Creative Writings for Room of My Own...

Artists participating in the Room of My Own ...project will work in response to the following creative writing texts by well known women writers from each country.  The writers  and their creative writing texts are selected by coordinators from India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

India

Selected text from India is The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.

The Palace of Illusions, authored by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, is a saga about the life of Panchali and traces her journey from childhood, to marriage, motherhood and beyond. Like scores of Indian children, the author grew up on a staple of fascinating tales of the Mahabharata. The larger-than-life heroes, epitomising inspiring virtues and deadly vices, etched many cautionary morals into her child-consciousness. However, she was left unsatisfied and felt a vacuum when it came to the portrayals of the women. She then decided that if she ever wrote a book, the women would play the protagonist and be the centre of action. She would unravel the story that lay invisible between the lines of the men's exploits and what better than to have one of them tell it herself, with all the various nuances of life's journey, the joy and anguish, the struggles and triumphs, the sorrows and heartbreaks, and a rendering of her perception of the world and her place in it. And for the author, nobody could render it better than Panchaali, who had the unique distinction of being married to five men at the same time. The Palace of Illusions is therefore Draupadi's life, her voice, her questions and her vision. The battle ground of Mahabharat sets the background for the unraveling of the book and the life of Panchali.


Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's other books include the bestselling novels, The Mistress Of Spices, Queen of Dreams and Sister of My Heart, amongst many others. She teaches creative writing at the University of Houston and divides her time between Houston and the San Francisco Bay area.

The Palace of Illusions
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Excerpts from “The Palace of illusion”

“Time is like a flower, Krishna said once. I didn’t understand. But later I visualized a lotus opening, the way the outer petals fall away to reveal the inner ones. An inner petal would never know the older, outer ones, even though it was shaped by them, and only the viewer the plucked the flower would see how each petal was connected to the others.

The petal of this afternoon opened like a red sigh. It was my time of month, which made me lethargic. Dressed in a light cotton that a trader had brought all the way from Bengal, I drowsed in the soft sunlight at my window, listening to the mynahs calling in the garden, feeling calmer than I had in a while. Yudhisthir had agreed (as a result of some sharp words exchanged in our bedroom last night) that it was time he ended his visit and returned to his own kingdom. He had promised to announce this to Duryodhan today. So finally I would be back in my own palace, where I could start working on forgetting the look of anger on a certain face.

I had no idea of the petal that had opened a few hours earlier in Duryodhan’s new hall, where the Kaurava prince, expressing his disappointment at the prospect of losing his dear cousin so soon, had challenged him to a last game of dice. Maybe this way I can recover a little of the money I’ve lost to you, eh? And in this game – connected to all those earlier petals, shriveled now, those games played in Indra Prastha, luring my husband in- Sakuni had taken Duryodhan’s place as Yudhisthir’s opponent. The petal unfurled, revealing the skill he’d hidden until now. Time after time he won until my husband – deaf to the entreaties of his brothers – lost his jewels, his weapons, and all his personal wealth. Then, goaded by Duryodhan, gripped by stubbornness, and intoxicated by the game, he began to wager things he had no right to jeopardize. And forfeited them all.”
*********************************************************
“A little of my anger faded. I remembered my girlhood sympathy for Karna’s unknown mother. When Kunti gave birth to Karna, she’d been young and afraid, with no one to confide in. Could I have done any better in her place? She’d made Karna suffer, yes, but hadn’t she suffered just as much? And now it was too late. If she told Yudhisthir about his elder brother, he would lose heart. The kind of man he was, he might even give up the war rather than commit fratricide. So instead, now she’d have to watch her sons kill each other, knowing that she’d brought it about. No wonder she’d tried to sacrifice me in a last effort to prevent such a calamity.


I remembered how in my dream a weeping Karna had raised Kunti up and kissed her hands. If he could forgive her – he who had been the primary victim of her fear – shouldn’t I at least try?


I followed and found her lying facedown on her pallet. She’d been weeping. At my voice, she hastily wiped her eyes and glared at me.


“What do you want?” she snapped.


But for once, instead of bristling in annoyance, I heard the vulnerability beneath the pride. I told her I had a balm made of turmeric and shallaki, excellent for stiff joints. Would she like me to bring her some? She peered at me with suspicion, but finally she nodded, and so, for the first time I became her daughter-in-law – I did something for her that she hadn’t demanded. I rubbed her legs until she fell into a twitching sleep, and as her muscles relaxed against my fingertips, I found that by some inexplicable osmosis Kunti’s secret had become my secret. I too, would guard it now.

Perhaps the spell of the balm had put me in a trance, for as I moved my hands back and forth, I thought I saw hanging in the night sky a great web, its glinting threads woven from our present nature and our past actions. Karna was caught in it, as was I. Others were enmeshed there too: Kunti, my husbands, Bheeshma, even Duryodhan and Dussasan. If there was a way to escape the web, I couldn’t see it. Our puny struggles only entangled us further. A strange compassion came upon me as I watched us twist and turn in the breeze.

