ARTIST Shyama Golden SHYAMA GOLDEN is a Sri Lankan-American artist whose oil and acrylic paintings use figuration to explore the complex and layered ways identiy is experienced, performed, and reinforced. Her work has been featured on covers for the New York Times , LA Times , and Netflix Queue , as well as various book covers such as Shruti Swamy’s Archer , Fatimah Asghar’s If They Come for Us , and Akweke Emezi’s PET and BITTER . Her work has been exhibited at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery and Trotter & Sholer, among others. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Cambodia’s trade union leaders, alongside young environmentalists fighting to preserve the country’s environment, have been imprisoned and censored for demanding just ecological policies and labor conditions. As the Cambodian monarchy continues to harpoon advocates with falsified charges ranging from conspiracy to “disbelieving a court decision,” movement leaders continue to demonstrate, knowing the people’s struggle for personal and environmental dignity transcends the carceral means of the state. · THE VERTICAL Reportage · Phnom Penh Cambodia’s trade union leaders, alongside young environmentalists fighting to preserve the country’s environment, have been imprisoned and censored for demanding just ecological policies and labor conditions. As the Cambodian monarchy continues to harpoon advocates with falsified charges ranging from conspiracy to “disbelieving a court decision,” movement leaders continue to demonstrate, knowing the people’s struggle for personal and environmental dignity transcends the carceral means of the state. Sophie Neak, Hang On, no.18 (2015). C-print photograph. Paean to Mother Nature In Cambodia, activists are facing a crackdown on their fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly. The state is particularly targeting those advocating for environmental and labor rights, and as civil society space continues to shrink and tolerance for dissent wanes, the government is increasingly resorting to arrests to silence perceived opposition. “We have fallen deeply in love with nature, and we don’t want it to be destroyed by corruption. People’s livelihoods depend on natural resources, and they don’t want to lose their land, their home, their culture. We understand them, we feel the pain, so we want to protect them. Our lives are inspired by nature, and that motivates us to take the risk of standing here.” These are the words of a young activist from Mother Nature Cambodia , a youth-led environmental rights organization that launched in 2012. He requested to remain anonymous due to fear of reprisal. Since the organization’s launch, its members have campaigned on a raft of environmental issues in Cambodia, leading to multiple arrests, members being jailed, and authorities attempting to silence their voices. In July 2024, 10 young Cambodians were sentenced to between six and eight years in prison, convicted on charges of plotting against the government and insulting the king. Three of them, including Spanish co-founder Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson , who was deported for his environmental activism in 2015 and permanently banned from re-entering Cambodia, were sentenced to eight years in jail and fined USD2,500. The others were handed six-year terms. Five, including Gonzalez-Davidson, were sentenced in absentia. Ahead of the verdict at Phnom Penh Court of First Instance, 26-year-old Long Kunthea, who has already been imprisoned for her activism, told a group of supporters who had gathered around her that she would not be silenced, encouraging her peers to remain undeterred. “May you all not be hopeless but continue your work in protecting the environment, your rights, your land. Although we are in jail, we will be strong. They can only arrest our bodies, but they cannot arrest our will and conscience,” she said. The sentencing has been condemned by various international organizations, who are lobbying for the release of those imprisoned. “The verdict is devastating for the 10 activists, who face between six to eight years in prison for their efforts to protect Cambodia’s environment,” said Bryony Lau, the Deputy Director for Asia of Human Rights Watch, in a statement in 2024. “It also sends an appalling message to Cambodia’s youth that the government will side with special interests over the environment every chance it gets.” Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for Research, Montse Ferrer, said in a statement that the convictions were “another crushing blow to Cambodia’s civil society,” adding, “Mother Nature Cambodia is a renowned activist group that has brought attention to environmental degradation fuelled by long-standing corruption in the country. “Instead of listening to young leaders at the forefront of the environmental movement, the Cambodian government has chosen to jail those that dare to speak out. The government has shown time and time again that it will not tolerate any dissent.” Attempts to silence the defenders Since 2012, Mother Nature Cambodia has lobbied on environmental issues from illegal sand dredging and lake-infilling to pollution and protesting against mega hydropower dam projects. The organization has successfully campaigned to halt the Chinese-led construction of a mass hydropower dam in Areng Valley in southwest Cambodia, that threatened the Indigenous community, as well as the delicate ecosystem of the area. Mother Nature Cambodia also played an instrumental role in ending illegal sand dredging operations in Koh Kong. Mother Nature’s philosophy has resonated strongly with Cambodian youth keen to protect the environment for future generations. The environmental defenders, however, have also repeatedly been targeted by authorities. “The main environmental issue is the corruption in the systems, and these diseases are getting harder to solve because environmental crimes are happening all over the country under development projects,” a member of Mother Nature anonymously told SAAG. However, the arrests and intimidation have failed to dampen spirits, instead fuelling members’ determination to continue their mission. “We must empower and mobilize youth in the country to speak up. They must speak up against repression as we continuously demand an end to devastating actions against nature. We stay focused, resilient and innovative,” he said. “People’s voices are needed to lobby the government to give our friends back their freedom. We won’t stay silent if our friends are still not free. We, Mother Nature Cambodia, are demanding power for the people, not the regime.” In September 2023, Mother Nature Cambodia became the first Cambodian organization to win Sweden’s Right Livelihood award for its “fearless and engaging activism to preserve Cambodia’s natural environment in the context of a highly restricted democratic space.” Fighting for the disappearing rights of workers It’s not only environmental activists whose voices are in danger of being silenced. Recent years have seen a targeting of Cambodia’s union leaders, who have been peacefully advocating for workers’ rights amid claims of human rights abuses, unfair dismissals and wages, and mass layoffs. On September 16, trade union leader Chhim Sithar, 37, was released after serving two years in Prey Sar, a notorious prison on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. Sithar is the head of the Labour Rights Supported Union of Khmer Employees (LRSU) and was charged with incitement to commit a felony. Sithar led a year-long series of peaceful protests that started in December 2021 against the mass layoff of 1,329 employees at NagaWorld—a casino giant in Phnom Penh—during the pandemic. Hundreds of workers took to the streets outside the casino in protest of the dismissals, with LRSU demanding 365 union members be reinstated and that all those who lost their jobs receive fair compensation from the Malaysian-owned casino. In May 2023, Sithar was sentenced to two years behind bars (having already served almost two years), for incitement to commit a felony, while eight other union members were handed lesser suspended sentences or monitoring orders. “They were convicted for simply exercising their rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, protected by both the Cambodian Constitution and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ratified by Cambodia in 1992,” UN Human Rights Office spokesperson Jeremy Laurence said in a statement . “The rights to peaceful assembly and association include the right to hold meetings, sit-ins and strikes, and the right of individuals to interact and organize among themselves to collectively express, promote, pursue, and defend common interests.” Cambodian authorities have maintained that citizens have the right to exercise freedom of speech and hold peaceful gatherings, as stated in the law, and arrests are only made when laws are broken. Khleang Soben, LRSU Secretary General, joined 70 Cambodian civil society organizations and many international organizations, including Amnesty International, HRW, and the US Department of State, in lobbying for Sithar’s release while she was in prison. “Until now, I’m curious about why she was detained as this is a labor dispute between workers and the company,” she told me. “But they accuse worker representatives of inciting social chaos. For me, it’s too much and unexpected that they turn the victim into the perpetrator. It’s very unfair.” In April 2024, Sithar’s “fight for democracy and respect for human rights” earned her the Swedish government’s annual Per Anger Prize, which celebrates courage, capacity to act and engagement. “She is a vital source of support for Cambodian women who are forced to work under appalling conditions. They are demanding to have their voices heard and