When home becomes the scattered limbs of your mother’s body, the screams of your sister as savages rip her apart and missiles raining fire on the streets, you will run. Feet slapping against rubble, glass, sand and the fires of hell itself. You will run and run until you’re breathless and your knees give way and then you will crawl because somewhere deep down you know home is more than just the rattle of machine guns going off instead of a wedding march.

It is my right

to love as she wants it,

to get ripped by desire

when her necklace scatters

the tears of pearls.

It is a riot,

and it is my right

to love and die

the way she wants it.

Satish’s habit of reading the newspaper early in the morning was gone a long time ago. He had that urge when he had to dress up and go on duty, sitting in front of the wheel and narrating to his boss in a nutshell the fresh news of the day within two minutes. It could be less but never more. But sometimes it happened that his boss wanted to hear the news in an elaborate manner and it took Satish fifteen minutes to narrate the news. But that was rare because the front page news was on politics, and the last page sports. Entertainment? What was that? When Amithabh Bachchan was injured on the set of Coolie and was fighting for his life in the hospital, Satish used to read at least two newspapers to know how he was.

I live in a country rife with systemic inequality.

These days, my Facebook feed is flooded by a certain share, friends urging friends to sign a petition: Allow Nepali citizenship to be conferred by the mother or father in the new constitution. The petition stares at me every day from my laptop screen. Women aren't granted this legal right, I explain to my Spanish flatmate, who is a traveler passing through Nepal.

تمام شعر من موج نگاهت
ترا من دوست دارم بی نهایت
اگر روزی نباشی در کنارم
جهان گردد برایم چون قیامت

Apart from English, I speak Nepali and Hindi. Nepali is my mother tongue and the official language of my country Nepal. Nepali is spoken and understood well throughout Nepal. It is also considered to be one of the official languages of India as it is widely spoken in Eastern parts of India and especially in Darjeeling, Sikkim and Assam. The script of Nepali is Devnagari and in fact, even Hindi, follows the same script and many words are common to both languages.

A poem written inspired by the Silk Princess, a Chinese wood panel painting from the 7th or 8th century. As the BBC's "A History of the World" describes the artifact: 

According to this legend, a Chinese princess smuggled the secret of how to make silk out of China and into the country of her new husband, the king of Khotan. As she was a princess the border guards did not dare search her. In this painting her elaborate headdress conceals the cocoons of the silk moth and the seeds of the mulberry tree.

You are an escort in my head-dress

which everyone claims beautiful;

I came out with Gulab’s son. We waited near the Bibi Mahood Mausoleum. Cars were all around us. The police and army personnel were standing on both sides of the road too. Opposite the mausoleum, an American guard was looking down from a high concrete bunker, keeping an eye on the road.

My heart was throbbing with fear. I was afraid that the guard would suspect me. But Gulab’s son reassured me that no one would recognize me. Like me, many others were also roaming around with wireless sets in their hands.

My hands are two little antennas
which receive remote waves
distill and disseminate messages
generated and circulated by the brain.

My heart pounds and heaves
releases blood to brain and body
like a raja of the east
the brain commands.

And like the raja’s subjugated subjects
the body concedes
and the hands execute
though oft times bruised they are.

My heart’s the maker
a legislature
formulating the fundamentals
hoping for honest obeisance.

My mind’s the decipher
a judiciary
making analytic and indifferent decisions
on fair and the fallacious.

Unlike in Shakespeare’s verse,

I felt the summer day.

The sun burned

my nocturnal wings

and the wind tossed me away.

My steps on the milky shore,

my feathers in the sky

drawing a Picasso painting,

asking

“What? Who cares?

And why?”

When we look back at Turkish women’s poetry of the Ottoman period, we also read an historical process. In Ottoman times, as it is known, women were not in the social arena at all. They could not be educated in Islamic schools (medrese). So writing was a daring act and some Ottoman women took this chance for themselves and for later generations of women.

Urdu, a language thousands around the subcontinent speak, a language that is my mother language, a language which encompasses a culture, a cosmos of its own. Hidden beneath its charisma is a rich history, defined by poets, revolutionaries, novelists, scholars and spiritualists. It is defined by its decorum and propriety, a language of the elites of South Asia. Urdu is history, is my past, my present and my future. It runs in my veins and clogs my brain. It defines who I am, my identity and I can never be more proud of it.

When the distance to stillness

becomes a ticket for the passenger

and there is no other trip,

the port of transfiguration

is caught in

desertification.

Sound waves

seduce the dreams

and offer the holiday bread

and the flavor of new cotton

while awaiting the holy Eid

On the banks of silence

on the side of absence.

Nepal has a rich multi-lingual literary history dating back to the Malla Dynasty in the 12th century. The Malla kings supported literature in Nepal Bhasa (the language of the Newar community) and the Maithili language. Literature was orally produced, written and enacted through dance-dramas and songs. Nepali language literature came into prominence with the establishment of the Shah Dynasty in the 18th century.

Repeating of a sentence is repeating of life
Do not be silent!
Because by silence,
Life means repeating to nothing…
A border between existence and none existence,
A shadow among life and death_
A question "To Be or Not To Be?"
Empty seconds,
Lonely moments,
Stop hours…
Forever you'll see…
Hey you Immortal!
I have always experienced my existence in none existence,
Please do not destroy me!
Because by your existence the word "destroy"
Is forever destroyed...
Besides you, life is lovely;
Magnificent,
Just like a dream…
I won't feel hurt,
Neither I will be frozen…

My diwali thali has pink

bougainvillea petals, fallen

banyan leaves, tiny cracked twigs,

gathered from this bend

in your road, once 

an entire country to me.

(for JNU)

When I was a child and travelled around the island with my parents, I would see a sign board dotted along the roads with the slogan: Anytime is Tea time put up by the Ceylon Tourist Board. Invariably every journey would include a stop for tea at a wayside tea shop. That is a tradition that remains with us still and whenever we travel between cities and towns, a tea break has become essential. It is a chance, to stretch your legs, have a picnic, admire the scenery, take a break from driving along treacherous Sri Lankan roads, and an opportunity to chat with your fellow travellers and share your travel tips.

میروم با اشک و آه و ناله ها
میطپم من از هجوم درد ها
آخر اینجا هم برایم جا نبود...
هیچکس صادق به مثل ما نبود
در پس هر چهره ای بود چهره ها
هیچکس چون من نبود در هیچ جا

آهای! آدمک های ظاهر نما!
خسته ام از قوم و خویش و از شما!

Iowa !
I am beside you
On the rim of your heart.
Hear the cry of my soul. 
I only ask you
Do not hurt me
Let me be the guest of your heart.
I am not born in your prairies
I do not whisper that I am your child
               Heartbeat...
               Trembling voice...
Let me enjoy your sky .
Let me be part of your beauty.
Merge with the singing of your birds.
I do not whisper that I am your child.
Let me be the guest of your heart.

I am a girl from  a country in the heart of Asia. My family named me Farkhonda, which means beatific and auspicious. I am the oldest child; 12 years ago I was sent to school to learn to read and write. I read books and step by step started to practice writing.  I chose to write stories. Their narrative style was one of the reasons behind my interest in fiction: I enjoyed writing about different characters and what I imagined about them. After getting some of them published in a few Afghani magazines, I realized that critics and readers alike believe my fiction mostly focuses on women. Maybe this is natural, since I am a woman living in a country that has experienced decades of war and setbacks for women.  

