Mountains and Rivers
To learn to draw a flower, it is best to place a blossoming plant in a deep hollow in the ground and look down upon it. Then all its qualities may be grasped. To learn to draw bamboo take a branch and cast its shadow on a white wall on a moonlit night; then its true outline can be obtained.
The old horizontal landscape scrolls of China, ink on golden brown silk, must be laid flat on a table, and opened right to left, no more than two feet at a time. This one begins with autumn trees in the foreground, behind them the water flowing, and across the water, high, austere mountains. Unrolling a little more the mountains rise even higher, their peaks meeting clouds. A waterfall comes down and divides into two. In the foreground trees continue, they are bent and increasingly bare. A few huts appear. Moving on leftwards the mountains suddenly drop away, the river broadens and comes up close, two trees twist and bend over the shore, one almost parallel to the ground. Opening more there is only water below, clouds and mist above, and a fisherman in the foreground, small, alone, with his line in the river. Under the monsoon sky of the Indian peninsula, the scroll is lit by an even, reticent light, that looks as if it belongs in that autumn landscape. The near, the far, and the infinite, have the same illumination. Only densities separate mountain, water, and cloud. For a viewer of these, China has always been immense, not as nation but as landscape. Mountain and water are not representation here but experience, as in classical Chinese poetry. The poetry and the painting seed each other, mirror each other. They are both of high mountains and vast waters, solitude bending sometimes into loneliness, gnarled trees, fishermen alone, hermits, scholars studying the mist. “The nation is destroyed, the mountains and rivers remain,” said the poet Tu Fu, when the eighth century T’ang kingdom was torn apart by the An Lu-Shan rebellion. It is a painting and a poetry of the emptied consciousness, not of the personal self. Sometimes when that personal self tears the consciousness, these ancient arts of China bring spaces in which to dwell, to rest. These arts have come to the watcher, the reader, in books searched and found in distant cities, and in the wintry light of museums in New York, Zurich, and Berlin. Though in books and museums, to the watcher this painting, this poetry has always been more than art. One of the books searched for over many years is An Essay on Landscape Painting by the master eleventh century painter, Kuo Hsi. It is a slim, small hardcover book, out of print now. The essay is a little over thirty pages. It has been translated from the Chinese by Shio Sakanashi.
On the rim of a mountain a man sits under the pines, looking out. Beyond the rim there is only mist.
China unravels anew through the hands of Bei Dao, a searing poet from a different time. Centuries have passed between the old poets, the old landscapes and the present. The intrinsic light that Bei Dao brings to illuminate this present is as reticent as that of the scrolls, and as infinite, being also the light of exile. I know the idea of exile from our myths, Rama living in the forests, Jab Rama ban gaye, tab hi Rama ban gaye, and the Pandavas banished from home when they lose a kingdom, but there is to these exiles a known end, after which the traveller returns, his soul made more substantial. Bei Dao’s is not an exile with a known end. The light that he brings cannot help but illuminate the iron paradox of the present, the variegated past of an immense land, and his own self. He looks at everything, even what is near, from a great distance. It is perhaps the immeasurable distance of the self from all that surrounds it, something that existed always, and became more elongated in exile. His absence in China turns for me into its opposite.
The presence of the friend, and his absence, fills the old Chinese poems, as much as mountain and water, and more than love between man and woman. The writer and critic Li Tuo, the lover of painting, literature and cinema, does not like it when I say “Thank you.” At first when I say those words, he protests, and later he comes almost to the edge of disapproval. “We are friends,” he says. In the older cultures, gratitude still has many expressions, only one of them, perhaps the lowest, being language. I know that I am sometimes too much in my words. I ask him why only in the older Chinese poetry is the place of the friend equal to that of mountain and water.
From Yellow Crane Tower, my old friend leaves the west.
Downstream to Yang-Chou, late spring a haze of blossoms,
distant glints of lone sail vanish into emerald-green air:
nothing left but a river flowing on the borders of heaven.
