Prose 500 2015 FeaturedWriter Shashi Angelee Deodhar

Quo Vadis?

A brisk breeze stirs grasses on the sand banks of the Holy River, a hymn to it reverberates on the IPod as I walk barefoot into the shallow water, offer it up to the sun while wild ducks call and a vee of gulls flies across the rising orb, silvering the sand.
water- worn boulder
so smooth now
against callused feet
 

Cows coming down the stony path to the river, stop wait for us to pass.They are better behaved than the commuters during rush hour on their way to nowhere pushing shoving heedless of the aged or the slow ,while this gentle rusty brown creature pauses to one side, looking at me with questioning soft brown eyes, not skittering away nervously but waiting quietly for me to pass her on this narrow incline back to the ashram. Having learnt from her courteous patience I bow to her bovinity and mindfully wait and allow other cows to go past me .

                                                                                                    footsore -
                                                                                       outside the temple, I try on
                                                                                              a comfortable pair

Prose 500 2015 Winners & Featured Writers

FIRST PRIZE	SECOND PRIZE	THIRD PRIZE
Debadrita Bose	Arka Datta	Vidya Panicker
FEATURED WRITERS
Shakya Bose	Anirban Nanda	Ipshita Chatterjee
Yesha Shah	Haimanti Dutta Ray	Sufia Khatoon
Debdip Maitra	Shashi Angelee Deodhar	Longlist

Prose 500 2015 Longlist, Dimple Kaul

 On Friends and More by Dimple Kaul

It’s been many days since I have put pen to paper (figuratively) or thumbs to better use than twiddling (literally)! Well, the slump wasn’t for lack of thoughts but that of a motivational kick. The one that can only be provided by a friend who having once succeeded in being insistently persistent into nagging you into writing and posting it all online (for your own self, no less) thinks that you can easily be riled enough to retaliate through writing!

With a friend prodding me into writing this piece by another friend, I felt like recounting the number of people I have befriended over the years. Fellow students from school and college, colleagues from workplace, ladies frequenting the neighbourhood salon, people renting or buying books from the local bookseller, rail/road/ air co-passengers, online common interest group folks, people from the local gym, the ones you go to the movies with and the list goes on. But then there are the ones who you act as a sounding board for and the ones who you call your ‘best friends/friends’.

If I say that I am friends with someone, I mean that I would most certainly be someone who cares about them, would take time out for them when needed and would certainly volunteer to help if and when required. What they don’t know and what I would certainly not want them to know, for, they are, in most instances, bound to misinterpret it, is that they may not necessarily be my friends in the way I interpret the word. See, there I said it? The cat is so out of the bag that I may never be able to coax it back into it now, phew!

I wonder why is it necessary to call someone a friend just to show that you care for them or wish them well? Can one not simply care for fellow human beings? Why can’t one have the same concern for a colleague/ fellow collegian/ gym buddy/passenger on the adjacent seat as one would have for a ‘friend’? Beats me!

Most of us end up being forced into bracketing such bonds as friendship. The 21st century person has complicated everyday life so much that there is a need for such stiff connotations to show concern and love for humanity. Imagine if people were to say that their ambition in life is to just be good and spread love and cheer all around while leading happy, contended lives of their own, wouldn’t others jeer with incomprehension? They most certainly would, unless they belong to a sect set up by one of the many Gurus around who have been marketing the basic concepts of humanity so well that it is cool to follow them!

How wonderful would it be to have genuine kindness and warmth permeate the world to such an extent that the phrase ‘being human’ becomes synonymous with actual living and not just the organization that we associate it with today!

