Divine Expression, Wider Dimension

Two Guyanese Storming into the Movie World

2011-07-05T05:49:00.000-07:00

Two Guyanese Storming into the Movie World

By Ramesh D. Kalicharran

Veteran Guyanese and Indo-Caribbean actor, Mahadeo Shivraj, is producing Dr. Churaumanie Bissundyal’s Ek Chameli Mali Ke Liye (its English name A Jasmine for a Gardener) into a movie unprecedented in the Caribbean, bringing to life the values, music, tears and laughter of people of Indo-Caribbean descent. Though the movie is written in English, it resonates with Hindi cadences, resuscitating seven old Hindi film songs to unparalleled beauty, crowning the talent of all people of Indian descent. The movie will be shot mainly in Guyana, showcasing landscape beauty, monumental buildings, and the social fabric of the country.

The movie announces a novel and dazzling motion picture in the panorama of the movie world, merging the Hollywood and Bollywood approaches into a distinctive Caribbean genre. At first glance, one can sense the Aristotelian design of Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense and mystery thrillers courting the song-and-dance opera style movies such as Kashmir Ki Kali, Sangam, and Devdas. With fresh strength and deliberation, it revives dialogue as an important ingredient of drama so that action cannot be superfluous and ineffective. In this way, plot and characterization are fulfilled so that the movie pulses with colour, emotions, delights, and landscape beauty.

The movie centers on the two characters Neetu Raghubir and Ravi Devdas, showing their hidden fears, their needs, their quest for a higher world, and their labour to find a balance between the material world and divine. Neetu, a medical student in New York, becomes tired of her parents’ domineering hammer over her, their boast of wealth, and their rigidity for social success and big life. As a reaction, she quits her studies to challenge her parents then turns to music, an offensive thing to the Raghubir family. Her mother Sharda, appalled at her new path, asks her to return to Guyana for a short holiday. When she arrives in Georgetown, her father Sukul (a Guyanese tycoon) commands her to marry his young friend Govind Somrah, a multimillionaire owning more than a score saw mills and trawlers.

On meeting Govind, Neetu sixth sense tells her that this isn’t the man for her, that Govind only promises a life of luxury, jewellery, and extravagant travels. Though basking in splendour of wealth, he cannot access the simple beauties of the world, cannot hear the music of the wind, see the glory of the moon, or sense the passion of the stars. Then, one morning in the Botanical Garden, after an incident, Neetu meets the gardener Ravi Devdas, a man of music and a seeker of higher planes. Sensing his quest for true happiness, she falls in love with him. Here the movie takes an acute turn, brooding conflicts and crises that will fill scenes with questions, guesses and anticipations, underlining the plot of a wealthy girl going crazy for a poverty-stricken man.

The story meanders into a bigger twist when Govind’s true character begins to unfold, revealing the murder of Pinky Gajadhar. In a back story, before Neetu’s arrival in Georgetown, to get Sukul’s wealth, Govind, as he’s doing to Neetu, tries the same trick with Sushma. The high point of the story puts the hair to stand on end with chattering teeth. Sushma finally gets a nervous breakdown. Then in a blood-curdling conspiracy, Sushma is treated by her uncle Dr.Suraj Gopal, a psychoanalyst. To keep Sushma as a nervous wreck with hallucinations, someone pays Dr. Suraj millions to treat her with dangerous drugs. But one day in a burst of terror, Sushma escapes from Dr. Suraj in an action-packed scene paralleling the best Hollywood thriller movies.

The plot suspense of the movie becomes lurid when Inspector Sunil Singh takes center stage. When he gathers adequate evidence of Pinky’s murder and Sushma’s rape, the movie explodes into a drama surpassing any action thriller.

The story, however, has not unfolded simply as this. Many things will not be made clear until the end, for instance Sushma’s rape, Govind’s nature, Ravi’s married status, and Inspector Sunil’s police game. The movie, though iridescent with humour, drama, action, songs, dances, family message, and cultural mosaics, forges a new genre of suspense model peculiar to the best stories written by Agatha Christie and Perry Mason.

Finally, the story balances protagonist with antagonist, explains the deeper side of each character, links characterization with plot, and shows the interrelation between the psychological, social and spiritual aspects of the world. In a nutshell, this is a movie that seeds a new era to showcase the best talents of the Caribbean with respect to writing, acting, directing, and producing.

Presently, Shivraj is casting and filming in Guyana. This is indeed an achievement for both him and Churaumanie Bissundyal.

Game of Death

2011-04-27T12:03:00.000-07:00

This is a poem I wrote in 1993 when all doors were closed to me as a writer. When I wrote this poem, I was sick with fever at the point of death. At that time it was raining torrentially in Guyana, and I was living in a bottom-house shack flooded with knee-deep water. My ground bed was soaked with flood water, so that I had to sleep on a makeshift bed of ropes. In my struggle for life, I had compared my battle with a game of cricket, as the god of death approached me to take me away. I won in the end. It was a contest of mind over matter.
Contact this writer at guyind@rcn.com

Game of Death

By Churaumanie Bissundyal

I lay suspended on a sling of ropes,

hung from ceiling to ceiling,

I couldn’t sleep on the floor:

it was knee-deep with water.

It was raining, a flood was all over,

the trenches overflowed with stench,

snakes and eels in front of my door.

Roaches and rats abandoned their quarters,

migrating to creases in the ceiling.

My books and other things floated sadly before me.

My room was a cemetery of stench and putrefaction.

I was dying with chickenpox fever,

entombed in a matchbox cellar.

And as I was dying,

(body ploughed all over with sores),

I remembered Marxist prophets

as they chanted mantras for salvation,

quietly filling their purses and living in mansions high.

This was their proletariat revolution, I thought,

from each according to his work,

to each according to his needs,

(a Socialist gyaan),

for even the rats and roaches

sought higher places of habitation.

In the middle of the night when all lights were gone,

I tried to look at my hands,

an eternity of darkness filled my eyes.

Everywhere was endless death and terror.

Across the road, a woman was shrieking,

her husband had died.

In the rain and thunder, I heard a mother wailing,

her newborn had made her last cry.

I guessed that my number was near,

the Ogre of Death was standing at my door;

he stood watching me:

four days I was bereft of food,

four days besieged by fear.

I heard the frogs croaking

and thought that there was yet life in the world.

I tried to move my legs,

but they had no strength for the putrid water.

Then I closed my eyes

and started my battle from a different plain.

I began moving away from my darkness,

going back long ago where I had wept and failed,

where I must play the game again

to spurn the Ogre of Death away from my door.

I was the last batsman of my side

to face the wrath of the demon bowler.

His pace was hostile,

my team was shattered,

their faces hanging in remorse and humiliation.

The spectators were perched in the fowl-cock trees,

the crows flew high in the sky,

circling and freezing for carrion.

This was a game of death;

I was the last hope of the sad faces watching,

one bad stroke against the demon bowler

and that would be the end of the game.

In two overs we must make twenty-and-seven runs,

a tall order for a tail-ender.

My average was zero in ten games.

I was no contender for the demon pacer.

The sun was shining harsh in the sky,

sheep were grazing amidst the fielders.

The pitch was bumpy with kneaded rice-dust,

my heart was pounding with a sense of failure.

I took my guard, nervous of what I was doing,

the umpire giving directions

and then nodding in terror.

I looked at the fielders preying upon me

like hawks ready to devour;

their eyes were resolute to get me out,

impatient for their victory hour.

The demon bowler was on his mark to bowl,

the Ogre of Death was yet standing at my door.

I was sweating profusely with a dying breath:

I knew that this was my hour.

The umpire signalled and the bowler started his run,

steaming with large, rapid strides.

His face was resolute with aggression,

his tall, huge figure looming like a giant.

He reached the crease, jumped and bowled,

the ball dropped and sped

and got me clean bowled.

The Ogre of Death at my door,

his face stern with ugly laughter,

made anxious steps to where I lay.

He took his shears to cut me down

and then to drag me away.

The fielders rose with one voice in the air

and appealed like a vicious predator.

The umpire ruled not out,

the bowler had bowled a no ball.

The Ogre of Death cut the ropes and I fell in the water.

“Get up and come with me,” he ordered.

“Your mission among the living is over.”

“No,” I cried. “Go away, you wicked sucker.

Even death cannot remove me from this torture.

I must live to prove my worth and power.”

The bowler walked back to his bowling mark,

fierce with anger.

The fielders crowded around,

the bowler began the long run of his race.

He reached the crease,

jumped and bowled,

the ball was pitched short, flying to my head.

I ducked from the missile,

the ball took an edge from my bat and flew high in the air.
The man at long leg was under it;

he never missed a catch, so it was said.

The spectators shook their heads with tears in their eyes.

This was the end of the game, they said.

The Ogre of Death looked at me in the water.

Fish and snakes swam around to say their good-byes.

“Get up,” he ordered again.

“I am an official who has no sentiments for the dead.

Your time is up and with me you must come.

Your purpose of the dead has now begun.”

“No,” I said. “With you I will not come.

On this earth my mission is not over.

Illness and hunger are no match for me.

I am a hero of implacable power.”

The ball was soaring high in the air,

comfortable under it was the fielder.

It was dropping lower and lower,

the spectators began leaving.

As it was dropping in the fielder’s hands,

a sheep looking for greener grass,

ventured between his legs.

In surprise, he scrambled in a start,

the ball spilled out of his hands.

In the heat of this moment, we made two runs,

twenty-four runs away from the winning total.

The spectators began coming back,

there was still life in the game.

The bowler walked back to his mark

and, like a furious bull, he started his run again.

He reached the crease, jumped and bowled,

the ball was pitched on the offside,

the slip fielders like a broad net waiting.

My eyes were too weak for the speed,

but I swung my bat with all my courage.

I heard an impact,

then I saw the ball rolling and hopping

speedily along the covers.

A fielder was chasing after it;

the pace overpowered;

the ball rushed into the boundary for four.

I saw dried cow-dung flying in the air,

Little boys throwing them and laughing.

There was a great cry of jubilation,

the spectators were dancing in the fowl-cock trees.

The Ogre of Death summoned his attendants to pick me up,
but I kicked them in their faces

and told them to go away.

“You have no claim on me,” I said.

“I am truly a living power of this day.”

We were now twenty runs away from the score,

I began feeling myself a champion.

An omnipotence suffused me,

and I told myself that I must win the game.

The next ball I played defensively,

the ball rolling back on the pitch to the bowler.

“A perfect bat,” the spectators cried.

“You are our hero. Keep your head and mind.”

The bowler began to show signs of nervousness,

there was no more zeal in his speed.

In a long run he reached the crease,

jumped and bowled,

the ball flew like a missile in a full pitch.

I saw the red apple coming to my left shoulder.

I swung at it: a glorious shot it was,

the ball took the leg-side field

and hopped into the boundary for four.

The next ball I played in defence,

the crowd roaring with approval and joy.

The fielder began spreading out,

for now I seemed a great terror.

It was the last ball of the over,

the crowd was shouting for me

to take a single to face the bowling again.

The bowler cut his run and bowled.

It was a good length ball on target,

pitched on the middle stump.

I leaned forward and stroked it gently to mid-on,

the fielder running in to take it,

an easy single was made.

The crowd roared in applause.

I felt my body surging with power.

The field quickly changed for the next bowler,

a burly man, stronger than his predecessor.

In his hands the ball looked like an awara seed,

a giant this bowler was

with a long run-up of ferocious speed.

His first ball was a quick one,

pitched on my leg side;

it beat the wicket-keeper

and raged into the boundary for four.

The captain reinforced the field

and cautioned the bowler with tense gestures.

The bowler took a shorter run and bowled again.

In my surge of confidence I went for a big drive.

I missed.

The ball hit my front pad.

The fielders rose in a confident appeal.

The umpire looked at me for a second.

My heart pounded in a blast of fear.

The attendants of the Ogre of Death

pinned me down in the water

to get a grasp of my hands and legs.

I kicked them in their faces

and cursed them of their evil.

“Get away from me, you dogs,” I said.

“I am the indomitable of this region.

Death is a weakling before me,

since I am the significance of the living.”

The umpire looked at me again,

the crowd was in a stress of silence.

Then there was a burst of celebration

when the umpire ruled me not out.

The bowler took his long run again,

jumped up like a Kung-fu fighter and bowled.

Like a thunder the ball was pitched short

and rocketed to my head.

In a wild burst of instinct,

I got on my back foot and swung my bat.

I heard a pleasant sound of connection,

the ball soaring high in my hook-shot.

It sailed over the fowl-cock trees

and dropped into the pasture beyond the boundary.

The blow sent the fielders scared,

the captain pleading to the bowler.

He strengthened the offside again,

the bowler came steaming in with his next ball.

He pitched on my off stump.

I swung my bat with all my might.

The ball took an edge and beat the slips,

rocketing into the boundary for four.

The crowd exploded in jubilation.

One more run to come with two more deliveries.

Limbs came tumbling down from the fowl-cock trees,

the spectators cared not for injuries.

The next ball I played quietly, no run added to the score.

The captain strengthened the field like hawks around;

the bowler now took a shorter run

and pitched on my middle stump.

I stepped forward and drove at it.

I didn’t get to the pitch,

an awkward stroke it was, with an edge to mid-on.

The fielder came in fiercely, got the ball

and threw it at the wicket as we tried to complete a run.

It hit the stumps, the fielders appealed in jubilation;

they were certain that I was out.

The Ogre of Death came in to assist his attendants.

But I took the rope and began beating them.

I was desperate man fighting for life:

to refute Death I was determined.

The fielders appealed again.

The square-leg umpire reviewed the crucial moment.

He hesitated for a while.

His finger was going up, then it came down,

and he shook his head.

“Not out,” he said, and that was the end of the game.

The Ogre of Death looked at me solemnly,

thinking of my strength and resolution.

The rainstorm was now over

and daybreak came with the shining sun.

“Get away from me,” I told my assailants.

And they stepped back cowardly to my door.

Then they disappeared in the howling wind

and Life came and embraced me with joyous cheers.

Caribbean Moon, Indian Bride--Part Eleven

2011-04-27T09:29:00.000-07:00

Click here for Beginning of Story
Continued from Part Ten

When Arkah heard Morris’s story about Savita, softness and sympathy clouded his eyes. He said to Morris, “Can I help her in any way, like giving her some money?”

Morris bared his teeth like an enraged jaguar. “What? What is the matter with you, Ark?”

Arkah threw back his arms on the sofa. “We had nice times, you know. She was the woman who had given me the first taste of life. . . ” He trailed out into silence, memories inundating him. The day when Bansi had asked him to go to Redeemer Corner to buy a second-hand Ferguson tractor came back to him, Redeemer Corner a village on the Essequibo Coast. Eager to accomplish Bansi’s request, he crossed to Rika and boarded the steamer, Toucan, choosing a seat at the stern on the second storey.

When the steamer blew its signal for departure, a teenage girl in a pink dress came and perched on a stool six yards away from him. She seemed to be immersed in her own world, her face sombre yet beautiful with bright eyes. Arkah wondered whether she was Portuguese but her thick black hair, neat cheek bones, and full lips made her a facsimile of the Sindhi actress Sadhana. Yet, her body, slim and lithe, would say she had a yearn to be like Aubrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday.

She looked prettier when the wind dispersed her hair. Arkah wanted to say something to start a conversation, but when he saw the cross look in her eyes, he averted his eyes and pretended study of the aftermath streams, swirls, and ruffles of the vessel’s propellers. He loved to sit here and watch the steamer moving between the islands of the Essequibo River, leaping waves yielding to placid streams, mud-coloured water becoming coffee-hued, sun-capped furrows melting to gleaming fleeces.

Soon the sun disappeared, the steamer lights came on, and the wind blew harder. The Sadhana-like girl took out her make-up kit from her handbag and powered her face, brightened her lipstick, and darkened her eyelash. Arkah watched her with covert eyes through the gaps of his fingers. She was a beauty any man would want to gaze at.

The ship made a sudden swerve and rendered its stern to a squall that had been developing, blowing up the hem of the girl’s dress. Trying to cover her legs back, her handbag fell out of her hand, papers and notes flying out of it. Anguish, distress, and desperation seized face when she saw twenty-dollar notes fluttering out of her bag and whirling and zooming toward the bars of the rail to seek freedom in the river. She could not go after them since her hands had to stay on her dress.

Seeing her plight, Arkah rose and scrambled for the notes. He retrieved all except one that had flown over his head and wheeled into the sky like a kite losing its twine.

He led her to the cabin, where the wind could not assail them. Torn between relief and affliction, she stared at him speechless, her eyes and throat rolling. He put the notes back in her bag and dropped himself on a stool. She, too, flung herself on a stool, glowed in silence for a while, and said, “You save all the money me work foh three month.”

His forehead furrowed. “You earn a lot. What work you do?”

“A floral designer.”

“Then you’re a celebrity.”

“Me is not a celebrity. A celebrity not going to work hard like me foh the little me get.”

“The little you get?”

She smiled wryly. You think me has a golden spoon in me mouth, eh?’

“You have more than a golden spoon. You have diamond stars in your eyes.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Me accustom to sweet talk like that, you know.”

“I can see that.”

“You belong to Essequibo Coast?”

“No. Hoogenheim Island.”

Excitement twinkled in her eyes. “Me hear than down there have plenty ah flowers.”

He shook with reproach. “Flowers? The only good thing you can see in my island is flowers?”

She sucked her teeth and shot him a look of equal reproach. “Why does many men always jumps back when they hears woman talking about flowers?”

“But Hoogenheim has better things than flowers to ask about.”

She clasped her lips in assertiveness. “Me is a floral designer, you know.”

“Oh,” he said, sinking into conjecture. Perhaps, he thought, that the flying twenty-dollar notes had a connection to her floral design sales. And though he had no interest in her work, only a yearning to hear her speak, he asked her about the things she made. Her eyes luminous with pride, her fingers fluttering, she embarked on a dense lecture on vertical, crescent, and oval arrangements. Then, after explaining how she would make her designs with foam, glue, pins and sprays, she sank into a gloomy exposition of bouquets, boutonnieres, corsages, and centre pieces.

Arkah restrained a yawn, feigned enthusiasm, waiting his moment to drop anchor and fish in her beauty.

“What village you live?” she asked.

He told her, his mind severed from his words, his thoughts wandering into a realm of topaz feelings; and she, a crystal galaxy, raining down on him, a medley of splendours. Her face, hands, tresses, lips, the heavenly lakes in her eyes, the angel swans swimming in them, lulled him into a world of India and more than India. She charmed him into a garden where the film world of Bombay transcended squalor, poverty and disease to express ecstasies caressing fairies of Indra’s celestial raaj. From their lyrics, music, poise, colours, and dances, mortals like Madhubala, Nimmi, Nargis, Waheeda Rehman, Sadhana, Saira Banu, Mala Sinha, Meena Kumari, Geeta Bali and Viyanthimala would shed their frailties, platitudes, and blemishes to blossom into immortals like Urvasi, Sabz Pari, Menaka, Rambha, Tilottama, and Laal Pari. Beneath the histories, lamentations, and tyrannies of India, the earth would quake and open to spout founts of iridescence to adorn constellations with imageries in Vedic, Puranic, Persian, and modern poems. The movie world, then, would create parallel heavens of Krishna dancing with Radha in peacock gardens, of Shiva sitting in trance on cloud-kissed mountains, of chandani-bedecked Sita blushing before Shri Raam, of Shah Jahan pouring love to Mumtaz Mahal. For Arkah and the islanders, movies like Aan, Arzoo, Sangam, Guide, and Milan would drop upon them like soft rain then harden into permanent jewels that would never crumble into transitory dreams. In their sundering from India, whatever beauty or symphony they drank from the silver screen would become the corpuscles of their real world to combat miseries of rice fields, cow pastures, and the sudden blow of fate. Now the Sadhana-like woman had awakened in Arkah the golden spirit of India created by writers, lyricists, actors, musicians, and directors.

“Me name Savita,” she told him.

“Oh,” he said, and told her his name.

She dropped her eyelids and put a hand to her chin. “Does the place you live get plenty flowers?”

Ruffled by her question, he swallowed a lump of air. Then trying to find something to say, he said, “Yes.”

“Which part?”

He felt his stomach gurgling, his mind blank. Then something occurred to him. “Oh, we have a place called Kumbha Pasture.”

She stared at him, questions simmering in her eyes. “Kumbha Pasture?”

He nodded and told her that Kumbha Pasture was a ten-acre plot of land taken up by ponds, trees, and clusters of wild flowers. When Mohan and Sunaina, Arkah’s great grandparents, died, Murli, Arkah’s grandfather, buried them on the bank of a pond overhung by bamboo trees. To keep a connection with India, he engraved the word “Kumbha” in Devanagari script around the tombs then planted marigold flowers on the lines to define the letter. Later, when Murli and his wife Soorsati died, Bansi buried them on the bank of another pond and planted oleander flowers around their tombs to shape the words “Prayag,” “Haridwar,” “Ujjain,” and “Nashik.” Bansi added more to this when Rajni his wife died. He buried her under a gular tree, planted flamboyant, frangipani and poui trees around the grave, then had constructed a mausoleum of statuettes telling the story of Kumbha Mela, a story of the danavas and devtas churning the mythological ocean of milk for nectar. When they finished the churning, they put the nectar in a kumbha, a pot. To defeat the danavas, the devtas stole the pot and hid it in four places—Prayag, Haridwar, Ujjain, and Nashik. Whatever Bansi had in mind to connect this place with the sanctity of the Puranas and the festivities of India did not manifest as he had wanted. Fishermen would go there at night to catch fish in the ponds; hunters to trap their best iguanas; lovers to have their best times; boys to plunder the fruit trees. To protect the place from sacrilege, he built a troolie-thatched green heart house near the place and put a man Whisker and his wife Sussil to live in it to keep watch. After a year, Sussil told Whisker she could live there no longer because she was hearing strange voices in the trees. So they left, and Bansi gave up the idea of fulfilling a dream of grandiloquence to celebrate good over evil and the celestials’ gift of nectar to humans.