At dusk, after a light shower, the bonsais tremble in the breeze. When night deepens with the hissing rain, their tiny leaves and branches shake feverishly as if in a storm. From the deep recesses of their pygmy bodies cracklings could be heard, as though the plants were stretching their limbs. Atiq watches as the tiny plants become enormous in size, grow in height, shoot up four-five stories to almost touch the sky. At such times a greenish aura oozes from their thick stems, their bulbous leaves and branches – and gushes forth in waves toward Atiq. His sleep gone, Atiq gropes for the torch under his pillow.

           These days he has grown used to it; no longer thinks it a nightmare. He knows what the bonsais are capable of.  

In bed because of the flu since the past few days, I am watching the movie Wild to kill time. My wife is readying to go out to meet her friend, and is asking for the laptop from another corner of the room, where she is standing and wiping her face on a cloth towel. It is noontime of a very ordinary day – and it is precisely at this unremarkable time when an earthquake chooses to strike. Over the past several years, we are used to a minor tremor here, a slight shake there. But this, finally, turns out to be the devastating earthquake that we in Kathmandu, which is on the list of cities most vulnerable to seismic risk, had been long dreading.

The night lasts longer than life
Briefer than ice. When everything deforms and evaporates in the dark
Meticulous words come only from the stars
We are dim and pale like a gray rock.

Leaning over the black spring water
You’d taste its blade, licking its
Icy chill reflection of the shadow behind you
Blade is a kind of deprivation
A kind of silence as well
Black spring water beyond comprehension
Endless repetitive histories
Trivial desires that get lost

Never could I clearly explain
Black is definitely a liquid
Bringing all sounds under its wings
All sounds have a reverse
To which you listen with the utmost respect
Only to approach that silence of horror

I sat on a big rock. We were hiking for about an hour.

“My feet ache, I won’t walk another step.” My sister was only one year younger than me and she always climbed father’s shoulders, instead of walking.

“Last year you told me I was old enough to walk by myself. She is the same age now. Why doesn’t she walk?” My eyes filled up with tears against my will.

Father put my sister down and sat before me so that I could climb his shoulder off the stone.

World was shinier here. Leaves touched my face and I showed my tongue to my sister who was walking down there. Looking up, she stumbled over a muddy area and cried for her dirty sticky shoes.

like seeds of ivory.

O! great Tin Hinan,

your brave knight

lost his way among

the salt caravans.

The Imazighen are free

No more.

is changing the spring

I desire,

my vinegary dreams,

and the songs that love me

into a one-night affair.

I come from a land where mountains stand as our guards, where clouds float around our heads as a symbol for thoughts, where it rains more than the sun shines, where you’ll see more monasteries than shopping malls, where people are quiet, calm and subtle about their opinions.The Earth is used as material for beliefs, and these beliefs, stitched into myths and these myths are sold for literature and culture, in return for respect. I come from Sikkim, the land of the Himalyas.

‘You could write a story about this,’ she said.

A long hallway stretched for dozens of meters. Darkness didn’t let the signs on numerous doors be read, didn’t let the dust on the bookshelves be distinctly seen. Lonely footsteps echoed in the labyrinth of abandoned knowledge, as he and she were the first to enter it in many days, months and years. The cruel heat of summer noon couldn’t touch them through countless intersections of walls and stacks of novels written on brown paper.

Their breath slowed down, tracks of sweat drops dried on their foreheads.

English writing in India is only a little over a hundred years old. It has been shaped by the cross-currents of history, cultures, mythology and modernism. Traders, travellers, dreamers and aggressors came, quietly and peacefully, or with violence and destruction. From the 10th century onwards, the foreign presence imprinted itself strongly on Indian society. Along with our ancient religions, scriptures and mythology it imbued our Art with a tapestry and sheen which is sometimes referrred to as exotic.

When I was nine years old, I read a random short novel by Russian writer Ivan Turgenev called “Notes of the Hunter.” I wanted to read any interesting story in the style of action, or maybe horror films, but I left dangerously confused because the story was not about hunting. It was my first reaction to literature. I was very small, but I understood that literature is not simply funny stories, is a puzzle, a secret, a joke that I was waiting for.

Freemasons of all alignments 
recognize their ilk 
without semaphores.
Need autographs its accueil
signing the other 
to club of consensus. 
Like cygnets 
with unuttered woops 
we seek our way.

http://www.thesquawkback.com/2016/07/sethi.html#more 

At the time of my birth, my small town Kalyan, did not have a library.

It had no road rage, few beggars, one defunct traffic signal at Murbad Road,

and fewer cars.

Horizontal buildings silhouetting the sun in shanties, chawls and cottages

Its outline gianted and dwarfed

with self-sustaining jobs of: kiranawalas, primary school teachers, factory workers, dentists,

general practitioners, cycle repair shops,

and a small bank (let’s not forget) on Rambaugh lane.

It was tone deaf to career ladders, six sigma, hierarchies,

MNCs, pecking orders.

Filled with pavwallas, mohmeddans, hindus, bavas,

north Indians, south Indians, non-catholics,

“We are all migrants… Writers are migrants.” This is how the Scottish writer Alison Louise Kennedy ended her opening remarks at the seventh annual European Literature Days Festival in Spitz, Austria. These words were a primary focus of discussion throughout the festival. There were discussions about the identity of literature and migrant writing in Europe, especially in its relationship to writers’ new locations.

What is the meaning of the identikits?

Why can’t I

have a simple answer

for a simple question?

What is the difference between

white and black?

O the place

where God

like a ripe fruit

fell on the ground

and crashed!

let's go

by rolling up our skin

like a silk cloth

           from the covered bazaar of our pain

Who knows that what is sad?
What is doleful and so flat?
Each one seen it, each heart suffered
Even flowers of desert, became hopeless of that.
Fighting, Fighting! You are for what?
Put the wrinkle on the foreheads; why you make humans sad?
What is your aim in whole life?
When you destroy a life, don’t you cry for that?
Would you please say that; why are you so cruel?
Why you always break hearts,
Is it your rule?
Fighting, Fighting! What do you earn?
By seeing your immoderate and credit less, what love birds will learn?
What is in you, are you heartless?
When you run dews, call it kindness?
Why you here but seem there?
Why when you came near, all existence have fear?

Alpenglow on your cheeks constellate me


to our cosmos, quickening in this heliolater


of calentures that never convalesced. Lost


in its energy, I continue bird-dogging protocols


for cushioning my passage here. It’s said:

breathing is for one’s behoof. Engird this


without forethought, and obliterate your

embroidering of my heart with thread of tendresse.

Grammar has no third choice, like guilt. 

Postcolonial Text, Vol 11, No 2 (2016) 

Your imperfections play up my perfectness. It is a superb
feeling. Short-lived? How long does hooch last?

Everyone I love faces the might of force majeure.
Do I harken them due to my heart?

If folks express their joy, let it not illude you. In these
flashes reside myriad half-truths and some falsehoods.

