Editorial

Sharmistha Mohanty

The monsoons were delayed this year, by a tropical cyclone near Oman, the strongest cyclone ever recorded in the area. The rains set in at the end of June, three weeks late. The monsoons, as always, began swelling rivers, unsettling seas, raising the levels of dams, breaking the branches of the jamun tree outside my windows, shattering glass somewhere, setting afloat whole villages, and making trees and plants so luminous that they seemed to be imparting light to a dark sky. A need for recurrence exists together with a need for the new.

In India the new has not often been seen as a disjunction, especially in the arts. In the traditional music, dance, and certain forms of theatrical performance, the new is seen within a flow of continuity. This traditional other is always standing close beside those of us whose practice is in the more contemporary modes. It is a fruitful opposite.

In India today and in many parts of the world, there is a false new as well. This is a writing where information does all the work, so it can hide the depletion of thought and feeling which is behind it. I would like to speak of the genuinely new as something which allows unknown connections to arise in the relationships between things; which has abandoned something, and so made space for the new to enter; and which is above all new because it has risen from inside the self.

Almost Island would like to be concerned with writing which does not have a purpose outside itself. In times where information is seen as revelation, Almost Island would like to publish work which is in no way sociological, or a travel guide to a foreign culture, or a substitute for historical or anthropological knowledge. Literature seeks wholeness, not fragmentation, and information is never whole.

Almost Island will seek work which is philosophical, internal, individual. It will seek work which either threatens, confronts or bypasses the marketplace by its depth and seriousness and form. This market is not one where the seller faces the buyer, both having walked miles, a once a week give and take of goods, honour, and guile. This market has a lot to learn.

This first and monsoon issue of Almost Island concentrates on prose and its many possibilities. The word prose here is not as distinct from poetry, but as distinct from verse, which seems to be the only separation possible. I have included work which may have already been published elsewhere but deserves to be more widely read.

I am deeply privileged to have Vivek Narayanan as consulting editor; and Itu Chaudhuri, as the designer of this site. I thank them for having made Almost Island together with me.

It has rained continuously for two days, a ceaseless, heavy downpour. When it suddenly stops, the street outside is empty. The only person there is a bangarwalla pushing his long, iron cart among the little stones and pebbles brought down the slope by the rain. The large wheels go over the soaked, muddied gulmohur petals that have made the street orange, they go over the drenched leaves. He is calling out for old newspapers, bottles, discarded radios, and collapsed umbrellas, all the broken, useless things he has come to take away.