Savita put her palms to her mouth. “My God! What a place is that! The house is still there, nah?”

Arkah nodded. “In very good condition.”

When the steamer reached Adventure stelling, they exchanged addresses, promising to write each other. Arkah stared at her, a string humming inside him, as she boarded a bus. Seeing the look of loss in his face, she kissed her palm and fluttered her fingers. The string hummed louder inside him, and he felt that his destiny had made a turn.

He waited for two weeks then wrote her a long letter describing flowers in Kumbha Pasture and thanking her for igniting his interest in floral design. He told her that he had even started making corsages. She wrote back and said that she would love to come to Bundarie Square to collect flowers and teach him the finer techniques in her work. After an exchange of ten letters, she had made up her mind to come and live in the Whisker’s abandoned house. Excited, Arkah employed carpenters to repair the house then furnished it with things to make her comfortable.

She liked the house, moreover its location on the rim of Kumbha Pasture, the tall trees around her, birds singing, fragrance from flowers, and the wind trilling in the leaves. At night Arkah would keep her company until she was ready to go to bed. They talked about many things, about movies they saw, about books they read, about their families.

“You know,” she told him. “You must be wondering what kind ah loose parents me have, to let me come here all by meself.”

“I don’t care.”

She smiled and tapped his chin with a finger. “You only say so, man. But let me tell you the truth.” Then she told him her story: that she did not know her real parents. A fisherman’s wife, Beena, found her when she was a two-month old baby, swaddled with a jute bag, on the Essequibo beach. She picked her up, took her to her husband Dennis, and having no children, she adopted her as her daughter. At age sixteen, disaster crept into her life. One night, Dennis getting into a fight in a rum shop, his adversary broke a bottle, stabbed him with the fangs and killed him. A month later Beena died of a heart attack. To survive, Savita attended a floral-design class, graduated, and started making floral pieces.

On a Makar Sankranti day, when the sun and moon had entered Capricorn, Jupiter in Aries, and the moon now half a disc in the middle of the dark fortnight, Bansi told Arkah that the auspicious day of Kumbha Mela had arrived. The villagers fasted on fruits and sweetmeats, bathed in the river, sang bhajans and offered prayers. Bansi performed a puja in Kumbha Pasture, fed his guests kheer, and gave monetary gifts to the poor. At this time of the year in January, the monsoonal rain of the Amazon would rage through the hinterland, abate when it reached the Essequibo islands, and fall in soft intermittent showers between clouds, sun, and moon; canals and ponds shimmering with pure water; rice fields green and happy as ever; trees celebrating their best moments.

Arkah and Savita, too, fasted, bathed in the river, and celebrated. When night arrived and the moon came out challenging clouds and drizzles, they decided to tour Kumbha Pasture for Sankranti blessings. Always in this place at night the call of bird or the thrumming of a salempenter would come as a pleasing sound. They visited the tombs and lay wreaths on them, adorned the mausoleum statuettes with garlands, and threw coins in the ponds and made wishes. To pronounce the sanctity of the night, they had taken off their shoes and walked on the wet grass and leaves as if they place was a mandir. Then, reaching the bank of a pond smothered with sumooto vines, they sat on a batseed log and watched fishes making eddies on the sky-mirrored water.

Savita dug her toes in the mud. “This is a night me will always remember.”

Arkah snapped a twig and hurled it into the pond. “We’ve had many nights like this, but tonight you make it special.”

She blushed. “What really in you heart?”

“Pure feelings like the nectar churned from the milky ocean.”

“Can feelings be so pure?”

“Yes, because real love is pure.”

She laughed and rose to her feet. “Let we go home.”

Weeks passed and Phagwah came with its spring flowers, kiskadees, songs, sweatmeats, and colours. Arkah and Savita, smeared with abeer, attar, and Talcum powder, went to the sumootoo pond again. The wind now made billows on the pond, distorting the image of a sun in a blue sky.

Savita threw leaves into the pond, nudged Arkah with her elbow, and said, “Let we throw coin in the water and make a wish.”

Arkah shrugged. “That would be nice on a day like this.”

They threw twenty-five-cent pieces in the water and watched the aftermath of ripples.

Savita studied Arkah, a finger to her lips. “What you wish for?”

“The very first thing came to my mind when I saw you in the steamer.”

“What that?’”

“To make you my wife.”

She flung herself into him, gripped his shoulder, and breathed heavily. “It all happen so nice. So many time me want to tell you how me feel. So many time me want you to tell me what in you heart. Never never me need so much for someone to touch me.”

“Do you want me touch you?”

“Yes.”

“Then, let us go and garland each other with oleanders and pray before the Lakshmi moorti that we become man and wife.”

They made oleander garlands and dropped on their knees before a large Lakshmi image near the mausoleum, closed their eyes, muttered words, then garlanded each other.

Now Arkah told Morris, “That day we became man and wife before the great Goddess, before the hilarity of robins and hummingbirds, in the witness of bright sunshine and green leaves, thinking that our love was divine. But on our new moon wedding day it seemed as if the danavas had found the kumbha of nectar the devtas had hidden.”

Morris laughed. “Sometimes snakes live quietly in diamond-studded temples.”

The Ordeal of a Woman Crossing the Mexican Border into America

2011-04-07T08:33:00.000-07:00

A short, sturdy man, Bernardo, his shaven head tattooed with scorpion characters, came to the Tijuana Elegante, a hotel in Tijuana and gave Aaron a brotherly bear hug, looking at the Nina Gazukin covertly. She could not help but laugh how he stammered and rolled his eyes with a twisted face in his struggle for speech, his voice husky, strained and aggressive. In a warped English accent, he told Aaron of his plan to get them across to the States. He took out a moldy, roach-ravaged map and showed them an outline that made them more confused than enlightened. Tijuana, he showed them, was on the border with the States in the northwest corner of the Baja California Peninsula. Across the border was San Ysidro, an adjacent township to San Diego. The Rio Tijuana, a narrow river, meandered in and out of the borderline and intercepted it at a point close to the Revolucion Avenue of Tijuana. Where the river flowed into the American soil, toward the Pacific Ocean, was the easiest point of crossing. First, they must consider the triangular block of land on the Tijuana side, between the toll road, the western bank of the river and the line of the border. On the San Ysidro side, there was a smaller triangle of land between the western bank of the river and the line of the border. For them to cross into the border, they must cross the big triangle of Tijuana to the smaller triangle of San Ysidro. Then they would have to swim across the river to the eastern bank.
The next day Bernardo took them to the bank of Tijuana. Nina shuddered when she saw the crowds of people living in squalor, disease, hunger, drunkenness and debauchery, all of them waiting for a chance to cross into the States. Here, she thought, rivers of different cultures and nations had met in a confluence of the vilest degradation, people risking their lives or selling their souls to cross into a better world where there might be misery and degradation, too.
She looked at the river plunging and meandering into the Tijuana and San Ysidro territories, calculating her skill and strength to swim across. The river’s current flowed swift and strong, hauling islands of debris, carcasses, containers, bundles of clothes, and other things, the water reeking of putrefaction and filth. Everywhere, US patrols stood vigilant and fierce against the ten-foot wire fence. Five or six towers with rotating flashlights stared like monsters ready for an assault.
On Bernardo’s advice, they moved from the Tijuana Elegante to the Tijuana Triangle amid makeshift shacks of corrugated zinc, clapboards and tree branches. Clothes lines, filled with clothes, crisscrossed in a jumble and flapped in the wind to add to a hellish festivity of marimba, cumbia, ranchera and banda songs. Naked, diseased children ran about, eating mud or squealing. Beggars and thieves came in different ways to survive or profiteer. Fights and quarrels broke out and heightened into gang wars and murders. Men raped women as if it were easy as smoking a cigar. In the absence of pure water, the people drank from the polluted river and relieved themselves in secluded corners in communal ease. Everywhere stray dogs and carrion crows battled over filth, carcasses and corpses.
Bernardo found them a shack, which they shared with a Chinese man, Henry Foo; a Russian girl, Oskaya; and an Indian girl, Smita. They cooked outside the shack and slept in hammocks inside at night.
Nina found relief and new life in the company of the other two women. They talked about everything: their trip, country, career, and prospects. To whisk themselves out of the squalor and noise, they went to such places such as Plaza Rio Tijuana and Mercado del Artesanias and shopped. Sometimes they watched bullfights at Toreo da Tijuana and rodeos at Lienzo Charro La Maison.
Nina listened to the others’ stories and thought how close were theirs to hers, a deliberation to seek a better life from their miseries and drudgeries. Like her, they had braved the long and wild trip through the Latin American mainland to cross the border into America to find something they couldn’t find in their own countries, enduring rape, illness, despair and violence.
“Does this worth it?” she asked them.
Oskaya smiled and said in Russian: “I heard that in America they leave you on your own and give you a little chance.” She was in her twenties, blonde with green eyes.
“Why did you take such a risk?” Nina asked her.
Oskaya chuckled. “I am escaping from a communist insurrectionist group to join my husband in Washington. He told me that I have great scope in the States since I am a medical doctor.”
“If I were a doctor like you, I would have stayed in Russia.”
Oskaya fell quiet, biting her nails. “They were trying to kill me.”
Smita, a brown-skinned girl also in her twenties, with long hair and dimpled cheeks said: “It is not easy too in India. Amid the splendor and ancient culture there is so many corruption, hardly a place for a woman.” She said that she was running away from the drudgery and cruelties of her husband to start a new life. Her brother Romesh would put her up in Texas until she found a job.
Nina shrugged and said: “Yes, we have dreams, but the big monster is before us: the border. I have heard a lot of people didn’t make it.”
Bernardo waited for a rainy night, and when it came, he gave them silver-gray jump suits to wear to defeat the rotating tower lights.
“Now our time,” Bernardo said, trying to boast his authority rather than giving clear instructions. “Nina first, Smita second, Oskaya third, Foo fourth, and Aaron last. Look out for rotating lights. Lie down when they come.” He paused. “And I hope all of you can swim.”
Nina felt her heart pounding like horses’ hooves. In the persistent flash and flare of the lightning, she could see the roofs of shacks blown away, screaming children running frantically, women trying to save their babies.
As she set out to go, reports from guns blasted across the border. Wailing and screaming followed in the rain and thunder. She hesitated for a while, then slipped on her silver-gray cap and waited for the rotating lights to pass. When the place became dark again, she ran out of the shack, but the lights were coming upon her again. She threw herself facedown on the ground and waited again for it to pass. Dark again, she scrambled to her feet and began running faster than before. Soon she gained the fence. The light was coming again. She flung herself on the ground and lay splayed on the sand and rubble. The lights passed, and in lightning speed, she bored through the aperture in the fence, an exultant thrill whipping through her. As if they were a demonic intelligence, the lights were coming on her gain. Guns barked; men voices shouted alarms. She flung herself heavily on the ground, waiting for the moment of bullets and her final pain, but the gunshots and voices subsided. She got on her feet in renewed life and bolted toward the river. In three minutes she reached the bank. The lights came again and missed her.
After sliding down into the water, she slipped out of her jump suit, made it into a bundle and fixed it firmly on her head. Then she began swimming, battling against the tide, stench and debris. She thought about Oskaya and Smita and wondered if they could make it. Why did they leave their countries for this hell? she asked herself. Why was Marco putting her through this test? Soon she found her head aching, her feet numb, her energy ebbing. For a moment she wanted to surrender and add to the burdens of carcasses and corpses in the river, but her inner self scowled and said no.
She reached the other bank and rested for a while, then slipped back into her jump suit and began running again. In seconds she reached a small clump of bushes, then a tract of jungle, through which she picked her way in the convolutions of vines, trees and brushes, the branches and spikes tearing her skin. Half an hour later, she emerged into a crisscrossing of streets, lights in houses everywhere.
Running again toward the east, she reached the Interstate 5 Highway, where ceaseless streams of vehicles roared and raced on the lanes. She looked about warily, stomping her foot for a break in the traffic. Suddenly the traffic thinned and disappeared, leaving momentary empty lanes. She took a chance and ran like a sprinter, and in seconds she reached the final lane. But she was still in danger. An approaching car was five seconds away from her. With all the speed she could muster, she made a lightning dash, the car whizzing past in defeat.
Now she had to cross the other side of the highway, the vehicles coming from the other direction. As if she were in the gods’ favor, the stream of traffic broke again, giving her a chance. She sprinted with closed eyes, causing screeching tires yards away. In her tenuous bid between life and death, she felt caught in another world, a strange world where two faceless beings on a frontier were in a contest to pull her over to one side. In the end, the stronger contestant won, and she crossed to a patch of grass, a car roaring past in a close shave.
Following Bernardo’s instructions, she headed for San Ysidro Boulevard, crossing more lanes. When she reached there, she found the relief of traffic lights and pedestrian crossings. In a spurt of exultation, she slapped her chest, and crossed into a filling station compound, where a truck awaited her. An hour later Aaron came.
“Where are the others?” she asked him.
“The patrols shot all of them,” he said.

The Necklace

2011-03-22T16:07:00.000-07:00

Contact author at guyind@rcn.com

This is a poem that talks about illusion, arrogance and determination. We sometimes look only into our world, forgetting that there exists a bigger and better world. If we live in arrogance that we are the best without looking at other possibilities, we will be like the nugget that never becomes a jewel. We must go on difficult journeys if we want perfection.

THE NECKLACE

by Churaumanie Bissundyal

Once in the heart of a mountain there lived two nuggets

glowing in their splendour, proud and jeering.

To the stars they even swaggered

that their hidden lustre

was greater than their brilliance.

And they laughed at the moon

of its waxing and waning,

of its yielding to the earth and sun

by its size changing

from quarter to half,

then from three-quarters to full, to darkness demeaning.

One day, in their vain boasting,

the sun said to them, singing:

“O fair nuggets of the mountain!

Your nature is greater than your illusion,

than your centuries of brilliance.

None sees your beauty except your vanity;

none sees your glory save your own flattery.

Then come out of the mountain

and let the rain wash your face

and the grass touch your toes.

Leap out to a better dawn

that the wind may blow the dust away from your eyes

and the trees may garland you with their flowers,

that the rivers, too,

may sing your song with joy.”

“No!” said the first nugget, screaming.

“I will not show my beauty

to the stench of a world disgraced, demeaned.

The rain and wind

shall not kiss my face,

save the realm of this mountain.”

The second nugget thought it over

and reviewed the sermon of the sun.

Then to the first nugget he said:

“I have considered the words of the sun, my brother.

It is true and fair that all we know

is this little hole of this mountain.

The greatness we gain is only the empire of our pride.

We have not seen the other side of the world;

we know not the frontier between pain and pleasure.

We are two cowards lying among these ugly rocks,

building false castles in our glory and splendour.

It is now fair for me to declare

that my heart is bent on farewell to my spell of illusion,

a parting from you, my brother,

to seek the pains and gains of other worlds.”

The first nugget became angry and said:

“ Foolish you are,

because you are lured by the oratory of the sun.

You have not yet learnt to discern

between the foulness of the heart

and the flavour of the tongue.

Then, if you go, my brother,

you’ll be a traitor to my love.”

The second nugget laughed and cried:

“What we have achieved these four centuries

except a little growth in size?

Why would these minerals and stones weep in shame,

since we add nothing to their pride?

Are we not only burdens to our conscience

that we have not fulfilled the will of the beautiful

to reach the ultimate of the jewel?”

So said,

the second nugget turned his face from his brother,

rolled out of the hole

and made himself visible on the road.

He waited there in anguish and fear;

days passed him whipped by the wind,

scorched by the sun,

drenched by the rain and tormented by the thunder.

Yet there was hope in his eyes,

until a hunter came and found him at sunrise.

The hunter gasped in delight

and took him to his hut and showed him to his wife.

When she saw the nugget, she danced a little carnival,

betraying her longings, deep and volatile.

The village heard

and the news went far and wide,

so far that it stirred envy and greed,

every cheat, every thief, charting his own design.

Then, one night

a thief came and stole the nugget from the hunter,

and, before sunrise,

he hid him in a dirty ditch of toads and crocodiles.

A crocodile, in an error of carrion,

swallowed him for food

and kept him in his putrid stomach

The nugget wept in the stench and darkness,

a terrible penitentiary for jewel of his kind.

But in surrender he did not yield,

for he remembered the little hole in the mountain

where he had been and the big world he must find.

Then, one day, the crocodile,

in its search for food,

came to shore in pursuit of a deer.

The hunter, in his remorse of loss,

was passing the scene of despair,

and when he saw the crocodile’s intent to devour,

he alerted the deer for cover

and trapped the vicious predator,

killed it and had it disembowelled:

deep inside the putrid filth the nugget was recovered.

The hunter kissed the nugget many times,

embraced him gently,

took him to a jeweller

and sold him for a great price.

The jeweller dropped on his knees

and wept in jubilant vengeance,

vowed to make a unique jewel out of this nugget

to win fame and approbation.

In the hottest fire,

he put the nugget to burn

and bathed him with acid to burnish his colour.

He beat the nugget with a strong hammer

and persisted with violent labour

to bring out the nugget’s charm and splendour.

He beat and beat and said to himself

that this nugget must pay the price

for all his misfortunes over the years.

But the nugget bore the torture,

endured the jeweller’s curse and sneers,

reflecting on the words of the sun.

Then the jeweller began to cut and file the nugget,

cut and file,

not caring for the nugget’s pain,

put him in a mould,

cursed when he would not form,

broke him to pieces again,

cut and filed with greater strain

until the shape of a necklace was formed.

Alas!

The jeweller smiled and said:

“Nugget, I’m sorry for the process of your torture,

but I have transformed you into a jewel

that shall make you into a monument of wonder,

a special gladness to the eyes

that will cleanse the ugliness of the mind,

enshrining your tale of sufferings with gilded phrases

on everything out of beauty born.

I must wash your pendants with my tears

for you have brought me to immortal fame.

I had taken your sufferings and covered all my shame,

all my lackings and frustrations,

and have now myself clad with the lustre

of your nature and name.”

One day the queen of the jungle

wanted to form herself into elegance

in contest with the other worlds.

She took the rivers, creeks and streams

and weaved them into a flowing cascade to make her hair.

She took the mountains

and made them her body,

the savannahs, her body line,

the rapids and falls, her arms and legs.

She took the smiles from a child’s face

and made them her eyes,

the trees, her raiment green,

the clouds, her eye-brows,

the red oleander, her lips,

the frangipani, her nails.

She took the song of the hanaqua bird

and made it her voice.

Then she pulled down the stars

and made them her earrings,

the sun and moon, her bracelets and anklets:

her rhythmic dance formed

from the gait of the chow-chow bird.

But still she felt sad,

because her beauty was not complete,

her neck was bare.

She flung herself in the court of the green heart trees

and wept for weeks

and would not stop weeping,

though the deer came and wiped her tears

and the bluesaki tried consoling her with a sweet song.

But she wept

and flung away all her jewellery

of the moon, stars and sun

and tore her hair of rivers, creeks and streams,

until the jaguar came and bowed to her

and said: “Beauty fawn-eyed of this jungle green,

my heart suffers when I see your tears.

Tell me, O beauteous Queen,

how could I soothe the wounds of your grief?”

“ Bring me a necklace,” she said,

“that I may contest the beauty of the other worlds.

Tell the king that I must have this jewel,

even at his life’s peril,

that I may burnish my regal being.”

The jaguar told the king,

who went and sought the treasure.

Days passed until he met the jeweller,

and happy he was when he saw the necklace of splendour,

that quickly he bought it with diamonds

and gave it to his queen.

She became bright with life again

and looked lovelier than before;

she made the sun shine brighter

and, the trees, with life greener,

that the mountains, seas and rivers

became part of the heavenly plain.

And in this resplendence she danced,

prancing to the mountain where the nuggets had been.

When the first nugget the sound of the music heard,

he loooked outside his hole

and saw the queen dancing,

embellished with the universe,

a lovely necklace around her neck hanging.

He had seen nothing as beautiful as this before

and wondered where this jewel had been.

How would he know

that that was his own brother

who had lived with him for years

in the same hole of the big mountain!

But the necklace could not bear

to see his brother in such torture.

Thus, he smiled and said to him,

his heart impassioned, filled with fervour:

“Do you recognize me, O brother, your own brother,

who has lived with you for centuries together,

the same couched shared,

the same food and water consumed?

You recognize me not, O brother

because through the mill of forbearance I have passed

and stench, darkness, curses and beatings I have endured.

I wept in silence and to none I complained,

but I thought of you in your little hole,

and even in my torture before the fire

I wept in shame. I wept with my tears flung to the wind,

my heart sunk in despair,

‘cause, my brother,

the jewel inside of you

you refuse to find.

But it is not too late to greet your soul.

Come out of your little hole.

Kill your conceit and arrogance,

and seek the higher world,

face the torture and tyrannies of evil men,

for, without pain, the jewel in you

you can never find.”

Check out Bissundyal's other links:
http://simple-views-big-issues.blogspot.com
http://www.suite101.com/profile.cfm/759030

Caribbean Moon, Indian Bride--Part Nine

2011-03-21T12:25:00.000-07:00

Click here for Beginning of Story

Continued from Part Eight

The following night the moon in waning came out bright again. Everything like last night—the bronze-capped waves, expanse of rice fields, and cluster of huts—became washed again with splendour and happiness. The island people, in beliefs from superstition to logic, would watch the moon as it dwindled for fourteen nights until it became a sickle like a curve of wire. They called this half of lunar month krishnapaksha or dark fortnight. The next night—amawasya or amawas—when the new moon would not be seen—they would sulk a little thinking of ghosts, catastrophes, and demons, then would brighten up as the new-moon sickle grew into a full moon again. They called this half of the lunar month shuklapaksha or bright fortnight.