Your inadequacies boost me to believe in the invincibility 
of my bluster: surety from frostbites in this slalom.

Originally appears in Squawk Back, issue 159 July 6 2016

I roll up.

I smoke the pulse of the minute.

I inject my hand

with heroin of love.

No one can shut me up.

My flying poems

hide themselves

in the pack of hearts,

seeding their poppy seed

in their cells

to grow like my words do,

Drunk and crazy.

For the red leaf
I once plucked and then forgot
I will pull off this flower.
For the love trampled
Coming from that vulnerable leaf
Which I remember now and then,-
I will pull off this flower.
These flowers I’ll call mistakes of my youth.
And I’ll weep as I send them off with the wind.

Translated by Sh.Tsog

Hi, I'm going to Starbucks, can you meet me there?
Which one?
The one on the beach, Yusuf is invited to a party nearby and I'll kill the time at Starbucks until he is done.
Where exactly?

Where exactly, I ask the driver.
At the end of Sari street.
Near Pizza Hut, yes, I know where you mean. Ok, I can. It's nearby, the driver can drop me and then go back to pick up Omar from school.

I arrived there before she did. I watched her get out of the car and went towards the stairs before she came up. I said, you can order because I already did when I arrived.

Rahoul Gonsalves 

The uncertainty of life annoys me. I mean, wouldn’t it be awesome to have all your life’s trajectory set, before coming of age? You could make a conscientious decision of what you want to do in life and then just do it. Imagine the comfort of just taking one direction, without “opportunities” popping up and derailing you from the path you’ve painstakingly taken.

                                                             If a river became road,
                                                                    I may forget you
                                                          Or my world was destroyed_
                                                                      I may forget you
                                                            You have forgotten me easily;
                                                                        Well, I do agree,
                                                              When the tears became rainy_
                                                                         I may forget you

                In a far off land, there was a king named Madhukar. He had seven brothers. All of them used to go on hunting always. As they set off for hunting, they used to come to a resting place (chautari) near the jungle, sat and rested there for a while before they decided who would to go to which direction of the jungle for a hunt. They also decided that he who returns from hunting earlier would leave, as an indication of his return from the hunt, a green leafy branch of a tree on the resting platform at the crossroad before returning home. They decided to do this to make sure that no one is left in the jungle.

I didn’t want to reach this state, on my back with limbs stretched out.

Not that it was so great out there, but to be like something from a museum zoology exhibit wasn’t in my plans.

Hey there, come and see from close up “The Aerobic Compostization Processes.”

I inhabit a mucous world. Forget aboutParadise.

The animal world is creeping and crawling all over me: red worms, black worms, roly polies, slugs, maggots.

Bone. That’s all I’m asking for. Two hundred osteoporosis pills may do the trick.

I am concentrating on one strong and solid desire: to repel, to destroy and finally rid myself of all the creepy crawlies.

SHE loved him you see and so she thought it was honesty that would matter in the end.
So when she said, “You can’t handle the truth,” she was unprepared for what happened next.
He dragged her by the hair, dragged her like a rag doll through the dark corridor lined with paintings and mould into the room at the end of the hall. It was dark and dank inside compared to the light in the verandah and the sound of singing voices. The smell of the jacaranda trees and the sight of the blooming white frangipani allowed her to think of all that was possible.
It is possible that he will accept this, she thought. All is possible. All I need is to speak the truth.

There was a back alley from 1st street to 6th street of Jongno, called Pimat-Gol in Seoul, Korea. It has been there since Yi dynasty around 1390ies. The people could avoid the dashing horses of the gentlemen in the main street and walked through the back alley. Pimat means to avoid the horses and Gol means the alley in Korean language. In the Pimat- Gol there were many shops and small restaurants that those small people used to visit and enjoy the food and leisure time. This alley was made by the planner of Seoul, Jeong Do-jeon when Yi dynasty was founded to protect the grassroots. In the era of tyranny student demonstrators crying for democracy and freedom also sneak into the alley to avoid the police.

Abstract

Burrowed under her duvet, snuggling close to the pillow on her right she was in that state where she was half asleep but half awake. Where everything was blurry and it felt like she was in a dream. Lately, without him, things were hazy.

The house, dead quiet, everybody tucked into beds. The vibration of the phone on her side board ringed through the room. The phone stopped ringing and she slipped into oblivion.

A pulse lapsed and the quivering of the table started again. Groaning she smacked her hand all over the table trying to locate her phone. Her hand hit the metal case and she squinted at the screen in the dark. Unknown number. God! Whimpering she swore if it was a prank call she would strangle the person on the other side.

Between the predisposition to the Absolute, and the red walls of the labyrinth, the paths that lead to the meaning vary. And, whether the letter is a sword, a candlestick, or a wall-- the truth is farther than being reached by normal or exceptional call. Today I sleep, beside me an old book; I don't think much of curves that can roll down infinitely, or of question chains, nor the absolute. I lie on the edge of the bed, looking down, to the abyss that can be a real scene--waiting death more calmly: the point where the line comes upon the point, the wish comes upon the riddle, and the meaning comes upon the inattention--Behind each letter.

[Concept definition: Religion will hereby be used to refer to Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, while writing refers to creative writing.]

“Catholics should consider boycotting the film "The Da Vinci Code" to let the world know the story offends and defames the church. If the kind of ‘slander, offenses and errors’ contained in Dan Brown's best-selling book and the film based on it had been written about the Quran or the Shoah (the Holocaust), they rightly would have provoked a worldwide uprising." These words, spoken by Archbishop Angelo Amato, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to the Catholic communications directors on April 28, 2008, illustrate the deep contemporary conflict between writing and religion.

Smoke disperses
Night has fallen
Violet Alice
Holds out two hands from the black velvet
Pastoral is getting old-fashioned
We’re tied up by utterances
Growing more clueless day by day
How to make ourselves transparent you said
There is one whole world out there yet we
Turn around to face the inside

Cat sneaking along the vertical edge
Rose of pain withers away day by day
Just a puff like this will do?
When we’re still searching for the right word
Like shaving our sideburns clean with a razor
Hoping in vain not to be bothered

I grew up in a house which had books in every room. We read everything we could lay our hands on. From well thumbed, back copies of my uncle’s Readers Digests to my father’s leather bound tomes of Anna Karenina, and A Tale of Two Cities. As little children our personal library consisted of all the Enid Blytons, Daphne Du Mauriers, and Rumer and Jon Goddens. In my father’s library no book was denied to us and long before we understood them, we had looked at Virgil’s Aeneid, the Mahabharata, the works of Aldous Huxley and even the original Arabian Nights.

Still you can see the blue under the nose
below Dia de los Muertos eye cavities,
glassy shine long splintered, littering
the dressing room to the afterlife
like the left-behind glitter
of a Bollywood star.
Though piled as if in a mass grave
the huddled shells seem content to lie close
to those alongside whom they served,
blaring and jostling along the same potholed roads,
enduring the same smears
of left-behind bubble-gum,
the indelicacies spewed
when the ride was rough.
Stripped now of muscle, stripped
of the power and strain of constant movement
they are still, left
to rust in peace.

There is a shepherd in the desert,

 His sheep long to be slaughtered.