--Li Po (Translator David Hinton)
He says that in the old Confucian philosophy there were five relationships that were considered sacred—that between emperor and subject, between man and woman, parents and children, siblings, and friends. And these were all equal in significance, without hierarchy.
The spring mountain is wrapped in an unbroken stretch of dreamy haze and mist, and men are joyful; the summer mountain is rich with shady foliage, and men are peaceful; the autumn mountain is serene and calm, with leaves falling, and men are solemn; the winter mountain is heavy with storm clouds, and withdrawn, and men are forlorn.
Beijing does not open as quietly as an old scroll. It rises into the air with its towering buildings, the effort to rise shining from glass surfaces under the summer sun. In its architecture it is an imitation city, reminding of everywhere else. The sudden golden roof of a palace interrupts the imitation. And the few meandering hutongs that lie behind the main avenues, where people have lived for centuries, show evidence of more everyday efforts, food being cooked, clothes drying in the sun, a man repairing a bicycle. The hutongs have narrow, curving streets, with one storied homes. The walls are grey and the sloping roofs are made of grey clay tiles. Mythical birds and animals often decorate roof corners and edges. There are shared public toilets. Towards the edge of the city, as we approach the Wo Fo Monastery, (The Monastery of the Reclining Buddha) there are areas of bare concrete, grey, in which are open air markets with fruit and vegetables, shops selling sweaters, food being served on tin tables. And once from a construction site a truckload of men emerge, crammed together, their faces striated like rocks.
In the centre of Beijing we walk through a market, narrow streets with stalls selling boiling dumplings, noodles, fish and crab, sandals, umbrellas. Lydia Liu, the scholar of Chinese literature, buys a bag of chestnuts for all of us. They are soft, and somewhat sweet. One can sense by the density and tone of the language that there are bargains being negotiated, buyer and seller meeting directly. Gestures are exchanged. At the other end of one of these streets we come upon a pedestrian mall, thrice the size of anything seen in Europe or America, clogged with shoppers buying the international brands. In this mall a panic seizes me as it often does in enormous spaces where the senses are drained of strength. When things are so large and uniform the sight is immediately defeated, touch and taste lose meaning when nothing is on a human scale.
Li Tuo has told us of his despair at the entry of global capitalism into China. He still believes in the core ideals of the communist revolution. Those ideals failed in many ways he says, and China is yet to understand the full implications of these failures as well as the undeniable achievements.
As we walk in the city centre Li Tuo says there is another Beijing. A parallel and invisible one. This is the underground Beijing, on which he is writing a novel. In the basements of all those fifty storied buildings of shining glass, are the poorest of this city, and they are underground tenants. They do have running water, and they have heating. But their lives underground resemble the London of Dickens. He would take us there, but no outsider is allowed in. Even when he visits it is as a prospective tenant.
Above ground it is green in Beijing, trees and grass everywhere, lining the avenues. But it is a landscape that has changed its intent, everything cut, pruned, presented, not one that unravels. Only at night, walking through the Ritan park in the heart of the city, there are tall, spreading trees, a pavilion on a lake, a boat, the weeping willow hanging over the water, and a near full moon above. If there are lights among the trees they are sparse. We make our way through the dense darkness of the trees, and the more transparent darkness of the night. The past in Beijing is barely present.
But in the old civilizations of Asia, time is still untamed. It appears in gestures and bodies, behind our eyes, proliferates like weed between things. Li Tuo says that when he and poets Ouyang Jinaghe and Zhai Yongming talk, they are always aware of what came before them, how this evening’s moon would have been described by the different classical poets. Ouyang, an intensely contemporary poet, asks once, “Do we have to be modern?” Allan Sealy speaks of bending tradition towards modernity. On the streets of Beijing all women, except the very old, are in Western clothes, jeans, miniskirts, spaghetti straps. As in the buildings built with zeal, these clothes are another way to inhabit the future.
