Pyrta Journal July 2010 Monsoon Issue #1

editor’snote

we’d like to save trees.we’re poor & can’t afford to go print with every issue.

a friend showed us an e-magazine where you can turn the pages (almost) like the real thing.

what can we say? we’re gullible consumers.

we wanted to bring together great poetry, creative-non-fiction, fiction, photographs and a splendid graphic story.

well folks, here it is.

janice pariat

Poetryneel chaudhurytrisha boranicholas y.b. wongkevin simmondssonia sarkarrobin ngangomsharanya manivannanpiya srinivasan

prosesajjawal hayatsamrat choudhury

photo essayshruti singhi

sketchesadam pavittstefan ehrenfeld

Contents

Poems from Europe (2004-2005)

Contemplating the sea at Beau RivageThe little boyclapped loudlywhen his mountainofpebblescrumbled crash into the sea

and then

asked his motherwhy so many stones still saton the beach

and she said -

well, son,some are taken now,and others left behindfor another wave.

Short stop at NurembergAllI will rememberof Nuremberg

arethose yellow-blue buildings -as seen through a web of wiresabove the tracks,

the dreary sky - greyer still, with the smokefrom the chimneys nearby,

andthe nipping wind - colder still, with the trainbeing late.

At Guidos café

I will walk the nightunguided by map or signpostfor these are but streetsthat men builtso long agofor us towander

and if I am lostI knowI mustalways return to the river.

Waiting for Figs A quiet accordionplaced against the wallwaits expectantly as I do

poetry

for Marseille Figswho will(with their music)rescue the evening inside thisdark tunnelover which the trains sometimes rumble and later,one of these trainsmighttake me home,content.

Neel Chaudhuri is a playwright and theatre director based in Delhi. He is the Artistic Direc-tor of The Tadpole Repertory, and his latest play is Taramandal, which won the 2010 MetroPlus Playwright Award.

*

The Resurrection It started with wood -aromatic deodar, woodof the gods; its years,etched out in rippleswhere it had beenhacked down, mockedus for our youth. He came with a mallet,hammer, chisel andsaw, and wielded,relentlessly, those

years into a table onwhich we would drinkwine and break bread. I watched him work,the June heat fierceupon his back, as heput on its legs, givingthe table its seven feetof earth, bringing itback from the dead.

lucid dreaming at night they come to me;visions of the Land of Cannanburning.its flames so orange theyremind me of the groves that once lined Jaffa, heady,ripe and heavy with fruit leap off the hallowed groundin one last frantic bid to be doused and cured by the lapping currents of the Dead Sea.

Trisha Bora is an editor/writer currently based in Delhi. Her poems have been published at Ultra Violet, nth position and Poetry Super Highway among others.

*

A Hermits Wedding Dead people get married, so does my cousin. No church would take them, the holy books gone, the priest didnt come,no flowers, just weeds; no doves, but faceless insects crawling on the ground, flying in the air. Even frogs paraded in the mud. I met no guests for my cousin was marrying a mannequin:they loved each other. Her name was Zazzy, from Puerto Rico. She had firm, poreless skin,a tall nose that could suck all mens souls, her nipples upstanding,but no cleavage down there under the purple legging. Shes designed not to have one. My cousin took the stage and spoke the love vow. I do, contented. Its her turn silence. A dragonfly intercepted their gaze,then the groom nodded. Shes too shy to speak. Rings exchanged, I took a mug shot of their day.They cancelled the honeymoon. She got seasick easily, he explained. And him, lovesick. Theyd spend the rest of their lives in the cottage, no phone, no work, but fishing, farming, watching the sun rise and set, hanging clothes by the river, and being blessed by Oshun.

This is the life I wanted, he said, the bride agreed this is real love.

Metropolis I want to hide in a place where trains dont come as often,people stay muted in cabins, read their own stuff, which, by luck, may be books. I want to find a place where babies dont learn, children cant spell and adults dont divorce. The world would be a better place as we arent any more stupid and lonely than each other. I want to leave this place where smoking makes me feel like a fugitive andflee to where everyone shall light a fag in church. Father, I want to confess my sin (of not smoking enough). Dont worry, my son, tobacco brings salvation. Its free in heaven. Is there a place where people pity unloved sick dogs, where God sings for us, not we for him? Why am I in a place where the real and unreal are inside our heads?Millions of hollow heads,with eyes that are equally open

and equally blank?So I plead this placeto mourn with me for itsfake existence on maps.

Nicholas Y.B. Wong is a creative writer based in Hong Kong. His poems and short stories are fea-tured in Asia Writes, Taj Mahal Review, 6S: The Green Bike Stories, Cha, Qarrtsiluni, and Yuan Yang among others.