 Ice is in his veins

He wants to eat the hay.

 A man with just a bowl,

Filled with falcon’s blood,

Wishes to meet his lover,

In the twin of roses.

There is a thin line between you and me.

 A hair’s breadth.

 There’s a fire underneath the line

 And a volcano above us.

In the sky of your sea.

In the red of my love.

The wind brought down this yellow:

petals littering

the garden, the Maruti’s windshield. 

The rain shreds petals, leaves

sticky splotches.

Armed with a rag, Ram Niwas

(a hardworking old fellow) declares war

on the yellow, enters the battlefield.

He works stubbornly, wrestling stains

in the rain.

The glass listens,

yellowness watches

the old man. It peels off quietly

in petals, remains.

Twenty Years of Burmese Writers at the IWP

She was a white round girl considered an outcast in her traditional Damascene environment, and I was a country girl raised in the big city, where neither Damascenes nor my original townsmen considered me one of their own. We were both in our early twenties, struggling with our families’ traditional values, and trying to be honest to our own, which made us stick together quite well through the seven years that followed. Each of us was trying to pull herself, and the other, together through the difficulties of growing into independent women in a complex and patriarchal society.

 When three; her best friend is the grass,

Silver stokes of pointy blades tug the cloth of her dupatta.

She draws an open life, two irises in the mud,

“Eyes are God’s to make,” says Baba jaan,

“Not yours to re-invent.”

Four; the water glows orange.

Its noisy layers embrace the surface of her toes.

She digs her fingers into its blue

& fishes for rainbow stars.

Baba jaan, come look. Look what I found.

Too late. It’s time for prayer.

She throws the stars away.

Five; she knows namaaz by heart;

Baba jaan recites a strange string of Arabic in her ear,

What does it mean?

She looks out the window thrice.

1. Do not write ghazals (lyric poems). Readers suffocate beneath the weight of ghazals that, much like guinea pigs, lack diversity and end up looking all the same. No more friend, enough already! However, write one in case you see the last straw of your existence or the burning coal to your immortality in it. One is just about enough to try out your voice and to get some rushed, insincere welcome applause for life. Having nine out of ten ghazals sounding like the first one is to gobble up both you and your audience’s most valuable lifetime in nine little installments. Such life-taking in the name of ghazals is not a poetic service.

I am the creature that country clichés often mention—
the city animal.

This restless wonderment
at my inability to harness nature in my poetry
is a distant thought now,
overwritten by the black airbrush exhausts—
probably precipitates on a friendly hawkers white smiley mask.

Case scenarios of what could be
are just voices in the wind now—
or the silent rustle of grass—
the rare child caressed by the final gush.

Instead, I wonder what happens if the hawker,
say for example, wipes his mask,

                  and his finger like a philosopher’s stone,

                  reduced to the exotic mediocrity of an ivory touch

                  leaves an ivory trail—the tiny island of truth

When there is no more land to walk, and all that’s in front is a river that cuts this into half, you relieve yourself of all your clothes and waddle into icy waters – till you hit rock bottom.

Your teeth start chattering. They make strange rhythms, which must have drawn out the animals to get a closer look at the source of the unusual call, only to face a red spot bubbling to the surface before spreading across the white expanse even as we sleep.

It comes to be known as the Call of the Hungry.

In any case, either of us would have willingly sacrificed oneself for the other when the claws and fangs come out. (Today, the boy (or for that matter, the old man) still feels the sharp paper cuttings on his neck, brain and all over the back of his torso.)

Writing in eternal battlefields

Afghanistan is country of wars. It has been the center of great empires under the Kushans, Ghaznavids, Ghorids, Timurids, Durrani dynasties and so on… in fact, the Silk Road passed through it. It was not only merchants who were passing through but also empires, extending from one part of the world to another. For example, Alexander the Great founded cities and military bases in Afghanistan, where he stayed for many years, while the attacks by Genghis Khan in the 13th Century resulted in widespread killings, including of Attar of Nishapur, Rumi’s spiritual mentor.

ای آشنای دیروز
در جاده های امروز
گم کرده ام ترا من
با یک دلی پر از سوز
قدم،قدم زنان من
هر سو روم حیران من
آخر کجای راهی؟
بده به من پناهی!
بمان،بمان کنارم
بخوان،بخوان تو یارم
از نغمه های شیرین
از رویاهای رنگین
از ماه و از ستاره
بگو،به من دوباره!
که این آخر راه نیست
دلت از من جدا نیست
بگو در دنیای ما
اصلآ فاصله ها نیست!

(I)

The red luscious apple was well beyond her reach.

As her limbs stretch, adrenaline courses back and forth inside and just like that, out of nowhere, her thigh muscles stiffened and she slipped and started to fall from a nine feet ladder.

As her stomach feels the strong pull of gravity, her seven year old heart feels a vigorous push of negative energy.

Her cherry coloured hair flew everywhere blinding her sight; in the same manner, doubts clouded her judgment and self esteem.

The gravity did its work and she did her: thinking if she was truly as pathetic as others describe, if she was indeed a failure and if ‘disgrace’ was the only word to describe.

Can literature accept social responsibility?

Some say that the arts should be purely arts--nothing else, that writers should only serve the gods of beauty and joy. In some cases, this makes sense, particularly when art assumes the status of propaganda in the service of a specific ideology--some religious poetry of eastern literature, for example, or the writings of some followers of Marxism, or the classic poems of Afghanistan written in praise of the monarchy.

Surrounded by the walls of memory

with no lover

and nothing to remember

I mock

my triangular cuffs

and the illusion

of hands in a circle.

An iron cage of emotions

and a jail of ironic melodies.

The accessory, zipped up,
awaits the blink-off.

Redacted, this could
just end up one jet-lagged lyre.

Keep soul, big stuff in the overhead
administration, says trolley dolly.

Here is what is: a suspicious package
with attendant implications.

It’s none of my personal vertex,
but we’re psyched for another

sexy spin, another hook
to hang civilisation on, like Equator.

Beyond allotted legroom,
degree of reclination and those

damp hot towels, we rise
and fall, aside from such plenitude,

terminal or tarnation.
Gazing out this sentimental window

into pitch dark, yanking soul
out of you . . . to winnow these aisles

To my father & also to Mike

You will find
Different leaders for each side there.
But the dates are still unified
Since the early days of the God.

Dates are
The morning key for
A woman who is on her way to vanish
Dates are anonymous women
Deponent of Ur's, Assyria's and Babylon's priests.

I inherited definitions of dates from my Kurdish father:

"You are as inviting and sweet as dates,
Stubborn as a date palm,
Genial, and sentient as black dates in Klecha*.

And I have learned persistence from bullets
And from friends I have learned what blanks mean,
And that blocks and obstacles are absolute violation!

That night we danced till 12

Strangers on planes

Layovers and airport gates

Awkward moves and aching limbs.

I thought we dropped together-

Because we were

Unsynchronized symphonies of

An out of tune piano.

I remember fortnights and study groups

Where we danced blues.

Cravings

For constellations at our feet

And cheap sunglasses.

I killed myself in Frisbee.

I survived.

Did we though?