Prose 500 2015 Longlist

Arka Datta	Namitha Varma Rajesh	Shakya Bose
Vasu Gangapalli	Arjun Mukherjee	Diwakar Pokhriyal
Shashi Angelee Deodhar	Debdip Maitra	Aditi Sahu
Devika Dhond	Anila Mathew	Ipshita Chatterjee
Haimanti Dutta Ray	Divvisha Bharati	Vidya Anand
Ami Misra	Anirban Nanda	Vidya Panicker
Sufia Khatoon	Biswadeep Ghosh Hazra	Surbhi Tiwari
Debadrita Bose	Sheerin Naz	Prachi Sharma
		Dimple Kaul
Aditi Mahajan	Prachi Manchanda	Yesha Shah

Prose500 2015 FeaturedWriter Yesha Shah

Caveated (Haibun)

A shiny gibbous moon with some wiry silver strands is how his head looks like. He has a striking resemblance to Albert Einstein. An old neighbour, I call him “uncle”. Most of his day is spent tending to the bonsais, roses, palms, flowering cacti, money plants and God-knows-what that grow in the hundred odd clay pots in his terrace garden. Odour of cigar smoke, geriatric medications, talcum powder, wet soil, insect repellent spray...his home is an eclectic mix of these smells. The time when he is not gardening he reads on his mahogany rocking chair and falls asleep there itself, reading glasses on his nose and an open book on his chest. The wall across his chair stained with the seepage of the years, bears a life-size framed photograph. That’s his son, Jay, my childhood playmate. Born to his first wife, Jay was the third progeny after two stillborn boys. Wife died during third child birth. Uncle re-married. New wife was a classic stepmom till she bore a son. A cherubic boy, the child had a hole in his heart’s ventricular septum and survived a year and half with umpteen hospital trips. They were blessed with another son, a few years down the line. Uncle’s visits to the crematorium seemed to have stopped. Addicted to TV video games Jay flunked his class ten exams. Reprimanded, he gulped a bottle of concentrated acid. Jay was fifteen then. 

Behind the bedroom door with peeling paint, a calendar hangs on the rusty nail. It is marked in red with birth and death anniversaries. A new potted plant makes its way into Uncle’s garden on each. “These don’t perish easily,” he tells me.

welder’s spark...
the dark gets darker
after each flash

Prose500 ThirdPrize Vidya Panicker

The Happy Woman

Summer mornings in the house was an entourage of sleepy children and hungry cats, punctuated by the clatter of spoons and plates in the kitchen which ran on a firewood stove. Ammoomma’s bangles clanged ceaselessly, as she mixed coffee, ground chili and masala on the stone and grated half a dozen coconuts to last us a day. This happened every April, when my uncles and aunts happily deposited their kids at this ancestral home, where they shared my room, clothes and Ammoomma.

As long as there were enough mangoes in the large trunk box to last us four weeks, as long as unfortunate baby turtles entered the rice pots left near the pond, to scrape off the remains from the bottom, got trapped and offered us endless entertainment, as long as Ammoomma still laid beside me at night, the sweat of her day long efforts smelling of smoke, raw onions and the sandalwood paste trapped in bits within the wrinkles of her forehead — I did not mind the invaders in my terrain.

Then there was this year when several more people came, most of them being strangers to me — some sat next to Ammoomma and wept, some stood watching her silently. Ammoomma was laid on the portico, balls of cotton stuffed in her nostrils and the thumbs of the feet tied together with a white strip of cloth. A bunch of incense sticks near her head gave out thick white fumes, almost as if her soul was escaping an overused body through a hole in her skull. She looked serene, promptly branded by everyone as a fortunate woman who lived mightily for 60 healthy years, and died in her sleep without suffering, that too on a day when all her dear ones happened to be near.

The mud etched within the calloused folds of thick skin of her feet, which could not be scrubbed off with a whole wad of coconut fiber and its chapped underside with the flesh almost visible, told another story.

Prose500 2015 FeaturedWriter Sufia Khatoon

The House at 99 Woodburn Park

I grew up in the dingy lanes of Kolkata’s woodstreet when India was gathering her torn pieces together. Dr Rafi’s house at 99, Woodburn Park, was known to have witnessed the turmoil’s of war and bloodshed. It had sheltered stories of love and hate for so long that often my scarred heart found recluse in them. Every house is believed to have a soul; I always felt that after Rafi uncle’s death, his soul might have shadowed the now broken dilapidated building looking for lost traces of his memories.

Rafi uncle loved this solitary recluse; he loved his books and life at large. It was during one such encounter that I had managed to sneak in his massive library tempting me with the rarest of stories hidden in its vast treasures. I was caught later but uncle’s imaginations, love for books and my innocent quest had made me his best friend. 