*

Cruelty

It was the rescueHow the fireman told meit would be OKA man had neversaid that to me beforecome to a sceneto tend mepolitely ask where it hurtask about the partsthat werent bruised orbleedingA fireman doesnt requiresurrenderyet thats on my mindand setting myselfon fire

the tongue

: hinge of body the leaving light wet tablet on which we write

solitary sheaf of ever-changing leaf

Kevin Simmonds is a writer, musician and photgrapher from New Orleans, now based in San Francisco. His writing featured in American Poetry Journal, Chroma, Fuselit, jubilat, Poetry and elsewhere.

*Plow seeds slowly

Sow them softlyAtai beseechedBut her children turned soiled ears

And as the earth swarmed,She bestowed upon them: Argument and DeathThen retired with Abassi to Florida.

Its a jazz songOur sliding Sunday suspension: flypaper moments are sticky forevers

Careening backward orPushing for(e)wardGrasp dark curls. Tightly in eager palms

Curved, like warm orbs of stained lentilsKita used to artfully machéAround my paper-thin plate

Burrow your brown nose in peach-pampered pillowFlicker flowers at me until I collapse gigglingIn the shade of a thousand tamarind trees shift-ing

We sway together, dulcet breeze of completion,In the middle of our cracking world Speak words that could make sense to you

While I still understand them too.

Old Tapes from the Communal Kitchen

Summers are when I run away,freed from whale bone and steel frameCascade headfirst into Carnaval colorsSweat sweet cranberry on the dance floor

you fill the space with your ethercoffee canister tucked sadly behind railssilver band glinting in moonlight, oxidized im-perfectionsmall chin tilted slightly in the changing

breeze like yellow orchids waving

salt and pepper mutton chopsshock me into partial growthtepid trust games as boys tremble,timorous

the sun plays peek-a-boo with your shadow heart,so I guard your fealty, won in our seesaw wager,and ginger-sidestep these infantile branchesas they begin to creep outwards

solemn summer solstice airpolite cheering in the standsrun lanes like rainbow crabs

have your pick and roll it too,

but after crowds have leftI am here sweeping.pink appetizer rinds and raw male egos.

Sonia Sarkar is a Bengali-American based in Brookline, Massachusetts. Her work has been featured in Right Hand Pointing, Frontage Roads and 32Poems.

*

Father on Earth

With a hobbling gaitmy father whips out his dickand pisses like a dog.Hes 86 and lost his reason.Not quite, for when he loses his temperhe blurts out: Dogs cunt.

But the man who never prayedwhen I was a kidand asked us to burn his horoscopeis now humming hymns.What is the matter with him?Is it the strain of dementiawhich is supposed to run in the family?Is he penitent about his infidelities?

I remember his gentle physicians handsthat mended my fractured fearsas a child,his joke about village dogsrefusing to bark at Rip Van Winkle,his histrionic tale of Bremens musicians.

My mother, long-suffering and prejudicedcould never catch a wink when he shoutsin the dead of night as his demons needle him.But she often holds his hands and caresses themand talks to him as one would to a child.Shes been doing this for years now.So it must be love.He now mimics my little daughter.In fact, he is the son I never had.

Postcard(Mumbai, May 2010)

This city sleeps like no other.No one knowsHow in the starry-eyed quests Of singing and theatricsA man ends up slumbering Either on the footpathOr under a glittering roof.

For now, the last terroristIs the new star in a billboardWaiting for his hour To step out among adulators,

The sea a mass of lilting Indifferent cobalt blue.

Robin S Ngangom was born in Imphal but has lived in Shillong for over thirty years. He is a bilingual poet with three books of poetry, and his work has appeared in journals and anthologies in India and abroad.

*

Dream of Burying My Grandmother Who Has No Grave We buried her upright, in the stance of warriors. My brothers and I drivingout alone to do this, miles and milesfrom the memory of warmth, lifting her small strong body out of the vehicle and laying it down beside the railway track. My gloved hand brushing frost from her face in theSiberian winter of a dream in which Iwas my mother, and she, mine. We buried her there withoutritual, lowering her slowly into a furrow,covering her with fistfuls of ice, hurrying against the long wail of the approaching train the engine of our car left running, our shaking hands, a sorrow blinding as snow. Near the end, my brothers stepped away. I was the last to see that dowager face. The sting of the ice from her forehead on my lips all the way back to waking. Sometimes her love lights my body up from the inside out, a love like a good

vodka. Grandmother whose body rose in smoke, I carry your sweet burn within me even into this, the frozen tundra of a life with not a stone left standing to bear witness.

Halāhala Like my blue-throated god,I have learnt how to hold mysuffering so it trembles betweenbelly and breath without trickle. All my life I have caught every drop and arrested it thus,and my voice has been darkened bythe bruise of its indigo. Gondolier, go slow. The river is deep and my vessel, full. All nightI must carry this fermata. I mustcontain all of these many tidal things,and I must swallow each one witha dowagers unflinching grace.