Paddling through

How do I colour my city
with creatures busy in living?
Do I walk along as if on an errand
seeking a lotus pond afloat with enlightenment?
Do I go in search of orchid petals
to unfurl whorls for hybrid pollens?
Do I hurry along street plans and measure landuse
to draw lines and shapes for my canvas?

My city has no mountain ranges
to be unscrolled broadened brownness,
neither has she bushfires nor epic tragedies
but her sky can be
as dry and distant as a desert’s.
My city has campaigns, policies and long-term planning,
has a reputation for drivenness
of a small country,
has shopping malls and more…

Searchlights within reveal the roost of my still

small voice is on a glacis: nothing unusual, I’m

getting on in years. Swizzle sticks are my way

of keeping track in a bar. Nip between us glaces

your eye, guttatim you defreeze. There is unrest

between faultlines and fruition: believe me, I’ve

detonated many. Yours is a phase. You too will

curtsy. This is the charter of growing up. 

Originally appears in Postcolonial Text, Vol 11, No 2 (2016)

This is the city of dreams,

not for their fulfillment,

but for those that it consumed

and passed down as heirloom;

you can see these on the streets at half past seven,

bare fists thumping clueless dashboards —

their existence a mere silhouette now

against the floodlights of expectation

that burn through in cyclic motion —

Red Light, yellow light, Go.

I had not met Shikhar in a month. I’d heard he went to Kathmandu. Not that I really cared where he was. But his face after what happened to Bhima Didi flashed in front of my eyes and threatened me every now and then. There were times when I thought he had left the Party. But I couldn’t enquire about him with my father all the time. In fact he didn’t even know about my decision to join the Party. Regardless of how I felt for him, he was the only person I wanted to tell about my decision after my father. I had a feeling he wouldn’t believe I’d work for the Party. So I was already elated, confident that he would try confirming it with my father.

-

These poems depict the life of displaced people (victims of border terrorism), living in a refugee camp in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, India. They are taken from the poetry collection “Tafteesh Jari Hai” (The Investigation Continues), by Kalpna Singh-Chitnis, published in 1993. These poems have been translated from original Hindi into English by the poet herself.

Dedicated to Agha Shahid Ali

I

No one knows her here by her name,
the one who is sitting mum
there on a wooden log,

the woman whose son was slaughtered
with a chainsaw,
is the only identity she has
in this refugee camp.

II

I was born and raised in a suburb of Fukuoka, a city in the south of Japan. After eighteen years in Fukuoka, I went to a university in Kyoto and lived there for seven years. My parents are Japanese. They are both from the region and never left the country except for occasional group tours. My native language is Japanese. Like any other Japanese student, I started to learn English in the seventh grade. I am neither an immigrant, nor a postcolonial subject, nor a refugee. Now I write fiction in English in Japan and submit my stories to literary journals in the United States. I represent a small, but ever increasing group of writers.

In my days of living alone I wander a lot in the parks between Prince Edward District and Yau Ma Tei. It is always late at night when street lights are dim and the silhouette of trees implies a shelter from notice. While my sense of smell is hopeless, bits and pieces of sounds weave into a vast blanket covering me. There are tweets and chirps and rustles and whirrs together with sounds of breeze and stray cats. Some heartbroken people shout on their phone from far away. With peace in my heart, I go on reading by the street lights. There would be phone calls from my dear friends from afar, sending me festival greetings or wishing me a happy birthday. I always surprise them by being in these cramped, filthy cage-like parks even in big festivals.

Facts in Fictions

Hello, my name is Nada Faris. I’m a Kuwaiti writer who publishes articles, poems and fiction in English, and I’m very interested in this topic, to base fiction on real life, because my motto is that I write to get back at people.

من آن گل سرخم
بلی آن گل لاله
رویم به در و دشت
چشمم چو پیاله
اندر دلم داغیست
از هجر غم یاری
آنکه گذاشت من را
با اشک و غم و ناله
 برگ برگم پریشانند
چون چهره ای حیرانم
  گاه گریه کند آسمان 
بحال منی واله
او صبر و قرارم بود
او شور و شوق من
دیوانه منم آری!
از هجر او دیوانه
مانده ام براه او
روزی او میاید
آن روز که نه از من است
حتی یک نشانه
من آن گل سرخم
پرپر شدم حالا
ربود هست و بودم
من زرد شدم حالا

Do you know the first cosmopolitan of Korea?

Hecho, the author of The Book of Travels to Central Asia and India, Wang O Cheun Chuk Kuk Jeun(往五天竺國傳)

Food stall 1

Old bald man at market yong tau foo* store
stands below his sign:
10 pieces for $4, $2 per bowl, 50 cents rice.

In between serving customers
before the weekend crowd builds up,
one hand on aproned waist,
the other holding a glass of kopi-si*,
he sips, whilst
biting into his home-made fried bean curd
stuffed with fillings,
clearly food-tasting and hunger-stalling
while his wife munches her pink rice-kueh* hastily,
stacking bowls of mee hoon yong tau hoo expertly.
(talk about multi-tasking).

For just one brief moment,
they sit down on the plastic bench in front of their store.
Within earshot,
they discuss last night’s ma-piew pou*
(we all have our strike-rich dreams).

A country is a toddler's hand
that holds you as long as it can before it falls asleep.

A city is a clipboard with lists built and crossed out,
clutched like a punctuated flotation device.

A house is a curled mollusk
fossilized as soon as milk goes sour.

A room is a patient stone in kidneys
kept alive by conflict and clay.

A heart is a spoon
most of the time.

First published in As You Were, Volume 1, Fall 2014
https://militaryexperience.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/marie-poetry.pdf

I am writing from Varkala, a coastal town by the Arabian Sea, located in India's south-western state of Kerala. Last weekend I was in Kochi, Kerala's biggest city, where I had an opportunity to check out the second edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Before writing about the Biennale, it is necessary to reflect on what led me there because until a month ago, I had no idea about the journey that lay ahead.

مُدُنٌ ظامئةٌ لوجوهِ النساء

 في بردِ ضحى يناير المشمسِ

 سرق توحدي رفيفُ ذيلِ عباءةِ إحداهن كبيرقٍ أسودٍ على رصيفِ (ستاربكس).

تحاولُ بذكاءِ هاتِفِها تبئيرَ أخرى جالسةً في وجلٍ على طاولةِ المقهى الخارجيةِ، مازجة مر قهوتها بطعم (الدونات).

 (الأخُ الأكبرُ) يُرْبِكُها،

 يُفْشِلُ سَعْيَها مراراً،

 يُرْغِمُها على تكرارِ المحاولة.

تخافان التلبسَ بجرمِ الحياةِ في مدن الظمأ.

بينهما و بيني، أنا المكبوتُ منذُ النشأةِ، سمكُ زُجاجِ المقهى.

أقاوم فضول النظر إليهما،

 أحاول تطبيع ذاتي مع الحياة،

 أتظاهر بالعادية.

I am with you wherever you are,
Up or down, near or far_
My soul cannot be separated from you;
Final destiny!
By Your precious love_
I see the moon and reach in sky.
Like sky sometimes blue, sometimes white
You are splendid in each color, cannot be sought_
I am with you in horror of dark night,
I always seek you at a small feign of light_
Let me call you fancy world!
Coz, I am with you till I became old_
My last wish is: just once tell me!
Just once tell me: I was the one, you wanted me.

