Tag Archives: Rohini Sunderam

Dec3

The Relationship Bazaar

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I was greeted this morning with a Whatsapp message that was really moving and expressed in an almost Gibran-like ‘voice’. It was written in Hindi, and another friend, whose Hindi has fallen into disuse, couldn’t read it as fluently as he would have liked to. So I made a quick and hasty translation.

But, as with a lot of poetry, once something starts buzzing in your head, until you sit down and actually write it it won’t leave you. So, of course I did just that, and here it is:

The Relationship Bazaar

As I was walking in the marketplace

My feet stopped at the Relationship Bazaar.

I looked around and saw it filled

With kinship on sale for near and far

 

Relationships of every kind

Were offered everywhere

‘Relationships for sale’ they cried

‘Come buy a few to spare’

 

Each seller had a lively trade

And I walked up to one

‘Aha!’ he cried, ‘What will you buy?

I have everything under the sun!’

 

With trembling lips I asked the seller

‘How much and what’s for sale?’

With a flourish he said

‘Most everything and some beyond the pale.’

 

‘What would you like? What will you buy?

I have a wondrous range

Special ties with a son, or father

I have all good, some strange.’

 

‘Choose from a sister or a brother

Dear shopper what’s your choice?

Humanity or the love of mother

Faith? Pray, where is your voice?’

 

‘Come, come,’ he cajoled me,

‘Come, come, don’t hesitate!

Ask for something, anything

Your silence on me grates.’

 

With fear and sorrow in my voice

And with a great unease

I sighed and asked him, whispering

‘Do you have friendship, please?’

 

He stopped mid-sale, he stopped and stared

As if I’d lost my mind

Then tearfully he turned and said

‘Ah that is hard to find.

 

‘For friendship is the relationship

On which the world depends

It’s not for sale, it has no price

No price that can be named

 

For friendship is worth everything

This earth and then some more

It is a pure and selfless thing

And this you can be sure

 

The day that friendship’s offered

For a price and put on sale

Why then my dear, dear shopper

The world it will have failed

 

This globe will be uprooted

And lose its orbit quite

The day that friendship’s offered

And can be quoted for a price.

Nov28

The birth of Corpoetry

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About eighteen years ago a chance remark from a colleague at the Chronicle-Herald, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, sparked off a buzz that has now eventually found expression in a collection of fifty poems that I’ve titled Corpoetry.

We were discussing an ad concept, when we heard that extra boisterous forced laughter that one associates with laughing to please. “Ah!” my colleague and friend said, “Corporate Laughter”. I found the phrase amusing and apt. But it entered that odd space that exists inside our minds where tunes get trapped, phrases beep-n-bop around, lyrics of songs we don’t even like buzz and we can’t get rid of them. So ‘Corporate Laughter’ bumped around inside my head.

I tried to dislodge it by listening to old music. Next I recited old nursery rhymes. Nope. It was still there. Grinning like a gremlin, ‘Corporate Laughter’ it said and hooted into my sleep, my dreams, my quiet space. Nothing helped until I sat down and wrote the first poem in what is my now published collection: Corpoetry. Then, like a deflated balloon it shrank to nothing.

The ‘thing’ didn’t disappear. But, I had found its weak spot – to write it out of my system in a poem – please understand I use the term: poem, loosely. These poems aren’t your highly artistic, searching-for-the-meaning-of-life poems. They’re just fun.

After that, every so often I’d see a situation that gave rise to another poem and then another. During my lunch hour, I’d sometimes use the clip art available and mix and match it with word art to create doodles to complement my poems. I had so much fun doing these that I soon began to see more and more situations, office dynamics, gossip, etc. that gave rise to ever more poems.

And that, dear friends is how Corpoetry began. You can find out more on my Facebook Page.

Corpoetry_cover_Page_02 copy

Nov16

Fajr, the morning prayer

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This is a fragment from something else I wrote some time ago…

Especially across the hush of the desert and the sand-coloured villas and high-rises standing like silent sentinels, you can feel it. That pre-dawn stillness when, for a brief instant, the ‘night life’ senses a shift that is not of the sands or the stones and it starts to turn in to sleep for the day. This is just before the ‘day life’ begins to awaken. The very stillness rings out like a clarion. Unbeknownst to themselves, the creatures of the day respond to it. They stir in their sleep, they mutter. The denouements of dreams culminate and bid farewell to sleeping minds still enwrapped in their tales behind closed eyelids.