Speaking to the writer and critic Tang Xiaodu, Bei Dao has said, “Compared to an individual’s scanty accomplishments, the breadth and beauty of the tradition is like a huge wind pressing down on a tiny sail, a sailor has to know how to use the wind if the boat is going to go far. And the problem is that the tradition arises from causes as complex as those that produce the wind...When I do readings abroad I feel that Li Bai, Du Fu, Li Yu are standing right behind me.”
I have, since the inception of these Dialogues, wanted to talk of the past, of the untamed time. I have wanted to talk of continuities and disruptions.
I stand before a painting in the Forbidden Palace museum. It is a vertical scroll. In the vertical scrolls one travels upwards many miles, past streams and over narrow paths, scaling hills and mountains. The eye rises from below, through flat foreground rocks in water, bearing a few pines. The rocks become hills, stretching upwards, hiding a few huts in its slopes. Water continues on either side. The hills rise into mountains that still bear pines, above the highest peak the sky. The painting is by Wang Jian (1598-1677), Landscape in the Styles of the Four Masters of the Yuan Dynasty. The one next to it, also vertical, mountains and water, is by Wang Hui, (1632-1717) who was a student of Wang Jian. The painting is Distant Mountains Veiled in Mist after Juran. Li Tuo explains that imitating the great masters is the way a painter learnt, and eventually made his own masterpieces, and sometimes the masterpieces were the imitations. How was originality understood in the older civilizations? I want to talk about this too. Bahauddin Dagar, the Dhrupad musician who is with us, carries on a very long tradition, the music he plays originating from Vedic chanting. Here too the music is passed on through imitation.
It is difficult, sitting at the long tables, in New Delhi or Beijing, to go the centre of an idea, of an emotion, to approach the core of our poetics. When that which is official is cleared away perhaps the empty space has to be very slowly filled. Bei Dao has shown the path to a few profound poets—Ouyang Jianghe, Zhai Yongming, Xi Chuan, novelist Ge Fei, and the writer and critic Li Tuo. What we have now is an approach. We are not yet labouring to get somewhere, but to arrive at where we already are. Only when Ashis Nandy speaks, and his clarity cleaves the surfaces of both our civilizations the way a writer will not because that is not the writer’s way, is there a silence where every one of us is present, whether in disturbance or praise. How can the dialogues understand silence as well as language, collective and individual? There is the silence of Zhai Yongming, who says hardly a word. She takes notes continuously, she listens. On the last day she brings us gifts, each one according to their needs, music for the musician, a film for the filmmaker, candy for Allan Sealy’s journey across China.
Both in Beijing and in Shanghai, we live, in consonance with our writers lives, outside the center of things. We live at the edges of both cities, between city and countryside, between present and past. The Wo Fo Monastery and the hotel that extends from it is in the western outskirts of Beijing, set among low green hills. The monastery reveals itself like a vertical scroll, each doorway at a higher level, opening to a different view, the eye discovering new elements as the gaze rises higher. At the very top, on the highest hill is a pagoda, hidden among trees.
The sunlight has been constant ever since we have been here. When the storm comes one day, wiping away the sunlight, bringing mist and clouds, making the green hills pale under the darkened sky, is there the feeling of being in that reticent landscape light, from a far past.
The colour of the mist is usually achieved by leaving the natural colour of the silk untouched.