After Darren Soh

 A great hand rises from the ground

to sweep the insubstantial sand,

gathering to a crown, an iron

crown, the roots of homes. A fire

chills the grass, the tree, and air

assumes the nonchalance of a door.

Big light pierces through the greatness

of the hand. My eyes say yes.

Today, the soil yields a worm,

bold, glistening in the calm.

Enchantment

بیا یک بار دیگر بیگانه شویم هر دو                     در قصه عشق خود افسانه شویم هر دو
مانند کبوتر ها پر کشیم در آن بالا                              در اوج تنهای تنها نشویم هر دو
همچو شاهپرکها بنشینیم روی گلها                      در گوشه ای تنهای پروانه شویم هر دو
بیا یک بار دیگر دستم را بگیر آخر                            در اوج بیکران پرواز کنیم هر دو
بیا یکبار دیگر به قلبم صفای ده                         با سایبانی از عشق لحظه ای پناهی ده
بیا برای اولین بار                                         به شهر نی لبکها همسفر شیم
میان باغ سبز آرزو ها                                   بیا برای اولین بار قاصدک شیم
بیا امشب برای لحظه هایم                                      قرار و مرهم دلتنگی ام باش

In my father’s head is a map of Singapore quite different from the ever-dancing web of abstract colours that we have come to know from the official records, the bus and train stations or the increasingly unreliable street directory. His chart of the city is marked by stories and street legends, not signposts or landmarks. Like the key characters in tales, who do not often stay in one place, the settings shuffle about – without causing anxiety, as long as one has been following the plot.

Helena Makri

“If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to me to be the book”—William Godwin (on reading a narrative by his future wife)

It was close to the midday and tears were flowing persistently from Manorama’s cavernous eyes like spring water gushing out of tiny holes in the land. The village women were trying to pacify her, to silence her and to remind her that one day all of them will have to depart. They all knew right from the day they became conscious that nothing in life was as sure as death, as real as death.

بیا من دمی تو گفتگو کن
دلم را با نگاهی زیر و رو کن
اگر بودی، نبودم در کنارت
مرا در خاطراتت جستجو کن

Everything I write is nourished by my childhood years. I have a clear memory of the beginning of my ability to remember when I was three plus a few months. My father who had joined India’s freedom struggle was to become the Chief Minister of the small Union Territory of Coorg (now Kodagu). I climbed the steps to the house which was to be his official residence, nervously holding on to the edge of my mother’s sari. I was awestruck by the electric lights in the house, and terrified of the fluttering moths thicketed around them. In our village home that was only thirty miles away, we were using oil lamps then, and for the next decade and a half. The newness of the rural town that I had just entered must have awakened the sensibilities of being a person.

In the footsteps of my history
And shadow, I am caught
In the half light of remembering,
The house, the mouth,
The woman, whose cotton-coiled
Waist is the yearning for an India far away;

In the archipelago dusk,
This world is a water kingdom
That swims and hisses,
And urges a love for the shimmering hills,
The parched sand, the plaited rain,
Where, Malaya, my freedom,
Is a dark face reflected in this sea.

 red lines of revolutions,

a dot of enlightenment

a calendar of life.

Urdu Drama Serial:-

Episode# 1
(Translation)

Scene No. 01

Location: Jungle
Characters: Akbar, Nazo
Time: Night.

Screenplay:

The eerie ambience owes to the thunder storm and heavy rain; the frame opens with a crane shot focusing on a bunch of dense grown trees. Two character silhouettes, Nazo and Akbar. grow out of the darkness in the moonlight from a distance through a top shot. As they approach the camera, the crane dismounts and the characters. maintaining a distance from each other, walk out of the frame. Nazo leads in a trance with a zombie-like feel to her, wherea, Akbar’s face bears no expression.

The thunder rumbles.

Cut

Scene No. 02

I wake up tense, the way I used to feel at the start of the war. I open my clenched fists, I don't say good morning to myself. I can't. Yusuf is asleep next to me, hasn't changed his habits, wakes up in the middle of the night and sneaks in to lie down beside me. School time, honey. As usual, he doesn't wake up. I remind him the psychologist yesterday said he doesn't suffer from any troubles. Mr. Saleh said you are a good boy, remember? He decides to get out of bed; for the first time I ask Norma the maid to get him ready for school. There has to be a first time for everything. And I find an excuse to myself, it's the war.

Responding to the invitation of this program’s organizers, I will first focus on the story, or fiction, in Persian language, then talk about women’s situation with regard to fiction in Afghanistan.

".عنقريزي بوتيله عساه يموت الليلة"

Kuwaitis did not discover or extract oil. At the time of its discovery, a torrent of experts was imported from the West to deal with this new black gold. However, the Kuwaiti society was rather a closed one. Although the sight of traders and such from neighboring countries was familiar, Kuwaitis were not used to Westerners. When Kuwaitis began seeing those blond, blue-eyed strangers, a rhyme was created. Children would follow a Westerner, and chant: “Englishman with a hat, may he perish tonight!”

Imagine if Mohammed, prayer and peace be upon him, had authored his own life story: wouldn’t that be a treasure beside which the Quran itself might pale into insignificance—in the eyes of some Muslims, at least? Imagine if we could read Mohammed’s description—in what English so fittingly terms the first person—of, “Of all his Lord’s Signs, the Greatest,” could see whether the Greatest of His Signs might be something other than Allah Himself, Most Glorious, Hallowed be His name? Imagine if we could read Mohammed’s account of Zaynab bint Jahsh—I don’t say Aisha. Imagine: If we knew what he thought of Abou Bakr, God honour him and grant him peace, and what of Ali, would we be split between Shia and Sunni?

I am the city of cities.

A city of invaders, conquerors

merchants, immigrants––

they twinkle on my horizon

appearing, disappearing

as words written

on a palimpsest.

I am the city of ruins,

O’ mighty and powerful,

look carefully at my

mausoleums, cemeteries, tombs

count them all if you can

how many lie buried here

who ruled me once.

These mannequin fountains and servant lawns
Preserve impressions
Of iron hoofs and Mughal Juttis
And that big dome you see, like a pyramid
Covers impressions of the same bones
And a legacy left for shoes of explorers
And eyes and wits and imagination and an era
That excites us like those hatchlings limping to soar
from the wistful dome shaped panes of perception.

Death, My Funny Valentine
By Yeow Kai Chai (Singapore)

Picture this. A blonde dude decked out in shimmering mail sitting on a stone outcrop. He’s playing a game of chess. His sparring partner? A tall, lean aesthete, face powdered white, and body suited with a Yohji Yamamoto-esque combo of black cape and kaftan.
The backdrop is a calm sea. Above, billowing tufts of clouds back-lit by a glint of sun. This scene, of course, is taken from Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 classic The Seventh Seal; the chain mail guy is a mediaeval knight (Max von Sydow) and his opponent, The Grim Reaper (Bengt Ekerot).

