ARTIST Josh Steinbauer JOSH STEINBAUER is an award-winning filmmaker, musical composer, and visual artist. His work has been shown in Heaven, Third Ward, No Moon, Gen Art, H. Lewis galleries, Harvard Art Museum and American Folk Art Museum , and published in Nowhere Magazine, Terrain, The Offing, Moving Poems, Scroll.in, BrooklynOnDemand , and the Times of India, amongst others. Some of his portrait drawings are currently exhibited at the Long Island City Artists' (LIC-A) newest show Drawing Beyond the Surface , curated by Jorge Posada. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

MUSICIAN Raya Ali RAYA ALI , a.k.a. Echnoid, is a DJ and musician from the Maldives. MUSICIAN WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

MUSICIAN Yazan YAZAN is a music producer from the Maldives. Growing up playing the guitar, he naturally progressed into producing music during his late teens. He released his first EP, Sunsets , in 2020. In 2021, he released an electronic dance single, "Hubbub." MUSICIAN WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

ACTOR Sadieh Rifai SADIEH RIFAI is a Chicago-based actor and ensemble member at A Red Orchid Theatre. She has performed at American Theatre Company, Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf, and Chicago Shakespeare Theater. On screen, her credits include Chicago Med , Easy (Netflix), Patriot (Amazon), and Shining Girls (Apple TV). A graduate of the School at Steppenwolf, she received the Princess Grace Award in 2011. ACTOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

ARTIST Radhika Dinesh RADHIKA DINESH is a visual artist and animator from Kerala whose work draws deeply from the rich narratives of South Asia. She practises blending nostalgia with whimsy, bringing stories to life through a vibrant visual language. She is currently in her final year at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

ARTIST Sabrina Tirvengadum SABRINA TIRVENGADUM (b. 1984, deaf British Mauritian) is a London-based visual artist and graphic designer. Blending AI-generated art, photography, graphics, collages, and digital illustrations, her work delves into themes of identity, relationships, and heritage. Inspired by her family’s history and the legacy of colonialism, Sabrina's work bridges the past and present, questioning the narratives we accept as truth. She has two upcoming exhibitions: Sabrina Tirvengadum: Who Were They? Who Am I? at the Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester (7th February - 6th April 2025), and I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies at Autograph, London (8 Oct 2025 – 18 Mar 2026). ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Rasel Ahmed RASEL AHMED is an Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University. WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

· FICTION & POETRY Poetry · Guyana Six Poems "In Ayodhya’s sacked Mogul masjid / vultures scrawl Ram on new temple bricks. / Brother, from this mandir of burning" Artwork by Kareen Adam for SAAG. Monoprinted, digitally-animated collage, ink on paper (2020). Ghee Persad I. You know straight away it’s ghee and not oil but you can’t eat it without gambling for the price of home-feelings, you may soon lose a toe, then a foot, then your leg. Call it faith—like drinking Ganga water? Call it an offering, like this sweet, that stood at the bronze feet of the ten- weaponed, tiger-riding Devi. You’ve recounted the tale of how she slew the demon-headed asura who made a compact with the gods so strong they trembled in heaven, how sugar is also divine and terrible. II. First hot the karahi with ghee and paache de flouah till ‘e brown-brown den add de sugah and slow slow pour de milk zat ‘e na must get lumpy. Like you mek fe you sista fust picknki ke nine-day, how you tuhn and tuhn ‘am in de pot hard-hard you han’ been pain you fe days, but now you see how ovah-jai you sistah face been deh. You live fe dis kine sweetness. You eat one lil lil piece an’ know dis a de real t’ing. Like when a-you been small an’ you home been bright wid bhajans play steady, how de paper bag wha’ been get de persad became clear from de ghee you been hable fe see you own face. III. You pass though ever kind watah, there is always new life to celebrate. Seawall At Morning Georgetown, Guyana 2019 What starts at night startles the dawn: rain water replenishes the trench lotus stalks and petals stand tall Seawall signs painted Namasté in acrylic Beyond, the sea silts brown as mud as a frigate soars wings of stone. And beyond: a ship with sails from 1838 I look twice— an oil rig? Another form of bondage? Pandemic Love Poem One by one the yellow jackets leave their nest, a hole covered with decaying leaves that warm the ground and an inert queen they’ve fed all autumn. What sleeps inside will one day burst into a wind of wings. What will wake a sleeping queen? Beneath my waist growing larger, the sting of nights one by one, when I am stranger and stranger to you. We