Sharanya Manivannan is the author of Witchcraft, and can be found online at www.sharanyamanivannan.com.

*

Saturday Night Down

the city can get you down, distances like the familiar strangenessof estranged membersof an extended family

saturday nights get lonely read a bookor watch a fly swim valiantlyin your stale beerand think across doors

look into barred windowsat millions of talesall saying the same thingsin different clothesor none.so many worthy of loveso little timeto love themand be loved in return

chasing an ideaacross dirty streetsand unemployed peoplehearingready-made answers poised on the lips ofstrangely dressed people like a diver springing lightly on the edge of the board

where do you take that mauve and gold eveningyou saw did anyone else?

Piya Srinivasan is doing an Mphil at the Centre of Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta. She writes poetry and short stories in her free time, and likes to travel and take pictures.

Slo-Mo Death

by Sajjawal Hayat

Tomorrow they will kill me. I am almost certain tonight is the last night of my life. Almost certain because I have not been killed yet. I am trying to calculate my chances of surviving. If I tell the truth, I have no chance. Absolutely no chance. The minimum punish-ment for what I have done is death by hanging. I will have to lie convincingly. I will have to hide myself behind words in such a way that they cannot reach it.

Some think I am stupid because of what I have brought upon myself. For others I have been too careless. The rest just want to kill me. Because I have blasphemed. Can I say I was provoked? Not a good excuse. How can anyone be provoked to blaspheme unless they have already given up their religion? Apostasy is a crime with death as punishment. So I cannot use undue provocation as my defense. Only others can use this excuse. If someone stabs me, they can be forgiven by a court if they say my murder was a crime of pas-sion, a result of undue provocation. They can say they were provoked to such a frenzy by what I had said that they lost control and killed me. Perfect defense in such a case. Killing an adul-terous wife, a sister who fell in love with a boy and eloped with him, and a blasphemer become forgivable crimes if the killer says it was a crime of passion. Killing a woman who believes in the validity of her desire and killing me is almost the same.

I do not believe in anything but in my right to doubt everything. The onus is on me. I will have to apologize for making them question the in-

tegrity of their faith. If they are convinced that I am still a believer, killing me will become a little bit difficult. A little bit. I have to say I caused a misunderstanding by my words. Or my words were misunderstood. The misunderstanding was also caused by me. I have to transform my crime, I have not blasphemed but I have caused a misunderstanding. I have to convince them my real fault is that I caused a commotion of doubt. If I try to defend my right to be cynical or criti-cal, they will kill me. In this way, I build a feeble strategy to defend my life.

I also need to be very calm tomorrow so that I can look properly surprised at the misunder-standing I have caused. I may even have to look slightly offended. Slightly. Not too much. My de-meanor should signify this: how dare they doubt my faith? It is all a misunderstanding. To be able to look surprised and slightly offended, I need to have the look of a well-rested man tomorrow. I should sleep a perfect sleep tonight. Wake up at 7 a.m. tomorrow. Shave. Put on a clean shirt and a clean pair of trousers. Properly dressed, I may be able to get some respect on my side too. Every little thing will count tomorrow. I should appear to be following all the ideas of a good life so that it becomes difficult for them to kill me. To be able to decide to kill me should become equal to killing their ideas of a good life.

******

On the day of the trial, they did not kill me but sentenced me to die on my own. Everyday. Slow. Ly.

Sajjawal Hayat is a Pakistani writer at large in the world.

prose

Should I call for help or try and fight them if they tried to molest her? Calling would be best, and before anything happened; the last time I was mugged in Bangalore, a month earlier, I had not had time to call for help. She was nonchalant. “Oh it’s so lovely here!”

“Yes” I said.

We went and sat under the shade of a gulmohar tree on a stone bench. The afternoon sun was hot around us.

Three other men came and sat on the bench across from us, about twenty feet away.

“Do you go to parks often, in your country?”

“Oh yes!” she said. “Go, sit with a book, read...I love it! What about you?”

“Er...no. My first time here.”

“You don’t like nature?”

“It’s not safe in Bangalore...or anywhere in India, for that matter. Only shady people go to the park in the daytime.”

She was surprised. “In Portugal, everyone goes to the park!”

Two beggar women came and began tugging at our sleeves, insistent. We gave them some coins, and they left. Then two more beggar women came and demanded money.

“I really desperately feel like having something to drink...coffee or a beer.”

She looked at me and smiled.

Shared breath, fellow-traveller

by Samrat Choudhury

“Let’s go to the park!” she said, smiling. I looked at her face closely, to see if she was seri-ous.

I saw no joke or ulterior motive.

“The park?” I asked, in confusion.

“Yes!”

She saw I was thinking very hard.

“Why? What is wrong?”

“Oh...nothing. Let’s go.”