...قایق کوچک

          ...اقیانوس بی انتها

...من باشم و من

             ...تنهای تنها

The letter was from a friend in Bihar, a nun who had trained with me in medical college. She wrote that a rural hospital there, run by the Sisters of Charity, was urgently in need of a surgeon. Was I interested?

I had just finished by surgical training in Liverpool. I loved every moment of my life in England but was also certain that I would go home soon. The offer from Bihar appealed to my foolishness. I said yes, and four months later, was heading north and east by train from Bangalore. My family was dismayed. Bihar was not a place anyone went to out of choice, it still isn’t. Tell anyone that you wish to work in Bihar and you’ll see eyes go round and big. “Bihar! Why?”

They opened a window and their mouths they rinsed
And spilled on their anger-laughter and cries thus cleansed
And if they were in reach they’d have been beaten black n blue
Let my kites lose their path, but not your tunes

You sparkle in the eye
Until a moment says good-bye

For twenty-four long hours, I cast a net to get you back in my heart
Heal me, oh love, from the pain that tears me apart...!

(Binoy Majumdar Hote Na Cheye, Tumi-i Pran, Tumi-i Por)

(an episode from the Sejarah Melayu – the Malay History)

And then several horses and cows and goats were slaughtered. Rice crusts collected in a mound. Water for the ceremony amounted to an ocean upon which the heads of buffaloes appeared like islands. After 40 days and 40 nights, bath water was brought in a procession abounding in joy and noise in a vessel decked with jewels. Then Seri Teri Buana and his wife Princess Uwan Sundari walked seven times around the raised throne. Then they were bathed on their raised thrones by Bat. Following the bath they covered their bodies with the finest threads, the threads of the kingdom; and sat as man and wife on a throne decked with jewels…

During IWP’s 2014 Fall Residency in Iowa City, I encountered on more than one occasion some unusual questions and impressions about my stories.

In preparation for the residency, which lasts for 10 weeks, the IWP published some of my translated stories on its website, along with my biography. One statement on my profile, when talking about my 1^st novel, reads: presently banned in his country.  

Комната. Обои с причудливым узором на стене. Письменный стол с неизменной настольной лампой, доставшийся мне еще от бабушки. Ворох бумаг – как правило, совершенно ненужных. Стопка книг – как правило, не прочитанных. Окно ноутбука с еще не выписанным пейзажем. Ручка, которой вот уж десять лет как ничего не пишу. Сказать бы чернильница – но увы: таковой на столе нет и никогда не водилось. Абсолютная, не раздражающая слух тишина. В сих условиях пишется проза. Если, конечно, пишется.

I

2014.

11:42pm

New York, USA

The room echoed with occasional sniffs and gasps of misery; and eventually everything hushed to emptiness. The sound of silence reverberated through everyone’s heart, which was accompanied by the swift and delicate performance of the tears that rolled down their cheeks. Yes, they were sad. Yes, he is no longer here… yes, he is dead.

Unveiling their shine on the cerulean sheet now pitch-dark,

radiant studs, rhombus-shaped compete with beauty


of bicephalous. When the orgulous are on a night out


in their best bib and tucker covering their kytes, chill

of westering winds add to the ambience. Presence of


sapid puffs invites our olfactories to the divine, making

me muzzy, and moved: even nature helps the well-heeled? 

 Originally appears in Postcolonial Text, Vol 11, No 2 (2016)

“Wealth … is the means by which we fulfill our desires.”
- Interview with Stan Davis & Chris Meyers, Harvard Business School Publishing

Hence the cat’s languid stretch, its bullet spring, the puppy
eyes of the one you love, asking undue favours
you resent, yet relent to. The mercenary burst
of bougainvillea, machine-gun clatter of rubber-seeds falling
to hard ground as December comes, bearing fistfuls of rain.
Consider the lilies of the field, how like your pale hunger,
the hollow in the gut that pulls you forward, the lust
to work, earn, mate, the same gravity that binds
water to sky, impels birds to song and blood, both.

Rabisankar Bal’s Ayna Jiban, translated from the original Bengali by Arunava Sinha as A Mirrored Life, is a captivating novel that celebrates the tradition of the katha, the dastan, the qissa and the kahani, the story that travels across continents, languages and centuries in the saddlebags of merchants and the memoirs of saints. Such a story gains in splendour as it goes, elaborating itself into a labyrinth inexhaustibly stocked with characters, episodes and surprises.

“Djailoo” in traditional Kyrgyz culture is a fundamental concept, embodying the summer pasture and grazing, where every year during warm period Kyrgyz nomads move their families and yurt homes. “Djailoo” occurs not only out of economic necessity, but also as a life-space and cultural practice that encourages free time and exploration for children. The precarious situation in contemporary Kyrgyzstan affects youth and hinders their access to education and books. Djailoo Reading, therefore, seeks to bring live readings and discussion—hosted by writers and/or actors—to ten remote communities in the Osh and Issyk-kul regions.

All those who worship that which is not knowledge enter into darkness

Those who delight only in knowledge enter greater darkness.

            - The Upanishads (800-400 B.C.)

Our ancestors knew how to bend the meaning of words so you could ponder over them long after they were uttered or read.

Humanity consists of men and women, so the earth needs both of them for its development. If we visualize a human to a bird which flies by its two wings then we can easily claim that woman is one of the wings and without it flying is impossible; therefore, in all aspects of life women set with men side by side. In fact, a woman is the maker and creator of the root of life besides shaping and consisting half of the population.

-the fragment of meta-novel “The Wings of Dying Bird”-

for M.

It hurt watching him hurt. I would see him from time to time around school, leaning against the wall trying to socialize when by the looks of it all he wanted to do was be alone. I think what got me hooked was the mystery he left each time I’d look away from his light brown eyes. He was a puzzle waiting to be solved and each word he would utter was a riddle waiting to be figured out. What first caught my attention were the poems he wrote at creative writing, every character and word was so vivid and alive. After he would read out his poetry everyone would clap and compliment it never knowing the true story behind it, that’s what shocked me the most. At school I’d avoid him, simply dodging him each time he’d pass me by in that filthy hallway.

The city has its own riddle for the lost.
When the sun’s departed, all others stroll along the street,
Leaving their own houses behind. Then I always start climbing up,
Secretly entering those empty rooms

No need to tell them apart. They’re always unfamiliar,
For they do not belong to me. Defined by the touches of someone else,
They have walls soft and transparent like leaf veins
Sofas carry me like floes on a lake

Some of the toilet bowls sparkle like cheeks of young girls
Some curtains are forever half-open like murmuring lips
There’re always pictures of the deceased, revealing the somniloquy of Time
Hair strands of lovers on pillows -- I wouldn’t bat an eyelid

She looks at me with those pleading eyes. I am driving, so I keep my eyes fixated ahead as we drive past the Seef flyover we’ve driven over a thousand times before.
     I don’t know where I’m heading, but I know how this will play out.
     She says, “You don’t have anything to say to that?”
     I had stopped listening at some point. Something was said about love and marriage and life and family and the many years we’d been together.
     She looks at me and waits for an answer. I stay silent and keep on driving. My mind is struggling to come up with a coherent response and all I want right now is for us to shut up and have sex in the back of the car.
     “Say something!” she snaps, now her voice quivering.