Purnima, still in her bridal dress, and Arkah in his bridegroom, stood at a window looking out at the river. They seemed tired, bored, and impatient, Purnima moving her feet as if standing on hot coals. When she found Arkah falling into silence, she thrust a finger into his ribs, good-humouredly, and said, “What is on your mind”

“You know what?”

She winked at him with a trace of reproach. “The moon right?”

He chuckled, his lips convolved with an ironic smile. “Yes, the moon.”

She pretended ignorance to his irony. “Does the moon seem smaller tonight?”

He shook his head to pity her little game. “I think so. That’s why I m looking so hard to find the missing piece.”

She ignored his tantrum again. “Everybody on this island talks about the moon. This is a moon island.”

“Yes, it is.”

“What do they do when the moon is bright like this?”

“Many things.”

She knitted her brows to feign rebellion at his brevity. “Come on, tell me. Just don’t be. . . ” And she trailed out of words.

And not wanting her to be truly angry, he told her about the festivals the people celebrated, about men playing cards under trees, women worshipping gods and goddesses at the river beach, men performing Ramlila and Indar Sabha plays in barns of rice mills, groups singing Tulsidas’s choupaaees, beating drums and clanging cymbals. Then he remembered how he, Agni and the other boys would boil crabs in large pots for group feeding. The crabs smelled delicious in the mix of coconut milk, wiri-wiri peppers, celery, callaloo and onions. Then everyone would be ready to eat, their gara-gara leaves, plate-like, stretched out in their hands to collect their portions. After that, they played cockadillo in the woods, singing and bringing back tree leaves. These were the best times in the village: the dry season with ripened paddy grains in the fields; mango, tamarind, and jamoon trees laden with fruits; the rice mill grinding.

When she saw him lost in his world, she poked a finger into his ribs again and made a face as if to kill. “Where have you gone. . . into your dream world again?”

Quickly he came back to himself, and said, motioning to the parrot in the cage, “Thinking what that parrot would report to Mother.”

Her eyes twinkled with amusement. “Don’t worry. I know how to bribe parrots.” Then, as if acting, she laughed convulsively, and pointed to the river. “What are those lights?”

He dilated his eyes to reciprocate her act, and said, “My beautiful dulahin, that’s where you’re from. Surprised? That’s East Bank Essequibo. Those lights you see there are lights of houses and other buildings between trees.”

Elated surprise flashed in her eyes. “My! Which part do you think is my place?”

He threw an arm around her and pointed to a place where a constellation of stars hung over a purple backdrop of dull flickering lights. “There. That’s Graceland.

She stamped her mouth with a hand. “Really?” Then she fisted the other hand, stomped a foot on the ground as if ready for a big exploit. “Let’s pretend to be goblins or angels and walk across. When we reach, I will cook you a nice dinner of crabs or hassars and break Mother’s rules. Then I will take you to the cane fields and ask the cane cutters to give us sugar canes to eat.”

He stared at her, his eyes wanting to break more than rules. He felt flames leaping within him. It would be so nice to be with her in the cane fields, he thought. He could even make it romantic like one of Jeetendra’s movies, dancing, hopping, hiding, teasing and singing. Her place, Graceland, was one of the most beautiful places on the other side of the river, with canals, meadows, stretches of cane fields, coconut groves, and a sea wall like that of Mumbai, waves billowing and leaping over to the road in blasts of sprays. Many times he had thought that this was a good place for a movie. Now he fell into a swirl of him and Purnima in a dreamland of Bollywood ecstasies.”

She nudged him to whisk him out of his reverie. “Come on, tell me something.”

He jumped out of his dream. “Oh, you want me to tell you that we should go across. Well, if you think it easy to walk across a six-mile-wide river, we can go.”

“So wide?”

“Yes, so wide.”

“Do you think anyone can swim across?”

He shrugged. “Someone did already.”

“Who?”

“Agni.”

“Who is Agni?”

“Thought you knew.”

“Why? No one told me about him.”

“He’s my brother.”

“Your brother?”

He walked across to the sofa and flung himself on it. “Not my brother really. We grew up as brothers. He’s my mother’s. .. Not my mother’s…” He trailed out of words.

She too walked across and dropped herself on the sofa. “Please don’t play a game with me. I hate being in the dark.”

He threw back his head and exhaled a gush of air. “Rewati isn’t my mother. She’s my stepmother, and Agni is her brother.”

Her face contorted with disbelief. “What I’m hearing? Is Rewati your stepmother?”

He shrugged. “That’s the truth.” Then he told her that his mother Rajni had died at childbirth when he was two years old. Two years later his father married Rewati, who brought her brother Agni to live with her. He was four years old then.

Serenity pervaded her face, and she flung her arms back. “I have never seen a stepmother adore a stepson as how she adores you.”

“With Rewati, I have never missed my mother,” he said. Then he told her when they were five years old how he and Agni used to sail paper boats on the pond behind their rice mill. One evening as they were having fun, Arkah’s boat got stuck between a bulge of grass and duckweed. To free it, he went to the edge of the pond and tried to extricate it with a bamboo rod. The dirt on the pond broke away, and he fell headlong into the deep of the water. Soon he found himself in a world of rainbows, amber moons, and lightning forks. Agni, panicked, ran and told Rewati. She sprinted, jumped into the pond and fished him out. When he came back to his senses, he saw Rewati slapping her chest, her eyes full of tears. From that day she became his real mother; Agni his blood brother.

Purnima, moved by the story, said, “I saw the pond, a very huge and deep one.”

Arkah nodded. “We use the water from it to soak our paddy for milling.” He fell silent for a while. Then when he gathered his thoughts again, he said, “Do you like the surroundings there with the rice mill, bungalow, jamoon groves, and troolie-thatched huts?”

She brightened up, her yes like two shimmering lakes. “Beautiful.”

“That’s why they did our wedding there, closer to everything.”

She now seemed ablaze with excitement. “Down there you have all you want of village life—the women cooking and singing, the men making tents and dancing.”

Yes, indeed she was right, he thought. When he was a child he used to think that Bundarie Square was like places in rural India he had seen in movies Jab Jab Phool Khile, Junglee, and Phir Wohi Dil Laya Hoon. Despite the hard work in the rice fields, cow pastures, ground-provision farms, and rice mills, angels and fairies seemed to be roaming everywhere. Colours—whether from sunsets, moonlights, gardens, or lily ponds--sang like kiskadees in trees. Even the grass after a shower of rain would challenge the green beauty faked in the best films.

The parrot cawed and said something unintelligible, hurling him out of his dream. Seeing Purnima gaping at him, he said, “Bundarie Square is different now. Many years ago people were poor but there was a kind of beauty and happiness you can’t find now.”

She ran a finger on his face in reproach. “Don’t say that. It is still beautiful.” Then she told him on her first day on the island she had taken a tour of the village and was thrilled to see women squatting on the grass, doing their laundry; boys throwing marbles into holes dug out for the game; others grazing their sheep or goats on parapets filled with daisies.

Then, drunk with her feelings, she said, “What I love most are the flowers—jasmines, marigolds, frangipanis, zinnias and lilies. And you can find them everywhere, in pots hanging from porches, in the churchyard, graveyard, school compound.”

Arkah seemed happy that she liked his island. He put his lips to the nape of her neck and said, “Ah, you have a feel of it! Bundarie Square, no place like it.”

To be continued

From Ocean to Ocean for a Home

2011-03-14T16:19:00.000-07:00

Contact author at guyind@rcn.com

Check out Bissundyal's other links:

http://www.suite101.com/profile.cfm/759030
http://simple-views-big-issues.blogspot.com/

This is the touching story of Indians leaving India to work on sugar plantations in the Caribbean. With the story centering on Karna, Rangrati, and Padmageet, the writer summarizes India with all her passions, beauty, strengths, and glories. The histories of the great subcontinent with all its Vedas, Shastras, and Puranas can be heard in this piece. And music and well as tears come like monsoonal rains in Mumbai.
This is a journey not only for the Caribbean but also for India and all those who care for her past.

SAMUDRAM-SAMUDRAAD-GRIHAAYA

FROM OCEAN TO OCEAN FOR A HOME

A ONE-ACT PLAY

Churaumanie Bissundyal

CHARACTERS

KARNA PANDE

RANGARATI

PADMAGEET

DHEERSUTTA

HAMID

SOHAN

KALLU

RAAMOO

RUTH CARLTON
HERBERT CARLTON

SAMUEL COLLINS

FIRST OVERSEER

SECOND OVERSEER

HOLI REVELLERS

JAHAAJIN

BALVIR PANDE

SONIA LOPEZ

Midnight. June 2004. At a squalid, noisy street corner in New York. The neighbourhood is a drug-infested area with bums, robbers and hookers roaming all night. Balvir Pande, a bearded, slovenly dressed man, in his mid thirties, is sitting under a street light, writing. An Indian woman, Sonia Lopez, with a trace of European blood and in her late twenties comes up to Balvir Pande and puts a gun to his head. She is coarsely dressed in skin-tight jeans and a leather jacket.

SONIA LOPEZ: Hold it! Don’t move! An—And don’t scream! (Looking around). You can only talk loud enough for me to hear.

BALVIR PANDE: (Composed) What do you want?

SONIA LOPEZ: What do you think a robber wants?

BALVIR PANDE: (Peruses her, then motions to her with his chin) A robber like you only wants one thing.

SONIA LOPEZ: Huh. You think I am one of them.

BALVIR PANDE: What else you want me to think?

SONIA LOPEZ: Come on! I am not here to do a soap opera. Give me all your money.

BALVIR PANDE: (Smiles) Money! (Chuckles). Did you take a close look at me?

SONIA LOPEZ: (Her eyes growing fierce) Yes! I did. You seem to be rich.

BALVIR PANDE: Really. How do you know?

SONIA LOPEZ: (Pauses and surveys him) Only two kinds of people come here in the middle of the night. A mad man with lots of money, and a thirsty man who looks for a woman to give away his money.

BALVIR PANDE: (Quietly and somewhat indifferently). I might be thirsty for many things, but a beautiful woman in the middle of the night putting a gun on a man’s head will either make him more thirsty or will make him never ever get thirsty again.

SONIA LOPEZ: (peering into his face) You think I come here to rub my legs on you?

BALVIR PANDE (Trying to be unperturbed) No, I didn’t say so.

SONIA LOPEZ: Come on! Somebody might pass and see me. What do you have to give me?

BALVIR PANDE: What I have to give you, you might not want.

SONIA LOPEZ: (Eyebrows knitted) What?

BALVIR PANDE: A poem I am writing.

SONIA LOPEZ: You think I will waste a taxi fare to come here for a poem?

BALVIR PANDE: It’s a nice poem. I think you going to like it.

SONIA LOPEZ: (Nose turned up) You writing poem in these hard times?

BALVIR PANDE: What’s wrong with that? It’s a poem about a woman I will meet one day.

SONIA LOPEZ: I think you are really mad!

BALVIR PANDE: Well, I am glad you said so. It makes me feel safer.

SONIA LOPEZ: You don’t feel frightened that this gun going to go off on your head?

BALVIR PANDE: Why should I? I never had an experience like this before.

SONIA LOPEZ: (Peering into his face) I think you’re terrorist. I will call the police.

BALVIR PANDE: (Raises his head and looks into her face) You! You going to call the police. Huh!

SONIA LOPEZ: Awright, read what you write.

BALVIR PANDE: You want me to read my poem?

SONIA LOPEZ: (Makes a squirming face) Yeaaah!

BALVIR PANDE: (Hesitates, chuckles mirthlessly, and after a few moments, starts reading) You are my solitude in loneliness,

the voice of my pen that writes with fury.

The sound of my tears you are

that urges my words to music,

to make me think

of my ocean voyages in search of a home---

SONIA LOPEZ: (Interrupts) That’s what you write there is for a woman who bakes cakes in flower gardens and waits for her man in silken nightgowns and bouquets to bring her ice cream and chocolates on moonlight nights. (Pauses) Are you broken-hearted?

BALVIR PANDE: (With a mocking edge in his voice) Well, how to put it. (Pauses). I’m more financially broken than broken-hearted. I want to sell this poem for a few quarters to buy food. (Pauses). Before you kill me, I want you to buy this one from me. That will do two good things: it will make you think more of men than guns, and will provide money for a man like me to buy food. I haven’t eaten a thing all day.

SONIA LOPEZ: I haven’t come here to feed you. I come to rob you. (Pauses and appraises him scrupulously) What kind of man are you? (Pushes herself forward and peers at him) I think you’re a terrorist. Where you from?

BALVIR PANDE: Guyana.

SONIA LOPEZ: Is that a place in Iraq?

BALVIR PANDE: Iraq? No. Guyana is in South America. I am a South American Indian.

SONIA LOPEZ: What tribe do you belong to?

BALVIR PANDE: (With an impatient, twisted face) I am not from a tribe like these Native American Indians you know. My roots are from India. I was cut away from there for more than one hundred and sixty years.

SONIA LOPEZ: (Bewildered) And how did you get there?

BALVIR PANDE: I thought you come here to rob and kill me and not to do a research.

SONIA LOPEZ: Well, if I can prove that you are a terrorist, I might not have to rob anymore. I might get a reward that will make me rich for life.

BALVIR PANDE: Oh.

SONIA LOPEZ: Tell me how you reach there.

BALVIR PANDE: It’s a long story. You might get bored and go away. You might not want to rob and kill me anymore.

SONIA LOPEZ: You . . . want me to really kill you?

BALVIR PANDE: Well, that’s what you’re here for.

SONIA LOPEZ: (Throws up evasive hands) I think you are a dangerous terrorist. Tell me your story.

BALVIR PANDE: (Looks at her with subdued resentment and then shrugs his shoulders) Well, you already know that I am from a country called Guyana.

SONIA LOPEZ: Yes, I already know that. Tell me the rest.

BALVIR PANDE: Well, Guyana, a British colony, was previously called British Guiana. After African slavery was abolished, the British began bringing immigrants from India to work on the sugar plantations. My great-great grandfather, Karna Pande, came sometime in 1858. He came due to the Indian Mutiny in 1857, fleeing from the British, who were hunting him down since he was a sepoy that mutinied. If he didn’t escape, they would have killed him.

His story became a sort of love story, since he had a woman, Rangrati, whom he had left behind. It was on the bank of the Ganges they last met, on a beautiful morning. (The present scene of Balvir Pande and Sonia Lopez dissolves into a scene of Karna Pande and Rangrati on the bank of the Ganges. Karna Pande (in his early twenties) is dressed in a white dhoti and kurta; Rangrati (in her late teens) is dressed in a pink sari).

RANGRATI: (Dropping her hand lightly on Karna Pande’s shoulder) Why are you silent?

KARNA PANDE: Thinking.

RANGRATI: Thinking about what?

KARNA PANDE: Many things . . . About this river and the story of King Bhagirath, about Rajputs who don’t care.

RANGRATI: (Endearingly) I don’t understand you sometimes, Karna.

KARNA PANDE: Quietly). Sometimes I, too, don’t understand myself.

RANGRATI: Why there is no more laughter in your eyes?

KARNA PANDE: (Chuckles mirthlessly) Because India has become a place of no laughter.

RANGRATI: Do you hate the British?

KARNA PANDE: No. Why? They have to do what they must do. We mutinied and now they are hunting us down.

RANGRATI: Are you afraid of them?

KARNA PANDE: No.

RANGRATI: (Tears in her eyes) Everyone is saying that they will kill you.

KARNA PANDE: Well, what can I do?

RANGRATI: All over India there are thousands of widows. (Pauses) Would I, too, become a widow, Karna?

KARNA PANDE: (Turns round and stares at her) I never want you to become a widow. Don’t ever say such a thing again. If you feel that I am going to die, then look for another man.

RANGRATI: (Incensed) How could you say such a thing when I am in love with you?

KARNA PANDE: In these times, love runs away like a frightened child.

RANGRATI: My love for you will never run away.

KARNA PANDE: (Sadly). It is always good to love, but what more can we do?

RANGRATI: (Stridently). If they kill you, I want to die with you!

KARNA PANDE: (Quietly). You are too beautiful to die.

RANGRATI: (Earnestly). Does this mean that you will run away?

KARNA PANDE: I don’t know.

RANGRATI: You can’t run away and leave me, Karna.

KARNA PANDE: (Endearingly) I will not run away.

RANGRATI: (Peering into his eyes). Your eyes are saying something different.

KARNA PANDE: They are saying what is in my heart.

RANGRATI: What is in your heart?

KARNA PANDE: You know it. I don’t want you to become a widow.

RANGRATI: I want to die with you, Karna.

KARNA PANDE: Huh. A woman like you? You are a green fruit that is yet to be ripened.

RANGRATI: Why are you talking this way?

KARNA PANDE: Because my heart is talking.

RANGRATI: That is not the voice of your heart.

KARNA PANDE: Why do you think so?

RANGRATI: Because your heart is saying something else.

KARNA PANDE: (Putting a hand on her shoulder) Perhaps you are right. My heart will never leave you.

(The scene dissolves into the scene of Balvir Pande and Sonia Lopez).

SONIA LOPEZ: (Angry) But isn’t your Karna Pande a coward and a liar? How could he lie to a woman who loves him so dearly? Even knowing that the British would kill him, he shouldn’t think of abandoning his woman.

BALVIR PANDE: His story has many sides, and sometimes we can’t see the thin line between a hero and a coward.

SONIA LOPEZ: (Glaring) You are talking as if it is you who holding the gun to my head.

BALVIR PANDE: (Looks up at the gun) Oh, the gun. Sometimes the hand of the gun turns into a feeling of the heart.

SONIA LOPEZ: Come on, don’t try to tangle me up with words. Tell me what happened to them after their last meeting?

BALVIR PANDE: Oh, them. I will tell you. (Pauses and looks at the gun again) Won’t it be better if you take the gun away from my head?

SONIA LOPEZ: I can’t. That is a way how the story must be told.

BALVIR PANDE: Okay. (Pauses). After their last meeting, Rangrati would go by the Ganges and wait all day for Karna, in the hope that he would turn up, but weeks passed and he didn’t. Yet she waited.

One day, Karna’s mother, Dheersuta, looking for Karna, found her sitting on a rock. Both of them were happy to see each other, thinking that the other might have some news about Karna, but the story unfolds with a strange pain. (The scene dissolves into a scene of Rangrati sitting on a rock on the bank of the Ganges and Dheersutta entering).

DHEERSUTA: (Speaking to Rangrati) Beti, I’ve been looking for Karna for days.

RANGRATI: (Stands up) I, too, have been looking for him, Maajee.

DHEERSUTTA: (Eyebrows knitted) Strange things are happening. Can’t understand (Pauses and peruses Rangrati’s face) Is it true that Karna has gone back to the Native Infantry to work for the British?

RANGRATI: Why would he? The British would kill him.

DHEERSUTA: (Shakes her head in disagreement) Don’t let your thoughts fly on dark wings, beti. The British will never hurt my Karna.

RANGRATI: (Smiles cynically) Do you think they won’t?

DHERSUTA: (Somewhat bewildered) Why would they kill him?

RANGRATI: (Breathes heavily) He didn’t tell you the truth, Maajee.

DHEERSUTTA: What truth?

RANGRATI: (Hesitantly) He was a ringleader in the Sepoy Revolt.

DHEERSUTA: (Slaps her chest and issues a stifled alarm) You make my heart spring like a tiger, beti. I don’t believe it. My Karna was never a ringleader fighting the British.

RANGRATI: (Sternly) He was, and the British will kill him.

DHEERSUTTA: (Stamps her feet in refutation) The British will not kill my Karna. (Pauses) My Karna will come back, beti. (Introspectively) He will come back and bring that happy day I have waited for all my life . . . when he will marry you and take you home as his wife.

(Enters Sohan, a short teenager wearing a dhoti and kurta)

SOHAN: (Running frenziedly) Maajee! Maajee! News for you! News for you!

DHERRSUTA: (Swivels around slowly, trying to compose herself) Where were you all week, Sohan? You appear and disappear like a ghost.

SOHAN: (Panting for breath) I was with Karna. He gone in a big-big ship far-far from Calcutta beyond. He gone to cross the kaalaa-paanee, black water, Maajee. (Smiles and modulates his voice) He say to tell you and bahen Rangrati that he coming back. He coming back with bag-bag gold like a Maharaja-dhanwaan.

DHEERSUTA: (Holds her head and looks up to the heavens) Hai Raam! This is the darkest moment of my life. (Turns to Sohan angrily). Why did you make Karna go? You are a darpok-namakharam!

SOHAN: (Stabs his chest with a finger) Oh, no, Maajee, I didn’t make you dulaaray Karna gone. Point you finger on the British. They make you dulaaray Karna gone.

DHEERSUTTA: (Turns to Rangrati) Beti, Ganga-Maiya weeps like a storm. Karna gone!

RANGRATI: (Head dropped) I know he’s gone, Maajee. But I couldn’t bring myself to accept it. (Pauses). Dark things are happening. Though Saaheb Canning says he wants peace, he is shooting down the rebels like mad. Maharaanee Victoria is giving titles to Raajputs’ land and is taking away their power with the other hand. (Censoriously) Stupid Raajputs!

DHEERSUTA: (Stridently defensive) But Karna is not like the Raajputs, beti, and the British respect him for what he is.

RANGRATI: (Shakes her head) The British do not respect him, Maajee. They call him a mutineer.

DHEERSUTA: (Resolute) Mutineer? No! The British treat him as a brahmin.

RANGRATI: (Shakes her head) Do you think the British care about brahmins, Maajee? Oh, no! They call us heathen-niggers. And Karna, in their eyes, was no better than a heathen-nigger. They only showed a little respect to him because he was a small cavalryman. And some of us get carried away with that.

DHEERSUTA: Don’t say such things, beti. The British are good-good devatas. They never do bad. (Swings around and loses her train of thoughts) But why Karna go away? He kills his dharam, when he crosses the kaalaa-paanee.