I often look at it in the creepy silent night, standing and just observing her massive structure. I was about nine or ten years old when the riots had uprooted our historical brotherhood. Victims of this confusion often were found loitering or healing their socked senses in this house. He would generously treat them, though it was tough times, he always stood for what was right, admired by all as a man of principles.

He loved to read and weave poetry. He often exclaimed that the world of imagination was far better than the real world, bloodshed and battles were episodic in stories, and it never left deep scars behind unlike reality. 

His most prized possessions, The Jungle Book, Panchatantra, Peter Pan, an entire collection of imaginations which had left me breathless, was a gift from him. When I look back I see his peaceful nature and his books that had actually saved me from my accumulated bitterness towards life after losing my family to war cry. The curious soul of a child was lost somewhere. I remember in the dim light in the balcony hiding behind the pillars I was awake the whole night reading and devouring the tales as the ear deafening noises of death consumed our world.

“In broken rusted walls grew haunted stories of love and the mystical tree branches hide them from pain.”

I write when I feel the need to visit my past and dig out stories to make people believe in miracles again. House at 99, Woodburn Park, running parallel to my life remains fresh in my memory, its depths surfaces now and then to breathe in and live again through me. I realised that imagination if survives bloodshed and turbulence, can preserve innocence and imagination, our greatest weapon to destroy man made walls.

The misty night consumes the sparkling stars and the house at 99, Woodburn Park, across my window hypnotises me to write its deepest secrets while I hide behind her shelter once again to weave tales of imaginations.

Prose500 2015 Featured Writer Rafaa Dalvi

Hair Growth Supplement

“Take only half a tablet at a time,” the doctor prescribed. “Stick to maximum one in a day. Patience is the key.”
“It’s a supplement. Take one, then another,” the friend suggested. “For crying out loud, you can’t just take one and hope for a miracle.”
“You’re an adult. You got to increase the dosage. Pop at least two at one go,” the enemy conspired. “Think of it as Crocin.”
“Sixty tablets gone so far and still no visible change. Ignore everyone else. Listen to me,” the wife nagged. “Try two after breakfast. Two more after dinner.”

Prose500 2015 Longlist, Sheerin Naz

Signs

Yes, that’s a sign!

As Paulo Coehlo says in his book The Alchemist that we all get omens which guide us to our ultimate destination. They pave avenues for the dreams that we wish to fulfil. Though, these omens or signs can be difficult for one to understand but then, dreams that get fulfilled easily aren’t worth watching, isn’t it? 

This was the case with her too. A girl kept herself caged in the four walls of her room and saw those kites soaring up high in the sky. They were signs from God asking her to get out and free herself but unfortunately, she was preoccupied with her habit of cursing her good for nothing life and so, she could never understand those signs until a day came when one of the kites soaring high abruptly came crashing at her window. She took the worn out kite in her hands and smiled at the fate of the kite. It had flown so high yet landed into oblivion but at least it has been able to see its share of life. She had finally understood her omens.

Yes, she too needed to fly. All these years, she had silently endured the cruel infliction of pain but now was the time to fly. She was no longer afraid of sinking into oblivion because she knew it was destined after all this world is a messy place. Nobody gets out alive. Some just stay a little longer and some lucky ones like her walk away in a split second.She looked herself in the mirror and removed the scarf that covered her head which had no hair. Yes, the cancer had taken it all. But that did not affect her anymore.

“The world is not a wish granting factory, my friend”. She recited a line from her favourite novel “The Fault in Our Stars” and walked outside those caged walls to enjoy the little time she was left with. She wanted to fly high once, before she could REST IN PEACE.

Prose500 2015 FeaturedWriter Ipshita Chatterjee

SHE

She is poetry. Her tiniest movement exudes an unmatched lyrical quality. Twirling her hair and flicking it back nonchalantly, the massive efforts she makes at stifling yawns during dreary lectures, the livid anger which shadows her face and the frown furrowing her forehead, the radiant smile which greets the world, irrespective of the tears which have soaked her pillow the night before - it is all a beautiful ballad. Her twinkling eyes surveying me from behind the thick spectacles – that is poetry. Her deep soulful voice, even when we fight – that is verse. Her walk exactly timed to the meter, her gentle touch and the feel of it on my hand – that is a soliloquy. Yes, that girl is poetry.