sleep in a converted porch, wooden siding, the wall that insulates what’s inside it which is not you, nor is it me. The bedclothes stiffen with cold. Remember me? One by one peel the yellow sheets from our nest. Prick me with your heat from sleep. Place a cardamom pod under my tongue. Come, dissolve with me. Sita ke Jhumar स्टाब्ब्रुक के बाजार में अंगूठिया गिरी गयल रे। स्टाब्ब्रुक के बाजार में अंगूठिया गिरी गयल रे। हमसे खिसियाई बाकी हमार गलतिया नाहीं । सास करइला चोखा खावे, ससुर दारू पिये। ससुराल में परदेसिया रोटी थपथपे अउर दाल चउंके। आमवा लाये भेजल हमके जीरा लाये भेजल हमके। बाकरा ठगल हमके संगे जाने ना माँगे है। गिनिप लाये भेजल हमके जमुन लाये भेजल हमके। ससुराल में परदेसिया, मासाला पीसे अउर बड़ा तले। ओरहन पेटाइहे हमार माइ के, बाबा से खिसीयाइहे। साँइया खिसियाई हमसे गलतिया नाहीं हमार रामा। स्टाब्ब्रुक के बाजार में अंगूठिया गिरी गयल रे • stabroek ke bajar mein anguthi giri gayal re stabroek ke bajar mein anguthiya giri gayal re hamse khisiyayi baki hamar galtiya nahi saas karaila choka khawe sasur daru piye sasural mein pardesiya roti thapthape aur daal chaunke aamwa laye bhejal hamke jira laye bhejal hamke backra thagal hamke sange jane na mange hai guinip laye bhejal hamke hamun laye bhejal hamke sasural mein pardesiya, masala pise aur barah tale orahan petaihai hamar mai ke baba se khisiyai hai saiya khisiyaiyi hamse galtiya nahin hamar rama stabroek ke bajar mein anguthiya giri gayal re • Me ring fall from me finga a Stabroek. Me husban’ go vex. He mudda’ wan’ eat karaila chokha, he faddah suck rum steady. Me na nut’in’ to dem. Me does clap a-roti an’ chounke de daal. Me husban’ send me a market fe buy mangro an’ fe get jeera. Backra been tek me ‘way wid dem come, me na been wan’ fe come ‘way. Me husban’ send me mus’ buy guinip an’ jamun. Me na no one fe he mai-baap. Me does pise de masala me does fry de barah. ‘E go sen’ complaint to me mumma an’ vex wid me faddah. Me husban’ go vex wid me but nut’in’ me na do. Me ring fall from me han’ a Stabroek. • My ring slipped from my finger, in Stabroek market. My love will be angry for what was his fault. His mother’s eaten karaila chokha his father’s sucked rum. I’m a stranger in their home, clapping roti, spicing daal. My love sent me to buy mangoes, he sent me to buy jeera. Backra kidnapped me; I didn’t want to go. My love sent me to buy guinips, to buy jamun. I’m a stranger in their home, grinding spices, frying barah. He will complain to my mother, gripe to my father. My love, it’s not my fault. My ring fell off in Stabroek market. IN SHIPS [HONORING MAHADAI DAS’ “THEY CAME IN SHIPS”] West— They came dancing and despondent hungry gaunt alone do not forget the field or your blood I lost the yokes of rage in chains. Janam Bhumi In November of 2019 the Indian courts allowed the Modi administration to construct a Ram temple at the site of the demolished 16th-century Babri Masjid built by the Mogul ruler Babur. On August 5, 2020 they broke ground for the new mandir. Jai Sri Ram, now god of murder. What is real, Rushi, the forest is now deforest, home its own undoing? Trench lotuses hard as dicks release truth, even the skinks and hawks shrink back into scarcity. What of shanti—? In Ayodhya’s sacked Mogul masjid, vultures scrawl Ram on new temple bricks. Brother, from this mandir of burning, each sunrise mantra shoots itself a poisoned arrow. Each snake prays. The unlit path sparkles maya. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Poetry Guyana Indo-Caribbean Bondage Colonialism Mahadai Das Babri Masjid Ayodhya Historicity Georgetown Pandemic Creole Guyanese-Hindi Ram Temple Oceans as Historical Sites Personal History Antiman The Taxidermist's Cut The Cowherd's Son Cutlish Histories of Migrations Code-Mixing Multilingual Poetry Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 31st Oct 2020 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

AUTHOR Ayah Kutmah AYAH KUTMAH is a Syrian writer and researcher. She has worked on prisoners' defense and advocacy in military tribunals in Guantánamo Bay and occupied Palestine. Ayah is U.S. Fulbright recipient and former visiting researcher at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank. Her writing has been published in The Nation, Middle Eastern and North Africa Prison Forum, Institute for Palestine Studies, Inkstick, and Mondoweiss. Currently, Ayah is a J.D. candidate and Global Law Scholar at Georgetown Law, where she continues to work on a defense team representing a detainee held without charge in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. AUTHOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

ARTIST Latifa Zafar Attaii LATIFA ZAFAR ATTAII is a visual artist whose work examines themes of identity, migration, and memory. Attaii’s work has been exhibited internationally, including in China, Switzerland, and the UAE, Italy, India, Iran, and across South Asia. Her practice has been recognized with the Prince Claus Seed Award 2024, and she has been nominated for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize 2023, the Cultures of Resistance Award 2022, and the Second Prize in the Allegro Art Prize 2021. Raised as a refugee in Quetta, Pakistan, Attaii currently lives and works in Tehran, Iran. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