RANGRATI: It is better that he leaves to kill his culture elsewhere

DHEERSUTTA: (Spins around on the balls of her feet, incensed) What do you mean?

RANGRATI: Maajee, he was killing his culture right here. He was biting cartridges made out of pig and cow fat.

DHERSUTTA: No!

SOHAN: (Moves up to Dheersutta and grins sheepishly) Hai-ray, Maajee, bahen Rangrati talk sense. British bad-bad. (Demonstrates) Make we bite cartridge with bull-fat, cow-fat, horse-fat . . . all kind of fat. Make we dance wine-up nagaaraa ah bad-house, Laal Beebee Baazaar. (Sticks a finger in the air) But Saaheb in ship ah Calcutta good-good. Saaheb ah ship nice-nice and smoke cigar like when a whole city ah catch-a-fire.

DHEERSUTA: (Pounces upon him angrily) Hut tayree! You darpok-namakharaam. Kaalaa-paanee kill the flag of Hanumaan. Kaalaa-paanee kill Veda and Puraan. Kaalaa paanee kill Poojaa-Satyanaraayan.

SOHAN: (Scampers away to keep a distance). Saaheb say ship going to Eldorado, land of gold. Gold plenty-plenty everywhere. Gold in you bathroom, gold in you bed. Gold in you coffin even when you time come to dead.

DHEERSUTA: (Picks up a stick and rushes at Sohan) I going to take this laathee and break you khopree, Sohan. Karna doesn’t want silver, doesn’t want gold. Karna want dharam, the beauty of his soul.

SOHAN: (Eyes dilating between fear and anger) When Karna see paisa and gold, you think he want dharam and beauty of soul? I take oath and swear (Kisses his palm and looks up to the heavens). Saaheb didn’t push Karna in ship to go to strange land. Karna jump with he own foot and run and gone. He put on he pugree, dhotee and kurta and jump on the ship as if he ah Shree Bhagwaan.

DHEERSUTA: (Stridently) Tayree gulaam! You blame Karna! (She pounces upon him again with her stick. He checks back in terror, stumbles on the ground and then regains himself to his feet).

RANGRATI: (Intervening with a placating hand on Dheersuta’s shoulder) Maajee, Sohan speaks the truth. Karna escaped on his own. The British would never forget the revolt of the Indians. They’re hunting them down like deer.

DHEERSUTA: (Begins to weep, and then drops her head) Ganga-Maiya cry bad-bad, beti. Dhartee-Maa cry, too. Karna crosses the kaalaa-paanee. (She turns to the river, drops on her knees, throws her hands up in the air, then beats her chest with a hand and begins to lament) Son, from your motherland you are severed and tethered in the dungeons of passion, where your duty becomes hazed in the dim shadows of ignorance. Greed will govern, so that the sacred thread is torn and thrown in the furnace of oblivion where vows are put to be burnt. You shall cross the ocean, my son, in embers of the Great War, where fate butchered relations and man drowned in fears! Now all are gone--the cry is all over, for the dark ocean’s water is bitter, so bitter, my son, that the rituals and colours are dumped to the creatures of the dark water. The flag of Hanumaan draped in the kum-kum of Sindh will cease to flutter in the wind: no bamboo to titter high in the legend of Seeta’s sindoor. (She walks away and exits).

SOHAN: (Constricts his body and dilates his eyes) Hai-ray, bahen, look me story: when you do good, you hold am wood. I get bad name for nothing-nothing at all. British poke fire ah Karna behind, Karna doesn’t have to bawl?

RANGRATI: (Immersed in her own thoughts) I heard that three hundred sepoys of the Bengal Native Infantry were blown up to pieces by Major Carlton himself.

SOHAN: (Jumps up excitedly and chops the air with his right hand) Saaheb Carlton mad-mad, bahen. He say sepoy kill he son, Tommy . . . and he say he going to kill sepoy back. Lucky Karna meet ah man at Dinapore.

RANGRATI: (Turns back and looks at him querulously) Dinapore! How did you two reach there?

SOHAN: (Chuckles proudly) We cross the Gograh River, dress up with ornhi and saaree, and dance (demonstrates) like paturiya ah Laal Beebee Baazaar.

RANGRATI: (Puzzled) You wore women’s clothes and went to Calcutta?

SOHAN: We had to do that, bahen, when the big moustache man come and tell we that he going to take we to the land ah Eldorado.

RANGRATI: (Querulously) Eldorado?

SOHAN: You don’t know Eldorado? Down there you get pumpkin big like bungalow, and you sift sugar make out of gold.

RANGRATI: (Ignoring him) The Indian people will say Karna has broken his caste, Sohan, by crossing the kaalee-paanee.

SOHAN: (Eyes dilating and narrowing in swift alternation) Cross kaalee-paanee, bahen. Kaalee-paanee good-good. Moustache man show me gold thaaree, gold lota he get on the other side of kaalee-paanee. Over the other side is Eldorado, the City of Gold. In Eldorado you drink dahee in gold lota; in gold thaaree you eat methai, baaraa, gulgula, kheer. Whole day in Eldorado you have nothing to do but sit down and smile. You don’t have to work at all.

RANGRATI: (Ignores him again) Sohan, they say anyone who crosses the kaalaa-paanee becomes impure. He breaks the sacred thread and falls prey to the lower qualities of the mind. He forgets the srutis and smritis, and curses the flag of Hanumaan.

SOHAN: (Penitently) Curse Hanumaan, bahenjee? I so sorry. I mean real business now. I going to pray to Hanumaan. . . . Pray to bring back Karna with the big ship and Saaheb with them cigars. (Jumping up and flinging his arms in the air) Jai Hanumaan! Jai Hanumaan! (Scene dissolves into the scene of Balvir Pande and Sonia Lopez).

BALVIR PANDE: So, this was how Karna escaped from India, in a squalid ship with little space, little or no medicine and bad food. But Karna did not complain. In the ship, he made many friends. A beautiful woman, Padmageet, came to like him. Raamoo, a man he met once or twice in a neighbouring village, came to like him also. But he was particularly fond of Hamid, a middle-aged man who was never afraid to speak his mind. (Pauses) One day as Karna was looking out to the sea, Hamid stormed into him and began complaining about the ship. (The scene dissolves into the scene of the ship, with Karna Pande looking out to the sea).

HAMID: (Entering) God dammit, jahajee, you sorrowing again? This is no place for an Indian to be even sad. (He spits) Everywhere you look there is filth.

(Karna feigns impassiveness).

HAMID: (Pressing himself forward to gain Karna’s attention) You heard what happened last night? Two more died. They were checking the sky for Indian stars, and, when the storm came, they fell overboard. (Pauses and flings his arms up contemptuously) Jahaajee, before the voyage started, these two fools wanted to go back home. (Laughs raucously).

KARNA PANDE: (Introspectively) They’re not fools, Hamid. Sixty days have already passed, and we don’t have a clue where we’re going. And everyday we have a sick or a dead.

HAMID: Better we dead than frolic in human filth. (Pauses) They say dead men don't talk. Huh! Last night I saw a dead man telling a jahaajee that it is better to be dead than go relieving his bowels like a sick, crazy dog.

KARNA PANDE: They can’t help it.

(Enters Padmageet).

HAMID: (Too engrossed to notice Padmageet) Oh, goddamit, jahaajee, there is so much filth here that even Allah is afraid to come here.

KARNA PANDE: It’s not the filth that frightens me, Hamid. It’s the disease that causes the filth. (Pauses) All of us are going to die.

HAMID: (Resentfully). Let me die, jahaajee! I want to die rather than to sail on this foul, rotten ship. (Making his exit) See you, jahaajee. (Turns around and notices Padmageet) Huh, Padma! (Pauses and stares at her with knitted brows). I like to look at you when the moon is on your face (Waving a finger) Hmm, and something is on your mind, sweeter than the moon.

(Padmageet drops her head and smiles).

(Exits Hamid)

PADMAGEET: (Walks up to Karna and stands beside him) When Hamid talks about the ship this way, he brings back an old fear to me.

KARNA PANDE: (Shrugs) What else can he talk about when children are shrieking, women are wailing, and men are shouting to die?

PADMAGEET: Sometimes I wonder if there is a way out of this.

KARNA PANDE: There is always a way.

PADMAGEET: Why you always try to be brave?

KARNA PANDE: (Turns and faces her) This voyage is only for the brave.

PADMAGEET: (Smiles cynically) It’s a good thing to be brave and die, I guess?

KARNA PANDE: The brave never dies. Bhishma didn’t die. Arjuna didn’t. Abhimanyu didn’t.

PADMAGEET: (A bit incensed) Why do you live in the past? The past is not real; it is only full of distant stars.

KARNA PANDE: The past gives us strength for the present and future.

PADMAGEET: Is that your way of telling yourself how you must survive?

KARNA PANDE: (Clicks his finger, touches her lips and smiles) Maybe. I have to think of the past to learn all over again how to smile.

PADMAGEET: The past never makes me smile. My past . . . (Trails off into silence with knitted eyebrows).

KARNA PANDE: These times, in different ways, we have to find laughter.

PADMAGEET: Are you just trying to make me happy, Karna? Tell me. Just trying to?

KARNA PANDE: Well . . . (Breathes heavily) How must I put it over? (Pauses and drops a hand on her shoulder) Only a man with a heart of stone can bear to see a kumud flower wilt in a pond of drying mud.

PADMAGEET: (Staring at him with intent eyes) Is that all?

KARNA PANDE: Well, what can I say? That is the only way for us to make each other happy.

PADMAGEET: I am always happy to be near you, Karna. But, sometimes, you are close to me, yet so far.

KARNA PANDE: My spirit is like every other spirit: it wanders close; it wanders far.

PADMAGEET: Does it wander where your heart doesn’t want it to go?

KARNA PANDE: Sometimes my spirit wanders without the voice of my heart.

PADMAGEET: You are fooling yourself, Karna. Stupid man! The past haunts you as how mine haunts me.

KARNA PANDE: Perhaps you are right. Sometimes I feel things hang around my neck like a millstone.

PADMAGEET: So, why don’t you get them off your neck?

KARNA PANDE: (Chuckles) Get them off! It’s so easy to say it.

PADMAGEET: Don’t you think we can get rid of our past? We are no longer in India.

KARNA PANDE: We can leave India, but India will never leave us.

PADMAGEET: What a way to say it! (She takes out a packet wrapped in her sari and hands him).

KARNA PANDE: What is this?

PADMAGEET: (Smiling). Your India that will never leave you.

KARNA PANDE: (He opens the packet and exclaims). Mithai!

PADMAGEET: You always told me you like it. This morning I stole into the pantry and made it.

KARNA PANDE: You didn’t have to take such a risk, Padma. If they had caught you---

(Padmaget interrupts him, putting a hand to his mouth).

PADMAGEET: Last night I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking of you.

KARNA PANDE: Sometimes I think of you, too, but the moon cannot rise from the west. It only has one way.

PADMAGEET: I know. I will forever have to live in funeral pyres.

KARNA PANDE: One day something will walk into your life, like a shower of rain that comes to please a wilting garden. (Pauses) So, please don’t talk like that.

(The scene dissolves into the scene of Balvir Pande and Sonia Lopez).

SONIA LOPEZ: (Angry, her hand shivering with the gun). Isn’t your Karna a heartless brute? Why was he allowing himself to get into Padma’s heart when he had already claimed love to Rangrati?

BALVIR PANDE: (Breathes hard) I don’t know. There is way between a man and woman (looking askance at Sonia Lopez) where things in the distance comes close and makes a storm.

SONIA LOPEZ: (Glares at Balvir Pande) That’s not the point. Your Karna is a bloodywell cheat!

BALVIR PANDE: (Purses his lips and shrugs) I don’t think he is a cheat. He is just torn between two women.

SONIA LOPEZ: (Her hand trembles with the gun). Is this the way God has created you men? . . . Now tell me where is Karna’s love for Rangrati? Has it evaporated in the wind?

BALVIR PANDE: (Feigning calmness). No, it is still there.

SONIA LOPEZ: (With dilated eyes) Where?

BALVIR PANDE: (Yielding). Oh, where. (Pauses). Awright. I think no other woman can replace Rangrati in Karna’s heart. There seems to be a sort of relation between them, only they themselves would understand. They talk to each other in ways only gods and goddesses understand, in a language of the heavens. (The scene dissolves into two sets: Rangarati sitting on a rock on the bank of the Ganges, and Karna Pande on the ship, looking out to the sea, the two of them in a celestial communication).

KARNA PANDE: Love! Often I stand here in the cheerless cries of the sea, waiting in the patience of stars for you to come, for you to creep out with the moon from the edge of the ocean’s bowl to soothe these angry waters with the silver spread of your smiles.

RANGRATI: On the bank of this river, in deepened solitude, a thousand years I seek you, my love! Ever-seeking you in the timeless sojourn of the sun to rouse my lips with the crimson splash of the morn. Rouse me deeper than ever with the soft whispers of the wind to sate every flutter of my passion, until you fill me enraptured in the heavens of your arms.

KARNA PANDE: How could you seek me, my love, so far away in the sadness of this ocean--ocean rolling, raging wild! How could you seek me when I could only carve you from my solitude and make love with you in guesses and dreams, knowing truly that you are not here and never shall be!

RANGRATI: Then who would come in my long waiting through these dark, green thorns to salve my blistered feet and show me the way to tread on the petals of patience, so that I may never stumble again?

KARNA PANDE: I shall come, if you so care, like a soft path of flowers and tend your feet with scented blossoms and salve them with my anguish, sadness and despair.

RANGRATI: If you come, my love, I shall gather sunbeams from the wind and make a garland for only you to wear, an inscription of my love hued with the touch of verdant trees and studded with jewels of dewdrops to make you shine in brilliance of green, killing all your sadness and despair.

KARNA PANDE: I will come, then, and let you take me by the tempest of your eyes. Let you take me by the thunders of your emotions, by your eyelids of dark clouds, by your lips of crimson blooms, voice that opens the buds at morn, gait that fills the heavens with fire.

RANGRATI: Love, when you come, I will not touch your hand until you drench me with the soft showers of your eyes. Then, I will let you drain my lips of every drop of passion so long gathered in my long wait from the patient flow of this river’s tide. (The scenes dissolves into the scene of Sonia Lopez and Balvir Pande).

SONIA LOPEZ: Are you sure you aren’t making up a story about this nonsense about celestial love?

BALVIR PANDE: Well, why would I do something like that to a woman who has nothing else to do than to kill a man?

SONIA LOPEZ: (Explodes) I am going to blow your head off!

BALVIR PANDE: There are better things to blow off.

SONIA LOPEZ: (Breathes out a gush of air) Do you think I am a joke?

BALVIR PANDE: I never said so.

SONIA LOPEZ (Removes the gun from his head) Are you hungry?

BALVIR PANDE: (Betrays surprise) What are you doing?

SONIA LOPEZ: I have a few slices of bread in my bag. Do you want them?

BALVIR PANDE: Are you here to kill me or feed me?

SONIA LOPEZ: (Takes out the bread from her bag and hands him) Now tell me something. What will Karna do with Padma?

BALVIR PANDE: (Eating) What he will do? Don’t you know? (Pauses) What do you think I will do if you come to me like Padma?

SONIA LOPEZ: Come on tell me, before I put the gun back to your stupid head!

BALVIR PANDE: Awright, I will tell you the story. (Pauses) The story takes a different turn when another man comes into Padma’s life. When the ship reached British Guiana and moored in into the capital’s port, a planter, Herbert Carlton, came to inspect the Indians that were to be indentured on his plantation. The moment he set eyes on Padma, he was never himself again. He was not only a lascivious man; he was also brutal. This is how he behaved when he came on board and saw a jahajin, a young Indian woman. (The scene dissolves into the ship ccene. Herbert Carlton grabs the jahaajin to sexually molest her, the other jahaajis and jahaajins looking on, including Karna).

JAHAAJIN: (Struggling to free herself from Herbert Carlton’s grasp) Leave me alone! Oh, leave me alone!

(The ship scene freezes)

JAHAAJIN’S INNER VOICE: This is a brutal game of passion, a massacre of emotions, where love is no more, where truth is tortured, where human tears are bought and sold like beans and potatoes for a handful of coins.

(The ship scene becomes activated)

JAHAAJIN: (Still resisting and weeping, shouting to Padmageet) Padma, help me! They’re taking me away! I will not see you again!

(Padma drops on her knees and begins to weep)

(The ship scene freezes again)

PADMAGEET’S INNER VOICE: Pearls of love, strung into a divine garland, is now torn asunder, eyes full of tears yelling the agony of the heart. The masters, dumb, deaf, blind to the voice of anguished yearns, callous to the pains of a child's cry, foul the soft breath of the wind and pollute the flow of this river's tide. In this wound of the past, the journey now ends with the masters’ passions erupting into greedy patterns. Here tyranny is no stranger where the soul will be measured in the fruits of toil, blood cashed into mansions, sweat sipped in sobbing wine.

(The ship scene becomes activated again. Two overseers enter to help Herbert Carlton take the jahaajin away)

(Exit Herbert Carlton, two overseers and jahaajin)

HAMID: This is bigger filth I see here than on the voyage. Allah will never come here.

PADMAGEET: Don’t speak too loud.

HAMID: (Ferociously) Why shouldn’t I? Don’t I have a mouth? (Pauses) Look how they treat the jahaajin like a slave girl!

PADMAGEET: You are living in a past world, Hamid, a world different from the world we now find ourselves in. I thought you knew they had brought us here to work like slaves. Soon, they will put us on sale like slaves.

HAMID: (Angry) On sale like slaves! What do they take me for . . . a vegetable in the market: pumpkin, caroilla, baigan, and tomatoes to be put on sale? That could never happen to me. I’ll go and talk to my Allah right now!

(Hamid exits angrily)

PADMAGEET: (Speaking to Karna Pande) That was horrible what they did to the jahaajin. Where are they taking her?

KARNA PANDE: Where else than where all of us are going to.

PADMAGEET: (Reflectively) I heard about this before I came to the ship.

KARNA PANDE: Oh, so you knew.

PADMAGEET: Yes, I knew.

KARNA PANDE: You are a strange woman.

PADMAGEET: I had no other choice---

(Herbert Carlton re-enters with one of his overseers and interrupts)

HERBERT CARLTON: (Speaking to the overseer, feasting his eyes on Padmageet) Oh, dickens Ronnie, this is a beautiful woman. I have to get this one at all cost.

OVERSEER: (Writing in a book) Shall I make a note of this one, sir?

HERBERT CARLTON: Oh, please, Ronnie! Oh, please! This woman sends my whole body in a blaze of desire.

(The overseer makes a note in his book. Herbert Carlton goes up to Padmageet and tries to grab her. She withdraws).

HERBERT CARLTON: I really like the way she’s behaving, Ronnie. She would really give me a jolly time.

OVERSEER: Sir, you have to be careful. The Immigration Agent General is here.

HERBERT CARLTON: (Indignantly). Oh, don’t worry with Mr. Crossby. I like to see him with his pants off masturbating.

OVERSEER: (Pointing to Karna Pande) Do you like this one, sir. He seems to be healthy and fit for the fields.

HERBERT CARLTON: (Casts a quick glance at Karna Pande) Oh, book him down, Ronnie. He looks like a good one.

OVERSEER: (Peruses his book) So this is six of them we have here. Shall I conclude the contracts today and take them up tomorrow to the plantation?

HERBERT CARLTON: (Staring lasciviously at Padmageet) Do anything that pleases you. (Deviates) Now the Almighty Father brings peace and calm to the volcano of my loins. He sends this beautiful woman for me. For me alone!

OVERSEER: (Whispering censoriously) Sir, I told you that you have to be careful. Mr. Crossby is here.

HERBERT CARLTON: (In an outburst of rage) What does Mr. Crossby have to do with my private sexual feelings? If he is the protector of the coolies, he has no right to interfere with my taste for exciting things. (The scene dissolves into the scene of Sonia Lopez and Balvir Pande).

SONIA LOPEZ: The Devil should cut off that thing between you men’s legs. Why do you use it to make women unhappy?

BALVIR PANDE: (Staring at her with dilated eyes). Make women unhappy? I . . . I . . . I thought it was . . . (Trails of into silence with dilated eyes).

SONIA LOPEZ: (Explodes) Does writing poetry give you a blind spot to other things?

BALVIR PANDE: What do you mean?

SONIA LOPEZ: Are you blind or deaf to what Herbert Carlton was saying?

BALVIR PANDE: No. He was normal.

SONIA LOPEZ: Normal? What is your problem, guy?

BALVIR PANDE: Come on. The guy was a slave master? And how else do you want a slave master to behave?

SONIA LOPEZ: Isn’t slave master only for African slaves?

BALVIR PANDE: That’s not fair to say.

SONIA LOPEZ: Do you mean he took Padma and the others to the same place where the slaves are living?

BALVIR PANDE: Maybe not the same place, but it was a place no better than where the slaves lived.

SONIA LOPEZ: Really.

BALVIR PANDE: In a nutshell, the planters had kept and cared for their mules better than these Indian people. After they signed their contracts, they had to work in the fields five to ten years, planting, cutting and fetching cane, weeding and digging trenches, or working in the factories, from dawn to dusk. They were paid small wages and were rationed with small amounts of food. They lived in adjoined huts called logies and had little privacy. Their homesteads, called boundyards, were squalid, so that they were plagued with all kinds of diseases. Bound in one plantation, some of them were restricted to go to other plantations. If anyone rebelled or committed even a minor offence, or pretended to be sick, he or she would be tied on to a post called the Laal Khambha and be whipped there by the planter.

SONIA LOPEZ: Is this the reason why you write poetry (looking around) in a place like this?

BALVIR PANDE: Maybe.

SONIA LOPEZ: If I were you, I would have turned to alcohol, cocaine or marijuana.

BALVIR PANDE: Sometimes I feel like taking a little.

SONIA LOPEZ: (Eyes dilated) Taking a little! (Pauses) Tell me truth. Are you using this poetry thing to push drugs?

