Finding Foremothers

So, the "2nd National Poetry Festival" took place in Guntur, India, on July 2. And although I am one of the participants -- my work features in the festival anthology as does poet-blogger friend Tikuli Dogra's (http://tikulicious.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/detritus-my-poem-selected-4poetry-fest-anthology/) -- I couldn't go down there. I am in Delhi, but down with what one calls here "Delhi belly"! A friend said, America's softened me, six years of stay... To be frank, we came back to Delhi for the first time in summer in all these years. Well!

So at Guntur, according to the organizers Suseela and Gopichand (both of them English teachers and literature enthusiasts), 100-plus poets were invited from all over India. Must've been a fabulous experience for all who went there.

Here is one of the poems, a personal favorite of mine.

"Finding Foremothers"

This is a day the family sits down
to a dinner for a festival remembering
ancestors they say hover disguised as
birds and animals – on the lawn, on garden boughs.

Is my grandma among the cows?
I knew she was feisty! Maybe
a crow then. And her own mother
was she there too with her broken
teeth and sad robes yellowed with
age in a photograph some gora had
clicked at her rich spouse’s gracious permission?

The sweetened tomato chutney on
my banana leaf plate seeps away like blood
dark dark red, blood of aunts, wives
who cooked and cleaned, sucked
blood from cuts, bore kids and bled till
they stopped; bled in their hearts when widowed and denied.

A few grains of paddy, holy water, forefathers still
flocked outside; on the television a woman wails.

I flip through an old photo album. Sepia, forgotten clutter.

***

In other news, I am out of the Project Verse contest. Stuck around for about three rounds I think. But of course, the worthy would carry on the battle whereas I am hoping to hop on to more scintillating stuff! Thanks Kristen McHenry for leaving a comment on my blog, it encourages me a lot! Do keep visiting.

Image from the Internet: women gathered for a party in Bombay, 1910

Fiction forthcoming in Mirage Books short story collection

This was a nice surprise:
My short story selected to appear in a collection by Mirage Books (http://www.miragebooks.com/), India. The story is "Tara Goes Home" that I originally wrote last year, as an entry for Orange Prize (ambitious, ambitious!), UK. It didn't make the cut there and I felt the story had too many loose ends and quite a bit of fluff. So I edited it over and over again. Finally, this year Mirage Books picked it up and I thought, OMG, they like this story? No way! I had contributed three stories (all within 1,500 words and only one to be selected), and my preference rested on either of those other two. Those were really nice tales! But this probably has more gravitas in the theme. Who knows?

Anecdote: When Nadine Gordimer wanted to stick to the title of her novel "A Sport of Nature", her publisher kept arguing against it citing some silly reason like this title might have the book mixed up with sports books! What I mean is, publishers and writers allegedly have totally different world views... (Now I'm not Nadine Gordimer, so let's move on...)

The selected story is about a young woman named Tara who lives in Delhi. She is chided and goaded by her family to bear a son while she keeps getting pregnant with girl babies (revealed by illegally done ultrasounds) that are aborted one after the other. So, finally one day, she steps out of her conservative home and gets on to a bus. The bus meets with an accident and Tara lands up in a hospital. There, half-conscious, she takes a strange decision about her life. This is all about Tara Goes Home.

Here's part of the e-mail that came this morning from Mirage Books editor:

"Hi Friends,
Announcing the winners of the contest -
[From the list below, you can check if your story has been selected, but do come back to read the following message.]
First of all, I'd like to thank all of you for participating in our contest. The response for it has been much better than what we had expected, initially. For us this has been quite an enriching experience and I hope you enjoyed participating as well.
These short-stories which we have selected will be published in our next book and each story will be followed by a short bio and a photograph of its author: That is the Prize.
The very reason why we announced this contest was to promote writers and story-writing. There are so many good writers who don't get the opportunity to get published: Well, today we feel that fifty talented writers will be added to the select group of – 'Published Authors'. Congratulations Winners!
For the ones whose stories don't feature in the list, I'd like to say: Most of the stories we received were good and it has been quite a tough task selecting the ones which we did.
Here is the list of the stories which have been selected:

SELECTED STORIES
01
Nandita Mundle
Ink And Lead
02
Anu Chopra
Arranged Marriage
03
Asma Siddiqui
Beyond Love
04
Ankita Aranke
Desert Faith
05
Ketan Joshi
Drilled
06
Padmaja Menon
From The Mouth Of Babes
07
Saurabh Turakhia
Call Of Nature
08
Vijaya Prakash
A Good Bargain
09
Susan Smith
Aware
10
Sunil Sharma
Butterflies Grandma And Me
11
Pooja Nair
Recipe For Disaster
12
Vandana Jena
Second Sight
13
Shantanu Dhankar
And I Burn
14
I D Atkinson
First Contact
15
Lilia Westmore
Escape To Hopeland
16
Gerardine Baugh
Father
17
M Annamalai
Million Steps
18
Anusarat Kothalanka
Nishgandha-A Dreamscape
19
Pratik Shah
Wavering Bounds
20
Rachana Shah
Gulabjamuns In Syrup
21
Cyril Sam
They Say I Am Crazy
22
B S Keshav
Fast Forward
23
Nathia
Mirage
24
Nabina Das
Tara Goes Home
25
Kenneth Cross
A Healthy Dose Of Insanity
26
Farahdeen Khan
Mona
27
Divya Mohan
The Silent Brook
28
Anita Baruwa
Just Rs 499
29
Sunil Tarini
Betrayal
30
Ribal Haj
Chased By The Wolves
31
Leo Mukherjee
The Fly Who Knew Too Much
32
Anubha Yadav
The Gift
33
Kamal Sharma
Ghost
34
Bharadwaj Vijaysarathy
Tom Dick And Harry
35
Chandru Bhojwani
The Love Letter
36
McKenzie Hightower
The Lost And The Forgotten
37
Sweta Vikram
Challenges Of Breaking Rules
38
Eva Bell
Perfect Execution
39
Kirin Gupta
Now
40
Ramprasad Adpaikar
The Baby
41
Sindhu Ramachandran
Happy Teacher's Day To Life
42
John Wolf
Earth Dogs
43
Vivek Shivram
A Conversation With The Damned
44
Salil Chaturvedi
Ta Rat Thing
45
Malavika Shridharan
The Shooting Star
46
G S Vasukumar
The Last Drop Of Tear
47
Joe Pfeffer
Supreme Reflections
48
Tia Rohit
Darkness Behind The Bush
49
Carmalin Sophia
Love Me Dear
50
Swapneel Khare
I Am Sorry

[This list is subject to the authors' furnishing the details and complying with the rules.]
The authors of these selected stories need to furnish some details, for which we will email them, individually, very shortly.

Warm Regards,
Huned Contractor
[Editor: Mirage Books]

SHEHER -- the Tentative Cover

Guest-edited by Meena Kandasamy, the anthology of "urban" poems by Indian women writers has this tentative cover. Haven't heard if they were re-working it. Encore shameless plug: my poem will be there humbly nestled, hopefully by the scintillating Kamala Das (same last names, you see!).

Basically, these were my comments on the cover:

*the vertical view conveys strength and direct approach of the woman’s position

*that she is holding together what represents the cities symbolic ‘mammoth’ bridges, pillars/monuments/edifice… she is like the female Krishna who held the mount govardhana (was it?) to shelter the cattle from rains… (aw I forgot my mythology!)

* that her back is turned towards us. We don't need to see her face always, a face that has been over-abused in movies, calendars, posters, matrimonial (shaadi.com?) ads… et al. hence we don't need to know if she is good/bad looking, dark or light, shy or angry… whatever

* that the image also conveys a sense of control in the way she holds the city’s edifice and looks upon the spread before her. She surmises it, it’s her say on the city.

* her hands holding together or apart of the monument and bridge is very emergetic. She has the capability to change, that comes out well.

What I didn't like is:

*that she looks very ‘rural’ in the way she has been dressed. per se there is nothing wrong with ‘rural looks’, but here, perhaps a more “straight” form would look better than a swingy, ghaghra-wearing sort of form. Perhaps the artist can rework on relaxing this formative structure of the woman’s image.

*I love B&W but there is just too much black there. and the spotlight kind of treatment doesn't make it less imposing. Could a border around the etching work to keep the image in its lightedness?

* The title font (I don't think it is spooky at all) seems to jar a bit with the slug/sub-hed below.

Also, friend and poet Anuradha Pujar's work will be there. Two writers from Ithaca in the same anthology, ain't that cool?