I longed and so longed to recite this poem, to place her verses on my lips. But I see the obvious truth staring me in the face. 

I have known her since she was born. I have known her as closely as anyone can know a person. I have seen her spirited and buoyant, and weak and vulnerable. I have reveled in her joy and comforted her, in her pain. When she received her first ‘Best Athlete’ medal and when she received her college degree, I was standing right next to her, my arms outstretched to hug this poem of a girl. When she fell off a bicycle and when her first boyfriend dumped her, I was up all night, caressing her and nursing the bruises on her knee and those on her heart.

Yet, she was never mine. She can never be mine. The laws of society and nature stand between me and my poem. But, I cannot think of anyone else but her. They say, love is blind, love defies all rationality and knows no bounds. Yes, my love was queer enough to disregard blood ties, the constraints of being the progeny of the same womb. Yes, the word ‘incest’ flashes before me each time I look at this poem of a girl, my little sister. 

The guilt, pain and trauma of it all rips me into pieces. Concealing this massive load of emotions tears me down to a million tiny bits. When I see her in love with another man, I can only sit down and helplessly weep my heart out. But this dull throbbing pain only becomes sharper, stinging my heart with every heave of my chest.

Today, as I watch her, all bedecked in her bridal finery, her hands dyed with henna, her head covered with a red veil, my heart just cannot hold its secret any longer. I have waited for almost twenty years for this moment. If she cannot be mine, she will not go without knowing my secret.

I silently shut the door behind me and walk softly into the room where she waits for her wedding. The three words softly escape my lips. With her mellow reply “I love you too, bhaiyya,” a lover’s heart turned to stone.

Prose 500 2015 Featured Writer, Haimanti Dutta Ray

My Childhood

For everyone, childhood memories are something to which we return to time and again just like a train traversing the same route, but coming back to the same station at the end of the day. These memories are there to make our moorings stronger, so that we stand on a firmer ground later in life. I would take the time to confess here that I had a unique childhood. I was the only offspring of my parents, who were schoolteachers at the time of my birth. My mother was a teacher, but her school was located quite far from the city of Calcutta, where we lived. She used to commute by local train. From the Sealdah station, she used to travel to Agarpara, in the South 24-Parganas district of West Bengal. To reach Sealdah, she had to take a public transport (bus). And, her school hours were in the morning session. So she was out of the house by 5 am, in order to catch her bus to take her to Sealdah station, from whence a local train would make her arrive on time in her school. She had taught in her school for thirty-six years at a stretch. Today she is a retired government employee, enjoying her pension. 

When I was a toddler, the task of feeding me in the mornings fell, quite naturally, on the shoulders of my father. My father who was an art teacher at a city school, had taken voluntary retirement (the VRS scheme), probably because I was becoming too much to handle, single –handed. My mother used to return from her school by half past noon. Wonder how I remember the exact time! It seems just like yesterday once more! My father had taken to painting in a big way and of course, my mother had been his muse. We used to reside at our earlier rented premises at 160B, Sarat Bose Road, Calcutta 29. When I was very young, my parents had faced real trouble feeding me. There used to be a wooden rocking horse, on top of which I used to be seated, before my meals. The gentle swaying of the toy-horse acted like a lullaby and I was fed. 

We have left behind those premises and have moved to our posh-new flat at Lansdowne Terrace. The wooden horse had been there even when we were leaving the house, never to return again. But of course, it was in a sorry state. I still remember that the book that I loved most in my childhood had been in the vernacular- ‘Toontunir Boi’ by Upendra Kishore Roychowdhury, the grandfather of the virtuoso film director, Satyajit Ray. Sukumar Ray’s ‘Ha-Ja-Ba-Ra-La’ also resided among my other bric-a-brac. Childhood is the time for some unalloyed fun. It never returns to one’s life again. Make the most of it and watch yourself grow into a glorious individual.