· FICTION & POETRY Poetry · Dallas Alien of Extraordinary Ability "Go back to sleep Ms. Chowdhury, the American situation is strange" "Error" by Saniya Kamal, for SAAG. Mixed media, 2020. Editors' note: The following is an excerpt from a longer work-in-progress called “A lien of Extraordinary Ability. ” The artworks at the beginning and end of the poem are a result of a collaboration between the author and the artist. Alien of extraordinary ability is an alien classification by United States Citizenship and ______________ Services. The United States may grant a priority visa to an alien who is able to demonstrate “ extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics” or through some other extraordinary career achievements. The ________________ version of the classification (EB-1A), which grants permanent residency, additionally requires the alien to demonstrate "sustained national or international acclaim”, “achievements recognized by others in the field of expertise,” and "a level of expertise indicating that the individual is one of that small percentage who have risen to the very top of the field of endeavor.” When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. —Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali “Why do you want this visa?” a home. is it here? is it here? is it here? “Why in this country?” everyone likes sweet stuff sometimes. “What are your plans?” To build a spaceship out of the years named Solace. so it is to be born a particular particle to no particular address on no particular day of a less-than particular week. so it is to be star-seer, sin-shelter, flower named nayantara, a rearview. so it is that the name∞ You were given is not the same. nonetheless You are chosen. so it is to sense in an other an otherworldly sweetness. Have we met? You ask. No— for I am talking to myself. Before You, Idea. so it is to walk towards a frame hoping for image vs error . . . for don’t You want to see Your own particles pictured in the museum mirrors? No? Ok. then forget continuum. be disruption ∞ go back to sleep Ms. Chowdhury, the American situation is strange but we have not met yet. this is a museum. i am making a list∞ Personal ornaments Collared disks Scepters & early imagery Neolithic axes of the _______________ culture Blades Dagger-axes arrowheads & knives Serrated disks Ceremonial blades Serrated and ________________ axes Handles Animal heads and masks Dragons Fish Birds Naturalistic animals Insects Surface decoration Dish with coiled bird & dragon interlacery Plaque Shroud∞ ∞this is a list to keep thoughts of you at bay ∞so it is to imagine your death. to hold a conversation with your absence: so good, this gallery, You say— yes, it is quite the door to a thousand years ago! cries the Past. sshhh, begs the Future. let’s watch the wall open . . . see, we’ll have time for the fields! see, we’ll consult the sun re the moon! see, now we’ll “see” other families. our own. is this a museum or a border? where there is a border, does there need to be patrol? “no touching the heart! i mean art!” security cries. okay, i say, okay. and part the regions of my torso that is how i learn the guard is blind to my mockingbird inside. “now walk towards flowering cherry and autumn maples,” Mockingbird commands. “do it. alone” ∞idea-You disappears. I leave the museum or linger. i become or engage in: an etching window shopping allusions to the sea light palette ewer & basin I once was and will never again be: virgin & child the rape of ____________ by _____________ Are you also trying to understand what it is to be: a master “Alien (Reflection)” by Saniya Kamal for SAAG. Mixed media, 2020. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Poetry Dallas Bangladesh Diaspora Immigration Cultural Narratives of Immigration Borders Visa Alien of Extraordinary Ability Alienation Work Authorization Poetic Form Particularity Temporality Ornamentation North American Diaspora TARFIA FAIZULLAH is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018) and Seam (SIU, 2014). Tarfia’s writing appears widely in the U.S. and abroad in the Daily Star, Hindu Business Line, BuzzFeed, PBS News Hour, Huffington Post, Poetry Magazine, Ms. Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, Oxford American, the New Republic, the Nation, Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Tarfia is currently based in Dallas. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 13th Oct 2020 Tarfia Faizullah Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

