Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Nothing (Faber&Faber, 2017). Its narration could be the toughest on any medium, and could have produced great result in the one Hitchcock worked on. It’s from the point of view of a man literally trapped in his room, his mobility restricted to crawling, at best, from his bed to a wheelchair and back. Though his body disintegrates steadily, his perceptions are not as restricted as you might think. Adverse physical circumstances fail to conquer this alpha male’s indomitable artistic will that takes on a vengeful route to reclaim his love.
Rear Window (1954) had already given Hitchcock all the luxury of dealing with voyeurism, but The Nothing would have given him more to explore in a different manner. The short novel is as much about the life seen through the window/mirror/lens frames as it is about your own eyes - where they belong, where their perceptions reach, and what exactly they look for, and get.
The story takes place between two points of grave realization that are well contained in the remarkable first and last sentences. The first refers to the protagonist Waldo’s concern for the noises in his own house at night that indicate the loss of what he considers the most precious achievement of his life, the love his wife has/d for him,
“One night, when I am old, sick, right out of semen, and don't need things to get any worse, I hear the noises again.
I am sure they are making love in Zenab's bedroom which is next to mine.”
And the last is about what many of us would fight for life to stay away from,
“… Dying's not so bad. You should try it sometime.”
Waldo is a film-maker who had tasted all the success one could dream of. It just turns out that his thoughts in this particular phase favours something else over the artistic talent he is blessed with and praised for:
“If you've once been attractive, desirable and charismatic, with a good body, you never forget it. Intelligence and effort can be no compensation for ugliness. Beauty is the only thing, it can't be bought, and the beautiful are the truly entitled.”
He is burdened by the presence of Eddie, the ambitious/pretentious younger man in the life of his even younger wife Zenab, fondly called Zee. Zenab is burdened by the prospect of spending the good years of her life bedsitting for her slow-dying husband who is content that his tongue can still move a bit and that could be a contribution to their marital bliss. And Eddie is burdened by life in general that he has no other way of getting around it than being a con man, pretending a love affair with Zenab and doing a film project on Waldo’s works in retrospect all the while.          
​You might notice that this has all the ingredients for not just a tightly woven film noir narration but also a sizzling Hanif Kureishi plot inhabited by edgy characters who deviate into self-deprecating playfulness and epiphanic bouts of depression at every turn.
What works the best in the novel is Waldo’s restricted point of view. The readers are kept in the dark on a few pieces of information that Waldo is aware of, but there is the convincing focus on his emotional turmoil than the mastermind that keeps ticking behind that façade. A careful reader might appreciate how this saves the novel from cheap twists, though those who look for something profound, in physical terms, to happen in the end might be a bit disappointed. The revenge is more symbolic in nature, addressing a set of moral concerns that are seemingly lacking in Waldo’s thought process. It might be a hard task to find compassion or a sense of justice in the selfish, bitter, possessive mind of Waldo, but it’s worth the trouble if you could.
Whenever Kureishi gets a work published, the whole world seems worried more about what the author has ‘taken’ out of his real life than what he has worked so hard to ‘create’. This seems to be the norm especially after Intimacy (Faber&Faber, 1998), for obvious reasons. For those who are still interested in all that, The Nothing has everything. Eddie the con man can be the real one who stole the author’s life savings, and Waldo could be  a self-projection of the author himself having a revenge in a world of imagination. But Kureishi has already addressed this issue in his thoughtful long essay published as Theft: My Con Man  (Faber&Faber, 2014) and also included in Love+Hate  (Faber&Faber, 2015). Perhaps it would be better to look more at the development of ideas that connect Kureishi’s body of work than the real incidents that are connected to the books. After all, it’s real life experiences that are often the inspiration/trigger for all works of art and literature and hadn’t it been our concern all these years to see how life and art inspire each other?
The extra angle of the ambivalent relationship between Waldo and Eddie in The Nothing could be perceived as an extension of what is dealt with in Theft: My Con Man. There could be an uncanny resemblance between the duo and the V.S Naipaul-like character Mamoon and his biographer Harry of The Last Word (Faber&Faber,2014) as well. Despite the role reversals and power shifts among the characters, all of them could belong to the same fictional realm of Kureishi. “Self-plagiarism is style”, says Hitchcock.
A recent work that explored an even more claustrophobic narrative sphere was Ian McEwan’s Nutshell (Jonathan Cape, 2016). A reworking of Hamlet with a foetus as the protagonist, it achieved a lot in exploring the Oedipal angst to a range even higher than Shakespeare could have consciously thought of. Add to it the Freudian precepts that could perhaps be extended to the prenatal stage. Nutshell had an intriguing plot set in contemporary London as well. However, McEwan had to compromise a lot on the linguistic expressiveness of the narrative from a foetus’s perception, demanding a suspension of disbelief in most parts. The Nothing has no such challenge, as it is from an adult perspective that could afford clean sentences that sparkle. The idea of Waldo going beyond his restricted real perceptions with the help of the camera in his hand, mirrors, ipad, and candid cameras contributes a lot to the plausibility of the plot.
The Nothing might not end up being a remarkably popular single work as The Buddha of Suburbia (1993), but it forms an integral part of Kureishi’s latter set of significant works that speak a lot to us if they are taken together. They might even help us make some sense of the changing world, and the moral chaos that are already upon us. In his recent BBC Newsnight discussion with Stephen Smith, Kureishi said, “One of the things I’ve noticed that has happened in the culture recently is that the criminals are not really any more on the margins. The criminality has moved, as it works at the centre.”
​Go grab The Nothing if a sex-obsessed old man as a protagonist, sandwiched between his irresistible wife and a con man, doesn’t offend you as much as this criminality at the centre.

​Jose Varghese is a bilingual writer/editor/translator from India. He is the founder and chief editor of Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts. He has been working as the sole short fiction editor and curator for the magazine from early 2013, choosing hundreds of stories from a staggering amount of submissions. He is the author of the books Silver Painted Gandhi and Other Poems (2008) and "Silent Woman and Other Stories (forthcoming). His poems and short stories have appeared in journals/anthologies like The Salt Anthology of New Writing 2013, Unthology 5, The River Muse, Chandrabhaga, Kavya Bharati, Postcolonial Text , Dusun and Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis. ​

He is a contributing writer for Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel and is in the advisory board of Mascara Literary Review. He was the winner of The River Muse 2013 Spring Poetry Contest, a runner up in the Salt Flash Fiction Prize 2013, and a second prize winner in the Wordweavers Flash Fiction Prize 2012. He was shortlisted in Hourglass Short Story Contest and was commended in Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize 2014. He has done research in Post-Colonial Fiction and is currently working on his first novel. He writes for Thresholds: The International Short Story Forum, Chichester University, UK and was a participating writer at Hyderabad Literary Festival 2012 and the 2014 Vienna International Conference on the Short Story in English.