Prose 500 2015 Longlist, Debdip Maitra

Of grave diggings, afterglows, and dances of madness...

Dance, my angel, dance... For you are a force of nature... Dance, find yourself, and revel in your glory... Dance through the stars and walk down the milky way... Dance, and let my eyes drink in thy beauty like you are the ocean, and I a traveller lost in the desert... Even though it will course red-hot through my veins, burning me up from within... But, it's okay, I'm caught up in the heat of my passion anyway...So dance, create new worlds at your fancy, and tear old ones down at your whim...Create, re-create the whole fiber of my being to suit your fantasy...Let me bathe in the glow of your being, drinking in every single detail about you... Getting close, closer, so close to my sun that every single drop of sweat clinging to your eyelashes are visible in a burst of HD colours... Moving in close with reckless abandon... Come, mould me up with the warmth of your heart, your smile's afterglow melting the deepest thaws, the most resilient steel of my heart... And then, you move away, your whim forgotten... Your fancy caught by some other trinket, you dance on towards your next plaything... And I freeze, crystallizing in the sudden absence of your guiding inferno into all rawness and sharp edges... Bleeding myself dry everytime I clench my fist to drive out the pain Drive out the voices inside my head... And my silent screams echo on... Mingling with the ringing notes of your being... Mingling, perfectly in tune with the harmonic chaos of the memories to rip my world to shreds, tearing off the last vestiges of my sanity with absolute abandon...Revelling in the redness flowing as I bleed myself dry on the memories frozen crystal-perfect in time... I forget on some nights, that I'm supposed to have buried you... Buried us... And then we're grave robbing for the rest of the night...Revelling with reckless abandon in the dance of the dead as I bleed out...And my whole world finally goes black...

Prose 500 2015 Featured Anirban Nanda

Broken

I just have been announced as dead. Me, my body is very hot now. In fact, I am famous for being hot. People like to stare at me and hold me in their hands lasciviously. Yes, I am that hot. But it is not true that I am always hot like this. Sometimes I wash myself in cool water. To be true, I wash myself in every 30 minutes, for I am manhandled in every 20 minutes interval. They order me and my owner listens accordingly. He washes me, then makes me hot ─because people like me preheated. Then I am prepared for serving, with a little heat here, a little sugar there and then some quivering and shivering and shaking. 

The customers then light up a cigarette and kiss me on my fragile and moist body, with their smoky lips. They devour me in open daylight, for they are too bold to do anything in secrecy. They have complained about me a few times ─I repeat, only a few times─ for my height, for I am quite tall for them. But different people have different tastes. Many customers like short ones, because they can hold them entirely, they feel like they can en-capture and absorb the whole body in a dominant position. I think they want to feel superior. But who doesn’t? 

Today, when I've been declared as dead, my owner is not sad at all, rather, very angry because it has caused him loss in his investment. He's started blurting abusive words to the killer. Oh, forgive me. I’ve forgotten to mention that it's not any natural death; it's a murder. An unintentional and accidental murder. I’ll tell you later why it's accidental. You know, I am feeling delirious during my last minutes and can’t remember everything chronologically. Everything I remember is a combination of different memories, entangled together with other blurred events in an obscure way. I would be cremated soon and I don’t have much time to talk more with you. But I so want to talk with someone like you, who listens my unworthy talks with such attentiveness. But what can I do other than bade you goodbye and vanish from this world? Because every soul needs to rest in peace. 

Before going, let me tell you why the murder is an accident. The customer has held me and talking with someone about some political issue. As the conversation has progressed, it has got heated up and he's absentmindedly left hold of me. And then I've fallen and I found myself broken into pieces, for I am simply made of glass, a glass in a roadside teashop in which hundreds of people drinks tea every day. My owner, I mean the owner of the shop is very poor and it costs him 10 rupees for a glass. It's normal for him to be angry. It's normal for me to be thrown in garbage and recycled.

Prose 500 2015 Longlist, Ami Misra

Rain

Moving to this landlocked city, after being born and bred along the coastline for all my life meant change in seasons. Until this point in time, my temperament was determined by the moderating influence of the sea. I am still adapting to the seasons in this Karma Bhoomi (place of work.)

