New Publication: New Asian Writing, October 2013

http://www.new-asian-writing.com/

http://www.new-asian-writing.com/starless-day-by-barnali-saha/

Recent Publications

        Dear Readers, here are the links to my latest publications. Do check them out and let me know what you think of them.

http://www.amazon.com/eFiction-India-Vol-01-Issue-12-ebook/dp/B00F09D9ZY

http://www.parabaas.com/translation/database/translations/stories/satyajit_gosaipur.html

In Search of Happiness with Walden for Company

         

A note of unruffled peace is borne on the wind from over the rippling waters of the pond of imagination.

A spot of philosophy is something that rarely appeals to our taste buds seasoned by eclectic worldly incidents and fast-paced virtual life. The events of the home and the world that surround us from dawn to the death of night are like the shrill noise made by a loud calling bell that extracts you out of a happy reverie in a reclusive pad. You listen to its sudden, sharp sound and sigh; then you open the door allowing the world with its often frivolous worries to come in.

Ageing under the weight of such worldly worries, I found myself sadly sipping the potion of despondence like many others that surround me. It was this pedestrian life and its normalcy, its mediocrity, and the fact that I was not doing, or rather not living, a life different that my counterparts that led me thinking. Was I happy, I wondered, living a life based on the strictures pronounced by the world and followed by its law-abiding citizens who, even if they wish, can seldom take a break? The idea of twinkling stars dying in the dark bedspread stretched taut abaft me came to my mind. I realized I would never want to be a star whose aspirations were extinguished because she jettisoned her own terms of life for the sake of others she knew. I realized that compromise is a drug more potent that Christie’s Strychnine.

Having finished my studies recently, I decided it was time to take a break for a few months and enjoy myself. I now had time at hand to do as I choose and this freedom, this sense of relishing leisure itself was a source of happiness to me. The thought that I could spend my days reading books I love, cooking, gardening or decorating my home made me beam. Nevertheless, I thought, in order to make these few months an experience to remember I should strive and shed off negativity for good and embrace happiness deliberately.

My idea of finding happiness as I had seldom felt before led me to browse the internet. My fingers tapped on the happy letters into the search box of the all-knowing web-encyclopedia and discovered that there are now manuals and personal stories about finding happiness. You punch in the word and the web provides you a list of codes which if followed will inevitably, or so some of the search results showed, lead you the ambrosia called happiness. As I found myself reading more and more of these manuals and self-stories about being happy, I felt powerless. I knew they would not do for me.

While I was switching off my computer smiling as I recalled some of the outrageous happy-codes I discovered  online in link with happiness and its nurture I sickness and in health, I stumbled on a little image done in yellow an indigo-blue that said “make happiness a habit.” It was something to think about and I dedicated my brain to the task.

Habits, as we know, are acquired sometimes advertently, but most of the time inadvertently. I remember an article I read in Reader’s Digest sometime ago which said that if you perform a task for three consecutive days; it will become part of our habitual activities. My task was to find peace and happiness, and I was more than keen to make happiness a habit. In my quest I turned to the one source I knew would never fail me: Walden, the book by the proponent of Transcendentalism, Henry David Thoreau.  I had read Walden before, but my reading was detached. This time I was keen on imbibing the delicious philosophy, on tasting it and savoring it and storing its wellness in my system.

My first task prior to reading Walden was to limit my virtual time. I had observed it before that people present their imperfect life in such fascinating lime-light virtually that it makes you wonder if you are on a right footing. The deluge of unnecessary notifications, needless articles on popular culture and boring news are together a concoction that can unnerve anybody. We are becoming too social, and too much of anything, as we know, is not good. I wished to curb my glutinous appetite for virtual society and see the results. I wanted to check how I would feel being abstracted from the virtual world for a time being. My idea was to carve a Walden for me, a patch of verdant greenery whose velveteen smoothness would cover the imperfections of my life.

For seven days around ten in the morning after my husband went out I would take my yoga mat out into the porch and a glass of juice and sit and read Thoreau’s book. The pretty periwinkles performed their soothing terpsichorean feat under the music of the zephyr. They entertained me in between my readings. The pigeons I feed know me and would make their customary guttural noise whenever they saw me. I was entertained by the rain as well, their pattering noise together with the bedraggled vista accentuated by the myriad other noises of a city life came as a symphony I learned to love. It is beautiful at times to be alone. People fear loneliness because of boredom and other contingencies initiated by self-company; but I have never felt that way, at least nowadays I don’t.

There is a chapter titled Solitude in Walden that I best loved. Here Thoreau seemed to answer my own queries about human company. He says that nature, if given a chance, can be a more soothing companion than any mortal friend. And sitting on my porch day after day under the shadow of my little plant breathing the smell of the earth I couldn’t but agree. My switched-off cell phone beside me didn’t ring and that fact alone made me calm and peaceful. The idea that my present state of peace was not dependent on anybody, that I would not be extracted from the seat of self-induced solitude by a ring of any bell made me happy.

I finished Walden in a week and found myself strangely attracted to positivity. Negative thoughts of failing at things, of competing for unachieved goals seemed trivial. I was refreshed by my read. Often I spend my after-reading hours writing about my diurnal activity, and now as I check those daily entries I discover how they lack remorse or off-putting contemplation. They talk about Thoreau’s little hut and life how it must have been alone in the forest in the company of nature. There were storms and long wintry days under the blanket of snow, but Thoreau didn’t let them usher him back to town. His rendezvous with nature was exhilarating; he enjoyed the diurnal and seasonal variations and let himself imbibe that essential truth that nature plates before us: in it is God, in it is love, and in it is happiness.

 Delve in nature and seek your God was what Walden said to me. Of course, I couldn’t jettison my family life and head for the hills, but that didn’t stop me from sitting on my little porch and savoring the sight of my little garden. I never knew their brilliantine green, I saw it now. I never judged the glorious red of the hibiscus, the delicate texture of a Chinese rose or the fresh smell of a basil leaf when rubbed between the palms. I felt them all now. The squirrel shooing a crow and a pigeon flying with its wings spread above me were sights I enjoyed for the first time in my life with relish. Unbeknownst to me with every passing day I was becoming more and more contented. The habit came naturally and in three days my heart yearned every morning for its customary sojourn in the porch.

It is often said that a book is a friend for life that changes your thought and moulds your character. I believe Walden has done the same for me. It is my un-mechanical manual to happiness that works right for me. Ultimately, it is nature, it aloneness, it is philosophy and a little time away from the touch of the world that made me happier and at peace with myself. That was the culmination of my experiment to find happiness. I inferred that happiness can indeed be made a habit, provided we know where to find it. 

Image from the internet

Random thoughts on a balmy afternoon!

As I sit re-reading Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary on this particularly balmy end-summer afternoon, I feel a sense of unmistakable peace stealing over me. I sit on my patio admiring the queer shaped cloud-monsters staring at me blatantly and observing the pattern of the sap-green hibiscus leaves. It’s beautifully quiet save for the occasional chirrup of birds, the guttural noise squirrels make, the flapping of pigeon wings and the intermittent thudding sound wafted from the carpenters’ workshop next door. Having spent the whole day reading and writing away from the hinterland of social media and cellular phone, I feel a lambent radiance slowly illuminating the hitherto dark corners of my mind riddled with the soot of future worries. Indeed, I am now convinced that when you need answers it’s best to look inside. I don’t know how many of you are in love with solitude and occasional asocial life, but I know I am. I derived the greatest pleasure today when I directed my attention toward my avocation. Writing solves problems, I am sure it does. I know sometimes it is hard to string together the thoughts; sometimes the mind is so eerily quiet that you begin to doubt. Nevertheless, you must persevere; at least that is what Virginia Woolf did. She labored from one story to another turning a conscious eye toward her art and striving her best to perfect it through experimentation and constant reading. I have always found Woolf a darling writer. I love her, and so, I love her fiction. Her often snobbish, often prudish nerd-like philosophical stance is deliciously palatable to my taste-buds. I remember getting back to this diary of hers when I was stuck with a short story a few years ago. The reading did nothing to alleviate the stifling situation, but it sure made me more confident of myself. Woolf is my panacea; and this afternoon I feel I love her more than ever. The cloud-monsters keep changing position in the sky sometimes growing grim with sudden desperation and sometime allowing the sun to permeate through them with the vim and vigor of a teenager. I see them and wonder if Woolf too had stared like me at some cumulous populated once-azure sky and indulged in wordplay. I can imagine her frail form at her desk close in her study looking out with an admiring eye at the ever-changing visage of a day. Somehow the colors seem very bright to me today. The digladiation between contradictory thoughts is conspicuous by its absence. All is calm, all is quiet. I know sometimes I let myself go on and generally give in to lugubriousness or loquaciousness without reticence, but the process of penning rambling thoughts clarifies several of my life’s puzzles for me. At the touch of self-created philosophy and under the aegis of contemplation, my thoughts sort themselves out. I think it’s going to rain this evening; I will wait for it. 

Benimadhab, Benimadhab, where art thou?

Sharing with you all an old translation done by me of Joy Goswami's Malatibala Balika Bidyalay:-)

The original poem by Joy Goswami.

My translation of the poem:

Benimadhab, Benimadhab, I want to visit your home
Benimadhab, do you still remember me? 
Benimadhab, when you played the flute of romance--
under the lush green canopy, I was a pupil at Malati School
Sitting at my desk I solved math problems in our small classroom
Outside the class our teacher alongside her groom
I was standard nine, I was sari
We met, Benimadhab, at Sulekha's home.

Benimadhab, Benimadhab, well-read and smart
When visiting from town I am but dark 
Just one glance at you and I ran to my abode
Benimadhab, my father works at a store. 
Despite it all hums the whining little bee, in the arbor blooms life decree 
And in my evening study hour I miscalculate my sums
I was standard nine, I was sweet sixteen
Clandestinely we met beside the bridge. 

Benimadhab, Benimadhab, tell me the truth
After all these years do you still remember our past?
Did you ever tell your girlfriend about us?
I saw you just once together with her
Under a light, a marvellous light
I tell you I thought you two looked smart 
The sight quenched my eyes, the sight burned my eyes
I came home and wished you good luck.

At night when I go to sleep at the basement chamber 
Silvery moon rays illuminate the bedding sheets spread on the floor
My other sister, the one younger than me, is lost in the barbed thoroughfare
She just disappeared; I don’t know with whom she now resides 
Today you have, what will happen tomorrow? Tomorrow is the devil
Nowadays I am the neighbourhood needlework tutor
Yet fire, Benimadhab, why the fire does not lit?
How will it be if I end too up being another fallen woman?