· FEATURES Essay · Bengal Dukkha “As life moves to time elsewhere, in the cities of the world I’ve set out to leave behind me, things move to water, its flow. I do not fail to notice that both time and water flow—perhaps it is this that abets and causes motion?” Artwork by Haris Hidayat Ullah for SAAG. “For a tear is an intellectual thing.” William Blake THEY are beating water. They are beating water with a hammer. I wake up with this sound in my ears. I yawn to be sure that I’m awake. I don’t know whether people yawn in their sleep. I don’t know many other things—whether the body wakes up before the mind, or whether it is possible to beat water with a hammer. But they’re beating water with a hammer. The ears must be the most alert part of our bodies? I’ve heard water speaking in different dialects before. From the sound of it being poured, I can make out how far water in a glass is from the brim; I hear buckets in neighbouring flats overflow; I hear leaking taps, disobedient drops falling to the floor from the mouth of a tap, unhurt; I hear sweat collect into drops; I hear saliva move inside mouths; I hear water breathe and sleep. But this is a different water. They are beating water . I walk out of my rented room. Outside, there’s the light, reluctant to announce itself as if it were a guest. The wind is just the opposite, seeking attention. Both invisible, invincible. What is visible is water—the river Teesta, swollen like an overworked muscle, twitching, like a nerve. But where’s the hammer? I look, but with my ears. There is the regular rhythm of water falling on water to the earth, where everything must collect. When I get out of bed—and from the dream where I was caged all night—the world is in motion. In towns and cities, that motion is triggered by time. Here, where I’ve come to escape time’s fundamentalism, it is not time that is causing motion, for water is the last of the revolutionaries, having managed to live indifferent to time. As life moves to time elsewhere, in the cities of the world I’ve set out to leave behind me, things move to water, its flow. I do not fail to notice that both time and water flow —perhaps it is this that abets and causes motion? There are no mirrors in this house, and so I do not see any humans. I do not know the antonym of ‘human’, but whatever it is, it is for this that I have come here. For me, the opposite of humans is water. It is perhaps because I feel related to water, related as in being a relative. Every time I’ve tried to say this to someone, they’ve dismissed or interpreted this as a ‘poetic’ reflection. I’ve seen doctors who’ve dismissed it as a phase—like teenagers who fancy themselves as their favourite crushes on their T-shirts— and others who’ve told me that there was nothing to worry about feeling like that, for humans are indeed composed mainly of water, more than three-fifths of us. But no one really understands. The drizzle has stopped though I can see its ruins—on leaves, floors, tarpaulin. That water can fall anywhere without breaking its bones is a slap to the superiority of vertebrates. I wonder whether water, if it were animal, would be mammal or aves. Are these raindrops eggs then, or corpses? I am water not because I long to flow. I am water because no metal, no air, no music, nothing can hold my sadness like water. Water fills a teardrop like air fills a yawn. The elements rush in when they sense emptiness. My fingers are on my face again. If water could leave fossils, I imagine that this is how they’d look—these marks coursing down my face. They disappear, but not the sadness. Perhaps it is my fossil. It might have all begun with dehydration. My days in the hospital were marked by the aloneness of being inside the womb of a dark room, but without the water of the womb that enables life. Bottles of saline water hung like benevolent angels beside me, keeping watch over my life. I could see them even in the darkness—the fluorescence of water inside a plastic bottle. I heard them coax life into me, drop by drop, as if I was being created anew. I lay on my back, my spine dividing the bed like a book, thinking of strangers—writers whose words still hadn’t left me, co-passengers whose words had stuck as spit does on walls. That is the thing about sadness—its extremism, its intrusiveness, that leaves space for nothing. Sadness changes us unrecognisably even as we appear the same to the world. Humans, after all, are not like the sky—one cannot tell the climate of feelings from its body and colour. Dark clouds do not appear like boils on human bodies to indicate sadness. It was hard to believe that it was crying that had left me dehydrated. Any piece of wood becomes sweet-smelling when left in the proximity of sandalwood: this is a saying in Bangla. Left beside water for days, hearing it trickle drop by drop into my body, I became an embodiment of that. The thought of organ transplants never left me, as if this water would replace my sadness, my body’s largest organ. I could not think of it as anything but water—it came out of me as tears, snot, and sweat, the last in moments of panic and anxiety, when I felt this fear would corrode everything. I