Home, situated at the confluence provided me with the assurance that no matter how uncomfortably we sweat in daytime, evenings would always be pleasant. For those of you who do not remember: here is a reminder that land close to ocean always gets its doze of sea breeze. The only time we were caught off guard was during the Monsoon season. Our city was partially submerged every year, due to heavy rain. Known for its spirit, all of us continued to move relentlessly. Maybe pace is a superlative difference between rural and urban areas. Cities are always in motion. Buses and trains wading through clogged water displayed the stubborn resolve to move here. During this season, black clouds didn’t have silver linings. Given that our skin is waterproof and we were residents of this industrious land, most of us continued to work in spite of the downpour. White noise from the pouring rain became the background noise to our daydreams painted on the gossamer windows of these transporting vehicles. Peculiarly so, rain in the home city always fell with a diagonal slant. Even if you covered yourself under umbrellas or roofs, the rain found its way into a shaft and drenched you. It’s almost the end of June! My mother tells me that it has been raining heavily for the whole month at home. 

And in this part of the world, the rain bearing winds have just arrived. Needless to say, most of the rain has been lost to the narrower parts of our peninsular sub-continent. It will rain, but only for a bit. The rain will come and go in short intervals between ostensibly permanent sunshine.

It was a year full of unfamiliar seasons: prodigal winter, dry summer and unrequited (ongoing) monsoon. While the winter was about surrendering to a tranquil sun and jittering in the harsh company of sharp winds; the summer came with burning winds lit up by a tenacious sun leaving us dehydrated yet sturdier than we ever were. As for the monsoon – the rain clouds in this arid city will thunder more than they can deliver. 

I am parched.

Prose 500 2015 Featured Writer Ipshita Chatterjee

She Is

She is poetry. Her tiniest movement exudes an unmatched lyrical quality. Twirling her hair and flicking it back nonchalantly, the massive efforts she makes at stifling yawns during dreary lectures, the livid anger which shadows her face and the frown furrowing her forehead, the radiant smile which greets the world, irrespective of the tears which have soaked her pillow the night before - it is all a beautiful ballad. Her twinkling eyes surveying me from behind the thick spectacles – that is poetry. Her deep soulful voice, even when we fight – that is verse. Her walk exactly timed to the metre, her gentle touch and the feel of it on my hand – that is a soliloquy. Yes, that girl is poetry.

 

I longed and so longed to recite this poem, to place her verses on my  lips. But I see the obvious truth staring me in the face. 

 

I have known her since she was born. I have known her as closely as anyone can know a person. I have seen her spirited and buoyant, and weak and vulnerable. I have reveled in her joy and comforted her, in her pain. When she received her first ‘Best Athlete' medal and when she received her college degree, I was standing right next to her, my arms outstretched to hug this poem of a girl. When she fell off a bicycle and when her first boyfriend dumped her, I was up all night, caressing her and nursing the bruises on her knee and those on her heart.

 

Yet, she was never mine. She can never be mine. The laws of society and nature stand between me and my poem. But, I cannot think of anyone else but her. They say, love is blind, love defies all rationality and knows no bounds. Yes, my love was queer enough to disregard blood ties, the constraints of being the progeny of the same womb. Yes, the word ‘incest’ flashes before me each time I look at this poem of a girl, my little sister. 

 

The guilt, pain and trauma of it all rips me into pieces. Concealing this massive load of emotions tears me down to a million tiny bits. When I see her in love with another man, I can only sit down and helplessly weep my heart out. But this dull throbbing pain only becomes sharper, stinging my heart with every heave of my chest.

 

 Today, as I watch her, all bedecked in her bridal finery, her hands dyed with henna, her head covered with a red veil, my heart just cannot hold its secret any longer. I have waited for almost twenty years for this moment. If she cannot be mine, she will not go without knowing my secret. 

 

I silently shut the door behind me and walk softly into the room where she waits for her wedding. The three words softly escape my lips. With her mellow reply “I love you too, bhaiyya”, a lover’s heart turned to stone.