The poet Ouyang Jianghe unrolls a calligraphic scroll on the wooden floor of his room. It is a long vertical scroll and we stand around it, looking at it from above. What does it say? He says, “And no one,” and spreads out his arms. He says, “pine” but then shakes his head. “Bamboo.” He points a finger towards the ceiling and says “Moon.” A night wind rises outside. It is a poem by Wang Wei. It is his gift to me. An extraordinary poet is a calligrapher is a host, is pure energy. The density of his poet’s soul is always visible, but never his achievements, what is seen is his singular ability to receive what he may never have met before, like dhrupad played on the rudra veena. “You changed my life,” he keeps on saying to Bahauddin Dagar after the music, but never is there a movement towards greater possession of the thing received. In India, last year, he had turned still after a visit to the Taj Mahal. Later, he wrote a five hundred line poem about it. And with this ability to receive, to take in, also the ability to give, in utmost detail. Morning coffee, the comfortable seat in the van, relieving the heaviness of luggage, umbrellas for sudden rain, and after dinner wine.
Sitting alone in silent bamboo dark,
I play a ch’in, settle into breath chants.
In these forest depths no one knows
this moon come bathing me in light.
---Wang Wei (Translated by David Hinton)
It will be difficult to dream of China without Li Tuo, Ouyang Jianghe, our interpreter Shuang Shen, and Lydia Liu. It will be difficult to be curious about China without wanting to understand more about their lives, and the immensely varied contexts in which each of these lives has been lived---city, countryside, exile, the West.
Lydia is a scholar of Chinese culture. There is in her, a rare illumination, a light moving outwards. She is present with a multiple and nuanced intensity, calibrated instinctively to the varying contexts of scholarship, hospitality, discussion. Her absence for even one evening is deeply felt. Once when we are on the road, and I’m suddenly hungry in the late afternoon, she brings out a bag of sesame cakes she has carried for a moment like this. Asia does exist. There are things that make it continuous, besides topography. The first time we drive by Tiananmen Square, no one speaks. In Asia, the relationship between question and answer moves through the landscapes of silence.
Tea is at once silence and language. It has been present over centuries here, sharpening the awareness. In conversation it aids language, and the empty spaces of rest. One learns to pour tea, at intervals, always for others before oneself. It comes in infinite nuances of yellow, gold, and brown, numerous transparencies. We begin drinking it at the teahouse in Tsinghua University, looking out onto a small quadrangle of garden, with gingko and poplar trees. When we walk into the Summer Palace, Li Tuo tells us we will end our walk at the teahouse inside. The Summer Palace was built in the late eighteenth century, partly destroyed in wars after, and rebuilt in the late nineteenth century by Empress Dowager Cixi. We walk by the vast man made lake, the water to the left of us, trees to the right. Small man made hills rise in the distance, and a pagoda stands across the shore. Li Tuo says that the ideal Chinese landscape is one in which “the view changes with every step.” Our walk continues through the long corridor, past the two storied stone boat. We experience the changing view as we walk. I remember that Bei Dao talked of loading boats at the Summer Palace when he was young, with his friend, the poet Mang Ke, and discovering poetry. At night I open Kuo Hsi’s book. “The change of appearance caused by the varying degrees of distance from the object is figuratively known as ‘the change of shape with every step one takes.’ The front view of a mountain has one aspect; the side view another; the back view still another. Thus a single mountain combines in itself several thousand appearances. Should we not realise this fact?”
At the teahouse in the Summer Palace there is the lake and the sky behind Li Tuo’s moving face. The sun is setting, the balconies of the teahouse begin to darken. The sweetened walnuts and pumpkin seeds we are given with tea are on silver paper plates. Li Tuo asks the woman who serves us why there can’t be actual plates instead of these. “No washing to do,” she replies. Many pots of tea have been drunk. When we emerge, Li Tuo shows us the way, he knows the Summer Palace well. He takes us through trees and meandering stone paths, we emerge on a great terrace, with the old tiled roofs of the palace rising behind us, in near darkness. Earlier in the day Ashis Nandy has talked about the importance of lamentation. He has said this is no longer possible in history, or sociology, or the sciences, but it is still possible in the arts. Under the sky darkened roofs of the Summer Palace, when the heat of the day suddenly ebbs with the light, the right to lament acquires clarity.