An almost imperceptible warming of the chill night air is counterpointed by the chill of the night air that is not willing yet to surrender its lower temperatures to the balm of day. They are poised mid-step – Night and Day, Light and Dark, yesterday and today. The dance of their two winds is halted for a moment, captured in the tapestry of pre-dawn, the warp and woof of life. And they make a brief exchange in silence. The merest kiss of a farewell. And then the deep velvet of the bowl of night is tinged at its very edge with a lighter shade of dark.

It is at this time that the muezzin sitting in the minaret of his mosque can just distinguish between two threads and his practiced eye informs him which one is white and which black, when it is day and no longer night. Then he raises his clear melodic voice to the skies and chants in his pure tones, “Allah hu Akbar! Allah hu Akbar!” God is great.

 The sound reverberates through the as-yet dark streets and alleys, up stairs and down narrow lanes, past shuttered windows, through richly carpeted hallways and equally over mud-smoothed stairways. It floats over sack-covered spices in the souk, caresses the dates and figs in their baskets and stirs the flies. It sends mice scuttling for their warrens and cockroaches for their drains. It wafts past curtained chambers and beaded blinds, closed eyelids and the last cobweb wisps of dreams and nightmares alike. Pushing all away. Announcing to every ear in this island of Islam, Bahrain; the miracle of the birth of a new day.

Nov6

A 50-word story

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I was thrilled when I learnt that my 50-word story, based on a poem I’d written, has been selected as the winner in a competition on Oapschat.

It is based on a real event that took place in the souk several months ago. First it was a poem, then it became a pithy story. Believe me, writing flash fiction – of any length – is quite a demanding exercise.

I’d love to feature anyone else’s 50-word stories here, do share. Sorry no prizes but if, in my opinion, your story merits it, I shall feature it here.

If you don’t want to follow the link here’s the winning story:

“You know Kite Runner?”

The Afghani salesman asked.

“Yes,” I ignored him, “How much?” indicating amethyst earrings.

He opened his lacerated hands.

Ashamed, I looked at him. “I loved the book.”

His hand on his heart, “I have more stories will you write them?”

“A thousand times.”

“Tashakor,” He smiled.

Over to you…

 

And here I am, holding my prize: “My Gentle War” by Joy Lennick the judge at Oapschat the publication that ran the competition.

2014-11-12 11.38.08

Jul13

After tremors

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Having just finished reading Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed, I recall a conversation I had some years ago in the Bab al Bahrain souk.

 

‘You know, that guy,’ he says

Between the displays

Of Lapis Lazuli and silverware

‘The one who wrote Kite Runner?’

I nod, my eyes coveting

A single large bracelet

Woven with fine strands of silver

Into exquisitely painful

Circles and arabesques

Imprisoning

A myriad stones

Inscrutable opals, amethysts

As purple as bruises on a tender face

‘What about him?’ I ask

Half caressing the bracelet

And pointing at

A pair of earrings dripping

Blood-red garnets

Set in marcasite.

Thinking, ‘what does he know of

Kite Runner, he looks as though

He can barely read

Selling jewellery in a store

Over-stuffed with shawls, rugs, woodworked boxes

And glitzy

perhaps-these-western-tourists-will-like-them

Waistcoats and table runners.’

Then I see it

Desperation woven into tiny errors

in the embroidery

Startled by a gunshot.

So, I ask again

This time waiting for his response,

‘What about him?

The book was so moving, so violent.’

‘Ta-shakor’ he replies

‘But they were like nothing’

He whispers

Holding the silver bracelet up for me

Quoting a price and adding

‘Like the stories I have in here.’

He points at his head and his heart.

I see half a lifetime

As it leaks out of his hands

Torn fingernails

The intricate patterns

Woven by hard manual labour

Deep cuts on the side

From scrabbling down a mountainside

Hiding in caves

Or was it from protecting his face

Against knife attacks?

As he enters the sale

For the day.

Jun2

Twenty-one again!