BALVIR PANDE: Are you selling me an idea?

SONIA LOPEZ: (Raises her hand to put the gun back to his head, then drops it back) Look, continue your story before I kill you!

BALVIR PANDE: I forget where I stopped.

SONIA LOPEZ: You were talking about the plantation.

BALVIR PANDE: (Staring transfixed into her eyes) I don’t know how to start again.

SONIA LOPEZ: (Raucously). What happened to Karna, Padmageet and Hamid?

BALVIR PANDE: (Coming back to himself) Oh, Karna, Padma and Hamid. Well, Herbert Carlton got them bound on his plantation for five years.

SONIA LOPEZ: That’s all. How did they make out?

BALVIR PANDE: Well, Hamid began rebelling, but Karna Pande took it easy. After work each day, he used to sit by himself under a tree, or any other quiet place, and would sing chowpaaees. One day he was singing . . . (The scene dissolves into a scene of Karna Pande sitting under a tree near the Laal Khambha in the boundyard, singing).

KARNE PANDE: (Reading the Raamcharitmaanas). Hay khag mrig hay madhukar shraynee/ Tum dekhee Seetaa mriganainee/ Kanchan shuk kapot mrig meenaa/ Madhup nikar kokilaa praveenaa/ Kundakalee daarim daamini/ Sharad kamal shashi ahi bhaamini/ Varun paash manoj dhanu hansa/ Gaj kay hari nij sunat prashansaa/ Shreephal kanak kadlu harshahee/ Neku na shanku sakuch man-maahee/ Sunu Jaankee tohee binu aajoo/ Harshay sakal paay janu raajoo/ Kimi sahijaat anakh tohee paahee/ Priyaa vaygee pragatsi kas naahi---

(Kallu and Raamoo, two indentured immigrants, enter and interrupt, Kallu right arm wrapping Raamoo’s neck and dragging him along).

RAAMOO: (Eyes dilating and struggling to free himself from Kallu’s hold) A-a-agh! A-a-agh! A-a-agh! You choke am me, you chugalkhor! When you loose am me neck, I going to pull out you laar!

KALLU: (Growling fiercely, seeking Karna’s attention) I going to kill him. This korehee lazymaan.

KARNA PANDE: (Stands up and raises his hands to appease) Why the two of you always fight like two fowl cocks fighting over fowl hens?

(Kallu releases Raamoo)

RAMOO: (Speaking to Karna Pande and flexing his muscles at Kallu) Bhaiya Karna, this thief-man, mahachor, beating me---

(Kallu attacks him again, but Karna Pande intervenes and takes Kallu away).

KALLU: (To Raamoo) I going to maar-saaray you. You, kutta, call me chor?

KARNA: (Wipes his face in irritation) What sort of game is this? I always tell the two of you: If we can’t live together, we shall all die.

RAAMOO: (pointing to Kallu). This kutta beating me because I talk Maasa Saahib bad. Maasa Saahib make me cut cane; he fool me, bring me here, tell me that he going to make me pray whole day to Bhagwaan, and that I going get plenty-plenty rice to eat with bhoonjaal, chokah and daal.

KALLU: (To Raamoo). You want eat rice and bhoonjaal and pray to Bhagwaan? (Laughs cynically) You korehee lazymaan!You must cut cane and work like a jackass. You don’t come here to pray to Bhagwaan. You come here to work foh Maasa ah backdaam.

KARNA: (Speaks mollifyingly to Kallu) Bhaiya, stop that talk. Not good to say things like that. (Points to the logies) Look! Look where we’re living, and look where the Maasas are. Look over there are Maasa’s mule stables. Over here are our logies. Tell me which is better?

RAMOO: (Clasping his hands in supplication) Bhaiya Karna, you talk am true-true talk. Anywhere you turn, you get am stink-stink kaka-sideline trench . . . outside, inside, frontside, backside. Bhagwaan frighten frighten to come here.

KALLU: (Pounces upon Ramoo again) You want me hold you and patkay you rass, you namakharaam? You say Maasa Saaheb bad man? Maasa Saaheb give you paisa, roti, dhoti, choka, and you say Maasa Saaheb bad man?

KARNA PANDE: (To Kallu) Kallu, your kind of talk would even make the carrion crows smile. (Points to the logies) Look over there. When the rain comes down, the roofs of our logies go leaking, the mud-walls go crumbling, the child goes shrieking, the mother goes weeping. On the ranges of kakasidelines, men and women are put to relieve themselves together: no privacy, no shame. We are treated like wild animals. If we complain, Maasa Saaheb would tie us to the Laal Khambha and beat us.

KALLU: (Shouting angrily) Then pack up your gotri and go back to India.

KARNA PANDE: (Dolefully) Maasa Saaheb is there, too. It is even worse.

KALLU: (Points menacingly to Karna Pande) In India, you namakharaam kill British. You call am Chapatee Revolution. Now British turn back and kill you, you say British bad-man?

RAMOO: Bhaiya Karna, (Pointing to Kallu) This daaku don’t have none dharam. In Cawnpore he was a big thiefman. He get away from jail and now he playing boss on this plantation.

KALLU: (Twists his lips in a mixture of resentment and contempt) Missee Carlton already come from India, Cawnpore. That Memsaahib come for all of you who been in the Chapatee Revolution.

(Kallu exits indignantly)

RAAMOO: (Dropping a tender hand on Karna Pande’s shoulder) What he mean, Bhaiya Karna by that kind ah talk?

KARNA PANDE: (In worried reflection) Ramoo, Kallu says Major Carlton’s niece has come here from Cawnpore. Too bad if she recognizes me. I belong to the Native Cavalry that killed her cousin.

RAMOO: (Looking up to the heavens) Bhagwaan, this is ah jhanjhat pan jhanjhat.

KARNA PANDE: Major Carlton was looking for me everywhere. He was steaming for revenge. He said Karna Pande was no different from Mangal Pande. He will kill me with his own hands if he finds me.

RAAMOO: (Shaking his head disconsolately and making his exit) Bhagwaan, this is jhanjhat on jhanjhat.

(Enters Padmageet)

PADMAGEET: (To Karna Pande) Why do always seem to be lost in a dream?

KARNA PANDE: What else there is but to dream?

PADMAGEET: (Sits beside him) Yes, only dream is here.

KARNA PANDE: Don’t know. (Pauses and rifles his fingers through his hair) Sometimes I think there is a thin line between pain and dream.

PADMAGEET: At least I can dream here. I couldn’t do it in India.

KARNA PANDE: Yes, we have time to dream here--dreaming of India of those we left behind.

PADMAGEET: Dreams have a way of talking of love and despair at the same time.

KARNA PANDE: (Looking up to her). Why don’t you tell me what is in your heart?

PADMAGEET: Will you be able to handle it if I tell you?

KARNA PANDE: (Drops his head) Well, I don’t know.

PADMAGEET: This has always been the way of my destiny.

KARNA PANDE: (Fondles her hair) Don’t say that. You are too beautiful to be overpowered by destiny.

PADMAGEET: (Chuckles painfully) Beauty! Hah! Our lips can say the word “beauty” a million times, but what is the purpose. Beauty, like everything, is a dream.

KARNA PANDE: I sometimes look at the stars and think that you are there.

PADMAGEET: (Chuckles again) Really.

KARNA PANDE: When I hear the voices of the night, I . . . (trails off into silence)

PADMAGEET: What?

KARNA PANDE: Nothing.

PADMAGEET: You know what: I think you’re a man who wants something and don’t really want it.

KARNA PANDE: You may be right.

PADMAGEET: But, again, that is only a way.

KARNA PANDE: One day I will make up my mind, Padma.

PADMAGEET: You don’t have to anymore.

KARNA PANDE: Do you hate me because---

PADMAGEET: (Interrupts and puts a hand to his mouth) No, I love you, Karna, but I am no longer your lotus of pink petals.

KARNA PANDE: (Eyebrows knitted) I don’t understand.

PADMAGEET: The petals of the lotus are all torn: that’s the only way how I can say it.

KARNA PANDE: What is it, Padma? Please tell me.

PADMAGEET: (Chuckles and makes a brave face) He came to my logie room last night.

KARNA PANDE: Who?

PADMAGEET: Maasa Herbert Carlton. He took me to the stable and locked the door. I screamed; no one heard. Then he did to me what was in his loins the first day he saw me.

KARNA PANDE: (Drops his head to his knees) Oh---

PADMAGEET: When he was doing it to me, it was like my standing before my husband’s funeral pyre.

KARNA PANDE: (Looks up to her) Why should your husband die, Padma! Why did the British kill husbands to make widows!

PADMAGEET: (Preoccupied with her own thoughts) When I saw my husband hanged on a tree, shot dead, I knew that Maasa Carltons and funeral pyres will be my way forever.

KARNA PANDE: The Sepoy Mutiny was a way to say that Indians are brave and Indians are weak.

PADMAGEET: (Ignores him) After they killed him, the panchayat wanted me to observe the satee--to burn myself on the funeral pyre of my dead husband. But I was a coward who ran away.

KARNA PANDE: You are no coward, Padma. You did the right thing. Satee is worse that the massacre by the British. (Pauses) That was why I didn’t want to marry Rangrati. I didn’t run away from her. I ran away to save her.

PADMAGEET: (Shaking her head) I should have observed the satee, Karna. When Maasa Carlton raped me, I was burnt in a million funeral pyres

KARNA PANDE: Don’t say such things, Padma. The satee is cruel. You should have been given another chance. (Pauses) There are many things wrong in India. Our own people sometimes become our murderers.

(Hamid enters, excited and in a hurry)

HAMID: The dhobi, Mootoo, is found dead floating in the Demerara River. Saaheb Herbert beat him in the sick-house and he run away and try to cross the river, thinking he was going back to India. Poor jackass could not swim. He was drowned. (Turning around to leave) I going to talk to my Allah. Maasa Allah will have to come sure right this time.

(Hamid exits, bustling out).

PADMAGEET: (Shaking her head) Here he is again. (Pauses) Why is he beating the sick?

KARNA PANDE: (Looks at her with fiery eyes) Why did he do what he did to you?

PADMAGEET: (Reflectively) Sometimes---

KARNA PANDE: (Interrupts) I know. Don’t say it. (Pauses) He is getting worse since his sister has arrived from Cawnpore.

PADMAGEET: Is it true that she has come to marry Saaheb Collins?

KARNA PANDE: I am glad if that is so. That might cool down the family a little. I left her uncle, Major Carlton in India, out of his mind. He wiped out his whole Native Infantry after the British had retrieved Cawnpore.

PADMAGEET: (Drops her head on Karna’s shoulder) I’m scared, Karna. I begin to get a feeling of a huge funeral pyre.

KARNA PANDE: (Rifling her fingers through her hair) Don’t worry. India had passed through worse than what we’re in now, and she had survived it. She is famous for transforming pain into beauty. We have to learn from her.

PADMAGEET: There is so much fear all over, like dark, heavy clouds swallowing a bright sky at noon.

KARNA PANDE: We have to learn from those who died, Padma. Mangal Pande wasn’t scared. Lakshmi Bai, Rani of Jhaansi, wasn’t. Remember? She had dressed like a male soldier and fought the British so valiantly that some of them ran to whorehouses to reload their guns. (Drops his lips on her head) You are our Lakshmi Bai, Padma.

PADMAGEET: We are so far away from the brave.

KARNA PANDE: No. We are closest to them ever than we were. They live within us, like fire in wood. We have only to look and see.

PADMAGEET: You become so irresistible sometimes. (Pauses and looks at his face). Now that you know what he did to me, would you scorn me?

KARNA PANDE: No. Never. Your pains are mine. I will be by your side until the last drop of my blood flows in my veins. (Looks into her eyes) Sometimes, I think of you and put many possibilities together. I know that I can never go back to India. And. . . And I would think of you in a way that you flow into me and I flow into you, like an ocean into a river, like a river into an ocean, as strong and beautiful as India.

PADMAGEET: Oh, Karna, I love you! (The scene dissolves into the scene of the Sonia Lopez and Balvir Pande).

SONIA LOPEZ: (Incensed) How can a beast like him deceive such a beautiful woman like Padma. She should never fall in love with that crook.

BALVIR PANDE: Well, women have a way of falling in love with beasts and crooks.

SONIA LOPEZ: (Slaps him) Was that intended for me?

BALVIR PANDE: (Impassive) No. Did I say that?

SONIA LOPEZ: Why are you here so late in the night? You can’t be a terrorist?

BALVIR PANDE: (Abstractedly) Why I am here? (Pauses) Oh, I now remember . . . Just before I came here, I found my wife’s sister doing strange things to her in my brand new bed.

SONIA LOPEZ: Isn’t that romantic?

BALVIR PANDE: I think so. (Pauses) And why are you here?

SONIA LOPEZ: Do you really want to know?

BALVIR PANDE: Yes, that’s why I asked.

SONIA LOPEZ: I have come here to kill every man on earth.

BALVIR PANDE: That’s nice. (Pauses) Are you a lesbian who is jealous of a man’s ways?

SONIA LOPEZ: No, I am not a lesbian.

BALVIR PANDE: Then why do you want to kill every man on earth?

SONIA LOPEZ: Because I found my boyfriend doing strange things to my dog, and my son in return doing strange things to him.

BALVIR PANDE: That is very fair.

SSONIA LOPEZ: (Slaps him again) Come on, tell me your story. I don’t want to get too sweety-sweety with you.

BALVIR PANDE: Awright, I will continue my story, if that what you want . . . Well, we’ve seen so far much of one side of the story. Let us now look at the British side. In the Plantations, there were two worlds. The Indians, on one hand, lived in poverty and squalor, and the Maasa, on the other, lived in large bungalows. The Carltons were the owners of Plantation Felicity. A few months ago, as you already know, Ruth Carlton, daughter of David Carlton, had left India and had arrived in British Guiana. She had come to get married to her father’s manager, Samuel Collins, and to oversee her brother, Herbert Carlton. (Pauses) One day in the sitting-room of the Plantation’s bungalow, Ruth Carlton and Samuels Collins, after talking much about their wedding, ended up in a little quarrel. (The scene dissolves into a scene of Ruth Carlton and Samuel Collins in the dining room of their bungalow. Samuel Collins is sitting in a chair, playing a piano, Ruth Carlton behind him, her head on his shoulder, her arms wrapped around him. The dining room is opulently decorated with mahogany furniture, French and Italian paintings hanging on the walls. The windows and arches are decorated with silver and gold trimmed curtains. A bar with crystal glasses and liquors of various kinds is at the western end. Samuel Collins, of medium height and long hair to his shoulders, is dressed in a long-coat and pantaloons, his boots well polished. He has a straight nose and blue eyes, his features neat and well built. Ruth Carlton is strikingly beautiful, shorter than Samuel Collins, her long wheat-coloured dress dropping on the floor and emphasizing the neatly carved outlines of her well-cultured body. Her hair is long to her waist and eyes are blue.).

RUTH CARLTON: Oh, Sam, you always charm me with Beethoven.

SAMUEL COLLINS (Swivels his head and kisses her lips) Beethoven brings a man’s passion closest to his woman’s beauty.

RUTH CARLTON: Remember when I first saw you sitting by the pond in Cawnpore?

SAMAUEL COLLINS: Oh, you liked how I played the violin?

RUTH CARLTON: After you left, I heard it every moment in my life.

SAMUEL COLLINS: That’s wonderful. You were also on my mind. You were glued to my thoughts like stars to the heavens.

RUTH CARLTON: Oh, Sam, I love you. I am dreaming of that day when we would get married and go back to London.

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Stops playing his piano, turns round and kisses her hard on her lips) Isn’t London too cold for a man like me who likes to make love to his woman in a lavish of hot sunshine?

RUTH CARLTON: It might cool off a man like you who has an overabundance of steam.

SAMUEL COLLINS: I love the pleasure of steam.

RUTH CARLTON: You can suspend your steam for a while during our honeymoon in London.

SAMUEL COLLINS: (With a twisted face) Are you telling me to suspend my steam on my honeymoon night?

RUTH CARLTON: I want my honeymoon night to be butterflies and not scorpions.

SAMUEL COLLINS: You are a very London woman, I suppose.

RUTH CARLTON: Yes, I am. After our honeymoon, I want us to go back to London and settle down like any conservative British to a simple, luxurious life. With your savings and my share in the estate, you can put them together and buy a seat in Parliament, raising yourself to high esteem. (Kisses his neck) Oh, Sam, won’t it be lovely to go back to London and spend Christmas with the Dawson family again?

SAMUEL COLLINS: What would happen to your father’s estate if we go to London?

RUTH CARLTON: Well, isn’t Herbert here? I think he is quite capable. Much more, Papa doesn’t care about these holdings any longer. He is thinking of selling out and retire, then join Uncle Wilson in Cawnpore.

SAMUEL COLLINS: Why would he want to do such a thing? Sugar is fetching handsome prices these days.

RUTH CARLTON: Oh, Sam, Uncle Wilson needs him. Since the Indian heathens killed poor Tommy in Cawnpore, he’s got a nervous breakdown and is behaving strange.

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Bitterly) Major Carlton was not treating his Indian sepoys as humans.

RUTH CARLTON: (In an outburst) Those Indians are not humans, Sam! They are worse than savages!

SAMUEL COLLINS: Don’t put it that way, Ruth, dear. It sounds unfair.

RUTH CARLTON: (Hysterical) I hate those Indian heathens! (Breaking down into tears) Oh, Sam, you should have seen how they killed poor Tommy. His head was fastened in a bowl of soup; his legs were found in the rose gardens. They were murderers! They exploded like ruthless savages, killing every British, irrespective of man, woman or child. They even killed the helpless and wounded. (Pauses) On July 15^th, my friend, Anne Dexter, among other women were raped and murdered at Bibi-Ghar. The Indian heathens entered the Bibi-Ghar with hatchets and knives and slashed the women and children to pieces; then they threw their mangled bodies in a well.

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Rises from his chair and walks to the bar) When I hear such talk, I think of nothing else but to drink rum and get drunk. (He pours rum in a glass and drinks) The British have a fine sense of humour. Two hundred and forty-nine years ago, they were on their knees, begging the Moghuls at Agra to give them permission to build a trading post beside the sea. A century later they brought their blue-eyed women and let them seduce the King of Oudh. Now they are the rulers, putting on Indian gowns and dancing with whores in Loll Beebee Baazaars. And syphilis and cheap liquor are easy to get since they now rule seventeen hundred miles from Burma to Afghanistan, and seven hundred miles from the Himalayas to Nerbudda.

RUTH CARLTON: (Snatches the glass from his hand and hurls it to the floor) My dear! We have brought civilization to the Indian heathens! Didn’t we teach them administration and order? Didn’t we teach them to live as good-mannered, decorous people?

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Picks up the shards of glass) Teach them to live as good-mannered, decorous people! (Laughs cynically) The British destroyed the people’s native laws and customs and you call that civilization!

RUTH CARLTON: Is it wrong that we teach non-believers to live in the folds of Christianity? People with dirty habits, and who worship a thousand and one gods?

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Throws the shards in trash basket and lights a cigar) The gravest mistake the British have made is that they don’t understand the sentiments of the people they have conquered.

RUTH CARLTON: (Admonishingly). So, that was right what the Indian sepoys did . . . to massacre the British without a reason?

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Blowing out smoke from his nostrils) The British gave them reason to do that. They had oppressed them. They took away their lands. They coerced them into dangerous ways. And, then, they introduced the darn Enfield Rifle.

RUTH CARLTON: You have it wrong, dear. We were trying to help them.

SAMUEL COLLINS: (With bitter sarcasm) You are so beautiful, Ruth, that the passion in my pants can’t resist you, but your judgement is coloured like any irresistible English Lady!

RUTH CARLTON: (Ignoring his sarcasm and yelling) Don’t you see the Indians needed to be cultured!

SAMUEL COLLINS: (With twisted lips). For Governor General Dalhousie to learn to wear his pants properly is good culture, I guess. (Weighing his hands). In the Deccan alone, he has confiscated some 20,000 estates. That monster! Then, we blame the Indians for the mutiny. Point your finger in your own face, and then let’s go to bed to let my passion speak about other things than Indian mutiny!

RUTH CARLTON: (Flings her hands in the air rudely to negate him) Those Indian heathens had no right to rebel in India!

SAMUEL COLLINS: If the Indians had no right to rebel in India, then the Americans had no right to rebel against the English king. There were worst massacres in the American War of Independence than in the Indian Mutiny. (Pauses and looks sternly at her) The price of independence is great, Ruth. Nations will shed their blood for it. That is why the British must pack up and leave India. India does not want them.

RUTH CARLTON: (Walking back to him and simmering down) You are angry, my dear.

SAMUEL COLLINS: There is nothing in the British Empire but anger. In every corner I look, there is this boast of British diplomacy, fat-looking, big-bellied diplomats eating rice and potatoes and talking nothing else but about British superiority and power, which makes me angry. I was angry in India as I am angry here. (Pauses) These balloons of diplomats are shipping the Indians from India to work on plantations like slaves. Our mule stables are better than the ranges in which we put them to live.

RUTH CARLTON: (Pacifyingly) Then let’s get out of here, my dear. We’ll go back to London and live like decent English citizens.

SAMUEL COLLINS: I begin to dislike England, Ruth. My ancestors did the right thing to migrate to America. In America, I have learnt to look at things from every side of the world. In England you are conditioned only see a situation from one side. The English have been myopic with their euphoria and sense of superiority of being masters of the British Empire. The Americans have learnt the hard way. They have come to accept that power is more personality than history, more present than past.

RUTH CARLTON: Let’s go to America, then

SAMUEL COLLINS: If a woman like you go to America, it is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Your dominant London ways will transform a dove into and owl.

RUTH CARLTON: (Embracing Samuel Collins and kissing him) Darling, I am tired of thinking. There was so much violence in my life. I want to forget about it. Now I want to turn to love. I want us to be married and go far away from all these things, never to see or hear of them again. It’s too much for me.