their rights respected at their places of work,” the judges said. Sithar’s case is one of a series of targeted attacks by authorities. Despite this, Soben remains determined to ensure Sithar’s voice is not silenced, and pledged to continue the fight for the rights of her members. “Recently, we’ve seen the arrest of many youth and union activists. Saying I’m not afraid isn’t completely true. But I won’t give up as it’s a valuable job that benefits many Cambodians,” she said. “Union work is undervalued and it is unsafe when we stand up for workers and refuse to undertake activities that exploit the labor force and workers' interests. We will continue our nonviolent demands until there is a solution. Even if I am scared, it won't stop me.” Yang Sophorn, President of the 16,000-member strong Cambodia Alliance of Trade Union (CATU), also came under fire during the NagaWorld protests. On 4 August 2022, authorities accused her of conducting illegal activities and threatened her with an unspecified punishment for supporting the ongoing strikes. “We know that when we work in this field, there are a lot of people who are not happy with us, but we still do it for the sake of our members and to fight for their rights. The reason we continue this work is because of love, passion and wanting to help people in need,” she said. “It’s an injustice” “I’ve had violence committed against me and been arrested many times, but I still take on the challenge because I work for the rights of people. I’m not involved with politics, only labor rights. I suffer and have a lot of pressure to stop, but I have no choice. I have to promote the rights of workers,” Ath Thorn told SAAG. The former president of the Cambodian Labour Confederation (CLC) , a role he served for 18 years until May, and president of the Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers Democratic Union (CCAWDU) , Thorn has spent the majority of his working life fighting for the rights of garment factory workers. He launched CCAWDU in 1997 while working in a factory, in response to the unfair treatment he witnessed from his employer. “I saw and experienced a lot of labor abuse, violations and cheating on the ground. There was nobody to respond to these problems. So, I established the trade union to address the challenges and negotiate with the employer.” During his time serving as union leader, however, he has been the victim of multiple legal actions and arrests, violence, threats, and intimidation. “As an independent, democratic trade union, we work to promote workers’ interests and benefits, and the authorities and companies abuse us,” he said. “Some of us are arrested and charged, violated and discriminated against, beaten and dismissed without pay. So, there are a lot of cases against us, and a lot of pressure and challenges.” A 2022 HRW report, ‘ Only “Instant Noodle” Unions Survive: Union Busting in Cambodia’s Garment and Tourism Sectors , based on interviews conducted between March and June 2022, found “widespread violations of workers’ rights to register, form and join independent unions at garment factories, a casino and other places of business.” On May 7, Mam Rithy, Vice President of CLC, became one of the latest voices to be silenced when he was detained after Phnom Penh Municipal Court convicted him for “inciting to commit a crime” and “disbelieving a court decision”. The charge against the well-known advocate for the labor rights of Cambodian factory workers was in relation to a video he posted on Facebook on February 24, 2022 commenting on the arrest of a female union leader in Sihanoukville in relation to a Chinese casino. The 35-year-old was handed a 1.5 year prison sentence and a two million riel (USD480) fine. “Vuthy has now been in jail more than four months and did not expect to be detained for long. It’s really tough for him and an injustice,” Thorn said. While the threats to these activists remain real, it has only served to strengthen their fight. “The arrests only make people get mad at the violent injustice to innocent people without any sense,” a Mother Nature member stated. “We have to strengthen our mental health and capacity-building to keep inspiring more people to become defenders. The more they arrest our members, the more defenders rise up. We will always be here, fighting for environmental justice.”∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Reportage Phnom Penh Climate Cambodia Mother Nature Unions Environmental Science Environmentalist Youth Youth Protest Censorship Ecology Labor Policy Movements Climate Security Community Security Freedom Free Speech Labor Rights Civil Society Civilian Activism Corruption Natural Resources Mother Nature Cambodia Anonymity Imprisonment Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson Deportation Banned Phnom Penh Court of First Instance Hope Political Will Human Rights Watch Amnesty International Dissent Hydropower Dam Hydropolitics Areng Valley Indigenous Spaces Ecosystem Koh Kong Future Generations Empowerment Silence Disappearance Worker Rights Prey Sar Labour Rights Supported Union Khmer Employees Peaceful Protest Monitoring Victimization Targeted Attack State Government Narrative Cambodia Alliance of Trade Union CATU NagaWorld Protests Injustice Violence Political Violence Cambodian Labour Confederation CLC Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers Democratic Union CCAWDU Garment Factory Labor Abuse Arrest Threats Intimidation Union Busting Capacity-building Environmental Justice 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. 25th Feb 2025 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:

“Formal preoccupations are presumed to be a part of the European avant-garde, even though what form and form can be has been deeply influenced by writings from other parts of the world, and the West's straitjacketed understanding of the Renaissance being exposed to that.” COMMUNITY Origins of Modernism & the Avant-Garde in India Amit Chaudhuri “Formal preoccupations are presumed to be a part of the European avant-garde, even though what form and form can be has been deeply influenced by writings from other parts of the world, and the West's straitjacketed understanding of the Renaissance being exposed to that.” Author Amit Chaudhuri in conversation with Associate Editor Kamil Ahsan on his previous works, his preoccupations with the banal and the label of "autofiction" that haunts contemporary appraisals of his work. Further, they discuss modernism in India, in particular Tagore's children's books as possibly the first impulse of modernism writ large. In surveying the history of literature and art in colonial India, the consequences of Europe's mistaken claim to originating the avant-garde is a profound ahistorical act, one that patently must be rectified. RECOMMENDED: Sojourn by Amit Chaudhuri (New York Review Books, 2022). ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Avant-Garde Origins Modernism Anthology Traditions Vaikom Muhammad Basheer Avant-Garde Form Auto-Fiction Wendy Doniger Multimodal Stream of Consciousness Rabindranath Tagore Tagore as First Impulse of Modernism Literary Activism Impoverished Histories Contradiction Criticism Intellectual History Internationalist Perspective Performance Art Satyajit Ray Avant-Garde Beginnings in India Varavara Rao AMIT CHAUDHURI is the author of eight novels, the latest of which is Sojourn . He is also an essayist, poet, musician, and composer. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Awards for his fiction include the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Indian government's Sahitya Akademi Award. In 2013, he was awarded the inaugural Infosys Prize in the Humanities for outstanding contribution to literary studies. His first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address , is included in Colm Toibin and Carmen Callil's The Modern Library: the 200 best novels of the last 50 years, and his second novel, Afternoon Raag , was on the novelist Anne Enright's list of 10 best short novels for the Guardian. Its 25th anniversary edition appeared last year with a new introduction by the critic James Wood. He is a highly regarded singer in the Hindustani classical tradition and has been acclaimed as a pathbreaking composer and improviser who performed, most recently, at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. In 2017, the government of West Bengal awarded Chaudhuri the Sangeet Samman for his contribution to Indian classical music. He is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, and was University College London's Annual Visiting Fellow in 2018. That year, he was also an inaugural fellow at the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris, and in 2019 became an honorary fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. Interview Avant-Garde Origins 4th Oct 2020 On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