felt it inside me as one does water, in its various states, moving inside me like water, me trying to push it out as if it were gaseous, but it was like ice, solid and heavy, territorial, refusing to move, immobilising me, every thought and action. I longed for a hammer that’d allow me to break it into pieces just like the ice-candy man scraped ice. I hoped for this new water from the drip to take its place, as rain cleans the air, to fill me with life as I imagined life should be: without pain. I thought of the agents of my sadness—those I’d loved, whose understanding had now disappeared. As if I’d suddenly turned into a foreign language. I imagined their sadness as well, even as I knew that it was different from mine. I saw theirs from the outside, and recognised it from their words and gestures. From the self-centredness that suffering brings, I understood only the obvious: if sadness were a species, I belonged to its phylum. Life with watercolour, I see now, was also a life with water. What I loved most about watercolour was what I loved most about water—its unexpectedness of flow and behaviour. Even after all these years, I couldn’t be completely sure how a dab of the brush would behave on the canvas. It could spread beyond my imagined prediction, or it could remain still, like the skin of a drying pond. That was how sadness settled inside me even though I still can’t tell whether the sadness was inside or outside. Watercolour changed my perception of language. Surface tension—the physical property of water that explained its behaviour on the canvas—I now saw only as ‘tension’. Paint I came to read and hear as ‘pain’. Like people, sounds and things and expressions had begun disappearing from my life. Cohabitation meant living with, living beside. My long history of living beside water, as it helped me understand the world on canvas, and then the interminable days of lying beside the relentless drip, reminded me of possible older lives—memories stored inside the gene, like a safe deposit that would remain unused until needed. My immediate ancestors had made a life in the alluvial plains of Bengal—my mother’s paternal family on the Gangetic delta, my father’s by the Padma. In this, they were related to the first humans who built settlements by the river. I hoped that that ancient sense of water, its blood and its carefree individualism, had trickled into me in some way. They had known water simply as water; as neighbour, not as something imagined , like ice or gas. This intimacy with water had marked their relationships—not just fluidity and flow, but a natural transparency and constancy. But the river was only a memory inside me—a human memory, of calls of fear by my great grand-people, of delight in its offerings, of the sound of splashing, of rolling abundance, and also of drowning. Why has the river stopped flowing after entering me? How have I become its station? There is nothing we own as deeply as pain. That is perhaps why we’re reluctant to let it go. I’m often unable to distinguish myself from my sadness. It is not like looking in a mirror, where I know I am related to the person looking back at me, who moves when I do, who walks away when I do. That sadness can have a body and breasts and fingers and a stomach that moves in all four directions is still new to me, even after all these years. For it is hard to imagine sadness. An infant might be able to imagine many things, perhaps even its hair blowing in the wind, but it can’t imagine sadness. Why am I sad? Trying to answer this question is like looking for a black stone from amidst a large pile of black stones—the answer is there, but not identifiable to me. If I knew which stone it was, I’d throw it far away, beyond the reach of the strength of my arms and the power of my eyes. I think of possible reasons for my sadness—I pile them together like those black stones. When they topple over inside my head, I arrange them differently, like books on shelves, but nothing helps. I only feel it inside me. Sometimes, I rub my chest as if sadness were a lump that would dissolve and melt inside me. But I can’t touch it. I feel that I’ve let sadness turn to god, the way god is invisible but everywhere. Like Hindu gods, sadness is also form-changing. The pestle pounding between my breasts transforms into a leech in my throat, and soon into water in my eyes. I touch the water and stare at it sometimes. For even though it might look like the same water, the sadness is always different. Like water, like god, like a caterpillar, it is always changing form. I struggle to remember why I was sad yesterday or why I cried all night last week. When I am exhausted by its ingratitude at my having given it a home to stay, I want to throw it out. Instead, I hide it from the world as if it were a secret love. I try to remember when I first made its acquaintance but I fail. It seems I’ve known it for as long as I have known my mother. Or life. Because I don’t tell anyone about