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Tenderly) You are a beautiful woman, Ruth. Truly, I have never met a woman as beautiful as you are. You can make the best wife in the world, and you can blow up any man in bed. But you have a problem of the spirit. You are suffering from an epidemic of English prejudice. (Sits down back at his piano and strikes the keys) And, with this prejudice, your world will be devoid of music and love.

(Ruth Carlton rushes out in exit and Herbert Carlton enters, drunk)

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Speaking to Herbert Carlton) So, Mootoo is dead. You whipped him and made him run away. He’s found dead in the river.

HERBERT CARLTON: (Raucously). That coolie-bastard pretends to be sick everyday. Believe this . . . he has answered the muster roll only five times in one month.

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Menacingly). You’ll be crossing sword with Mr. Crossby, Mr. Herbert Carlton.

HERBERT CARLTON: (Throwing his hands up dismissively) That fanatic is an easy nut to crack. He talks a whole lot of rubbish about the coolies being humans with their own fears and loves and spiritual persuasions. The Governor knows how to handle him.

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Pugnaciously) The law does not permit you to whip the Indians, Mr. Herbert Carlton.

HERBERT CARLTON: (Swivels around, eyes glaring with rage) Hey, what’s the matter with you. This is my father’s estate. You are only hired to work here.

SAMUEL COLLINS: (With raised voice) The Indians are hired, too.

HERBERT CARLTON: (Shouting back evenly) You seem to have a problem! Last night did Ruth give you a hard time or what?

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Walks up to Herbert Carlton) Indeed last night I had a terrible time. So, since morning, I am trying to do something to get what I didn’t get last night. (He punches Herbert Carlton in his face. Herbert Carlton buckles down to the ground and faints. Samuel Collins glares at Herbert Carlton’s prostrated figure for a while).

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Speaking to the unconscious body and making his exit). Don’t cross my path again, you bastard, or else I masturbate in your face!

(Kallu enters. Seeing Herbert Carlton lying on the floor unconscious, he hurries for a bucket of water, returns and splashes it on him. Herbert Carlton makes a stir and regains consciousness).

KALLU: What wrong, Maasa Saaheb? What wrong?

(Herbert Carlton rises slowly to his feet)

HERBERT CARLTON: That bastard, Collins, cuffed me down. (Massages his jaw). Get me a glass of rum!

(Kallu hurries to the bar and pours him a glass of rum, then steals a glance at Herbert Carlton and pours himself a glass of rum and drinks. He returns and serves Herbert Carlton his rum).

HERBERT CARLTON: (Drinks the rum in one gulp) Bring me a cigar.

(Kallu hurries back to the bar, pulls a drawer and takes out two cigars. He steals another glance at Herbert Carlton and puts a cigar in his pocket, lights the other one and gives it to his master).

HERBERT CARLTON: (Draws on the cigar and then blows out the smoke with relief) How about the coolie-girl?

KALLU: (Grinning). Padma, you mean, Saaheb?

HERBERT CARLTON: (Draws on his cigar again and blows out the smoke) Mmh. Did she tell anyone what happened in the stable last night?

KALLU: (Excited) She don’t going to talk, Saaheb. She like you bad-bad. (Pauses and looks at Herbert Carlton) But you have to watch Karna.

HERBERT CARLTON: Karna?

KALLU: Yes, Karna. He is a smart man, Saaheb. He don’t like British. He kill British in Cawnpore.

HERBERT CARLTON: (Forehead furrowed) Awright, I know him, but still point him out to me tomorrow.

KALLU: Tomorrow? (Laughs malevolently) Tomorrow they celebrating Phagwah. (Shows the motion) Sing am chowtaal, ulaaraa, baiswaaraa and dance like when bad cow breaking down bush.

HERBERT CARLTON: Phagwah? What is that?

KALLU: They throw am powder, abeer and gulaal on one another. Then they kiss up and hug up and eat baara, gulgalla, payra, pholourie and kheer.

HERBERT CARLTON: (Smiling fiendishly) Okay, tomorrow I’ll be there to share in their baara, gulgulla, payraa, pholourie and kheer.(The scene dissolves into a scene of a boundyard of indentured labourers celebrating Phagwah, throwing colours upon each other, singing and dancing).

REVELLERS: (Singing and dancing) Jaha rine bhayee andhiyaaree ghata lagee kaaree/ Maas asaar neend nahee aawai, saawan so hai saaree/ Kaam kalol dahat ur antar/ Doojay rine bhayee andhiyaaree, ghataa lagee kaaree/ Bhaado bhawan soon binu

preetam, kaar kushal kai paaree/ Kaartik aghan prath nihaarata/ Sakhi gawan karai nar naaree, ghata lagee kaaree/

(Herbert Carlton and Kallu enter)

HERBERT CARLTON: (Speaking to Kallu) Which one of them is Karna?

KALLU: (Peering into the crowd) He not here , Maasa Saaheb.

HERBERT CARLTON: (Shouting for the revellers to hear) These coolies are singing and dancing as if they’re practising witchcraft!

KALLU: What is witchcraft, Maasa Saaheb? Something to eat like baara and pholourie?

HERBERT CARLTON: (Admonishing Kallu) Shut up, you fool! Give me the whip! (Kallu gives him the whip, and he rushes to the revellers and begins shouting at them) Hey, what sort of evil worship are you carrying on here? Who gave you permission to practise witchcraft on my plantation? Stop it! You coolie-heathens! (Then he pounces upon the revellers and begins whipping them. Kallu jumps up in jubilation at the sight of the revellers running here and there).

KALLU: (Pointing to Raamoo) Beat that one, Saaheb! Beat that one!

(Kallu jumps up in greater jubilation when Herbert Carlton whips Raamoo.

The scene dissolves into the two sets: Karna Pande standing on the bank of the Demerara River and Rangrati sitting on the bank of the Ganges, communicating celestially).

KARNA PANDE: Here Phagwah comes, robed in rivers and flowers, driving darkness away forever, as the full moon rises and washes the earth with splendour. And so despair shall be killed like the evil ruler, ruler of false smiles bringing tears to the poor.

RANGARATI: So take the music of the river and the joys of the wind and sing the song of Kashyap, the tyrant, gone forever, for here in this season of tears and laughter, Phagwah will bring you to me closer, like the first jewel of dawn bringing the sun closer to the sky.

KARNA PANDE: I shall cash my love into birds and stars and share the coins of my deeper feelings to barracked mud-huts where men and rats live at war. I shall become a crazy sharer, giving away my treasures of moonbeams, flowers, stars, clothing bare-backed peasants with warm river songs, cheering sullen sheep girls with bouquets of the sky.

RANGRATI: Then, gather dew drops in the morn, string them into a necklace of pearls, stud it with Phagwah’s festive smiles and garland the bride that haunts the will of your eyes. (The scene dissolves into a scene of Ruth Carlton and Samuel Collins in the dining hall, a table prepared for dinner).

RUTH CARLTON: (Throws an arm around Samuel Collins, who sits in a chair at the dinner table) My darling, we’ve been warring with each other over the past two weeks. To bring all this madness to an end, I have prepared your favourite meal of roasted duck, bunbury cakes, toffee tarts, and hot cross buns. (Kisses him) Don’t you have something nice to say about this?

SAMUEL COLLINS: Well, I am hungry. And you’re a woman who can tame the angry stomach of any man. (He walks across the bar and pours himself a shot of rum) These hot times need nothing else but hot rum (drinks) and a good woman like you who sometimes makes me think a woman is synonymous with a bumping bed. (Sits down again) I now know why Western Europe had fought so hard for this place: it cures French, English and Dutch sexual impotence.

RUTH CARLTON (Drops herself in his lap and puts a finger to his cheek) Why does a handsome man like you talk in such a way?

SAMUEL COLLINS: Because this is the only way to express the pleasure you want, and without that pleasure, I can never be a man for you.

RUTH CARLTON: Why can’t you forget about the Indians and be like us again?

SAMUEL COLLINS (Drops his glass and glares at her) Do you want me to condone what your brother is doing to the Indians?

RUTH CARLTON: (Bites the nape of his neck) Come on, honey, soon he’ll be your brother-in-law, and don’t you want your brother-in-law to have a little fun?

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Eyebrows arched) A little fun? Whipping the Indians a little fun?

RUTH COLLINS: Darling, there is nothing wrong in that? He is the owner of these Indians. And, to whip them for a little personal pleasure, will not break down the sky from the heavens. Poor Herbert never had his childhood playing days. I think now he’s making up for it.

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Detaching himself from Ruth and rising from his chair) Sometimes I wonder at the thing they call “British civilization.”

RUTH CARLTON: (Rises, walks up to him and wraps her arms around his waist) Darling, you are breaking yourself down with something that doesn’t worth it. (Pauses and looks at him deeply in his eyes) These Indians that you’re staking your life for, if not savages, are lesser humans. Why do you continue to follow this primitive dream? It will pay you no dividends in the end. You will soon get married to me and will fall in stream within a reputable aristocracy. The British society will respect you. You will become a man of the day.

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Disengages himself from her contemptuously and walks away) Reputable aristocracy, British Society and man of the day! That’s what all you’re thinking about. If I have to become a man of the day and have to sit down and watch your brother treating those Indians like animals, then I prefer to go back to America and live with whores and in squalor than to live in a mansion like this, employed to watch scenes of human degradation. The feelings of human beings are so violated here that it will make even the baboons cry.

RUTH CARLTON: (Walks up to him and throws her arms around his waist again) Why do you hate the British?

SAMUEL COLLINS: I hate no one, but I will fight any human being that steals the rights and liberties of another human being.

RUTH CARLTON: But there are lesser human beings!

SAMUEL COLLINS: There is nothing like “lesser human beings.” It is human beings that make other human beings lesser.

RUTH CARLTON: (Deviating) Herbert told me that that butcher, Karna Pande, is on our plantation.

SAMUEL COLLINS: We have no butchers on these plantations. Here, we have only the butchered.

RUTH CARLTON: It was Karna Pande who was the ringleader of the mob that killed poor Tommy.

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Disengages himself from and pours himself another drink of rum) You are waging a war over Tommy, a war that was burnt out and is now dead. Of course, it gives me pain that Tommy was killed. (Drinks) It gives me pain that so many were killed. In the explosion of emotions, the sepoys killed every British they encountered. The British, in their turn, murdered thousands of sepoys as well. (Pauses) Violence! The stream of violence since the dawn of civilization has not yet stopped. It flows cruelly like a mad river (Moves up closer to Ruth Carlton) Ruth, you and I can stop this stream of wild violence. We can beat it out of our hearts with (walks up to the piano and strikes the keys) the hammer of music and love. We must get rid of this wild will to murder. We can, Ruth, because we love each other. We have transformed these poor Indians into the symbols of violence, because we can see nothing else but violence. These colonies were built on violence, Ruth. First, the Spaniards came and decimated the aborigines. To own this City of Gold, Europeans killed Europeans. The Dutch, French and English murdered and looted each other for these trees, mountains and rivers. Then they brought the slaves from Africa: millions were killed on ocean voyages, millions were enslaved, millions died. This urge to murder is nowhere else than within our own people, within our ownselves . . . within you and me, Ruth. Unless we can think of ourselves (striking the keys of the piano) as human beings of love, we can never truly love each other. We can never truly love each other, Ruth, if we hate others and want to be violent to them. If history has erred in violence, my love, the two us must correct that error, must stop this stream of wild passion with our love. (Playing the piano) With love, real music and beauty will come into our lives. (Stops playing and looks at Ruth Carlton) These plantations are echoing with the violence of the past; they lack music, beauty and love.

RUTH CARLTON: (Throwing her arms around Samuels Collins) How can I get over Karna Pande killing poor Tommy! For months I had dreadful nightmares, dreaming of Karna Pande killing. Sometimes, I dream he’s killing me, too. Darling, tell me, how can I get it over?

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Playing the piano) You can, my dear Ruth. All dreadful wars are forgotten, nations putting together the pieces of their lives and start to live quietly again. In the American War of Independence I have lost my entire line of family, so my father told me. They have lost everything they owned. They witnessed gruesome massacres, traumatic scenes of pillage, rape and murder. Yet my family got it over and we are still living. To live again we had to forget the violence. It is hard to live with the heart full of hate. We must, my love, destroy this seed of hate for if we do not, we’ll be planting it in the soil of future generations. Our future will be filled with only war and murder.

RUTH CARLTON: (Sobbing) I cannot forget poor Tommy!

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Rising and kissing her) Then my darling, I have to leave you alone, and let your mind weigh the events that haunt you so much, so that your spirit may seek the truth. (Rises, walks away, then turns back and looks at her). What else can we do, Ruth, in these times when our reason is violated by our hate?

(Exits Samuel Collins)

(Enters Herbert Carlton. He goes to the bar and pours himself a glass of rum).

RUTH CARLTON: Herbert, you have to act prudently. Don’t make things look scarlet obvious.

HERBERT CARLTON: (Drinks) My dear Ruth, I can handle my business in the most competent manner.

RUTH CARLTON: You have to take precautions, Herbert, and deal with that Karna Pande judiciously.

HERBERT CARLTON: My dear sister, I know how to manage my affairs discreetly.

RUTH CARLTON: (Rests a hand on Herbert Carlton’s shoulder) These Indian heathens are murderous butchers. (Breaks down into tears) Oh, poor Tommy, he always loved his soup and the daffodils and the oleanders of the rose gardens!

HERBERT CARLTON: Ruth, you must not learn to work your feelings to psychological perils. Remember the British empire is everywhere; the sun never sets on its horizons. There is no difference between Demerara and Cawnpore.

RUTH CARLTON: (Sobbing vehemently) Oh, Herbert, that morning before poor Tommy was killed, he won’t leave without eating his meal. He really loved his soup. He really . . . (She becomes hysterical, making her exit).

(Kallu enters with a saucepan in his hand).

HERBERT CARLTON: (To Kallu) What’s that you have there?

KALLU: (Grinning sheepishly) Nice-nice bhojan, Maasa Saaheb.

(Herbert Carlton takes the saucepan from him and removes the lid. When he sees the contents, he jumps back in apprehension).

HERBERT CARLTON: This is crocodile and sticks.

KALLU: (Smiles complaisantly) No, Maasa Saaheb, this is fish. Hassar curry and sijan.

HERBERT CARLTON: (Picks up one of the hassars) Are you sure? This thing looks like a baby alligator.

KALLU: It not baby haliigitta, Maasa. It bhoonjal fish. Eat am. It don’t going to bite you. It dead.

(Herbert begins to eat).

KALLU: Want ah drink, Maasa?

HERBERT CARLTON: (Crunching a hassar). Mmh.

(Kallu strides eagerly to the bar, picks up a bottle of rum, uncorks it, puts it to his lips and begins drinking, looking at Herbert Carlton gingerly. Then he pours a drink for Herbert Carlton and puts it aside. Still watching him, he steals a number of glasses, forks, spoons and cigars and puts them in his pockets. Finally, he takes the drink to his master).

HERBERT CARLTON: (Drinking) I love that coolie-girl, Kallu. She is seductively charming. She makes me behave like a beast.

KALLU: (Steals a piece of ornament from the table) What is beast, Maasa Saaheb? Fowl-cock what does crow night-time?

HERBERT CARLTON: (Ignoring Kallu’s frivolity) That coolie-girl makes my blood stream run into fire. I couldn’t even find my pants.

KALLU: (Stealing another piece of ornament) Where you pants been Maasa Saaheb? It been to dance nagaara?

HERBERT CARLTON: (Ignoring him again) I want to meet that girl again, Kallu. Nobody should know about this.

KALLU: She does sit down late-late night under ah tree near the Laal Khambha.

HERBERT CARLTON: Awright, tonight we go to her. You have to keep watch. (The scene dissolves into the scene of the boundyard, where Hamid and Karna Pande are sitting under a tree near the Laal Khambha. It is a dark night, the sky is bespangled with stars, night birds are crying against the commingled voices of men and women in the logies, interspersed with the whimpering of a child, mooing of a cow, and barking and baying of dogs).

HAMID: (To Karma Pande) I talk to Allah. He warn Maasa Saaheb Allah that I, Hamid, the descendent of Ishmael, should not cut cane and drink water like mule.

KARNA PANDE: (Inclines against the tree) Maasa Saaheb is not interested in your Allah, Hamid.

HAMID: (Belligerently) I, Hamid, is not born to work from morning when parrot come, till afternoon when parrot go. I, Hamid, is born to sit down and pray all day and eat siranee and mithai and channa till parrot come, till parrot go.

KARNA PANDE: (Quietly) We can do nothing, Hamid. We cannot fight Maasa with our bare hands. The African slaves had tried; despite their guns, they had failed. After their rebellions, hundreds of them were killed. I don’t want my people to be killed. We have to fight Maasa Saaheb in a different way.

HAMID: (In an outburst of anger) Your way to fight Maasa Saaheb is a jhankilaar way. I will die by the time you ready to fight.

KARNA PANDE: (Mollifyingly) Hamid, Allah will not help you if you don’t use your brains. We signed papers that we have to work for Maasa. If we don’t, he will beat us more.

HAMID: Five years cutting cane in that hot-hot sun and eating salt-fish and rice only, and having no private place to defecate is next to death. My Allah have to negotiate with Maasa Saaheb Allah. See you. I gone.

(Hamid exits)

(Enters Padmageet)

PADMAGEET: (To Karna) Why do you come here near the Laal Khambha every night?

KARNA PANDE: You know why.

PADMAGEET: Is that your heart speaking?

KARNA PANDE: What else will speak in the presence of a beautiful woman?

PADMAGET: (Sits beside him) I know what is in your heart. Everyday I see it clearer and clearer in your eyes. (Shakes her head) But the wind is saying something different, saying that this is no time for a woman’s feelings.

KARNA PANDE: (Trying to be stolid and evasive) You are right. Hamid was here just now. He was getting out of his mind.

PADMAGEET: All of us are getting out of our minds. Some of us run away to cross the river, thinking that India is on the other side. Then, when Maasa Saaheb catches us, we have no choice than yearning to die.

KARNA PANDE: (Evasive again) Something always bothers me. We Indians are sometimes too sentimental. And I think that is our weakness.

PADMAGEET: (Takes out mithais from a package and hands him) I bring your favourite.

KARNA PANDE: See? You are sentimental. That’s why you bring me mithais everyday.

PADMAGEEET: It’s a way to cover my shame.

KARNA PANDE: (Eating the mithais) Sometimes when I look at you, Padma, I have an impulse to murder him. I don’t know if it is jealousy or if it is a will of a man to fight for what he believes in.

PADMAGEET: We are indeed a helpless people.

KARNA PANDE: Don’t say that, Padma. You make me feel bad. Sometimes I feel so bad that I want to kill the moon and stars, because everything saw what he did to you and did nothing.

PADMAGEET: (Quietly) I know. This is a decision between courage and justice.

KARNA PANDE: (A bit incensed) Don’t talk to me in riddles, Padma. Please. You are one woman of whom I have a special dream. If I die, I want to die for you.

PADMAGEET: (Begins to weep) He ruined my dreams.

KARNA PANDE: I know, and I want to kill him. But if I take the men and go and fight him, he will shoot us all down. There won’t be another day to fight, another man to fight.

PADMAGEET: I am scared for you, Karna. I don’t want you to be killed like my husband.

KARNA PANDE: I, too, am scared, Padma. I am scared to do what I did in India. The bloodshed in India makes my mind sick. (Pauses reflectively) I killed in my violent emotions. Sometimes I killed the innocent that deserved no such death. We were all killing for freedom. But in the end what it brought? Mass executions of the sepoys. They were shot down like birds on a tree, their bodies were all over, hanged by their necks, dangling in the wind as if India were decorated with banners of corpses. Blood was on the land more than water in the river. Mothers wept for their murdered sons, widows for their husbands. Tears, blood and grief were in every home. (Softly) Padma, you may call me a coward and I will take it, but I would not want to see again the bodies of Indian men and women falling like slaughtered sheep on the ground. (Pauses) I’m tired of blood and violence, Padma.

PADMAGEET: I know. I have to endure it all.

KARNA PANDE: (Drops a tender hand on her) Padma, don’t say such things to make me feel worse than I am. You are on my mind every moment of my life. There is so much grief in my heart for you. I have been spending sleepless nights thinking of you. Sometimes I rise up to kill him, then slump again in another thought. Killing is no hard job for me. It is easy as eating a handful of rice. I killed many in my days, and had no feeling of guilt. It was to kill or be killed. But if I kill Maasa Carlton, they will not only kill me, but will kill every brave Indian on this plantation and other plantations, thinking all of them are Karnas. (Pauses) Padma, I left my lover behind in India and had solemnly promised to marry her. (Taking her hands and kissing them) Thus, to take another woman is wrong, but if making you my wife will prevent Maasa Saaheb from raping you another time, I will marry you!

PADMAGEET: (Stridently) Karna, I love you. But I can’t be so selfish. I can’t deprive you of your only hope of happiness.

KARNA PANDE: You have to marry me if it comes to that, the only way of saving you from Maasa Carlton.

PADMAGEET: Doing this to you is worse than being raped.

KARNA PANDE: We, the men, must protect our women.

PADMAGEET: Not like that. That is too much to ask of you.

KARNA PANDE: Think of it Padma. It would put an end to this great crisis we’re in. (Rises disconsolately with bowed head) I can’t promise to do better than this, Padma.