Even though valleys, hills, forests and trees in the foreground of a landscape painting may bend and curve, wind and meander with great elaboration, the scene will not tire the beholder with its many details, for the human eye has the power to grasp all the details in the foreground. Because of the open space of the plain at one side and the lines of the peaks vanishing, continuous as ocean waves in the horizon, the beholder will not weary of the distance, for human eyes can encompass a wide view.”
The eye is in search of the originary, that which it has not found in the architecture of Beijing, with its Rem Koolhaas buildings, its new opera house. Aside from the hutongs, this appears only in the most secluded gardens, like the one inside Tsinghua University. Here the elements of the old landscape paintings reappear, water, rocks, bridges, trees. Sometimes a boat.
In the village of Jinze, outside Shanghai, there are bridges from the twelfth century, one without railings, an arc of stones, so that horses could pass over. In the Summer Palace, bridges made of wood, in the Forbidden City, bridges made of marble. In the scholar’s garden in Shanghai, bridges crossing small ponds in which orange fish swim, for going over one’s thoughts. As though the crossing over was necessary, not only to reach the other side, but to practice and understand being suspended over water, as a different experience than watching the water from land. The old watchers of landscape, the makers of paintings and gardens, studied every nuance of sky and earth.
Rocks are placed all over the scholar’s garden in Shanghai, great porous rocks, considered the more beautiful the more porous they are. They are Tai Hu rocks, from Lake Tai, not very far away. In the great cities, enormous rocks inscribed with calligraphy stand at entrances to many institutions and offices, a continuation of the great rock inscriptions from olden times. In India, a rock is carved into a temple, an idol, a pattern of the greatest intricacy. It is an art of becoming. A rock would never be worshipped on its own terms. Here landscapes and men were regarded with the same gaze. Each thing had its worth, rocks, mountains, water, mist, man. The teachings of Lao-Tse and Chuang Tzu and later certain aspects of Buddhist thought gave rise to a sacredness without prostration before a higher being. The roots of equality are here, but equality is the wrong word. Mountain and water and man do not resemble one another, they are invested with opposing qualities, but they are equal in their presence. What is implicit here, the experience of emptiness, is the opposite of worshipping a god. There are vast distances here, infinities, horizons. In worship, everything is close, the temple walls, the sanctum, the flame, the deity.
If the artist paints these mountains just as they are, the result will be no different from a map.
In the village of Jinze, the art curator and critic Tsong-Zung Chang, along with the architect Mr. Wu, is recreating old dwellings in wood and stone, along the canal that runs through the village. They began with remnants found on this site, wooden balconies, a ruined hall, some windows. Masons who still remembered the traditional way of building work along with Mr. Wu on the restoration. The houses are built largely of wood, and without any nails to join the beams, the way they did it in the past. Our rooms open over the canal, where intermittently a barge appears. Walking on the roads nearby there is an old woman in blue shirt and pants, riding a bicycle with a cart attached to it. The cart is piled with discarded cardboard boxes. On one side of the canal, in the very rudimentary concrete one storied homes women and children sit talking. A man is fishing in the canal, sitting under a tree.
Bei Dao had told me not to be impressed by the prosperity in the cities. He had said that China’s growth comes at the cost of a great disparity. Even then, looking at the slums of Mumbai, he had said very quietly, “Communism does have its achievements.” And afterwards, standing under the evening sky at the Gateway of India, watching people strolling, sitting on the ledge watching the sea, he had said that the lack of faith in China would drive it deeper towards a material culture.
There are various ways of painting landscapes. They may be spread out in large compositions and yet contain nothing superfluous. They may be condensed to a small scene and yet lack nothing.