Two years ago, short on money and hungry for something new, Rasti Farooq started pillion riding through Lahore. What began as a practical choice became an intimate, disorienting encounter with the city, and with herself. Here’s everything you would note about everything if you went around your city on a bike. · FEATURES Essay · Lahore Two years ago, short on money and hungry for something new, Rasti Farooq started pillion riding through Lahore. What began as a practical choice became an intimate, disorienting encounter with the city, and with herself. Here’s everything you would note about everything if you went around your city on a bike. "Ode To History" (2024), gouache on paper, 21 x 28 inches, courtesy of Khadijah Rehman. On Smelling Men’s Hair & Other Lessons in Impropriety Since 2024, I’ve smelled more men’s hair than I ever signed up for. It would be untrue to say that I never signed up to smell anyone’s hair, because I certainly have. But only women’s hair and specifically silky hair. I have walked behind and past many a straight-haired girl, and been slapped in the face with that fruity post-shower waft. I wanted it. But I could never have it, because the usual department store shampoos that boast that signature scent are not designed for the likes of me, with my type 3C (very curly) hair. Having said that, I have never been even vaguely curious about men’s hair, mostly because men’s scalp hygiene is poorer than women’s on average. Shampooing just doesn’t seem to figure the same way in their lives. All this unfortunate oversharing to underscore that the smelling of men’s hair was entirely involuntary. I’m just: 1) seated very close to men, 2) seated very close behind them, 3) we are moving through space at about 30-40 kmph because we are on 4) a motorbike 5) which means a trusty bit of wind combined with 6) the fact that riders have to take off their helmets when passing through the smattering of military checkpoints around Lahore, (they also get taken off during the ride because most will only wear them to hoodwink traffic police officers and then proceed to dangle them off the bike handle the rest of the time). The physics of this dynamic means that the wind in their hair whips my pillion-riding face, and that’s how I know that most men’s hair smells sebum-y. But every 18th ride or so, that coveted fruity shampoo smell makes a surprise appearance. In those moments, I would take lung-fulls of that fragrant air because it calmed my nervous system (a need I had at that time, more on this in a bit). One day, I caught myself mid-exhale: how would this rider feel if he got wind (!) of this involuntary intimacy? It felt a bit like an Uno Reverse situation of the impropriety lesson I got from my mother growing up: she would spritz her perfume once on her palm, dab the tip of her forefinger into the droplets in her hand, and then press the tip lightly on a single point on either side of her neck. Your perfume was for you to smell, she would remind me, never unknown men. But here I was, an unknown woman, smelling men’s various bodily scents on the daily. In truth, I’ve spent a great deal of my commute on motorbikes considering impropriety. Pillion riding was new to my life in 2024. I was 31, used to waking up every morning, dressing to my heart's desire and, with tempered confidence, stepping out the door into what was a well-studied yet inscrutable world. But now , new contingencies demanded an updated protocol: I felt that my very conspicuously dressed “up” body may as well be a sharp knife slicing through public space in the early morning hours, cleaving the worlds of everyone it encountered into halves as I covered the 18 kilometers from home to work every day. It sounds overly dramatic now, but at the time, those misgivings felt reasonable. My Virgo temperament was keen to approach this problem systematically. I mapped out variables, cycled through undesirable scenarios, considered several tactical approaches, and eventually devised a near-perfect SOP. When the rider accepts your ride on the app and calls you to confirm your pick-up location, it is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate with your voice that you are female, a fact they may not necessarily pick up on by your profile name alone (not “Rasti” but “Jehan”, as in your friend whose name you borrowed for this app 3 years ago, after a government ban on a film you acted in turned things dicey, personal security wise). For extra measure, you turn up the girly in your voice. Some do a double take, others don't break a sweat. The next potentially tense moment arrives when you walk out of your building and your rider takes in the sight of Jehan: you’re usually in pants/jeans, rings on your fingers, bangles and distracting shoes, your helmet dangling from your hand. You avoid sleeveless tops entirely now because two attempts of riding with bare arms down Lahori streets have resulted in considerable vexation on the faces of fellow riders (and other pillion riding women), not evidenced with, say, a calf (sometimes you think maybe it is true what your friend’s mother once said in her case against the sleeveless: something potently sensual about the curve of the shoulder, entirely absent in a calf and unmatched by the curve of a knee). You’re approaching your rider now, and you make sure to put on your business-as-usual face because it is important to set the rider at ease: this is not a hapless girl attempting this for the first time and no, she most certainly will not fall off the bike and no sir, this is not her papa’s borrowed helmet. You say salam, throw your helmet on your head and your right leg over the seat. At this leg-throwing junction–confirming that you will indeed be riding astride and not modestly sidesaddle like most women do–you’re aware of some mild tensing, which is sometimes just curiosity, sometimes some caution. You let it pass and grab on tight to the U-shaped silver rail behind you that juts out over the rear light. This is a failsafe strategy to avoid contact and avoiding contact is absolutely imperative for everyone’s sake, nevermind that the repetitive gripping may have gifted you your new elbow joint dysfunction. By this point, some riders slide onto the petrol tank to widen the gap between their hips and your crotch. But sometimes they don’t, and that’s okay too because you’re pretty good at squeezing yourself between the rider and the U-rail. All in all, you’re a confident pillion rider except for when that silver rail is missing, which it is on some bikes, in which case you try and clutch on to the sides of the seat in front of you but the grip isn’t as secure and you can’t stop yourself from lurching forwards. The missing U-rail is not even how I ended up accidentally touching my rider for the first time. I was making what I thought was a small, harmless adjustment on the seat, but by the end of it I had poked my rider in his left buttock with my thumb. I held my breath. My first thought: how to not make him think that just because I'm in excessively flared, sort-of see-through pants with a linen button-down that won’t even cover my ass that I get up to this kind of behavior all the time? I said an audible “sorry”, he said nothing, and we carried on down Ferozepur road. The first time I flew onto a rider’s back with all my breasts, I didn't say anything. It felt like nothing would have sufficed for the moment; the line had been crossed so egregiously that the line just had to be treated like a construct. My breasts have bumped into 3 other riders since; nobody says anything and things carry on. The only kind of unremarkable physical contact is when I accidentally headbump my rider and our helmets go pop. *** My helmet is to me what I imagine a Garmin sportswatch is to a sando-wearing gymbro. I fawn over her, I’m always waiting for someone to notice her and ask me about her so I can show her off, and I'm never lax about wearing her which most riders will compliment in a mildly surprised tone as if a prudent female rider defies some expectation. Except for that one rider who seemed to be slightly bothered by it: ‘ Aap nay kyun helmet pehni hui hay?’ (‘why are you wearing a helmet?’), he asked as we rode out from my workplace. I paused. The inflection on you was provocative. He was waiting for my response. I’d had yet another brain-melting day at work, and was thinking about keeping my knees pressed into the sides of the bike for the duration that we would be zigzagging through post-work gridlocks; I wanted quiet, not whatever this question was. I shot back: why do you wear a helmet? And he went: but I asked you. We did maybe one more round of that and then I snapped at him with an unkind lesson on the physics of flying through the air after a car collision and becoming jam on the road. He didn’t respond and we rode in silence. That was one of only two cantankerous rides I’ve had in over 300+. I realised the helmet doesn't factor as a safeguard against death for most bikers; like the seatbelt, it’s an annoying imposition, yet another tool available to the state to squeeze fines out of ordinary citizens. I, on the other hand, am very serious about dodging death by drunk drivers / underage boys / underslept drivers of public transport / rich people in their SUV’s and pick-up trucks who think traffic lights are for pussies. In June 2024, I went looking for a death-defying helmet in Bohri Bazaar, Karachi, after consulting with my friend who rides his heavy bike (a cruiser) around Karachi (bold). It was a small store, shelves top to bottom packed with helmets and other riding gear. After some research, I decided that I wanted a full face (chin protection) flip-helmet (raiseable face shield) with a second, smaller visor inside, tinted to protect against the sun. It also absolutely had to look cool. The ones that were most popular (‘jo sab say ziada running main hain…’) according to the store owner all had snakes and skulls graffited on them in colours that gave ‘energy drink’. Ideally, I would have liked a helmet with something whimsical painted on it, like a rock nestled in a forest that hadn’t moved in three thousand years. But I settled for a matte grey-black with red streaks that curved around from the back, a faint skull at the very top, and some raptor-esque graffiti on the sides. She was a thick girl (useful for my bigger-than-average head size and even bigger hair), with detachable inner padding and a neat little flip switch above my right ear to flick the tinted visor down. I’ve stared many an MP (military police) in the eye as I flipped that switch and rode off away from their smug little checkposts and it has felt cool every time. In spite of my helmet, I’ve spent much of my commute time considering death and its