After the drill of social punctilios, when curtains are drawn, the blah
blah of bovarism lies peeled in hearts willing to eavesdrop on themselves.
Therapy of truth unveils its secrets: we know our lies better than all
the light there is. After a mortise level on laminate of life, it is meaningless
to tend to every kernel of truth. Attempts to amp this will end in ache.
The key is to find your centre. If there were a panopticon edge to one’s script
there wouldn’t be need for prophets. To be famed for clerihews is meta.
Synesthesia bedrocks all impulse. What is the color of your grief?
Pain isn’t proprietary, join the party.

Originally published at Lemon Hound.

are easy to possess—the dim tunnel

where trains flow, submerged halls

fevered and dense, make it such

that if we go barefoot we will touch

high places, anyhow—or so they

say. Let nighttime test them, then:

the girls decide to go home late,

balancing accounts on their necks

like pearls, singly or in sequences,

almost safe, leaving the last hours

to the boys who reach flat rooftops

lined with iron, not to jump,

instead, burning the ants of cars, to find

again the whisper, this is mine, mine…

When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi asked India’s first cosmonaut, Rakesh Sharma, at a video conference in April 1984, how India looked from space, he replied without missing a beat: “Saare jahan se achcha.” Every schoolchild in India recognised the phrase, for it comes from a song composed by Allama Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), and is deeply identified with the Indian nationalist struggle. At the same time, many in South Asia regard the same man as the ideological father of Pakistan.

A Biogenesis of Processed Singapore Noodles

for Mary Nazareth

…a case of you,

Sa’adat Hasan Manto, widely considered to be the greatest short story writer from the Indian subcontinent, has a story called The Dog of Tetwal. Set against the backdrop of the Partition of India, it tells the story of a dog in the border region of the two newly created countries. The dog appears one day when Indian soldiers are having breakfast. One soldier takes a liking to it, names it Chapad Jhunjhun, and gives it a biscuit. Just then, it occurs to one of the other officers that this dog could be Pakistani dog since it had approached them from the Pakistani side of the border. They ask the dog to prove his identity. The dog wags its tail.

Since the night of shooting stars, the night of travail,

the call to prayer calms me. Some people chant,

“Hale Loya.”

It was the last supper and the birth

of a certain death.

My silicone

was oxidized with love.

I was born from a pairing of the dust of Al-Jalil

and the waters of Euphrates and became

the infant martyr.

From the collection Bleeding Gull: Look Feel Fly

When I was 7, I saw hell

possess the skin of my father.

There was a madman's fury

Simmering in him, his eyes orbs of darkness

and dementia.

I expected flames to erupt into

life around him,

burning us all but there was only stillness.

Nothing except the salt

trailing down my cheeks and disappointment

coating my tongue.

His movements became lightning quick,

skin striking skin in a blur.

Time stilled. Breaths were abandoned. And a bruise

flowered across her cheek.

At 10, this was no longer a

rare occurrence.

The Easter bunny was still

Real.

but silence after 6:00 was not.

Anger took refuge under the devil's skin.

“You get a strange feeling when you leave a place, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you miss the person you are at this time and place because you’ll never be this way ever again.”

 – Azar Nafasi

 “I’ve picked out the stones, dada. Will you teach me how to play now?”

Arjun glanced up, the innocuous question breaking him away from his reverie. Dazed, he blinked several times before looking fondly at his younger sister, Laxmi, who in her petite hands held out an assortment of pebbles.

“You won’t need all of these,” he commented.

Laxmi carefully dropped the stones in her brother’s outstretched hands and sat cross-legged, her pigtails dangling with every shake of the head.

It is widely accepted that the greatest literature is born when cultures, civilizations or worldviews come together. This often happens in case of diplomat-poets who often find themselves in exotic milieus, novel circumstances and in company of people with diverse viewpoints.

There is a connection between diplomacy and poetry as several diplomats over the ages have excelled in poetry, to the extent that eight of them have won the most coveted prize in literature -- 'the Nobel Prize'. This is one of the least known literary facts.

For the past ten years I have led a double life, for not only am I a writer I am also a publisher of English language books. Sri Lanka has two official languages: Sinhala and Tamil with English as the link language. Each language enjoys a parallel existence, rarely meeting or intersecting. The three languages have their own set of publishers and publications catering to their own group of readers carved out of a population of twenty odd million. English writing and publishing in Sri Lanka is the smallest segment and yet today it is the window to the larger world and reflects a vibrant and promising future. I like to think that the publishing house I co-founded was instrumental in this.

Balamani Amma, feminismo de una forma diferente.

Laying on this uncomfortable couch which daddy drove all night to find,

Made me realize,

I am living and breathing in a shantytown

And this sincerely made me want to drown,

As never once has this frown turned upside down.

Living life in poverty,

Resulted in mockery,

This ensured the steady strength of this armory,

Which I now wear on my body,

Never to be taken off.

Oh, gravity why’d you have to hold me down?

Laying on this thick grass,

Petrified to take a chance.

The world around me was voiceless,

All i could hear was the smooth flow of the Beatles through my ears.

And at that very moment I wasn’t hopeless.

It felt like ecstasy,

So very heavenly.

The northern Himalayan districts of Bajhang and Darchula in far western Nepal bordering Tibet still have rich oral traditions that tell fascinating tales about human life and death, happiness and sadness, love and hate, along with rich details about societal customs, rituals, economies, cross border relations, and the hazards accrued by the difficult topography of the region. Like many oral stories today, threatened by the erosion of traditional cultural practices and languages, these stories are on the verge of disappearance and with the changing landscape of Nepal and the rise in the tendency of linguistic code switching, there is a strong possibility that younger generations will discontinue such oral traditions.

Will dread to speak straight
Maintain a distance between the cup and the lip
Will scatter bits of politeness
In a cauldron of arrogance
And conclude that it's perfectly fine...

Will find fault in the authority and their fellow-passengers
After losing their cell-phones
While returning from a trip

Will keep on bugging about extremely fashionable issues
If necessary, will champion it
And get enraged at the slightest criticism

Will swear bare-chested people, uncultured and rustic
In the night of power cut
Beside the pond in the neighbourhood
And fall in love with wolves disguised as sheep

In my place I came from, people believe in reincarnation.
I do not believe, or better put it, I did not think about it yet in order to decide if I believe or not. But I inherited from my grandmother and women in my family the habit of saying:
“Tomorrow, in my next life, I will do… so and so”……
And now if I am asked what my dream is for the coming years my answer will be: to continue writing and to make a major life trip on the Trans- Asian railway.
And because I do not want to wait for a next life, I am planning this trip to be in 2017 to celebrate my 60th birthday. I want to live this marvelous voyage and discover the Silk Road that inspired hundreds of universal literary and art works.

There is a holy spot

bher eyes

where angels burn their feathers

And lose their faith.

Do not blame me.

 O the earth tribe

drums were played, doors were closed

in caravanserai

a candle, a loaf of bread, a dish of soup

and a sack of oat for the horse

in this courtyard shadowed by ever-present tree

mostly three days

then a caravan of three thousand camels...

on the wall an axe, a battle axe

bodies are hot by fireplace

and the moon grows as if it settles

a new daytime