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21 for 21

…that’s what the invitation said. That number took me back to the day I turned twenty-one. When the palate was young and my taste buds were alive to every nuance of flavour and texture. Back then, when aromas teased one’s nostrils, they imprinted olfactory memories onto my grey cells to be drawn upon in later life.

It was a time when intense was the shade of every colour in the rainbow, even those less vivid like green and yellow hidden between blue and orange. When a sunset was grist to my writer’s mill and could, on one day move me to tears and on another to revel in the joy of being.

So what has all this meandering in my memory banks got to do with an invitation from Obai & Hill and those lovely ladies Wafa and Zainab to Vapiano’s 21 for 21 press event?

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Feb21

Threading the Needle

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A Bahrain Writers’ Circle Creative Workshop Exercise

Secreted from the underbelly of the moth caterpillar called Bombyx mori, it sat in suspension for thirty-five days, a single filament one and half kilometres long. The cocoon was plunged into a hot bath to loosen the glue that held the threads together. Then it was cooled so that this thread could be unravelled. The caterpillar died in the process. That fine single strand of silk, for which a life was sacrificed, then joined three other martyrs to form a thread of one of the finest, most prized fibres in the world.

It shone in the light with a gentle glow, blushing as each of its minute three-sided faces caught a sunbeam that exposed its lissom length and supple sinews. It glowed as a moonbeam caressed its tresses. And it stretched in pleasure almost to its tensile limit pleased at its own resilience as one of the strongest natural filaments in the world. Its pride was short-lived.

Before it could revel in its own existence, the thread was trapped. Caught and wound into a skein. Then, enslaved in a ring, the yarn was packed off to a fabled land, Turkey. Here in the dyer’s harem the skein lost the innocent cream of its youth and was plunged into an indigo dye.

The indigo whispered its own sad story of capture, beatings and torture. The two strangers in a strange land wept and embraced each other. As their tears mingled the indigo imbued the silk with the softest, most beautiful hue of sorrow – blue; the kind that shines bravely in the sun and glistens pensively in the moonlight.

Today, a three denier thread of that silk waits suspended, rigid with fear, as a lady’s fingers clutch its neck and aim to push it into the oval eye of a sharp metal spike. At the last moment the thread flinches and dodges the eye of the needle.

The lady looks at the thread, then gently slides it over her tongue. The wet muscular rough appendage arouses an old memory – the glue that once held each strand tight and safe in that cocoon of the Bombyx mori caterpillar so long ago. The recollection makes all three deniers cling to each other now stiff with anticipation as they fly through the eye of the needle. It is threaded.

And the slavery of the silk is complete as the metal spike pulls all three strands together through the squared fabric to form a blue daisy in the lady’s embroidery. The silk sighs as it succumbs to its eternal punishment, forever bent, never free to flow and dance in the light again except in minute parts of its length as it weeps across the tapestry.

Note: This was another exercise through the Bahrain Writers’ Circle – Creative Writers’ Workshop. Back then we had a different format: we’d do exercises and were then given homework to share at the next session.

I remember it was given to us by  Shauna Nearing Loej when, as a group, we were mendicants going from one refuge to another. At the time we were kindly granted a spot in a bookshop in Adliya. Shauna gave us us all a choice of subjects to write on. As usual I, ever the ‘teacher’s pet’, had done my assignment – the above post. It was an inspired piece although written frantically the night before we were due to meet. The atmosphere was perfect: dim lights, leather sofas and a slight chill in the air. I intoned my piece and at the time felt my voice sounded almost sepulchral, later I was told I sounded poetic! Anyway, this was met with such enthusiasm that I sent it to the Flaneur, where it still resides as a story under the same title! I’m hoping it’s okay to publish it here after almost two years. And I hope you will enjoy it.

NOW PODCAST

Thanks to Morgen Bailey, this is the first time a story of mine has been Podcast!

And, here are the links

iTunes
https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/baileys-writing-tips/id389840707

Just sharing the info… don’t feel obliged to listen to it 🙂

Other links taken from Morgen’s email to me:
I’m pleased to say that the podcast of your flash fiction is live. The direct short link to the relevant blog post is http://wp.me/p18Ztn-8Kp and long link ishttp://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/2014/04/27/baileys-writing-tips-podcast-short-stories-episode-no-39. Feel free to use them wherever and whenever you like. I’ve also added the details to the Podcast Short Stories, Flash Fiction Fridays and Contributors pages.