cousin, paralysis, with only a brief respite in between. It was January 2025, and the city was launching a (sadly short-lived) pilot project: a designated “bike lane”. One day, there were laborers painting the left strip of Ferozepur Road green going down several kilometers. They did this for a couple weeks till a spell of light rain washed all the green away (along with allegedly 110 million rupees for the locally produced paint, supposedly a cost-effective substitute for the imported variety, as per a local news channel). A week later, some parts of the stretch got a fresh coat of paint and a barricade went up, cutting off the bike lane from the rest of the road. For a while, vehicles tried to navigate the nightmarish crisscross of entry and exit points to the lane. It was chaotic, but once inside the lane, my heart rate would be noticeably lower. It was on Ferozepur road going down this bike lane that I first noticed them. *** They were riding outside the barricade on the main road, 50 meters ahead. I noticed the pillion rider’s arms first: they were encircling the rider and…it wasn’t a loose grip. Then: her riding astride, black hair in a braid that came down to her shoulder blades, and finally: she was leaning into the hug, her whole body pressed up against the rider and her chin was resting on the rider’s right shoulder. There was something so immediately unfamiliar about this posture–it felt like it was maybe 3 moves shy from kissing in public. Luckily, a flyover was approaching; my rider slid onto the main lane to go up the bridge and suddenly I was riding parallel to the Chin and the Shoulder, and the Shoulder was attached to a head with cropped hair and pointy ends and the head was tilted sideways toward the Chin–eyes still pinned to the road in front–and Chin’s nose would periodically brush against the rider’s cheek. The rider had a loose zipper jacket on, sleeves pulled up to the elbows, 3 thin bands on her (gasp!) right wrist. She was saying something maybe wicked, maybe jovial, because both the heads were low and the mouths pulled up into smiles. Suddenly, she flicked her eyes from the road onto me riding to her right. She couldn’t have known I was also a woman because of my generously concealing helmet, and she didn’t pause to do the usual check I get subjected to by other riders on the road: hands, then breasts. And even if she did know, I had a feeling she would’ve still been annoyed at how keenly I was taking the two of them in. She revved her engine and rode off, her CD70 zigzagging between cars, leaving me feeling exhilarated because my secret hypothesis seemed to have had its first positive testing. It was April of 2025 and by that time, young girls on e-bikes had become–sorry, give me a second, it still feels unreal to say this–common around all parts of Lahore. It happened steadily: one month it was one girl on her e-bike jostling for her place on the road in early morning traffic. The next month there were 6. And somehow, it broke through whatever ceiling had stalled previous “women friendly” transportation initiatives: ”pink” rickshaws, “pink” buses, women-only ride-hailing apps. At first, it was just young girls headed to school or work; a few months later, the middle-aged women who work as house help in the gated community where I live, the ones who would make the morning walk to their respective houses every day, were now riding into the community on e-bikes. Picture it: thick-set women in their printed shalwar kameez riding astride in two’s, taking their own damn selves to work. I was afraid to point it out to anyone lest I jinxed it. Quietly, I placed a bet against, well, patriarchy: the excess of women on e-bikes was going to stir another kraken: the CD70, the reigning bike model in Pakistan for many decades, would betray its male overlords and turn out to, in fact, be quite maneuverable in the hands of women. Like Chin and Shoulder. In that way, 2025, which was otherwise miserly, gifted me a score of utterly new silhouettes to devour everyday: the girl riding down Sherpao into the setting sun with her billowing abaya making her look straight up Batmanesque; the mother taking her son for an evening ride on a pleasant April day, riding at a leisurely pace; two girls lounging on a bench in a small park, their e-bike parked next to them. Something fundamental seems to be shifting in the working and social lives of women in Lahore, and on many days I sit quaking with anticipation about all its possibilities. I imagine this is how our boomer parents felt about the arrival of the internet. *** As giant a stride as that is, I have to remind myself to be patient when it comes to what bike-riding women will be allowed to / will allow themselves to wear as they step out in this new, knife-like way. For anyone who has been disturbed by the sighting of all these newly “out” girls on their e-bikes, it must be reassuring to know that almost all of them are in abayas. And I suppose it has to be that way if we are to be collectively eased into this new age with minimal harm. I was stupidly dismissive of this when I started pillion riding, though not out of any principled defiance. It was May 2024, and we were hurtling toward a heat wave (hitting a record high of 44.5 degrees celsius that June). Not burning my skin off on the 40-minute 9:20 am ride would entail layering over my short-sleeved work clothes. A friend with moderately high survivalist tendencies gave me a windbreaker: a steal from Daraz, grey, light as a feather. Even so, the thought of double layering in Lahore’s May was unbearable. So May through June, I rode on the streets of my city with nothing but my bra under my kind-of-see-through windbreaker, rolling up my day shirt in my bag to wear when I got to the office. I figured my backpack would cover most of my back, along with any evidence of a bra-strap. The front was trickier, but there was always the slouchy shoulders trick, a tried and tested method to diminish the appearance and therefore possibility of breasts. The only problem was that I kept having visions of being thrown off my bike because of a drunk driver, followed by my flimsy wind-breaker ripping and me lying on a public street in my bra. Terrifying. By the time summer of 2025 rolled around, I was prepared: a series of black-as-night sleeveless chemises, waist-length, made of the thinnest cotton by the family tailor, Ramzan sahab, as light as the windbreaker that would go on top. *** Along the way, there have been the usual reminders that God dislikes a self-assured planner. There was that one (and only) time that I walked out of my building with my usual confidence and was told bluntly by the rider that he couldn’t take me (“sorry ma’am, main ladies ko nahi leta”) which, essentially, was him refusing me permission to get on his bike. Maybe his own personal discomfort, maybe a promise made to his wife–either way, fair. Only twice have I been prompted to consider fates worse than death and paralysis. Turns out that a healthy 40 percent of riders consider running out of petrol somewhere out on the road a low-stake problem needing attention only after the fact. One night, I had just finished dinner with a group of friends in DHA Phase 5, an upscale area by all standards. It was past midnight, so not ideal, but I calculated that the route back to my house would skirt through patrolled parts of the city, so not too bad either. About 4 minutes into the ride, the bike began sputtering with low fuel, and my rider veered to the left, parked, got off and started walking across the road to a petrol station 100m down, leaving me in a darkened spot of the street, sitting on a vehicle I had no knowledge of how to use. Peeved, I scampered after him and waited at the well-lit and peopled station while he went back across the road to his bike with a pitcher of fuel. When we got back on the road, I discreetly leaned over to see who and what he was messaging, and noticed that his wallpaper was him with a big grin and a rifle in his hand. When he asked me if I was studying in college, I made him drop me off at an approaching mall. The second time, we were travelling late afternoon on a service lane that runs parallel to the Ring Road highway around the outer part of the city. The bike sputtered, but this time, the closest pump was at least 1.5 kilometers away. These words were barely out of my mouth when my rider, a 50-something man with a bright orange beard, told me to hang tight and rode off and out of sight. I stood at the side of the highway – maroon suede shirt, top three buttons open, heeled boots, grey flared pants, bronze bangles and a helmet on my head – and waited in stunned silence. Every passing person on bike or rickshaw or car gawked at the sight of this strange helmeted creature who seemed to be standing beside a highway without much of a plan. I considered someone snatching my bag, snatching the whole of me, or getting frisky as they drove past. I waited with a mini blade tucked in my knuckle (thank you again, survivalist friend). It was a tense 10 minutes, but then I spotted my rider–big flashy mehndi beard–speeding back to get me. *** My first ever ride was probably the nicest one I’ve had in these two years. I approached it as an experiment to see if pillion riding was going to solve either one of the two pressing problems of my life at the time (more on this too, I promise). It was noon on a Sunday which meant fewer people on the roads. That increased my chances of getting a serious-minded uncle kind of a rider instead of a flamboyant youngster because he would likely be sleeping in on a Sunday. Moreover, it was an intentionally short ride (8 km) into the cantonment area (hello military police everywhere). Sure enough, my rider was a mid-40’s uncle with a greying beard and he rode me uneventfully to my destination. It