At the university in Shanghai, Mao Jian, the young woman who teaches literature, is dismissive of our attempts. She says we are trying to dodge the reality of the nation state, and not facing the impossibility of dialogue. She is dismissive of Bei Dao’s poetry. It is, she says, no longer relevant, like the journal Jintian, of which he was one of the founders. There is anger in her. She says we should move away from the poetic, and talk about ground realities, by which she means we must be critical. Ashis Nandy responds by talking of the history of the nation state in Europe. He says, “India and China can point the way to a new manner of nation, one which is not brutal towards diversity, but compassionate.” To this the young woman responds by saying, “I am not interested in the history of the nation state.”
Modernity feels threatened by the absence of criticism. It is deeply suspicious of praise. It sees truth, if not as clearly negative, then at least as an attempt towards balance. It does not like to feel that things could have been better in the past, it likes to question everything but itself. “We are older cultures,” says Ashis Nandy. “We take our time to say to someone, if we have to, that we don’t like their face.”
And to what should a writer be relevant?
Li Tuo and I speak to each other through a whole morning, sitting under the open summer sky, under trees that rain small petals down on us. He tells me that he no longer believes in all the achievements of modernism. He is critical of the modernists, Chinese and otherwise, and therefore critical of himself. He has changed his mind. Literature, he says, has to be relevant to society. But is great imagination not relevant, I ask, no matter what its texture? He believes, I think, that its relevance determines its texture. I don’t agree. But I listen very carefully. Li Tuo is a writer and a critic. He grew up in Beijing and went to one of the best schools in the city. In the late 1950s, he wanted to be a writer but felt that he must experience life first hand. So he decided to train as a skilled worker in the heavy industries and worked for twenty years-- including ten years during the Cultural Revolution--at the Beijing Steel Manufacturer, one of the centers of China's industries. He has also been in exile and returned. I listen to him very, very carefully. I don’t agree with him but he will now stand before me as an opposite. “I’ve learnt a great deal by talking to you,” I say. “So have I,” he replies. He is possibly more than two decades older than me. It would not happen in India.
I notice the way Li Tuo talks to cab drivers, sometimes through an entire long ride, the banter, the laughter on both sides. I look at the striated but smiling face of the cook in Jinze, who serves us the more “simple” food of the Shanghai area, as opposed to the imperial cuisine of Beijing. She is not casual, but neither is she deferential. In every restaurant we visit the drivers of our vans sit at the same table. Certainly, one is in a country without caste. Yet, it is a complex equality, unlike that of the West. The body contains layers of experience, the feudal, the traditional, the communist, and the contemporary, and it is perhaps constantly modulating itself for changing contexts.
Our interpreter, Shen Shuang, is with us for the entire journey. She is a scholar, with a special interest in literature. Often, she wears a kurta she has bought during our last dialogues in India, and on the final day in Shanghai a violet salwar kameez. Two languages have passed through her continuously over our visit, and not only passed through, but had to be transformed into the other. She is a master at this, but we realize this even more when confronted with other interpreters in Beijing and Shanghai. They either stumble constantly, or deliver a certain imagined exactitude in a monotone. When Shuang speaks she renders the emotional stresses of the original language, its profundities, its humour. The depth and nuances of our dialogues would not have been possible without her.
Stones are the bones of heaven and earth. Bones are valuable when they are buried deep and do not appear on the surface. Water is the blood of heaven and earth. Blood is valuable when it circulates and not when it congeals.
The horizontal landscape scroll is one of the most profound and disorienting manifestations of the Chinese consciousness. In its few feet it condenses a thousand miles. In its unraveling it creates duration, the moving in a landscape in time. As it unravels with its shifting perspective, its multiple vanishing points, there emerges no centre, and there is no travelling to what is final. This is not a painting one can gaze at, it is a painting that can only be entered, the viewer placing himself inside it. He rises with mountains and clouds, he falls and flows with waterfalls and streams. He moves laterally as the scroll opens, forward and back. The human being, always smaller than the elements of nature, works his daily work, fishing, chopping wood, studying, searching for a master in the forest, or looking at mist and horizon. All of this stems from the real, but its disorienting quality comes from the fact that it has not been distorted or made unreal. It is abstraction and illusion in its subtlest form. This is not landscape the painter has passed through, it is landscape that has passed through the painter. What he gives back is the received landscape. In it there is no dust, no decay, no suffering, and neither a denial of them. The watcher of these landscapes cannot help but remember the Indian Pahari miniature paintings, of which she has written, “The king has known great grief and so has come to the sage, the sage is a student of suffering, a prince is in an interminable exile, a lover is separated from love, yet everything is lit evenly, and there are no shadows, and so no sense of time passing, though of course it must, and there is a perfect warmth but no heat, no dust, no weeds, no decay. The traveler recognises this landscape of assurance, as he would recognise within himself a lifelong need never fulfilled.”
Behind everything is the silk. The extreme genius of these painters recognised its inherent qualities. They knew that the muted, even, illumination, resembling a hesitant daylight, created by the gold brown colour of the silk on which the scrolls are painted, is in fact a light of the universe, an internal illumination issuing from both painter and landscape.
One of the things clearly shared by the pasts of India and China are ideals that have emerged from a thousand years of reality, and an understanding of the eternal without denying the undertow of time. Perhaps we can talk about this too, when we are together again.
What is, or has become recessive in a civilization, can often be among its most profound expressions. This is why they are the most battered and bent, even crippled. But when the time comes, they may contribute to the rescue of that civilization. Lydia Liu and Li Tuo have told us in the course of our dialogues that Confucius went from city to city with his ideas but they were everywhere rejected. We seem to have met to exchange our recessive strains, to develop them.
The talk of India and China now is about the future, about the power of new nation states. Books proliferate, built on far observations. Li Tuo says whenever he is in the West, no one is actually curious about his experience of China, his thoughts. Rather, they prefer to tell him what China should do. Inside we are at points of transformation that may bury the originary imagination of both cultures, and create an implosion from growing disparities. The Chinese poets say they have no one like Ashis Nandy, they say we are fortunate to have someone so originary, so strong. I remember a conversation between a young poet and Ashis Nandy, a few months ago in New Delhi, at a conference table, after the session had ended. It was about living in a different time. “You can and should live in whatever time you want,” Nandy said. “You mean off the grid,” said the young poet. “Why should I say off the grid?” replied Nandy. “Who decides what the grid is?”
Allan Sealy wants to take back a gingko sapling, and suddenly on the day of departure it arrives. Two of them, rooted in heavy clods of earth, with their leaves shaped like small fans. He is the only one who will have something material from China that will have its own life. He writes to me. “I travelled all night straight from the airport home. Now all three of us--but chiefly I imagine the ginkgos--are a little bewildered.” And a few days later, “The gingkos look content. Or not yet discontented. They get carried out each evening about six and carried back in each morning about ten. That way they escape the rigours of June in Dehradun. No direct sunlight yet; maybe after the monsoon will then consider putting them in the ground.”
Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of three works of prose, Book One, New Life, and Five Movements in Praise. Her most recent work is a book of poems, The Gods Came Afterwards. Her work has been published in several journals all over the world including Poetry, Granta, World Literature Today, and the Chinese journal Jintian. A chapbook made from a selection of poems from The Gods Came Afterwards appeared early 2020 from Ediciones Pen Presse in Spanish. The poems are translated by the acclaimed Argentinian poet, Mercedes Roffe. Mohanty is the founder-editor of Almost Island and the initiator of the Almost Island Dialogues, an annual international writers gathering held in New Delhi. She has taught for several years at the International Creative Writing MFA program at the City University of Hong Kong. She has also taught at the Creative Writing programme at Naropa University, set up by Allen Ginsberg. Mohanty has held fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany (2002), at Ledig House in New York (2004), had residencies at the La Napoule Foundation for the Arts in France (2004), and Yaddo, USA, 2009. She is a recipient of a Senior Fellowship from the Indian Ministry of Culture.