I tried to hold on to this compassion, sensing its preciousness, but even as I reached to grasp it, it dissipated into wisps. No revelation can endure unless it is bolstered by a calm, pure mind – and I’m afraid I didn’t possess that. “

Sri Lanka
Selected text from Sri Lanka  is Left Behinder by Jean Arasanayagam from her book A Nice Burgher Girl.
Jean Arasanayagam (born Jean Solomons, 1931 in Kandy, Sri Lanka) is an English-language poet and fiction writer. The theme in her work is ethnic and religious turmoil in Sri Lanka. Her husband, Thiyagarajah Arasanayagam and their two daughters, Devasundari and Parvathi, all share the same passion for writing. She has made a mark of her own as a poet/writer. (Taken from Wikipedia site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Arasanayagam) on 27 June 2010)


Jean Arasanayagam, a Sri Lankan writer of Dutch Burgher origin, traces her saga journey from childhood to adolescence to young adulthood and beyond. A Nice Burgher Girl is a quest for an identity which is part of her inheritance, creating form out of the complex kaleidoscopic patternings of connections and interconnections. Her search is also embodied in her poetry and fiction. Of her writings she says: “There are many facets to an identity which I relentlessly explore and scrutinize against a background of colonialism, post colonialism and the post-post colonialism, yet I am always conscious of Home and Roots in the Island of my birth. I belong here”. (Taken from back cover description of ‘A Nice Burgher Girl’)


Left Behinder is the opening poem in her book A Nice Burgher Girl.

Left Behinder
by Jean Arasanayagam


Sadness fills me. It is oppressive.
Betrayal is corrosive. The violence that gapes
Wide-open its gargoyle mouth, the words that
Squirt their acid to wound the innocent skin.


What do I do? Open out a file in which I keep
Old recipes from the past, descriptions of tiffins,
Birthday parties, dinners, recipes allied to a genealogy.
It is soothing to read of what women did with their
Lives a century or two ago, perhaps.


What a vocabulary of lexicals with all their
Connotations, translated into tastes and flavours
Contrived out of those newly discovered indigenous
Ingredients, recipes that sound to our finely attuned
Ears, esoteric, the tongue exotic, forgotten now
Only to be resurrected as part of an inheritance
History looks askance at.

I retrieve those retrospective names,

Rose koekjes, that cake shaped like the heraldic
Flower; dendeng, strips of meat dried in the sun,
Fried in oil, sugar syrup soaked golden poffertjes,
Allerlei, those mixed pickles resembling our own
Historical breed and countless others, ‘toothsome
Delicacies’ conjured up by those ingenious women
Who lived in and loved the good life of the Tropics.
Words that now belong to the reminiscences of the
Past, material for the indefatigable identity researchers.


And there are the memories of emigrants
Who set out on their own voyages in this century,
Emigrants who started out from those early genealogies.


They have gone away, all of them, left me behind,
Still write to me of lamprais, love cake and breudhers,
Making merry in those distant antipodes even though
Says Romaine, “Aunty Yvonne had undergone major
Heart Surgery (triple by-pass) only three months ago,”
So, she continues, “Christmas was all eating, drinking and
Being perhaps a little too merry!”


I do not know when I last knew
The meaning of that word ‘merry’
Belonging as it does to all those lost annals
Including nativities, proselytization, ballads and lyrics.


No, the word has lost all meaning for me,
I do not make merry any longer
Not with thoughts of blood-sodden battlefields
With their unrecognizable dead, revolutions,
Torture or burning tyre-piles and the weight
Of fear my daughter still expresses of that
Terrifying past inscribed in the minutiae
Of her psyche.

For the moment, it is comforting to read of

The personal reminiscences of others and the
Painstaking process of those time-consuming
Preparations of meats, cakes, fritters,
Burgitter soup and milk ponce, all closely guarded
Family secrets handed down the generations by word
Of mouth, narrating the personal histories of their
Lives, through anecdotal recitals of their culinary
Skills, to enhance those inherited names for a
Fast vanishing, now almost effaced posterity.
Their hands, fingers heavy with gold bands engraved
With bonded initials, kneading pastry dough, beating up
Hundreds of eggs before the centuries cracked apart
In fragments. No more, the perfect shell remaining
To protect the embryos.


No one then thought those people alien?
Not belonging. Were they not accepted just as
They were, for themselves and not as the stranger,
Or did they think their lives a private enclave
Inhabited by a different genus?


The questions are open-ended,
The answers, individual, helped occasionally
By turning over the pages of documented
Histories, while still writing one’s own.
What use to others then, are my own memories?
Memories that were and are, although now
Faded, part of the warp and weft of that
Tapestry of life, many hands wove together.