cost me RS 110. When I got off I felt compelled to tell him he’d made me feel very safe. He seemed slightly surprised at receiving this compliment at 12:17 pm on a Sunday, but accepted it nonetheless. He rode off and I stood there with a growing sense that riding around the city was going to save me from me. At the time, without any prior notice, I had embarked on my first pilgrimage to rage. Before, rage and I had been wary acquaintances; she would hang around my circle a lot but I knew better than to trust her. By 2024, I was beginning my mornings with her and taking her to bed every night. I was convinced she was funnier and cleverer than anyone else, and I let her regale me with tales about how obnoxious and insufferable and disappointing everyone truly was: women, men, children, siblings, mentors, friends, colleagues, neighbours, strangers, everyone . During rare moments of clarity, I wanted more than anything to be freed of her, freed of the pinball machine that was my mind and its most sulphuric thoughts, and it turns out that heat on the roads can do that for you, specifically heat that bounces off asphalt as you wait at a 30-second traffic light on a 39°C morning. Something else that can do that for you is touching treetops as you go down fly-overs, which I do every time I’m taking Jinnah toward Firdous Market or Sherpao toward Jail Road. Little clusters of trees spill over the parapet walls on both routes, and something about having a brief unscheduled encounter with the very top of a tree short-circuits my nervous system. These daily offerings of my rides back home–fleeting, mystifying, unexpected, primordial–peeled the rage off slowly. Like the sight of an uncle crying behind the wheel of his car as he drove down Kasur, a tissue pressed to his eyes; auburn February sunsets that cut me down to size; the masculine urge to shake the head at anything inconvenient: missing a green light, jumpy pedestrians, the petrol finishing, a surprise speedbreaker; leaning in to have shouty conversations over wind and horns with men you were probably only going to meet once in your life about living in this wondrous city and seeing it be asphyxiated by smog, by 100-legged billboards, rental prices, the military, housing societies and megaprojects. My other life-problem was a lot simpler in comparison: pillion riding kept me from going broke for the third time in 2 years. My life had experienced seismic shifts during Covid’s debut year of 2020. Before, I had had unobstructed access to someone else’s Honda City, and I had driven it all over Lahore at all kinds of hours. In 2021, I moved into a house where the cars (multiple) came with multiple conditions. I could drive the older manual Honda Civic Reborn (a glorious model) but not the newer Toyota Aqua even though it was smaller and automatic (so more “female-friendly” as per man-logic) but that too only during daylight hours and for certain stretches of time. By the end of 2023, I was living on my own, chest deep in bills and groceries and with the acute sense that the city I had been living in for 14 years had become unaffordable. I couldn’t even take myself to work on a hailed car everyday, let alone to restaurants or shops that I used to frequent. It took some time, but once I accepted that I was indeed poorer in my 30’s than I’d been in my 20’s—not the favoured trajectory—I found myself calling my first bike that Sunday afternoon. Another 20 or so uneventful rides later, somewhere on Canal Road, the heat like a whip cracking open the synapses in my brain is when suddenly: what if all these women riding behind these men on the Canal aren’t all wives and mothers and daughters and sisters? What if I’m not the only stranger-danger-woman impinging on this equilibrium of public order and decency? And sure enough, when I really looked, I saw that some of the women whizzing past me on the Canal also sat as far as possible on the other end of the seat with their arms folded away from the man transporting them. Then I noticed two women getting off around a commercial area and handing money over to the rider. In the end, rather embarrassingly, I had to admit to myself that of course I was not one in a handful of women in this sprawling city who were compelled by necessity to hail bikes for their commute and of course women did it every single day given how affordable and fast it was. Really the only oddity about me doing it was that I presented as somebody who would have some other means. Which makes for the usual confusion on the faces of the military police stalking the 10 or so checkposts that surround the cantonment area (‘cantt’) where I usually find myself. Their job in some ways is to complicate the entry of 1) non-rich looking people 2) non-Punjabi looking people 3) non-Pakistani looking people into Cantt. In that regard, I am a bit of a headache in that I am not 1) ( phew because critical security priority) but I am 2) and 3). In fact, popular opinion suggests that I can comfortably be confused for Turkish/Lebanese/Iranian/Greek. So as I approach the checkpost, riders ahead and behind taking off their helmets so their faces can be recorded by the Go-Pro’s hanging off the neck of every MP (I keep mine on, only pushing the face shield up), I see consternation tense the face of the MP. He clocks first the clothes, then the legs parted in a straddle, then the (always) painted lips. He can’t help but puff up as he steps toward me–he’s about to strike down the stealthy advance of a foreign woman into a securitized zone of the city. I disarm him a little by asking curtly, jee bhai, kia chahiye? (yes, what do you want?). He falters briefly at the comfortable Urdu and the tone, gathers himself up again, and demands my ID card. This is good because I have it ready in a zipper pocket and I get to pull it out, hand it over and watch his face fall as he realises today is not the day he gets to intercept a foreign conspiracy. What I hate is when they don’t ask for the ID card and instead order me to get my entry “logged”. Getting myself logged in the system means parking 50m ahead beside a cabin and coming face to face with the “Lady Searcher” (as advertised in big lettering on the outside of the cabin, which, if one considers the tradition of military parlance, is surprisingly lyrical, almost poetic: ~ lady searcher ~ ). She’s usually in an abaya, and has been sitting in that cramped cabin over, no doubt, a long shift with no view and no company and no Go-Pro or other fancy tech to deploy either; just an old register with lined columns in which she has to enter data by hand . I sympathise, I do. And I really would rather confront the villain than the stooge, especially since something about being expertly surveilled by a woman is extremely unsettling. The Lady Searcher always looks at me like I’m the whorish offspring of disreputable people. She’ll bark at me to take my helmet off and we’re off to a very bad start. I’ve tried different approaches—doubling down, impudence, shaming, humour—she does not back down. She is very bad for my rage, I’ve realised, so now I try and limit my exposure to her. I go into the cabin and promptly answer all her questions about where I’ve come from and where I was born and where I’m going and why I’m going where I’m going. *** I really thought that unless I pursued some bucket-list calibre things—requiring at the very least money and a new destination—I wouldn’t be unlocking any truly new experience in my 30’s; new like the unique thrill of the absolutely unfamiliar felt explosively at a cellular level. I certainly did not think it was going to happen on a narrow street in a cramped junction nestled under the Sherpao flyover. This street is the preferred alternative route for some riders because it snakes under busier parts of town. It is lined with motels and food joints—burger and shawarma, biryani and pulao, mithai and bakery, kebab and fish. We, two fools on a bike, were attempting to cross the 250m stretch five minutes before iftar. Crowds thronged food stalls on either side, buying snacks to break their fast, men hung about in two’s and three’s, listening for the azaan, hawkers shouted and flailed their arms trying to entrap customers, people scurried back home to break their fast. I instructed my body to brace for some swift dodging of stares and limbs as we approached the throng, forgetting that it was still winter and my body was hidden under layers of clothing including a puffer jacket, and my hair was still cropped and entirely hidden under my helmet. The first man that I passed by on that street must have stood not a foot away from me. He was holding a menu in his hand, and was looking over my head, his eyes fixed on customers across the road. The next was a man who was rushing across the street, his arm outstretched as he yelled something at someone. It began to dawn on me that we had all gone off-script; this wasn’t how crammed public spaces worked. I cast my eyes around hurriedly trying to catch at least one man looking my way, but it was as if I was a blurry detail, a thing to be cropped out. And–the truly new new–while my mind had needed to ascertain all this, my body had arrived at it much earlier. It hadn’t actually braced for anything at all even after I had instructed it to, not a muscle tensed in the knowledge that we were approaching male bodies in various states of frenzy and languor, not even with the awareness that nobody was bothering to create a “respectable” distance between us as we crossed. It was precisely because of this, because my body was a non-event, that our proximity was a perfectly neutral, luminously new sensation. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Lahore 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. 25th Mar 2026 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:

Two years ago, short on money and hungry for something new, Rasti Farooq started pillion riding through Lahore. What began as a practical choice became an intimate, disorienting encounter with the city, and with herself. Here’s everything you would note about everything if you went around your city on a bike. Two years ago, short on money and hungry for something new, Rasti Farooq started pillion riding through Lahore. What began as a practical choice became an intimate, disorienting encounter with the city, and with herself. Here’s everything you would note about everything if you went around your city on a bike. "Ode To History" (2024), gouache on paper, 21 x 28 inches, courtesy of Khadijah Rehman. Artist Lahore Rasti Farooq 25 Mar 2026 th · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION On Smelling Men’s Hair & Other Lessons in Impropriety Since 2024, I’ve smelled more men’s hair than I ever signed up for. It would be untrue to say that I never signed up to smell anyone’s hair, because I certainly have. But only women’s hair and specifically silky hair. I have walked behind and past many a straight-haired girl, and been slapped in the face with that fruity post-shower waft. I wanted it. But I could never have it, because the usual department store shampoos that boast that signature scent are not designed for the likes of me, with my type 3C (very curly) hair. Having said that, I have never been even vaguely curious about men’s hair, mostly because men’s scalp hygiene is poorer than women’s on average. Shampooing just doesn’t seem to figure the same way in their lives. All this unfortunate oversharing to underscore that the smelling of men’s hair was entirely involuntary. I’m just: 1) seated very close to men, 2) seated very close behind them, 3) we are moving through space at about 30-40 kmph because we are on 4) a motorbike 5) which means a trusty bit of wind combined with 6) the fact that riders have to take off their helmets when passing through the smattering of military checkpoints around Lahore, (they also get taken off during the ride because most will only wear them to hoodwink traffic police officers and then proceed to dangle them off the bike handle the rest of the time). The physics of this dynamic means that the wind in their hair whips my pillion-riding face, and that’s how I know that most men’s hair smells sebum-y. But every 18th ride or so, that coveted fruity shampoo smell makes a surprise appearance. In those moments, I would take lung-fulls of that fragrant air because it calmed my nervous system (a need I had at that time, more on this in a bit). One day, I caught myself mid-exhale: how would this rider feel if he got wind (!) of this involuntary intimacy? It felt a bit like an Uno Reverse situation of the impropriety lesson I got from my mother growing up: she would spritz her perfume once on her palm, dab the tip of her forefinger into the droplets in her hand, and then press the tip lightly on a single point on either side of her neck. Your perfume was for you to smell, she would remind me, never unknown men. But here I was, an unknown woman, smelling men’s various bodily scents on the daily. In truth, I’ve spent a great deal of my commute on motorbikes considering impropriety. Pillion riding was new to my life in 2024. I was 31, used to waking up every morning, dressing to my heart's desire and, with tempered confidence, stepping out the door into what was a well-studied yet inscrutable world. But now , new contingencies demanded an updated protocol: I felt that my very conspicuously dressed “up” body may as well be a sharp knife slicing through public space in the early morning hours, cleaving the worlds of everyone it encountered into halves as I covered the 18 kilometers from home to work every day. It sounds overly dramatic now, but at the time, those misgivings felt reasonable. My Virgo temperament was keen to approach this problem systematically. I mapped out variables, cycled through undesirable scenarios, considered several tactical approaches, and eventually devised a near-perfect SOP. When the rider accepts your ride on the app and calls you to confirm your pick-up location, it is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate with your voice that you are female, a fact they may not necessarily pick up on by your profile name alone (not “Rasti” but “Jehan”, as in your friend whose name you borrowed for this app 3 years ago, after a government ban on a film you acted in turned things dicey, personal security wise). For extra measure, you turn up the girly in your voice. Some do a double take, others don't break a sweat. The next potentially tense moment arrives when you walk out of your building and your rider takes in the sight of Jehan: you’re usually in pants/jeans, rings on your fingers, bangles and distracting shoes, your helmet dangling from your hand. You avoid sleeveless tops entirely now because two attempts of riding with bare arms down Lahori streets have resulted in considerable vexation on the faces of fellow riders (and other pillion riding women), not evidenced with, say, a calf (sometimes you think maybe it is true what your friend’s mother once said in her case against the sleeveless: something potently sensual about the curve of the shoulder, entirely absent in a calf and unmatched by the curve of a knee). You’re approaching your rider now, and you make sure to put on your business-as-usual face because it is important to set the rider at ease: this is not a hapless girl attempting this for the first time and no, she most certainly will not fall off the bike and no sir, this is not her papa’s borrowed helmet. You say salam, throw your helmet on your head and your right leg over the seat. At this leg-throwing junction–confirming that you will indeed be riding astride and not modestly sidesaddle like most women do–you’re aware of some mild tensing, which is sometimes just curiosity, sometimes some caution. You let it pass and grab on tight to the U-shaped silver rail behind you that juts out over the rear light. This is a failsafe strategy to avoid contact and avoiding contact is absolutely imperative for everyone’s sake, nevermind that the repetitive gripping may have gifted you your new elbow joint dysfunction. By this point, some riders slide onto the petrol tank to widen the gap between their hips and your crotch. But sometimes they don’t, and that’s okay too because you’re pretty good at squeezing yourself between the rider and the U-rail. All in all, you’re a confident pillion rider except for when that silver rail is missing, which it is on some bikes, in which case you try and clutch on to the sides of the seat in front of you but the grip isn’t as secure and you can’t stop yourself from lurching forwards. The missing U-rail is not even how I ended up accidentally touching my rider for the first time. I was making what I thought was a small, harmless adjustment on the seat, but by the end of it I had poked my rider in his left buttock with my thumb. I held my breath. My first thought: how to not make him think that just because I'm in excessively flared, sort-of see-through pants with a linen button-down that won’t even cover my ass that I get up to this kind of behavior all the time? I said an audible “sorry”, he said nothing, and we carried on down Ferozepur road. The first time I flew onto a rider’s back with all my breasts, I didn't say anything. It felt like nothing would have sufficed for the moment; the line had been crossed so egregiously that the line just had to be treated like a construct. My breasts have bumped into 3 other riders since; nobody says anything and things carry on. The only kind of unremarkable physical contact is when I accidentally headbump my rider and our helmets go pop. *** My helmet is to me what I imagine a Garmin sportswatch is to a sando-wearing gymbro. I fawn over her, I’m always waiting for someone to notice her and ask me about her so I can show her off, and I'm never lax about wearing her which most riders will compliment in a mildly surprised tone as if a prudent female rider defies some expectation. Except for that one rider who seemed to be slightly bothered by it: ‘ Aap nay kyun helmet pehni hui hay?’ (‘why are you wearing a helmet?’), he asked as we rode out from my workplace. I paused. The inflection on you was provocative. He was waiting for my response. I’d had yet another brain-melting day at work, and was thinking about keeping my knees pressed into the sides of the bike for the duration that we would be zigzagging through post-work gridlocks; I wanted quiet, not whatever this question was. I shot back: why do you wear a helmet? And he went: but I asked you. We did maybe one more round of that and then I snapped at him with an unkind lesson on the physics of flying through the air after a car collision and becoming jam on the road. He didn’t respond and we rode in silence. That was one of only two cantankerous rides I’ve had in over 300+. I realised the helmet doesn't factor as a safeguard against death for most bikers; like the seatbelt, it’s an annoying imposition, yet another tool available to the state to squeeze fines out of ordinary citizens. I, on the other hand, am very serious about dodging death by drunk drivers / underage boys / underslept drivers of public transport / rich people in their SUV’s and pick-up trucks who think traffic lights are for pussies. In June 2024, I went looking for a death-defying helmet in Bohri Bazaar, Karachi, after consulting with my friend who rides his heavy bike (a cruiser) around Karachi (bold). It was a small store, shelves top to bottom packed with helmets and other riding gear. After some research, I decided that I wanted a full face (chin protection) flip-helmet (raiseable face shield) with a second, smaller visor inside, tinted to