Cubbon Park was a patch of verdant, tropical green in the heart of Bangalore, a short walk from the Hard Rock Cafe on Mahatma Gandhi Road outside which we had just met. It was a pleasure to be there after the noise and mad-ness of the traffic outside.

We strolled under the canopy of trees and headed towards a thicket of giant bamboo. Three young men, shabbily dressed, sat smoking at the edge of the thicket. They whistled when they saw Teresa, and then shouted out, calling her.

We pretended not to notice. I hoped they would not follow.

“You really desperately want to get out from here. You are so tense.”

She reached across and touched my shoulder for confirmation. I tensed up, then laughed.

The men on the bench across from us sat star-ing at us, the pretty white woman and the plain, dark, Indian man, saying nothing, doing noth-ing.

“You worry too much,” she said.

“Maybe”, I said. How little she knows, I thought.

“Ok we will go,” she said. “After a smoke.”

After ten more tense minutes, we got back out-side, in the smoky, chaotic, loud lunatic traffic that never stops. I took a deep breath. It was a relief to be out of there.

The shiny new chain coffee shops on Mahatma Gandhi Road were full. Outside, the autowallahs lurked like predators waiting for prey. Surely there is no wrong in fleecing a rich bastard who can afford Rs 50 for a cup of coffee, they always say.

We went to the Coffee Board’s coffee house, where the coffee is Rs 10, and the year feels like 1965.

“So why are you still single, Karan?” she asked suddenly.

“Oh...because it just never worked out for me. I did live in with someone, and we were planning to get married, but she went to New York and found a handsome Englishman...I have been more cautious since.”

She was silent.

“What about you?” I asked.

“I have many stories,” she said, smiling. “But nothing now.”

Her phone rang. She cooed hello and walked off to answer. Some boyfriend, probably. Pretty girl like her would have admirers...and she wouldnt shy away either. Yes, she would have many sto-ries.

Whatever happened to romance and longing and the slow beauty of lasting love? The West has forgotten it, I thought. And now their amnesia is spreading around the world.

Waiting for her to return, I pulled out my laptop and headphones, and put on a Begum Akhtar ghazal. The plaintive notes of ‘Mere hamnafas mere hamnawa, mujhe dost ban kar daga na de’ My shared- breath, my fellow-traveller, dont become my friend and betray me - floated up into my

head.

She came bounding back. She was looking happy.

“Do you want to go for a play?”

I hesitated.

“Er...when?”

“Now! At five”, she said.

I had the evening free. Also, she was interesting.

It was a performance of TS Eliot’s The Waste-land. There was no stage; in the first floor of someone’s house, a couple of rooms were being used for the play. As we entered, a crazed look-ing young man came rushing up shouting “April is the cruellest month”. There were four more spectators, who left soon, leaving us alone with the cast of four. They wound up the show. As we were leaving, I realised this was the house Eric Weiner had mentioned in his book The Geogra-phy of Bliss. He had come to Bangalore explor-ing the concept of happiness, and had stayed here. His chapter on India, written here, was titled “Happiness is a contradiction”.

Teresa was angry. “How could they just stop performing?”

We got out onto the road. “Take me home”, she said.

I was silent. I wondered what she meant.

We stopped an autorickshaw. She gave her ad-dress.

We sat in the rickety vehicle. She pulled out her

iPod, and drifted away from me.

“What are you listening to?” I asked, loudly.

“A fado”.

“A what?”

Fate.

It was a haunting melody. She is singing a song of melancholy love, Teresa said. It is a Portu-guese tradition, this music of sad beauty.

It is a ghazal! I said, surprised.

We reached her house. I got out to give her a hug, and maybe a kiss. She just stood there like a schoolgirl, almost at attention, hands in front.

“Good night”, she said.

I reached out towards her. She held my arm one long moment before turning around and walk-ing away.

This is the first appearance of Shared Breath, Fellow-Travller in English. It was first published in Spanish and Portuguese in the 2009 edition of literary journal Vislumbres.

Samrat Choudhury, a Shillong boy, now works as Deputy Editor of the Hindustan Times, Delhi. His first novel Urban Jungle will be published by Penguin in 2011.

photo essay

delhi delhi delhi delhi delhi delhi delhi delhi dela city which bites. loves hates dies & is reborn everyday. a city burdened by history. by age. a city of riots. violence. your city. my city. everybody’s city. nobody’s city.

Open

ha

nd

delhi delhi delhi delhi delhi delhi delhi delhi dela city which bites. loves hates dies & is reborn everyday. a city burdened by history. by age. a city of riots. violence. your city. my city. everybody’s city. nobody’s city.

“The photographs were taken

while on an heritage

walk to some of the older

quarters of Delhi.”

Shruti Singhi is a Senior designer at Dorling Kindersley, Delhi. She spends her time photographing the city and its people.

sketches