The links to listen to the podcast are on the blog post but they are…

iTunes (the first item), Google’s Feedburner (scroll to the end), Podbean, Podcasters and Podcast Alley.

Feb14

Rebirth

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Shiva’s tandav nritya* the dance of destruction

He the transformer, limitless, omniscient

The holder of time the ultimate destroyer and creator

Man-woman centre of the trinity

Ever moving forward and backward

His cosmic dance

Frenetic in its final phases

We beat the drums and tablas

Dha din din tha, tha din din tha**

Urging him on to our final destruction, hoping to return

To a world reborn, renewed, refreshed

And pure as the first dew on the first day

Of the first dawn.

(*The dance of destruction
** Names of the basic tabla strokes)
Feb3

First Catch

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I remember the jade green turbulence

Of the river Beas up in the Kullu valley

The summer I turned twelve and discovered rainbow trout.

When papa showed us how to bait the hook

And cast way out and stand on the rocky river bank

Making sure we didn’t stand in it as he did, knee deep in the water.

But on the side, waiting for the tug on the line

On my forefinger held against an already taut string.

Not for us the expensively bought silver flies

Imported from the UK because they didn’t make them here

And children learning to fish could so easily lose them

The Beas is a hungry river and runs almost as quick as thought.

And yet, we learnt to feel the fish as it nibbled squirmy worm

Painstakingly threaded onto the hook

Papa did that because the hooks might hurt our soft girls’ hands.

Stand still and quiet not a word, not a breath

The fish can hear us and will swim away

Instead look at the pines and the deodar silver green

Climbing silently up the Himalayan hillside smirking at us.

We watched them in the hush of nothing but the rushing river

And learnt to feel each breeze, listen to the birds

And the crickets in the growing evening light

And pay no heed to the insect that’s biting my thigh

A stern look from papa because I scratched

And then that creeping thrill when I first felt that other nibble

The one at the end of the line, different from the impatient tug of the river

The rainbow trout was having his last meal.

Tug, tug and reel it in, not all at once but slow

In the excitement I could wait no longer and pulled it all

Rod, line and fish arching over my head in a kaleidoscopic glitter

It caught the setting sun as it flew overhead scattering

Beas water clear as diamonds that came showering down on me

The trout landed on the grass behind

I ran to catch it

Papa at my heels – when did he reel in his line?

Now he was near me so that I wouldn’t try to get my trout off the hook.

Our first catch of the day was all of six inches long

And it was mine.

Palpitating gills and wide eyes.

We put it in a bucket of Beas water to keep it fresh

Later mama fried it along with the others we caught

Right there on the riverside in a pan on the primus stove

Everyone had a bit of my trout

The best fish I ever tasted, salted with success.

Note: The Beas is a river in the northern part of India that rises in the Himalayas and flows for some 470 km (290 miles) to the Sutlej River in the Indian state of Punjab.

Kullu, where my father took us on several fishing holidays, is located on the banks of the Beas River in the Kullu Valley. This valley, formed by the Beas, lies between two cities – Manali and Largi – and is famous for its majestic hills covered with Pine and Deodar Forest. Today, The Kullu valley promotes itself as a popular destination for trout fishing.  It is also the starting point of several trek routes into the Himalayas, white water rafting on the Beas river is also becoming popular. Back in the early 1960’s it was relatively undiscovered and as far as I recall, there weren’t any suitable hotels and so we camped in tents higher up the hill and walked down to the river every day in order to fish.

Oct13

I missed Malala

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…At point blank range

With Malal Yousafzai so much in the news again with reports and articles such as these:

in the The Prague Revue

in the Washington Post

and in the New York Times

I thought the time is right for me to post a poem I wrote several months ago on a chance remark made by my husband when I wondered how the would-be assassin could miss Malala at such short range? And he replied, ‘Perhaps he couldn’t do it’. And from this, the following poem arose:

The training it was thorough

The orders loud and clear

The young girl was a menace

And she was spreading fear

I really didn’t get it

But my superiors were sure

And on the Internet they said

Her demands were all impure

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