protect against the sun. It also absolutely had to look cool. The ones that were most popular (‘jo sab say ziada running main hain…’) according to the store owner all had snakes and skulls graffited on them in colours that gave ‘energy drink’. Ideally, I would have liked a helmet with something whimsical painted on it, like a rock nestled in a forest that hadn’t moved in three thousand years. But I settled for a matte grey-black with red streaks that curved around from the back, a faint skull at the very top, and some raptor-esque graffiti on the sides. She was a thick girl (useful for my bigger-than-average head size and even bigger hair), with detachable inner padding and a neat little flip switch above my right ear to flick the tinted visor down. I’ve stared many an MP (military police) in the eye as I flipped that switch and rode off away from their smug little checkposts and it has felt cool every time. In spite of my helmet, I’ve spent much of my commute time considering death and its cousin, paralysis, with only a brief respite in between. It was January 2025, and the city was launching a (sadly short-lived) pilot project: a designated “bike lane”. One day, there were laborers painting the left strip of Ferozepur Road green going down several kilometers. They did this for a couple weeks till a spell of light rain washed all the green away (along with allegedly 110 million rupees for the locally produced paint, supposedly a cost-effective substitute for the imported variety, as per a local news channel). A week later, some parts of the stretch got a fresh coat of paint and a barricade went up, cutting off the bike lane from the rest of the road. For a while, vehicles tried to navigate the nightmarish crisscross of entry and exit points to the lane. It was chaotic, but once inside the lane, my heart rate would be noticeably lower. It was on Ferozepur road going down this bike lane that I first noticed them. *** They were riding outside the barricade on the main road, 50 meters ahead. I noticed the pillion rider’s arms first: they were encircling the rider and…it wasn’t a loose grip. Then: her riding astride, black hair in a braid that came down to her shoulder blades, and finally: she was leaning into the hug, her whole body pressed up against the rider and her chin was resting on the rider’s right shoulder. There was something so immediately unfamiliar about this posture–it felt like it was maybe 3 moves shy from kissing in public. Luckily, a flyover was approaching; my rider slid onto the main lane to go up the bridge and suddenly I was riding parallel to the Chin and the Shoulder, and the Shoulder was attached to a head with cropped hair and pointy ends and the head was tilted sideways toward the Chin–eyes still pinned to the road in front–and Chin’s nose would periodically brush against the rider’s cheek. The rider had a loose zipper jacket on, sleeves pulled up to the elbows, 3 thin bands on her (gasp!) right wrist. She was saying something maybe wicked, maybe jovial, because both the heads were low and the mouths pulled up into smiles. Suddenly, she flicked her eyes from the road onto me riding to her right. She couldn’t have known I was also a woman because of my generously concealing helmet, and she didn’t pause to do the usual check I get subjected to by other riders on the road: hands, then breasts. And even if she did know, I had a feeling she would’ve still been annoyed at how keenly I was taking the two of them in. She revved her engine and rode off, her CD70 zigzagging between cars, leaving me feeling exhilarated because my secret hypothesis seemed to have had its first positive testing. It was April of 2025 and by that time, young girls on e-bikes had become–sorry, give me a second, it still feels unreal to say this–common around all parts of Lahore. It happened steadily: one month it was one girl on her e-bike jostling for her place on the road in early morning traffic. The next month there were 6. And somehow, it broke through whatever ceiling had stalled previous “women friendly” transportation initiatives: ”pink” rickshaws, “pink” buses, women-only ride-hailing apps. At first, it was just young girls headed to school or work; a few months later, the middle-aged women who work as house help in the gated community where I live, the ones who would make the morning walk to their respective houses every day, were now riding into the community on e-bikes. Picture it: thick-set women in their printed shalwar kameez riding astride in two’s, taking their own damn selves to work. I was afraid to point it out to anyone lest I jinxed it. Quietly, I placed a bet against, well, patriarchy: the excess of women on e-bikes was going to stir another kraken: the CD70, the reigning bike model in Pakistan for many decades, would betray its male overlords and turn out to, in fact, be quite maneuverable in the hands of women. Like Chin and Shoulder. In that way, 2025, which was otherwise miserly, gifted me a score of utterly new silhouettes to devour everyday: the girl riding down Sherpao into the setting sun with her billowing abaya making her look straight up Batmanesque; the mother taking her son for an evening ride on a pleasant April day, riding at a leisurely pace; two girls lounging on a bench in a small park, their e-bike parked next to them. Something fundamental seems to be shifting in the working and social lives of women in Lahore, and on many days I sit quaking with anticipation about all its possibilities. I imagine this is how our boomer parents felt about the arrival of the internet. *** As giant a stride as that is, I have to remind myself to be patient when it comes to what bike-riding women will be allowed to / will allow themselves to wear as they step out in this new, knife-like way. For anyone who has been disturbed by the sighting of all these newly “out” girls on their e-bikes, it must be reassuring to know that almost all of them are in abayas. And I suppose it has to be that way if we are to be collectively eased into this new age with minimal harm. I was stupidly dismissive of this when I started pillion riding, though not out of any principled defiance. It was May 2024, and we were hurtling toward a heat wave (hitting a record high of 44.5 degrees celsius that June). Not burning my skin off on the 40-minute 9:20 am ride would entail layering over my short-sleeved work clothes. A friend with moderately high survivalist tendencies gave me a windbreaker: a steal from Daraz, grey, light as a feather. Even so, the thought of double layering in Lahore’s May was unbearable. So May through June, I rode on the streets of my city with nothing but my bra under my kind-of-see-through windbreaker, rolling up my day shirt in my bag to wear when I got to the office. I figured my backpack would cover most of my back, along with any evidence of a bra-strap. The front was trickier, but there was always the slouchy shoulders trick, a tried and tested method to diminish the appearance and therefore possibility of breasts. The only problem was that I kept having visions of being thrown off my bike because of a drunk driver, followed by my flimsy wind-breaker ripping and me lying on a public street in my bra. Terrifying. By the time summer of 2025 rolled around, I was prepared: a series of black-as-night sleeveless chemises, waist-length, made of the thinnest cotton by the family tailor, Ramzan sahab, as light as the windbreaker that would go on top. *** Along the way, there have been the usual reminders that God dislikes a self-assured planner. There was that one (and only) time that I walked out of my building with my usual confidence and was told bluntly by the rider that he couldn’t take me (“sorry ma’am, main ladies ko nahi leta”) which, essentially, was him refusing me permission to get on his bike. Maybe his own personal discomfort, maybe a promise made to his wife–either way, fair. Only twice have I been prompted to consider fates worse than death and paralysis. Turns out that a healthy 40 percent of riders consider running out of petrol somewhere out on the road a low-stake problem needing attention only after the fact. One night, I had just finished dinner with a group of friends in DHA Phase 5, an upscale area by all standards. It was past midnight, so not ideal, but I calculated that the route back to my house would skirt through patrolled parts of the city, so not too bad either. About 4 minutes into the ride, the bike began sputtering with low fuel, and my rider veered to the left, parked, got off and started walking across the road to a petrol station 100m down, leaving me in a darkened spot of the street, sitting on a vehicle I had no knowledge of how to use. Peeved, I scampered after him and waited at the well-lit and peopled station while he went back across the road to his bike with a pitcher of fuel. When we got back on the road, I discreetly leaned over to see who and what he was messaging, and noticed that his wallpaper was him with a big grin and a rifle in his hand. When he asked me if I was studying in college, I made him drop me off at an approaching mall. The second time, we were travelling late afternoon on a service lane that runs parallel to the Ring Road highway around the outer part of the city. The bike sputtered, but this time, the closest pump was at least 1.5 kilometers away. These words were barely out of my mouth when my rider, a 50-something man with a bright orange beard, told me to hang tight and rode off and out of sight. I stood at the side of the highway – maroon suede shirt, top three buttons open, heeled boots, grey flared pants, bronze bangles and a helmet on my head – and waited in stunned silence. Every passing person on bike or rickshaw or car gawked at the sight of this strange helmeted creature who seemed to be standing beside a highway without much