(Karna Pande makes his exit)

PADMAGEET: (Bursts into tears). No! I can’t do it! (She kneels down and begins expressing her hurt feelings) This, my body, that once makes the flowers smile, is now baited with sweet sugar to have my dignity defiled. Maasa’s lecherous hands stink with shame as they touch my skin. Maasa’s greedy eyes smell of the urine of the mule . . . beastly loins that bring scared memories of the crude passions of the tiger. Oh, let me die! I do not care . . . I am torn from the land of grandeur and sown in this soil of dishonour, left to bloom in stifled splendour amidst leaping thorns of terror. The tears of the sugarcanes drip in silent anguish and prompt memories of India so far away. The evil of the Maasa kills my dreams like a dagger in my heart, and sends the gleaming stars to wail. Oh, let me die! I do not care . . . I am torn from the land of grandeur and sown in this soil of dishonour, left to bloom into stifled splendour amidst leaping thorns of terror.

(Enter Herbert Carlton and Kallu. When Herbert Carlton sees Padmageet in her meditation, he walks up to her stealthily and grabs her from the back on her unawares. She jumps up in panicked terror and runs about screaming. Herbert Carlton pursues her lasciviously, and when he catches her, he struggles to strip her off her clothes. She fights back, biting him, scratching him with her fingernails and kicking him in his face. This makes him more violent, and, in his struggle to pin her down, he strangles her to death. Seeing her prostrate, lifeless body, he rises dispassionately, takes a long drink from his rum, mutter some curses and strides away in exhaustion. Kallu flees in terror).

(The scene advances to the following morning, the corpse of Padmageet still lying there. It is now raining hard, accompanied by thunder and lightning. Karna Pande enters and finds Padmageet’s corpse. After examining the body and is sure that it has no life, he explodes into a vehement expression of his feelings).

KARNA PANDE: Why droop my head and let my churkie die? For I am an ambassador of the ancients brought to be measured in the savage history of this land. Then, oh, rain impassioned! Oh, thunder, incensed! Oh, weeping trees! Show me the serpent of oppression crawling through the history of green sugarcane leaves, killing innocent joys, brilliant dreams with its venom of tyranny! Oh, birds, saddened, wings flapping wild! Companions of my thoughts when all hopes are gone! Here, this corpse of innocence screams at these jeering, corrupt mansions where slithering serpents scheme plots to poison the creation of love. This moment of blood, rain and storm, shall march through the passage of time. This corpse shall walk again to life and scare the conscience of this land. Now my blood steams with persistence to face tyranny with my bare hands and hold him in the justice of the sun, hold him there for amends of this slain honour. I shall walk through the labyrinth of my anger, and accede the throne of my unconquered mind. Never shall I scorch my will with the embers of fear, for I choose to shout in he heavens for the power of Kaali’s sword!

(Enter Herbert Carlton, Kallu and two white overseers. Herbert Carlton notices Karna Pande over Padmageet’s corpse).

HERBERT CARLTON: (To Karna Pande) Hey! Not reporting to the muster roll? (Moves up closer to Karna Pande and pretends as if he sees Padmageet’s corpse for the first time).

HERBERT CARLTON: (Expressing feigned horror) Gosh! What’s this! Horrifying! (Points his finger at Karna Pande) You murdered her.

KARNE PANDE: (Angry) Murdered her?

HERBERT CARLTON: You murdered her as you did to Tommy in Cawnpore.

KARNA PANDE: (Retorts). I did not murder her. It was you who did it

(Herbert Carlton hits him with his gun butt. He rises and punches Herbert Carlton in his face. The blow sends him reeling to the ground. Then, Karna Pande jumps on him and begins to punch him in his face blindly, giving vent to a mad anger).

KARNE PANDE: (Punching Herbert Carlton in his face) This is your last day, you lecherous dog! I will kill you. (He takes out his knife and stabs Herbert Carlton in his face. An overseer, seeing that he intends to kill Herbert Carlton, shoots him on his arm and then shoots him again on his left leg. Herbert Carlton squeezes himself out of Karna Pande’s slumped body. When he is totally free, he begins to pound Karna Pande’s face with his heavy boots. Thinking that he is dead, he exits with the three other men).

(Samuel Collins enters. When he sees Karna Pande motionless in a pool of blood and Padmageet lying dead, he checks back first and then goes up them. He checks Padmageet first, then goes to Karna Pande. Sure that he is still alive, he begins to shout for help.)

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Shouting) I need help! I need help! Is there anyone around! Is there any one around!

(Hamid and Raamoo enter).

HAMID: (Appalled at seeing the two bodies) Who kill them, Maasa?

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Aggrieved). I don’t know. Karna is still alive. Help me with him. We have to take him to the sick-house.

(The three men lift up Karna Pande and fetch him out, making their exit)

(The scene dissolves into the scene of Samuel Collins and Ruth Carlton in the dining hall of their bungalow)

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Vehemently). Your brother murdered the Indian woman. He pounded Karna Pande in his face and made him blind. Now he is saying that Karna Pande commits the murder.

RUTH CARLTON: My dear, you should not say that. Poor Herbert would not commit such an atrocious act. These Indian heathens are savages. Nothing can convince me that they are humans.

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Resolute and enraged). Herbert will bribe the Medical Officer and the Inspector General. And the Governor will not listen to Mr. Crossby.

RUTH CARLTON: Why do you hate Herbert so much? He’s such a poor fellow. He nearly died of consumption last year. Do you want him to die of humiliation this time?

SAMUEL COLLINS: My dear Ruth, Your baby-faced brother murdered the Indian woman and he caused an innocent Karna Pande to be arrested and charged with murder!

RUTH CARLTON: (Hysterically) Karna Pande murdered poor Tommy.

SAMUEL COLLINS: (Becoming more enraged). He should have cleansed this earth of all the Carltons. They have put a bad name on every man that wears a white skin.

RUTH CARLTON: (Exploding) You dare not say that!

SAMUEL COLLINS: The evil nature of the Carltons has built an evil system on this earth!

(Enters Herbert Carlton).

HERBERT CARLTON: (To Samuel Collins). How dare you shout at my sister?

SAMUEL COLLINS: I am shouting at the evil of the Carltons. They ought to be wiped out from the face of this earth!

HERBERT CARLTON: You’re getting beyond your privilege. I will clip your wings. (Takes out his revolver. Samuel Collins springs upon him; the revolver falls to the ground. They fall into a big fight. Samuel Collins, getting on top of Herbert Carlton, begins to pound his face with his fist. Finally, he gets the revolver and recovers himself to his feet).

SAMUEL COLLINS: (To Herbert Carlton). You dare not make a move, or I will blow your head off.

HERBERT CARLTON: (Advancing to Samuel Collins) Your gun is futile like your manhood between your legs.

SAMUEL COLLINS (Shoots Herbert Carlton on his legs and turns to Ruth Carlton, making his exit) My beloved Ruth, this is my last day on this plantation. (Tears welling up in his eyes) I tried in vain to initiate you into music and love. (Pauses). Some of us, through the cruel vicissitudes of life, have been lost in the wild jungles of dark reason. (Tenderly) It is not your fault, Ruth. Do not feel guilty. It is the poison that flows from the river of history. It tears my heart to see you, the most beautiful woman of this continent, drowning in the poisonous tide of this river. I have never experienced failure like this before. I feel guilty for not saving the woman I love from the turbulent waves of prejudice and hate.

(The scene dissolves into a scene of Kallu, drunk, singing and drinking)

KALLU: (Singing) Sharwan laal kaa naam lay, kaa ko rahay pukaar/ Shrawan shrawan taat para, soyo paaw pukaar/

(Enters Raamoo)

RAAMOO: You namakharaam chugalkhor! You sing am song? You join in killing Padma, shoot am Karna down, now you want am Karna go to jail?

KALLU: (Stabbing his chest with a finger and dilating his eyes) I kill Padma? I shoot Karna down? I want to send Karna to jail?

RAAMOO: You and Maasa Carlton kill am Padma. You and Maasa Carlton shoot am Karna. You and Maasa Carlton want am Karna to go to jail.

KALLU: When eye see, mouth must talk. When eye don’t see, how mouth must talk?

RAAMOO: Everybody say you and Maasa Carlton do the work, you thief-maan, mahachor!

KALLU: (Takes a drink) That is what they say. Coolie-man mouth running too much! They see and know everything.

(Enters Hamid. He pounces upon Kallu and begins to choke him).

HAMID: You go talk who kill Padma? You go talk?

KALLU: (Mouth watering and eyes bulging) Ow-ow-ow-ow-ow . . . loose me! I going to talk!

HAMID: You go talk?

KALLU: Yes, I going to talk! Loose me!

HAMID: If I take you to Saaheb Crossby, you go talk?

KALLU: Yes, I going to talk.

HAMID: (Speaking to Raamoo and smiling in self-satisfaction) You see the power of Allah? Allah can make even a donkey talk.

KALLU: (To Hamid). Allah can make tree talk, too, Bhaiya Hamid?

(Hamid and Raamoo drag out Kallu, making their exit).

(The scene dissolves into the scene of Sonia Lopez and Balvir Pande).

BALVIR PANDE: So this is my story.

SONIA LOPEZ: (Eyes narrowed at him) Is that the way how you end a story? It seems to me that you don’t know how to find a climax. Perhaps that is the reason why your wife chose to sleep with her sister.

BALVIR PANDE: (Shrugs and drops his head) Perhaps, yes. Perhaps I am a man who can’t reach a boiling point.

SONIA LOPEZ: (Puts a fist to his face) Who told you that you can’t?

BALVIR PANDE: Well, if I could, I wouldn’t have been wasting my time telling a story so late in the night to a beautiful woman without thinking of other things.

SONIA LOPEZ: (Peering into his yes) Your lips say one thing, but your eyes say something different.

BALVIR PANDE: Maybe that is a way of saying what I have to say.

SONIA LOPEZ: You have said many things already.

BALVIR PANDE: Yes.

SONIA LOPEZ: Still I want you to find an end to your story. Perhaps that will make sense more than anything else.

BALVIR PANDE: Awright, I will try to find an end. (Pauses and peruses Sonia Lopez’s eyes) You have beautiful eyes.

SONIA LOPEZ: (Raises her gun to hit his head, then drops it) You are not here to look at my eyes. You are still my prisoner.

BALVIR PANDE: (Quietly) Yes, I am your prisoner. You have imprisoned everything within me, and I how I love it.

SONIA LOPEZ: (Raises her gun again) Come on, bring a climax to the story.

BALVIR PANDE: You are my climax.

SONIA LOPEZ: (Jabs his head with her gun) Come on, end the damn story!

BALVIR PANDE: Okay. (Pauses) The plantation Indians buried Padmageet, with prayers, rituals and songs, at a cemetery given to them. Karna Pande was still in the sick-house, guarded by colonial police. Herbert Carlton was taken to the city public hospital and was told that he would be a cripple for life. Samuel Collins joined a ship for the United States, with a deliberation to never return.

Days later, when Karna Pande felt a little better and was discharged from the sick house, the Immigration Agent General fought his case and proved that he was innocent. Now, knowing that he was in trouble, Herbert Carlton joined a ship and sailed for London. Ruth Carlton did the same too.

Karna Pande, badly wounded, his arm and leg torn by gunshots, and permanently blind, was a man still filled with faith and strength. He would go by Padmageet’s grave, sing songs and throw flowers. Sometimes his mind ran on Rangrati and his mother. This was the time when his deeper self would speak. One day this happened when he sat alone on the bank of the river, thinking of India. (The scene dissolves into three sets: Karna Pande on the bank of the Demerara River, Rangrati on the bank of the Ganges, and Dheersutta at her altar).

KARNA: Oh, India! You will look at me no more. My sacred thread is broken, my churkee is slain, whilst leather boots spurn me in the verbiage of tyranny. Like the paturiya I am gone, disembowelled of rank and honour, losing my claim for home: a shudder in placelessness, for I’ve trespassed the loftier plains of the Sages’ conscience.

RANGRATI: Flow, my river flow, for I can feel my love in the passion of the waves kissing the lips of the foam and caressing the loins of the shores. Then, I become deaf to the pilgrims’ call, for I cannot barter the climax of my silence for the pleasures of the chanted word.

DHERERSUTA: You have forgotten what you have become, my son: a power beyond all satire, for your strength does not teach you to die. Long before Yajnavalkya, you were a spirit that walks on the blade of the sword, sleeps in the deep of the water, delights in the flames of the fire. You then knew that you could never die. Yes, my son, you then that you could never die!

(The sets with Rangrati and Dheersutta fade and the one with Karna Pande remains, with Hamid, Kallu and Raamo entering).

KALLU: (In bandages, speaking to Karna Pande). Bhaiya Karna, them pull out me trousers, tie me up and beat me like wild jackass. Joint-joint ah me skin get pain.

But, Bhaiya Karna, I sorry. I proper wrong. I tell lie. You didn’t kill Bahen Padma. Maasa Carlton kill she. I tell Saaheb Crossby everything.

KARNA PANDE: I am glad it is all over.

RAAMOO: Bhaiya Karna, Kallu stop thief. Turn good-good now, since we cut he rass. He stop work ah Maasa house. He ah cut cane now ah backdam.

HAMID: If Allah can make Kallu change, he can also make all Maasa Saahebs change. (Pauses) After five years, we all can now go back to India. Allah say that I, Hamid, the descendant of Ishmael, will cut no more cane and live no more like Maasa mule. (Noticing Karna pensive) Eh? You don’t want to go back to India? What’s the matter?

KARNA PANDE: I can’t go back. Everything has changed. (Pauses reflectively) I am now a broken man. I’ve lost my leg. I’m blind. Mother will be terrified to see me this way. Rangrati will be horrified. Then Padma lives on my conscience. I saw her . . . (Trails off into silence).

HAMID: Bu . . . But Allah does not like that kind of talk. You must go back to India!

KARNA PANDE: (A strange smile flashes on his face) Go back to India! Hmm.

HAMID: Why? I can’t understand you. I will have to talk to my Allah.

KARNA PANDE: There seems to be things that God himself doesn’t understand, or he is playing a game with me not to make me understand. Strangely, he has made these cane fields and logies my India. Each night a harsh voice is shouting out to me to stay here to tell a story to a future generation. Then monsters of funeral pyres, British guns and dead faces would haunt me. The voice would tell me if I go back to India, they would kill me.

HAMID: By the name of Allah, I don’t understand your language.

KARNA PANDE: Now, it is this voice and me alone, Hamid. And it is singing a song to me “SAMUDRAM SAMUDRAAT GRIHAAYA” (From Ocean to Ocean for a Home). In this song I hear the voice of Rangrati telling me of the love and beauty of India. In this song, I hear my mother’s voice chanting srutis and smritis. Then Padmageet’s sweet chorus would come, like a nightingale, and chant a strain of future struggles, journeys, pains and victories. (The scene dissolves into the scene of Sonia Lopez and Balvir Pande).

SONIA LOPEZ: (Eyes dilated in a pretext of aggression) Is that the end of your story?

BALVIR PANDE: Yes.

SONIA LOPEZ: Such an end will even make a rooster get a bad impression of what a climax is.

BALVIR PANDE: (Quietly) There is nothing more I can do?

SONIA LOPEZ: You don’t know how to reach a climax.

BALVIR PANDE: Perhaps I don’t.

SONIA LOPEZ: Oh, now I understand. (Pauses). Awright, tell me what connection you have to this story.

BALVIR PANDE: My connection?

SONIA LOPEZ: Yes, if you know.

BALVIR PANDE: Awright, I will try to make up something. (Pauses) Karna Pande, though he was blind, was given a job as an interpreter for the Indians, interpreting their native dialects, mainly Bhojpuri, into English. Determined not to go back to India, he married one of the Indian women on the plantation. He got four sons. The last one was my great grandfather. From there my generation had started in British Guiana. (Pauses) The population of the Indians in British Guiana increased rapidly, outnumbering the other races. In the beginning of the twentieth century, local politicians began clamouring for political reforms. Several political parties were formed, adult suffrage was won, British Guiana got its Independence and was renamed Guyana. Social situations made thousands of Indians seeking other lands. To North America, thousands came to seek liberty, and, over the decades, have worked hard, rebuilt their families and started a new generation. I, too, came here in the flow of migration for a new life. Remember? Karna Pande called this SAMUDRAM SAMUDRAAT GRIHAAYA (From Ocean to Ocean for a Home). Then one day I met a woman in a library. The same day I married her, I knew that she was not meant for me. (Pauses and looks at Sonia Lopez in her eyes) Now you came here to kill me. And I am beginning to---

SONIA LOPEZ: (Interrupts him) Beginning to what?

BALVIR PANDE: Beginning to feel that Padma and Rangrati are playing a little game.

SONIA LOPEZ: What game?

BALVIR PANDE: Don’t know.

SONIA LOPEZ: Do you think I should kill you?

BALVIR PANDE: You have already killed me, in a sweet way.

SONIA LOPEZ: Oh. Did you mean that you are dead inside?

BALVIR PANDE: No, I am alive. That’s why I tremble when you speak to me.

SONIA LOPEZ: You are a man that I really want to kill.

BALVIR PANDE: I know.

SONIA LOPEZ: What the hell do you know?

BALVIR PANDE: I know why you are here and why I am here.

SONIA LOPEZ: Why?

BALVIR PANDE: Perhaps this is another game of some power, reminding me of a strange voice that always speaks.

SONIA LOPEZ: Maybe this is the voice that makes you write poems?

BALVIR PANDE: Don’t know. (Pauses) But the poem I wrote is about you and for you.

SONIA LOPEZ: Why you didn’t tell me that from the beginning.

BALVIR PANDE: You wouldn’t have believed me. (Pauses) You didn’t even allow me to finish reading the poem.

SONIA LOPEZ: You can finish it now, if you want.

BALVIR PANDE: Awright. (He starts reading)

The orchestra of the birds you are

within the forested frilling of the leaves;

the metres and iambic of my poetry you are,

the fire of the language of my soul.

I adore you in the court of the stars,

where the moon blooms like a kumud flower,

your face is veiled with sprinkles of brilliance,

with dust of gems from the sky.

(Pauses and stares at her) This poem is about my life and the woman I seek from the day I know what was a woman. The story I told you is about me, deep inside what is happening to me in my search. The Karna Pande is in me, seeking his Rangrati and Padma for the beauty, love and peace that I really want the world to be. Tonight Padma and Rangrati came as one woman, a strange woman, who put a gun to my head to awaken the bigger guns of life, which has only one message, that every man must have an angel like you to tell him that this world is futile with its violence and greed, for all nations (powerless or powerful) are rudderless boats moving from one island to the other, searching for a shore.

SONIA LOPEZ: Wow! What a great climax! And now here is the resolution of the story. (She throws away her gun and embraces him).

THE END.

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A Poem for the Earthquake Disaster in Japan

2011-03-12T20:55:00.000-08:00

Contact author at guyind@rcn.com
Please visit other links:
http://www.suite101.com/profile.cfm/759030

http://simple-views-big-issues.blogspot.com

A Poem for the Earthquake Disaster in Japan

(by Churaumanie Bisssundyal)

In the bowels of the earth,

a demon snarled with vengeance of fire.

Mother Earth shivered and sagged;

Japan shriveled

from the stab of the infernal dagger.

The Pacific now flows silently, weeping;

the cuckoos sing in mourning;

fairies swoon away

in the flood, fire, and noise.

In this sudden lash, leap and shudder,

a civilization of love and peace was shattered;

splendid buildings came tumbling down,

even the garlands of the divine were broken and strewn;

devotees of love were drowned and buried alive;

the angels weeping in clouds.

The little infant suckled the breasts of the rubble;

the mother was minced into the earth's womb;

the father disappeared like a leaf in the wind.

In the wrath of this dark unknown,

iniquities are hatched and traded;

the air becomes polluted with conspiracies of destruction;

the thunder colludes, and holds its silence

to absolve itself from this infernal murder.

Yet Asia’s faith

stands strong with mountains and rivers,

lilies open their petals and cry out to the moon

to distill its salve of silvery splendor

on broken souls of wounded tears,

where the funeral pyre blazes in irony

with the crimson horizons of Japan,

where grief and sorrow rise and set with even fire of the sun,

where, like sands of the desert,

shrieks of mourning fill the wind,

playing melancholy tunes

in forests and cities, in dreams and waking.

Here despair and terror

rage like a hurricane with blankets of dark clouds,

covering Asia’s innocence with pain,

like the demon’s reign of terror,

like the tyrant’s rage for power.

Then, My God,

if this is the mystery of fate and action

in the reverberation of some ancient retribution,

then the gods of the worlds

should discard their duties of celestial arrogance

and listen to the sad symphony of dead and dying men,

listen to the sitar of bleeding emotions,

to the flutes of widows shrieking,

to the foot bells of dancing smiles, plundered.

If this is your way to test the frailties of humans,

My God,

then you should review the mortal link with your supreme power,

and survey again the matrix of mortal love.

Here you have chosen your best garden for destruction,

the uprooted roses will never grow again,

the petals of human joy wither in the ground;

the fragrance of sacred thought dilutes in the stench of fear.

We mortal still adore the mystery of your actions, My God,

and are satisfied

to weave corpses and sorrow into garlands for your prayers.

Our loss and pain shall now be our mantras,

the funeral pyre, our faith and love.

We ask no more for mysteries we do not understand,

but pray that such wrath may not occur again.

The earth is yours.

You are the creator, and we, your children.

If on the path of sin we tread,

then you must scold us into understanding.

But with such infliction of pain and murder,

it is too much for a father to give to his children.

If this is the vengeance of some evil power,

and not the anger of your chiding,

then, My God, it is imperative, that you heed my call

and fight the schemers of this wicked terror.

You must seek justice for this crime in the earth's womb,

and incarcerate the criminals into silence forever.

Never again should the beauty of your creation

be so ravaged and plundered.

Never again should human tears

be made so swift and wild,

swifter than the currents of oceans,

wilder than the monsoonal rains.

In these spoils of your creation, My God,

I can only pray

that you receive the murdered mass with love.

Give them a place in your home

and let their souls be resplendent in the heavens' alcove.

Each night when I look into the sky,

I must see them amid stars.

The partridge shall be my witness,

gazing at them as on the moon,

drinking nectar from their tears,

singing the remorse of this infernal song.