it, I cannot seek their assistance. Once or twice, a friend who sensed the wildlife of my tears over the phone, says, ‘Maybe you should see a doctor? I have a friend who benefitted from…’ I struggle the most at that moment—her words are like a laxative inside my gut, they push my sadness out violently. My face is in my hands then—I have to hide my tears from the world. I have no idea why hiding my face seemed necessary at that moment. I am embarrassed. I feel guilty. I always feel guilty for being sad. Happiness missionaries are everywhere—on my bookshelves, in my phone, in notes I have copied and written to myself. Life seems to be only about joy, about participating in ananda, in pleasure, in happiness—everything we do ought to be directed towards that sole aim. Sadness is life’s outcast, and those like me are therefore life’s outcasts too. Why tears are more private than laughter, I don’t know. I will not be able to recognise my tears, in spite of having known them for so many years, ever since I was born. They are not like blood and its groups. If they were, we might have been able to know about the group that constituted the saddest people. When a friend asks what sadness feels like, whether it’s permanent, (‘Like paralysis?’), I try to think of an appropriate metaphor and fail—‘It’s like a niggling cough inside you. You feel it there, inside your chest, waiting to come out all the time’. Nothing helps. Nothing helps. For everything might have a language—some kind of language—but sadness doesn’t. It is pre-linguistic, and hasn’t evolved since then. That is another thing that I think about often. That sadness might be my only connect with my oldest ancestors. My body, with deposits of pollutants, might not be related to theirs, their reasons for joy must have been different from mine, but I think it is our sadness that makes us true relatives. I refuse to see a doctor. A friend says: ‘You must change a shoe that pinches’. It is not the fact of my sadness being compared to a shoe that irritates me. It is their assumption that sadness can be replaced. Everyone seems to have a vague idea about what that replacement might be, but they can’t be quite sure—a spare tyre replaces a similar tyre; will another kind of sadness replace this sadness? Sadness paralyses. It is because the water freezes. How does it move then? I pose this as an anonymous question to a suicide prevention website and someone writes back immediately. I imagine the responder to be a woman, and soon after, a machine. ‘Try origami—take paper and try to fold it into a shape that resembles your sadness. Write to us after you’ve done that. Being able to do that is half your work done.’ I recoil from the aggressive tone, this ridding of sadness now so integral to me, as close as a biological child. The annoyance passes, but the thought loiters in my consciousness. I bring old newspaper and turn to my fingers—they’ve fed and cleaned me all my life, won’t they bring me some calm if they can? Stars and birds, flowers and balloons—everything can be created from folding paper, so at that point it appears that this is how god created the world, merely by folding. I’ve only ever made boats before—folding squares into triangles and pulling them inside out gently until the likeness of a boat emerged. It was a surprise every single time—the genius of folds, of lines and planes, sticking without water’s glue. And yet, no matter how much my boat-making improved with practice, the tiny boat never managed to sail without capsizing. The thinness of paper, even with its softness, fails to find appropriate support in a partner like water, it being without a spine itself. Is sadness the paper I’ll have to fold into a boat, or the water on which the boat must sail? My heart feels like a boatman trying to boat on a dried river. I cry in the shower. Water washing water, as if water were excreta—the way I heard my grandmother say bishey bishkhoy, poison kills poison. Water runs over me, touching me in places where even light struggles to enter. I close the tap from time to time but cannot leave. Water is a magnet—I know I should leave for dryness, for warmth, but I stand there waiting for more water. I am aware of my aloneness, I feel like a seed. It was possible that all seeds are as lonely as the mango stone. Loneliness had turned them hard and unwelcoming of every kind of touch, whether of blade or tongue or teeth. The opposite of this was the papaya—seeds that were soft and silky and naughty, this joy coming to them from living in a commune inside: a hundred blackish seeds. That is why hair too is never lonely—it struggles for space, but is never in want of company. The heart, on the other hand, is completely alone. One heart, one penis, one vagina. But two breasts. Was there a moral in this? Was water as lonely as me? I wouldn’t ever know, so dependent was I on this body and its inability to migrate to anything besides itself. I hated my thoughts and wanted to be rid of