I re-read the letters of my immigrant niece,
Piece together the scattered leaves of her
Own memoirs, her family wapenheraut,
Before those pages, in that distant country
Will have no place in any archives.


While she lives together with her people
Displaced from their historical heritages,
She survives on carefully preserved
Ancestral memories before the somnolent eyes
Of the past close in death, recreates, retrieves
Along with remembered childhoods, her past.


What do I possess? I am the lost cipher
Rediscovered, the pointer in that reading
Of a history that is now ruthlessly scrutinized,
Leaving no room for redress.


What is there left to retrieve?
In a room, antiquated artefacts locked away
While I still remain, groping with a rusted key
That reveals in a cobwebbed trunk,
The vital clues, in diaries, letters, time preserved,
Of a fragmented identity,
That has meaning not only to myself
But for our collective histories.


Nepal
Selected text from Nepal is Am I Seeing the City?by Manisha Gauchan.

Manisha Gauchan was born in 1981 (B.S. 2037) in Mustang. Her publications include : Phoolharuko Rang Chhaina, (The Flowers Have No Colours - Collection of Poems), Baali ka ko Diary (A child's diary -Novel)


Am I Seeing the City?
by Manisha Gauchan


From the window of a five-storied house
my eyes travel down
down…down…down to the street/ to the pavement
to the footpath/ to the goods on the footpath
to the owners of those goods
to the eyes choosing those goods/ the hands feeling them
to the owners hope of profit
to the buyers’ cash that vanishes like snow
O people look up!
I, one without eyes, am looking at the city from the window
Is the city astir only on that footpath?


Yesterday, I set out through an alley in search of the city
and found myself at a slaughterhouse
A play of khukuris on the chopping block
and below, tears of severed heads
There I also saw my own head
and behind, I saw my friend’s hand
sliced from the elbow onward
On the ring finger glittered
a ring his Sarita had placed there
I don’t know what happened
but I saw the parts of my own kith and kin
scattered there
O people, go through that alley once
and if you see what I saw,
come, let us unite to take it down
so the city doesn’t become a slaughterhouse


From this window
to forget that horror
I’m looking at the city
From afar I hear
the whirring noise of the factory
fumes eager to destroy the ozone layer
fingers moving with the machines
with the whirring, a humming
of a folk song –
Suntala paani .. nakhau bhane dui din ko jyaan jaani
(Orange water… if not drunk, this short life will expire)


Am I seeing the city in the factory?
O people, if the city itself is a factory
let us go and say –
produce food to satisfy all
and clothes to cover all bodies
and bricks to build houses for all
Dancers in the psychedelic lights
and dohori singers
who‘ve run their throats dry over all that din


Am I seeing the city in dohori 1 evenings and dance restaurants?
If I am
then I’m also seeing dancers weeping
and hearing the singers’ moan of agony
O people,
am I seeing the city rightly?


On the street a child who sleeps with a dog,
in the middle of the street a lunatic naked, crying, laughing,
with a resume and an empty stomach
aimlessly wandering in search of a position
a middle-aged man without a job,
alighting from a shiny car at midnight her work done
a sad, beautiful young woman
Have I seen the city in all these?
O people, am I truly seeing the city?
If I am,
then why am I seeing this discrepancy?


No, this isn’t the city I sought
For in the city people should be happy
1 Dohori - local songs or duets which are typically sung by men and women during harvest and rice planting time.The hallmark of these songs which are that they are spontaneous, flirtatious and witty. These songs have become very popular as a form of entertainment in the city.




Pakistan
Selected text from Pakistan is  Compromise by Zehra Nigaah

Zehra Nigah is one of Pakistan’s most prominent and loved poets. She appeared on the literary horizon as a child prodigy in the 1950s and has consistently been hailed as the one voice worth listening to on the mushaeraa circuit.

Zehra Nigah views life around her through the eyes of a woman but her concerns are not those of a woman alone. She speaks in a woman’s tongue, using feminine imagery and idiom to make powerful social and political commentary. She has alluded to the bitter war that culminated in the creation of Bangladesh as well as the heart-rending situation in Afghanistan. She has written of the repressive Hudood Ordinances introduced during General Zia’s oppressive regime and also about love, friendship and small everyday joys and sorrows.

Zehra Nigah has published two volumes of poetry, Shaam ka Pehla Taara and Waraq. She says she has never felt the urge to be prolific, to write when there is nothing to say. Yet every word that emerges from her pen, every syllable that she speaks, carries the spark of a luminous intelligence.



Compromise
by Zehra Nigaah


Warm and tendersoft , this “chadur”
Of compromise has taken my years to knit
No flowers of truth embellish it
Not a single false stitch betrays it.
It will do to cover my body though
And it will bring comfort too,
If not joy, nor sadness to you.
Stretched above us, this will become our home,
Spread beneath us, it will bloom into a garden,
Raise it, and it will become our curtain.