But you must never cease

giving strength to the living and wounded,

for the living must now love you more dearly,

worship you with greater faith and ardor,

chant the enigma of your glory,

even in this trial of despair.

And in these rubble of fallen spirit,

where centuries of mind is crushed in pain,

inspire the dispossessed to prosper again.

Make your avatar in the tragedy of this mourning nation,

that Japan may rise and walk again.

Salutation to the Divine Poet

2011-03-09T16:01:00.000-08:00

Contact author at guyind@rcn.com

Salutation to the Divine Poet

by Churaumanie Bissundyal

Your feet shall be my pen, O Master,

and your robe, my ink.

Your footsteps on the grass shall be my prayer,

the stones that bruise your feet,

my strength against the shrewd and vile.

Walk on the grass

that the little blades may kiss your feet with joy.

Walk on the stones

that the sharp edges may test the fibre of your soles,

for both grass and stones are ways of life:

little blades of love, sharp edges of the world.

Then, grace the sojourn of my pen,

that I may bathe the stones with milk

and water the grass that it may grow,

for the scorpion ceases not to sting,

the flower ceases not with scent and colour.

Let the breath of the wind be the rhythm of my song,

the sweet cry of the birds, my persistence to write,

for the wind is a servant of your silence,

the birds, the children of your love.

Let the rays of the sun be my phrases and imageries

and the ebb and flow of the ocean, my mood, tone and style,

for the sun is your brighter eye of learning,

and the ocean, the figures of your vision.

I care not,

whether the clouds stifle me with their shawls of darkness,

yet I will borrow jewels from the moon and stars

and make them ornaments of my song,

for the things of the sky

are the abundance of your cosmic perfection

and I, the little heir, am the inheritor of your love.

Let the Muse come to me in her apparel of sunlit dawn,

bejewelled with the silver amber of the ocean’s waves;

let her come to me in a festival of raindrops

and sprinkle pearls of life on the gratitude of green leaves.

Let her hum the melody of your silence

as the bees begin their task, caressing flowers for nectar.

Take the petals of the oleanders,

String hard thoughts into garlands of simple feelings

that I may perceive the deeper side of life,

your silence urging my lines to perfection.

Churaumanie Bissundyal's other links:
http://www.suite101.com/profile.cfm/759030
http://simple-views-big-issues.blogspot.com

Yaddo Poem: Flora Mater

2011-03-07T15:01:00.001-08:00

You can contact me at guyind@rcn.com

This is a poem I wrote when I was at Yaddo in 1996. Yaddo, one of the most beautiful and divine places of the world, has given me a new life as a writer, taking me out of anonymity and hopelessness and put me on a path where I can go forward. I have won the Vera Rubin Residency at Yaddo, and I am forever grateful for this. From here I have achieved many things, becoming a better writer. In my stay at Yaddo, I have written a collection of poems titled Presence. The poem below is one of them.

YADDO POEM: FLORA-MATER

(by Churaumanie Bissundyal)

Why are you staring at me,

O Trees,

as if I am intruding

on the leafy pathways of your silence?

Why do you let your branches

drip your tears into my face

as if my feet

trample on some darling

of your seedlings?

I have come, O Trees,

to learn the theorem

of your stillness and patience,

to study the craft

of your quiet waiting

over the millenniums

of pain and laughter.

I come not to break the twigs

of your silent watching,

to scare the squirrels

of your omniscience

in this ceaseless flow

of time and matter.

Then,

why do you shrink

when my shadow kisses

the breasts of your luxuriance?

Am I a lecherous stranger

wrapping my sensual imperfection

around the virgin purity

of your boughs and leaves?

O Trees!

I have lived a million times

in this hushed sanctuary

of your boughs, brushes and pathways;

yet, you do not know me.

So many times

I wrote my heart’s feelings

from your insects’ noises

and birds’ calling.

Yet, you think I am a stranger

trespassing

this green manse of your existence.

It was in this sanctum

I sat at the feet of your silence

and took my first learning of life.

It was here in this knowledge

of shapes, sounds and colours

I read the vowels

of the wind rustling your leaves

and the consonants of the rain

drenching your solitude with life.

Yet,

you let the dark clouds

leer at me

through your branches

as if I am a tramp in these woods,

crying for love

in the green vastness

of your presence.

Yet,

you won’t remember

when I climbed your limbs

and scolded the cattle

grazing the pastures.

Nor would you remember

when I picked your fruits and bearings

and lavished my dreams

with your profusion.

Sometimes,

I sat in the luxury of your shade

and watched the farmers

reaping their crops in the sun.

And, then,

I would take your leaves

and string necklaces

for the village women,

dreaming dreams

of my deepest passion.

Yet, I know

you know me not,

O Trees!

If you do,

why your trunks loom

into the sullen vault of the sky

and your branches

hide their eyes in the frost of rain?

But I will not dip my eyes in repulsion,

less I see

the benediction of your leaves,

for, whilst you are the benefactress

of this benign earth,

you are the lungs of my soul.

(August 1996)

Churaumanie Bissundyal's other links:
http://simple-views-big-issues.blogspot.com
http://www.suite101.com/profile.cfm/759030

Prayer to the Muse

2011-03-03T08:45:00.000-08:00

Contact author at guyind@rcn.com

( I wrote this poem in 1993 when I had lost my rhythm and flow in writing, praying to the Muse to return my gift, and She did return my gift.)

PRAYER TO THE MUSE

(by Churaumanie Bissundyal)

Reach my crippled hands,

hands withered with pain,

broken bones

having no instinct for joy;

bones all splintered in a sting of loneliness,

bandaged for a gain in strength

to write my next song.

I’m so shattered in this bleak valley of my failure,

become a wreckage that none wants to claim--

fallen from the dreamy twinkles of the mountain top,

where I once sat, entranced,

in the glitters of success, garlanded with cheer.

I’m so lonely in the death of my rhythmic lines,

ever so lonely

in this ditch of wretchedness,

frayed, ravaged by thorns of jeer--

no soft, friendly hands to touch my wounds with care;

no warm, tender touch to salve my ruptured knees

to climb the mountain again.

Only, only,

I’m rationed with memories in this tempest of pain,

become a fallen seeker,

inward blind,

with no power to feed my heart with joy,

no vision to tune my spirit

in concord rhythm

with the lilting wings of the red-breasted robins

that breathe life in the sky

at the first smile of dawn.

Reach my listless dreams

ravaged to ruins by the prejudice of time.

Dreams that were once the flood of my blood

to seek the cadence of the wind,

the drums of the thunder

to scare the scimitar of the tyrant king.

(October 1993)

My Island, My Beauty

2011-02-28T09:56:00.000-08:00

Contact author at guyind@rcn.com

MY ISLAND, MY BEAUTY

(For the people of Leguan, and to wish my friend Kali continued success on the 28th anniversary of his Kali Bharat Yatra)

(by Churaumanie Bissundyal)

Where cannons boomed and Raleigh searched for gold,

where Europe warred,

nations killing nations for forests and rivers,

where the Caribs and Arawaks

hollowed trees into canoes,

where Black slaves were whipped and hanged on trees,

where the indentured worked in music of squalor,

there I grew up on a little island

in the mouth of a big river.

Checkered with rectangles and pentagons,

my island was a geometrical board of sugar plantations.

Its rich soil was the cause of history:

the Dutch, French and English rivalled in jealousy.

The names could tell their own story:

in the east are Blenheim, Amsterdam, Endeavour.

Canefield is farther down towards the Atlantic,

adjacent to La Retrieve and Elizabeth Ann.

Midway are Greendam and Enterprise;

La Bagatelle and Maryville follow after.

To the west are Waterloo, Success, Phoenix and Theriens.

Doornhaag and Richmond Hill are on the northern side.

Like a curse from the wounds of history,

the plantations came tumbling down:

factories dismantled, cane fields abandoned.

Then there came new proprietors,

growing ground-provisions, rice and vegetables.

But the habits of the past died hard.

The ghost of Europe still ruled,

the psyche of the islanders still sweetened in stupor:

the Africans, Indians, Portuguese and Chinese

still followed the legacy of their old masters,

imitating their ways with a stronger passion.

In the fire and ice of Europe’s hold,

the enslaved lost their language,

some their gods and culture.

Some imitated the English, spoke with a fervent accent,

others borrowed a word or phrase,

patched and sewed them into a distinct vernacular.

The island is green with the flora of tropical splendour.

Tall coconut trees wave in the wind,

sakiwinkis springing on gara-gara limbs,

iguanas reposing in the branches green.

At night when the jumbies come out for pleasure,

devotees worship Dutch devatas at kumaka trees,

propitiating with white rum and cheese.

Then there are the groves of bamboo trees

with tall, spreading lukass between.

Mango trees, genip and gooseberries

are all over, with growths of monkey-apples,

plums, tamarind and jamoon between.

Here and there is a breadfruit tree,

star-apple, jackfruit and catahar.

Mangroves and courida are profuse at Dauntless

where roots form themselves into cottages for crabs.

Sumootoo and bird-vines invade trees

and press upon them for territory.

Whitey, hog-plums and wild-cocoa on the seashore

made groves for us little boys to play and wander.

Fowl-cock trees and batseed overshadow the black sage,

mucka-mucka and piri-piri,

giving shade for the growth of cana -grass.

On the road parapets are daisies with their yellow flowers

opening like smiling fairies to the sun.

Everywhere there are bahayma and iron-grass

on abandoned sugarcane beds.

In every yard are hibiscus, marigold and oleander;

awara is seen in woods thick with trees.

The para grass grow where the cattle graze,

and papoos the children reap after the rice crops are over.

In every farm are papayas,

plantain and banana suckers, cassava and sugarcane.

Melons and pumpkins sometimes grow like wildfire,

and the cucumber is a popular creeper.

Some cultures of the islanders persevere.

The Africans still worship their spirits

and dance at Cumfa and Queh-Queh.

The Moslems celebrate and fast at Ramadaan.

the Hindus observe Diwaali and Phagwah

and worship their awataars.

But all celebrate Christmas and Easter,

the legacy of the European masters.

My first impression of my island

was a man mounting up a coconut tree,

his feet, tight-roped, giving him grip to climb.

Bip bap the coconuts began dropping

like spent shells of an aerial bombing.

This alerted the red-breasted robins

and put them to flight.

The wrens, too, and the brown-cocks and several others,

all became disturbed from their nesting:

the air filled with clouds of birds trafficking the sky.

Their noises heralded disaster,

like civilians in danger at war, the siren sounding.

Growing up I loved looking at the humming-bird;

kakazooyaa we called it by its frolicking over flowers.

It trembles and frizzles like a tiny ballet dancer,

as if performing to celestial lookers-on,

its shiny green colour blends pleasantly

with the trees.

I loved looking, too, at kushay ants marching in files,

cutting and fetching leaves and building little empires.

My childhood innocence could not read their ways,

their harmony with a deeper intelligence,

no conflicts in their labour

a perfect community of beings.

I loved listening to the rain and thunder,

the swooshing and splashing sounds

with intermittent claps of thunder.

The cattle huddled together,

frozen and motionless, accepting the slanting runnels.

Then everywhere was filled with shiny pools of water,

the ducks swimming, then spreading and flapping their wings,

the white-cranes flying thickly in the air

and alighting for the fish in the canals.

I loved listening to the bees when the sun was going down,

an enveloping cheeping,

with echoes in the barns of rice-mills,

and in the groves of trees,

a symphony of nature breaking the stress of the day

and saying that night was coming.

And whilst the curtain of darkness was dropping,

the crickets gave a different chirruping sound —

chirrup-chirrup-tra-tra.

Then when darkness fell and daylight was over,

a jumbie bird would utter

a cutting, sharp shriek, ripping the silence.

Morning would stir me with the bush-fowls

cawing in the woods,

the parrots clucking in their flight for feeding,

the cattle mooing, the sheep bleating,

the dogs barking and yelping,

the hens and ducks, now awakened,

adding new music to the morning.

One day I stood watching the boys swimming in the river,

the waves tossing and crashing on the seawall.

A thunderous blast lasted for a second,

surfs like ruffled cotton pads were formed;

the water played a little, then dropped back again.

Yet the boys plunged and frolicked,

dived and swam as if the river was a simple game:

they had no fear of danger,

their fear bewitched by the river.

I stood watching my brother swimming,

his clothes bundled in my hands.

I seethed with jealousy of the pleasures I could not share

and cursed myself for the number of my age.

Then someone hoisted me and threw me into the river.

I sank and rose and thought I was drowning.

Soon, my arms began to work like a propeller

and my legs moved like a fish tail.

A wave came and aborted my little struggle.

I swallowed the river’s water

and saw videos of strange colours.

Then I tried again to swim.

Soon, I was like the other boys, floating, swimming.

I pitched marbles everyday, buntoos was the game.

I gambled for buttons,

staking those on my clothes.

My mother whipped me

when she found me buttonless

and strapped with blacksage skins.

I whimpered like an injured puppy,

swearing that buntoos was a bad game.

But when the sting of the whipping was gone

and my mother’s chidings forgotten,

I played again.

I played and played,

hoping that one day I would win,

but a poor pitcher I was, even in the taaga game.

In the moonlight,

when the heavens glowed with stars

when the hedges appeared like hideouts for jumbies

and the trees like huge scarecrows

dropped from the heavens,

we children came out playing the choor game,

running between lines,

playing cockodillo, hide-to-seek, wait-to-find.

Our shrieks and laughter

brought life to the dullness of the evenings;

our silhouette movements heightened the effect

of flickering lanterns burning in windows.

The older men playing cards

and the women boiling crabs outdoor

scolded us for noise and wild running.

Then Loongair, staggering on the dam,

took a drink from his rum,

snapped his tongue like a drum and sang his alaap of taan.

In Jamoon Alley where I lived

I had to be a street fighter from the day I was born.

Each day it was a game for survival:

fight to survive the day or take a beating and run away.

One day my father found me sobbing,

my nose was bleeding.

He became pink with anger

and whipped me for losing a fight in surrender.

He wanted no son who would yield, sobbing.

Winning a fight, like triumph in life, he said,

is only for the strong and brave.

The world has no place for surrender and weeping,

for without strength and triumph

life is an unhappy game.

From that day I became a great fighter,

never to lose a fight again.

It was a great lesson in my life’s order,

giving me strength in the subtleties of the human game.

School was an ordeal

with punctilious teachers of English idioms,

official grimaces on their faces,

their starched collars fitted with ties,

a cane perpetually in their hands.

Each day I came to school, I looked only at the cane

and thought when it would drop on my posterior,

a whick-whacking of brutal pain.

I hated hymns and poems;

they had no meanings except that of the teachers’ cane.

The teachers rapped my knuckles with a ruler

if my finger-nails were not clean,

or dropped the cane on my back

if my feet had specks of mud.

Each day I thought of this penitentiary

and dreamed for the open air.

The smell of books, furniture and teachers’ perfumes

brought only repulsive sensations.

I learned nothing,

save preparing for the teachers’ cane.

Then they called me a dull boy

and whipped me persistently,

my posterior marked with ruddy weals.

In this anguish,

grammar lessons and math tables were greater torture:

words and figures had become a nightmare.

My sleep was full of anger,

my dreams were stressful days of war.

Then when the school term was over,

I lay hidden behind bundarie hedges,

waiting quietly for my teachers to pass.

I peeped through the fenestration of the branches

and prepared for battle in nervous anger.

As my torturers passed,

I missiled them with rotten eggs,

eggs breaking and splashing on their faces.

Then they whipped me again, over and over;

each time whipped,

I gathered more rotten eggs to throw again.

Tash would come over each night to our home,

reading stories.

I loved the tales he read,

stories filling me with fantasies of heroic deeds.

My mother sat by the fireside,

the lantern light glowing on her sombre face.

Sometimes, I saw pearls of tears in her eyes

as Tash read how Roland was killed.

I wept, too, for King Arthur:

tragedy always touched my heart.

My little sisters liked Grimm Fairy Tales

whilst I enjoyed the bigger stories of Shakespeare.

Jane Eyre for months kept us in rapt attention;

we were torn between thinking and weeping.

Here, in these sessions of tales and scenes,

I vowed to be a writer of courage, tragedy and dreams.

The rice-fields were my altar,

where I learned that hard work is the strength of the soul.

In the planting season,

I marched with gangs of planters to the fields;

in deep mud and water we planted rice-shoots,

our hands working like fingers on typewriters.

The rain drenched us;

the planters’ humour gave relief to the wet discomfort.

Talking and planting became the mode of working,

working until the fields

had become billiards tables of green shoots,

bringing promise to the shiny oceans of water.

Harvesting was longer hours of work.

It began when the rice-mills bellowed in predawn.

The women rose from their beds

and lit their firesides with mangrove wood,

cooking in the amber light of lanterns.

As the curried aroma came from the kitchens,

donkey-carts trundled on the brick road,

rice cutters, with grass knives tucked at their sides,

marched to the fields for the day’s work.

Tasks were given by rods length and width thrown,

the area of a task thirty-six square rods.

The work began like a mass game in the hot sun,

hundreds of backs bent in the same motion,

then rose and paused,

bent again,

cutting the sheaves tangled like matted hair.

Then a sudden shriek was heard:

a grass-knife had slipped and severed a finger.

Faces contorted in terror;

blood spurted like that of a freshly killed bird.

The bent backs straightened again

and legs worked like scissors to give aid.

Soon, the yellow billow of gold disappeared

and stacks of paddy sheaves,

(standing like dwarfed sentinels)

were perched all over.

The drug-man came with his bull-and-slide

and fetched the sheaves to be thrashed into grains.

Then bags of paddy were filled

to give work to the mills to bellow again.

In a fowl-cock tree bristled,

and filled with red inflorescence,

I perched, watching the game I best love.

This is cricket,

a game with feelings of nirvaan,

a game I had played in wishes and dreams.

I watched my heroes batting, bowling or fielding,

tense, biting my finger-nails.

Sometimes, I walked away weeping

when my heroes lost a game.

Then when my batsman hit a ball,

I jumped down from the tree,

throwing discs of cow-dung in the air.

The ball soared and sailed high in the sky,

then it dropped out of the boundary,

dropping in the distance,

like a tiny awara seed,

dropping far away

on the mud-hut of rum-man Loongair.

I was a prince in the jamoon groves,

scouring the canals for fallen monkey-apples,

slinging on gara-gara limbs for berries.

I watched the spurwings in duckweed canals

guarding their eggs from predators,

stretching out their necks and uttering kwee-kwee cries.

The parrots came and feasted on the jamoons,

clucking and clucking

in noisy voices of war and love.

Then came the gawlins in aggressive flight

behind the ploughman ploughing the fields,

alighting and feeding on fishes and worms.

The boys, with their slingshots, shot at them,

shooting, too, chow-chows and doves.

Braks and I went searching for baby-jamoons.

We found a tree loaded with fruits and started picking.

In greed, Braks ventured out to a hanging limb

where was a follow-me wasps’ hive in the leaves hidden.

Absorbed in his picking,

and thinking how much he would gather,

his head crashed against the hive.

The wasps swelled out in their numbers,

stinging Braks with all their vengeance,

chasing him everywhere he went for cover.

The next day his face was swollen large,

his eyes could not be seen.

That was the price of greed, I learned,

and made it a lesson for my harder times.

I looked at the steamer morning and evening

ferrying from stelling to stelling.

It was looming large, or petering out to extinction.

It had some connection to me, I thought,

as if I were waiting each day for some liberation.

Today I know what it was:

the steamer was my prophet,

foretelling my travels far and wide.

(1999)

Mini Glossary

Sakiwinki: a type of monkey.

Iguana: a green edible reptile.

Gara-gara, Lukass, Ginnip, Monkey-apple, Jamoon, Batseed, Catahar, Jack-fruit, Mangrove, Courida; Whitey, Wild-cocoa, Fowl-cock tree, Awara, Baragat tree: all, native trees of Guyana,

some flowering and bearing edible fruits.

Mucka-mucka, Piri-piri, Bundarie: all, native shrubs of Guyana.

Iron-grass, Bahayma, Cana-grass, Para-grass: types of grass of Guyana.

Hibiscus, Marigold, Oleander: all, decorative and fragrant flowers of Guyana.

Jumbie: ghost.

Devata: god.

Sumootoo: a type of vine that bears edible fruits.

Bird-vine: a parasitic vine grown on trees.

Cumfah, Queh-Queh: African rituals.

Awataar: incarnation.

Aalaap: a modulation of the voice before singing.

Taan: a musical note.

Kiskadee, Red-breasted Robin, Brown-cock, Humming-bird; Bush-fowl, White-crane, Gawlin, Chow-chow, Spurwing:

all, native birds of Guyana.

Diwali: Hindu festival of light.

Phagwah: Hindu spring festival.

Buntoos: a type of game played with marbles pitched in holes.

Taaga: a type of pitching game with a flat, heavy lead material.

Choor: a type of game with the players running between lines.

Cockodillo: a type of hide-and-seek game.

Grass-knife: a type of sickle.

Fireside: a cooking-stove made of mud and brick.

Task: a job with a area of thirty-six square rods.

Paddy: rice grains borne on paddy sheaves.

Divine Expression, Wider Dimension

2011-02-24T14:37:00.000-08:00

Contact author at guyind@rcn.com

http://simple-views-big-issues.blogspot.com/

I am creating this post to encourage people to express themselves in their best ways. However, I am not asking too much from anyone. I'm just trying to encourage writers to write a piece, whether long or short, whether prose or poetry, whether a song or a greeting, in their best language. Writing is one of the oldest and noblest occupation. And to bring back some of the pleasures, challenges, grace and dignities it has enjoyed, I have envisaged an online community where people can talk to each other in angelic voices.

I will not encourage vile, crude or obscene language on this post; neither will I encourage anyone attacking anyone's piece. In this way, we will build a community of the best minds.

More than all, I expect young people developing their writing skills as they read how established writers write on this site.

This venture will grow into a marvelous establishment, I envisage.