them. In fact, I wanted to be rid of myself. I questioned all my thoughts and actions as if they were someone else’s, even an enemy’s. I did not realise that I was lonely—I did not understand that my loneliness had pitted me against myself. It was a surprise, what I had become—like a wet and fierce wind that carves rocks, so that what we see is actually the remainder after the tussle between stone and wind, I was now a leftover of my sadness. Sadness slows down everything—it survives on echoes, for everything returns over and over again. It stammers inside, trying hard to get out. It becomes like a port of the heart, and mind that they always return to. Compared to other emotions, its pace is slow—but slow only horizontally, for it moves southwards like water does through soil. Other emotions, like the roots of trees, feed on sadness urgently. They change immediately, for sadness is a powerful catalyst: it changes its surroundings without itself changing. I try to understand sadness through physics—taking away a piece of brick will result in exactly the same volume of air taking its place. The disappearance of a person leaves sadness that is far greater than the physical volume of the person. How does that happen? Science fails, I fail. To carry the size and weight of sadness that is bigger and heavier than one’s body; it was sadness that Sisyphus was trying to push up the mountain. I have this image: I’m standing at the top of a hill, about to jump off, but I can’t. I think it is sadness that glues me to the spot for sadness is an addiction. I’ve become a parasite to this sadness. I must remain alive to keep my sadness alive. I don’t know why they call it stream-of-consciousness. Lately, every time water from my paintbrush has leaked onto the canvas, that phrase has come up. Information doesn’t interest me—they are like nails that break for being too long, the fact of this phrase coming from William James’s revolutionary book. Did he actually mean stream of sadness when he said consciousness? Was he sad when he coined the phrase? But at times it doesn’t feel like a stream but a waterfall—water hurting water, sadness hitting sadness. I’m teaching my nephew to draw water. Next to him is a box of watercolours. We are rubbing water—with a brush, of course—on a blue tablet to produce blue water: adding water to produce water, a version of sexual reproduction as it were, humans producing humans, plants producing plants, like producing like. (That is the nature of reproduction: to produce versions of oneself. Only the sun is different. We, in all our varied forms, are its offspring, but we don’t resemble it.) The little boy takes the brush and pulls it from one end of the page to the other until its bluish stains mark the page. He promptly calls them water’s pimples. He’s angry when I laugh at his diagnosis. Scolded, I ask for a cure—water, he says, and pours the entire bowl on the page, and, of course, the drawing book. The flooded page is put under a patch of sunlight. There it dries unequally, crinkling, losing its flatness. We imagine land as we do water—flatness pleases us, it makes us feel powerful. Sharp undulations, prickliness, bristliness—they trouble us. This comes to us from our body which wants smooth surfaces; even a tiny grain of sand can keep us awake. The eye, like our back, seeks plain surfaces. There is aaram in looking at a straight line instead of jagged lines. But water is neither straight nor jagged. It is a moving line. The closest approximation of water’s movement on land is that of ants moving in a line, untouched by the push and rush of time. For many things move water—feet and machines, pumps and pipes, but time has no power over water’s movement. Time cannot move water, like it cannot move sadness. Another day we try again. This time land is sandwiched between two blocks of blue—water and sky. One of these he can see—and so it is not hard for him to be faithful: he looks outside the window, the blue sky is squatting there as always. He needs no tutoring, no demands are made on the imagination. Blue must be coloured blue. But water, silent in the bowl next to him, is colourless. Why must he colour it blue? It is a lie, he thinks. I try to paraphrase the Raman effect for him, but it’s like chanting a mantra to prove the existence of god. Water can be any colour, he says, and then demonstrates—dipping the brush into the colours one by one, letting it leak and dissolve into the bowl. Water collects all the colours. There’s nothing more accommodative than water. It is more elastic than even the human heart. ‘Making a bucket is a lot of work. Anything that holds water demands a lot of work.’ It is Rath Yatra, and I’m at a small fair that accompanies it every year. The fairs of my childhood are gone—clay, iron and tin toys have now been replaced by plastic. Almost everything squeaks, or runs on battery. I’ve come here to buy clay utensils—miniatures, toys for children. Utensils, fruits and vegetables, even houses with sloping roofs—most of these things don’t exist anymore, not even in villages. They are a part of folk memory, on their way to turning into nostalgia, a space as inert as a museum. This man sits in a corner. He is a remainder, and reminder, from an older time, when men trusted their hands, and when they blamed their poverty on destiny and not the government. In front of him are three kinds of things: kulo, boti, balti, the first for winnowing, separating grain from husk, the second a kind of flat bladed knife, used by sitting on the floor; the third is a toy tin bucket. For the bucket he asks for twenty rupees. Scared that I might bargain, he adds: "Anything that holds water demands a lot of work." It is folk knowledge that it always rains on the day of Rath Yatra. But there is not a cloud in the sky. That humidity which makes rain possible has landed on earth,. Around me is a blind crowd, blind because, like me, they do not know where we’re all going. We’re being pushed, and are pushing each other without will. We are sweating, we have become clouds. People are eager to touch the rope that pulls Jagannath and his siblings. It is endearing, this sacredness of a rope, how belief transforms the common into a thing of wonder. It is what love does too. I notice that the priest who’s sitting in the "ground storey" of the Rath is carrying a black umbrella. But the rains don’t come. It is as if we’ve become skies—water is flowing out of us relentlessly. The man’s words don’t leave me—how difficult it is to create anything that holds water. I kept thinking of god as the old man spoke, and how hard it must have been for him to design our eyes that hold tears. "Because you can’t carry water in everything after all." I’ve watched time lapses of water solidifying into ice. It is still a thing of wonder for me, for I was born into a household that did not have a fridge until I was seven. It was a magic machine. The magician P.C. Sorcar visited Siliguri almost every winter. We watched him cut human bodies into pieces and put them back together, the people, who were dead only a while ago now walked back to their seats in the auditorium. I thought of the fridge as akin to the magician—it could change unwieldy, liquid water into solid square cubes. But, like Sorcar, the fridge kept its technique hidden from me—it would freeze water only with its door closed. These time-lapse videos affect my body. I find that I swallow my saliva more often. I see water freezing into ice and I imagine this is how pain coagulates into sadness inside me. I remember looking at the icy peaks of the Himalayas from the balcony of my rented apartment overlooking Darjeeling’s Happy Valley Tea Estate. When I couldn’t see them clearly, I realised it wasn’t just my clinical myopia but the water in my eyes, which surprised me with its inexhaustibility. At first I dip just my head in the old iron bucket. It is cold—the water feels like metal, cold, solid, and resistant to any entry. When I force my head in, it tries to expel my head out of the bucket. I try again—I push my head in and then pull it out when the resistance seems too strong to bear. My head doesn’t learn to swim. One thing I take from this with some relief, even joy, is how water drowns out and distorts almost all surrounding sound. For a moment, perhaps because of the unexpectedness of the impact, it drowns out the sounds inside my head as well. I immediately begin thinking of this as a cure—this dunking my head in water every time sadness paralyses me. I remember my mother pouring water on my head and forehead to bring down my fever. I will trust in water too. Later, as the day wears warmer clothes, I walk to the river and sit on a rock. My feet enter the water. The river doesn’t push back like the water in the bucket. Head and feet—these are our extreme points, where tiredness accumulates the fastest. But how different the aches, and how different their cures. The water, even though it is colder than my body, as it mostly is when we meet in natural conditions, doesn’t seem as foreign to my feet as it did to my head. I do not know why. All my life I have allowed the water poured over my head to run to my feet. I read that the Indus Valley civilisation came to an end because of water shortage. Civilisations can end because of water. Can sadness end for the same reason? I am sleepy. Sleep feels like a pencil whose nib breaks every day. The history of hurt remains unrecorded. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Bengal Personal History Holding Water Epistemology Trauma Temporality Water Sadness Depictions of Grief Grief Essay Form Experimental Methods Banality William Blake Teesta Disaster & Language Intimacy & Disaster River Guilt Privacy Siliguri Loneliness Stream of Consciousness Watercolor Rath Yatra Memory P. C. Sorcar Darjeeling Himalayas Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 4th Jul 2021 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note: