A Poem for The Folded Earth

There was an interesting email recently, on The Folded Earth, from a reader who introduced himself as Ashirbad Raha. He included a poem he had written, in Hindi, which picks up themes and threads from the novel. Inter-language intertextuality!

"...I penned this small piece of poetry (below) this morning dreaming of where Maya lives and with a dream that some day I too would go back to my parents, hills and my small town and write a book... This small poem is dedicated to your writing in The Folded Earth."

ASHIRBAD RAHA

[THE HINDI ORIGINAL FOLLOWS. A ROUGH ENGLISH TRANSLATION IS FURTHER DOWN.]

पडोसी के बरामदे में वो पीली बल्ब..
शाम को पहाड़ी हवा में ऐसे झूमती है..
जैसे, मानो मदहोश हो शाम के इश्क में...

ठीक जब सुबह के 6 बजते हैं
तो आकाशवाणी की आवाज़ खिड़की से झांकती है....
हल वाले पूरण चाचा भी खेत जाते है उस वक़्त...

अंग्रेजो के ज़माने का होगा वो गेस्ट हाउस...
फर्श की दरारों में अपनी उम्र छुपाये...
दीवारों पे सीलन सजाये....

कमरे के कोने में मकड़ों का एक शहर है..
बाहर नर्म घास पे एक गिलहरी आती है हर दोपहर..
एक मोर की टोली भी अक्सर गुजरती है....

दो महीने के लिए आया हूँ यहाँ..
रेशमी सुकून में खोने....

शायद एक किताब भी लिखूं....

TRANSLATION

That yellow bulb in the neighbour's verandah

Dances every evening in the mountain breeze

As if drunk with love for the evening.

At exactly six every morning
The sound of a radio through the window
And Puran Chacha leaves for the fields with his plough.

This guest house must be from British times
Its age hidden in the cracks in its floor
Its decoration the damp on its walls
There is a city of spiders in the corner of the room
A squirrel appears every afternoon on the soft grass
A colony of peacocks walks past.

I am here for two months
Lost in the silken threads of dreaming.

Maybe I will even write a book.

All the Lives We Never Lived wins the Sahitya Akademi Award 2022

Anuradha Roy bags coveted Sahitya Akademi Award, 22 others feted Anuradha Roy bagged the coveted Sahitya Akademi Award on Thursday. The author of 'All The Lives We Never Lived ' was felicitated along with 22 other authors for their exemplary contribution in the field of literature. This is the fourth book penned by the 40-something Roy. This book also won the prestigious Tata Book of the Year Award for Fiction in 2018. The book revolves around the life and times of a horticulturalist Myshkin, who narrates his life story, and his unending wait for letters from etters from the mother who abandoned him, for greener pastures in another country. Roy, who lives in Ranikhet, has previously written 'An Atlas of Impossible Longing', 'The Folded Earth' and 'Sleeping on Jupiter' which won the DSC Prize for Fiction 2016. It was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in the year 2015. Read more at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ma...

Ten years of Anuradha Roy’s ‘An Atlas of Impossible Longing’: What the writer and publisher remember ‘For three years, it was an alternative, secret universe in which I lived, awake or asleep.’ On serendipity and the difficult road to getting published: Anuradha Roy, writer Read this in Scroll.in Christopher MacLehose and Anuradha Roy. Photograph by Rukun Advani An Atlas of Impossible Longing started in one of those “dummy books” – blank pages, hardbound – that binderies used to make to establish accurately the spine width of books that they would bind for a publisher. The publishing house was one my partner and I had recently set up. It had no capital but our savings, no office, and the only books as yet were dummies with blank pages. Because I still have that notebook, I know I wrote the first section of Atlas in pencil, in a non-stop scrawl that poured out without warning. It went on for a few pages and then came to a stop, after which the ...

Language, Lost and Found

In France for a long spell earlier this year, everyone around me speaking in a language I didn’t speak or read, I began to think about the many streams of language I've swum in. My mother tongue, Bengali, was the language of home and of intimacy. Yet somewhere along those years, with a sigh drowned out by babel, the language had left me. I tried to find my way back to it through writers like Leela Majumdar and Bibhutibhushan. In "Language, Lost and Found" out now in Noema Magazine, I write of how I found it again, and of language in alien contexts. I'm not sure if this essay is travelogue or memoir or a bunch of stories. But here it is, and I hope you will read it. It was a red paperback with a green, winking cat spread across its large front. Just a few taps pulls it up on my screen now, and I wonder if my mental image of the day my father came with it as a gift for my brother and me is the work of memory or imagination. He walks in as if he has a happy secret and l...

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