The Machinery of Departures
-Hemant Mohapatra

I woke up at two a.m. with a start.
It was raining outside – birds
were angry, the streets full
of fire-engines – and I thought
of you after years: where are you now
and how are you living, so far away,
With your black and white t.v.
by the window that opens up
to tea-stalls, your single-bed
in a square apartment, walls
calendared with gods and goddesses
all the way back to nineteen
ninety-six. Now, the moon
is half gone, it is already august,
and how many years has it been?
I am still the south, you north,
and somewhere in between
they are sending astronauts
into space. Tell me, my beautiful
loss, my hyacinth, how are you living
in the valleys of Dehra,
in that house you have made
with a young man you love.

Second is Narrative Limits
Name: Nabina Das

Nabina Das has published her work in several national and international journals and e-zines. Most recently, her short story is featured in Inner Voices, a contest-winning collection of fiction (Mirage Books) and a poetry commentary appears in Kritya. She has published her poetry in India as well as in North America in publications like Muse India, Kritya, Shalla Magazine, The Toronto Quarterly, The Cartier Street Review, Maintenant 3 (Three Rooms Press, NY), The Smoking Book (an anthology from Poets Wear Prada press, NJ), Mad Swirl, and Lit Up Magazine, and more of her poetry and short fiction is forthcoming in Quay Journal, Sheher anthology (Frog Books), Liberated Muse anthology and The Cartier Street Review. A 2007 Joan Jakobson fiction scholar from Wesleyan Writers’ Conference, and a 2007 Julio Lobo fiction scholar from Lesley Writers’ Conference, Nabina was Assistant Metro Editor with The Ithaca Journal, Ithaca, NY, and has worked as a journalist and media person in India for about 10 years in places as diverse as Tehelka.com, Down To Earth environmental magazine, Confederation of Indian Industries, National Foundation for India and The Sentinel newspaper. She has published several articles, commentaries and essays during her tenures. An M.A. in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, her other interests are theater and music. Formally trained in Indian classical music, she has performed in radio and TV programs and acted in street theater productions. She blogs at www.fleuve-souterrain.blogspot.com and freelances when not writing poetry and fiction.

Narrative Limits
-Nabina Das

He was holding baby-food cartons rotten eggs ill gotten perhaps and soggy scraps
Running from a plum-dark night into what seemed starkly bright starlight or searchlight
Flying with the power of bullets in his back horse powered from menacing police guns.
He surely said truthfully he had a starving child, but he looked like an enemy, he did.

She was scared plumbed with interrogation, the tongue numb from an untranslatable fear
Skin shallow like swamps she jumped. Rising vapour or human crumb her hair or breasts.
Take away my hemp clothes, she pleaded, my sentimental nesting flowers but don’t
Take away my books my looks no different from you in your cities of rapturous life.

They (drove trucks, laboured, choked on dust, drank spit, came trudging here humanlike
With cherries and berries of sweat to sweeten the world, also in anger or merriment cried,
Crossed creeks, counted reluctant tax money much like you or me and with care wiped
Mud from germinal faces and hands) were sent back across the nettled fence, embattled.

They held curdled milk beans dying seeds torn clothes our discarded marginal materials
Their faces like myth raked up from the bottom of our narrative limits of scatter and filth
Nametag dog-leash passport license branded on skin sizzling with fried-fish tan or tear
Standing at the razor lines that distance them because of the way they walk the streets.

Third is An orchard short of fruit-trees
Name: Deepika Arwind

Deepika Arwind is 22 years old and lives in Bangalore. She currently works at The Hindu, Bangalore Bureau. She is interested in theatre and has acted in four plays. Other than theatre, she likes doodling, travelling, taking pictures and music. She won the first place in the Poetry with Prakriti contest in December 2008, and will be reading her work at the next Poetry with Prakriti festival in Chennai in December this year. She also received a special jury commendation at the Toto Funds the Arts Awards 2009, and is writing a play.

An orchard short of fruit-trees
(Or a literal interpretation of “borders” through the eyes of Surjeet Singh Katyal.)
- Deepika Arwind

Surjeet Singh Katyal is due to be 90 tomorrow.
Don’t set foot across Fazilka, Darji, says
his grand-daughter of twenty-four gazing at her nails.
But the mangoes look fatter and yellower and
happier on that tree he says.
They won’t shoot me silly beta, I’m old and
I don’t look like trouble.

Don’t go there paaji, they will cut you up.
his broad, crinkly son says counting his money,
But the mangoes look fatter and yellower and
happier on that tree he says.
They won’t shoot me silly beta, I’m old and
I only want mangoes.

Surjeet, you greedy man, stay this side,
we have better mangoes here, says his
tottering buddy of 94, farting through the charpai.
But the mangoes look fatter and yellower and
happier on that tree he says.
They won’t shoot me silly, I’m old and
I am armed.
(thinking: shut up you senile stinker, I’ m younger than
you and better-looking.)

So this grey morning, as he watches the mangoes
ripen to an orgasmic state, and threaten to
burst into little mango stars if not eaten
he tucks his white beard into his collar,
prays, takes his kirpan from the bed,
and takes that epic step over a line
he does not see, a line he has not known.

(A gun shot goes off in the distance, and
kills a dog whose whimper goes unheard.)

After he plucks half a dozen sparkling
Mangoes, juiced up to their exploding stalks,
an earthquake swallows his village whole.
Eighty-nine and one mango down,
watching Fazilka go down into no specific place,
Surjeet Singh throws a seed into
the disappearing distance and says,
”Grow a tree for yourself down there, you stupid fucks.”