of a plan. I considered someone snatching my bag, snatching the whole of me, or getting frisky as they drove past. I waited with a mini blade tucked in my knuckle (thank you again, survivalist friend). It was a tense 10 minutes, but then I spotted my rider–big flashy mehndi beard–speeding back to get me. *** My first ever ride was probably the nicest one I’ve had in these two years. I approached it as an experiment to see if pillion riding was going to solve either one of the two pressing problems of my life at the time (more on this too, I promise). It was noon on a Sunday which meant fewer people on the roads. That increased my chances of getting a serious-minded uncle kind of a rider instead of a flamboyant youngster because he would likely be sleeping in on a Sunday. Moreover, it was an intentionally short ride (8 km) into the cantonment area (hello military police everywhere). Sure enough, my rider was a mid-40’s uncle with a greying beard and he rode me uneventfully to my destination. It cost me RS 110. When I got off I felt compelled to tell him he’d made me feel very safe. He seemed slightly surprised at receiving this compliment at 12:17 pm on a Sunday, but accepted it nonetheless. He rode off and I stood there with a growing sense that riding around the city was going to save me from me. At the time, without any prior notice, I had embarked on my first pilgrimage to rage. Before, rage and I had been wary acquaintances; she would hang around my circle a lot but I knew better than to trust her. By 2024, I was beginning my mornings with her and taking her to bed every night. I was convinced she was funnier and cleverer than anyone else, and I let her regale me with tales about how obnoxious and insufferable and disappointing everyone truly was: women, men, children, siblings, mentors, friends, colleagues, neighbours, strangers, everyone . During rare moments of clarity, I wanted more than anything to be freed of her, freed of the pinball machine that was my mind and its most sulphuric thoughts, and it turns out that heat on the roads can do that for you, specifically heat that bounces off asphalt as you wait at a 30-second traffic light on a 39°C morning. Something else that can do that for you is touching treetops as you go down fly-overs, which I do every time I’m taking Jinnah toward Firdous Market or Sherpao toward Jail Road. Little clusters of trees spill over the parapet walls on both routes, and something about having a brief unscheduled encounter with the very top of a tree short-circuits my nervous system. These daily offerings of my rides back home–fleeting, mystifying, unexpected, primordial–peeled the rage off slowly. Like the sight of an uncle crying behind the wheel of his car as he drove down Kasur, a tissue pressed to his eyes; auburn February sunsets that cut me down to size; the masculine urge to shake the head at anything inconvenient: missing a green light, jumpy pedestrians, the petrol finishing, a surprise speedbreaker; leaning in to have shouty conversations over wind and horns with men you were probably only going to meet once in your life about living in this wondrous city and seeing it be asphyxiated by smog, by 100-legged billboards, rental prices, the military, housing societies and megaprojects. My other life-problem was a lot simpler in comparison: pillion riding kept me from going broke for the third time in 2 years. My life had experienced seismic shifts during Covid’s debut year of 2020. Before, I had had unobstructed access to someone else’s Honda City, and I had driven it all over Lahore at all kinds of hours. In 2021, I moved into a house where the cars (multiple) came with multiple conditions. I could drive the older manual Honda Civic Reborn (a glorious model) but not the newer Toyota Aqua even though it was smaller and automatic (so more “female-friendly” as per man-logic) but that too only during daylight hours and for certain stretches of time. By the end of 2023, I was living on my own, chest deep in bills and groceries and with the acute sense that the city I had been living in for 14 years had become unaffordable. I couldn’t even take myself to work on a hailed car everyday, let alone to restaurants or shops that I used to frequent. It took some time, but once I accepted that I was indeed poorer in my 30’s than I’d been in my 20’s—not the favoured trajectory—I found myself calling my first bike that Sunday afternoon. Another 20 or so uneventful rides later, somewhere on Canal Road, the heat like a whip cracking open the synapses in my brain is when suddenly: what if all these women riding behind these men on the Canal aren’t all wives and mothers and daughters and sisters? What if I’m not the only stranger-danger-woman impinging on this equilibrium of public order and decency? And sure enough, when I really looked, I saw that some of the women whizzing past me on the Canal also sat as far as possible on the other end of the seat with their arms folded away from the man transporting them. Then I noticed two women getting off around a commercial area and handing money over to the rider. In the end, rather embarrassingly, I had to admit to myself that of course I was not one in a handful of women in this sprawling city who were compelled by necessity to hail bikes for their commute and of course women did it every single day given how affordable and fast it was. Really the only oddity about me doing it was that I presented as somebody who would have some other means. Which makes for the usual confusion on the faces of the military police stalking the 10 or so checkposts that surround the cantonment area (‘cantt’) where I usually find myself. Their job in some ways is to complicate the entry of 1) non-rich looking people 2) non-Punjabi looking people 3) non-Pakistani looking people into Cantt. In that regard, I am a bit of a headache in that I am not 1) ( phew because critical security priority) but I am 2) and 3). In fact, popular opinion suggests that I can comfortably be confused for Turkish/Lebanese/Iranian/Greek. So as I approach the checkpost, riders ahead and behind taking off their helmets so their faces can be recorded by the Go-Pro’s hanging off the neck of every MP (I keep mine on, only pushing the face shield up), I see consternation tense the face of the MP. He clocks first the clothes, then the legs parted in a straddle, then the (always) painted lips. He can’t help but puff up as he steps toward me–he’s about to strike down the stealthy advance of a foreign woman into a securitized zone of the city. I disarm him a little by asking curtly, jee bhai, kia chahiye? (yes, what do you want?). He falters briefly at the comfortable Urdu and the tone, gathers himself up again, and demands my ID card. This is good because I have it ready in a zipper pocket and I get to pull it out, hand it over and watch his face fall as he realises today is not the day he gets to intercept a foreign conspiracy. What I hate is when they don’t ask for the ID card and instead order me to get my entry “logged”. Getting myself logged in the system means parking 50m ahead beside a cabin and coming face to face with the “Lady Searcher” (as advertised in big lettering on the outside of the cabin, which, if one considers the tradition of military parlance, is surprisingly lyrical, almost poetic: ~ lady searcher ~ ). She’s usually in an abaya, and has been sitting in that cramped cabin over, no doubt, a long shift with no view and no company and no Go-Pro or other fancy tech to deploy either; just an old register with lined columns in which she has to enter data by hand . I sympathise, I do. And I really would rather confront the villain than the stooge, especially since something about being expertly surveilled by a woman is extremely unsettling. The Lady Searcher always looks at me like I’m the whorish offspring of disreputable people. She’ll bark at me to take my helmet off and we’re off to a very bad start. I’ve tried different approaches—doubling down, impudence, shaming, humour—she does not back down. She is very bad for my rage, I’ve realised, so now I try and limit my exposure to her. I go into the cabin and promptly answer all her questions about where I’ve come from and where I was born and where I’m going and why I’m going where I’m going. *** I really thought that unless I pursued some bucket-list calibre things—requiring at the very least money and a new destination—I wouldn’t be unlocking any truly new experience in my 30’s; new like the unique thrill of the absolutely unfamiliar felt explosively at a cellular level. I certainly did not think it was going to happen on a narrow street in a cramped junction nestled under the Sherpao flyover. This street is the preferred alternative route for some riders because it snakes under busier parts of town. It is lined with motels and food joints—burger and shawarma, biryani and pulao, mithai and bakery, kebab and fish. We, two fools on a bike, were attempting to cross the 250m stretch five minutes before iftar. Crowds thronged food stalls on either side, buying snacks to break their fast, men hung about in two’s and three’s, listening for the azaan, hawkers shouted and flailed their arms trying to entrap customers, people scurried back home to break their fast. I instructed my body to brace for some swift dodging of stares and limbs as we approached the throng, forgetting that it was still winter and my body was hidden under layers of clothing including a puffer jacket, and my hair was still cropped and entirely hidden under my helmet. The first man that I passed by on that street must have stood not a foot away from me. He was holding a menu in his hand, and was looking over my head, his eyes fixed on customers across the road. The next was a man who was rushing across the street, his arm outstretched as he yelled something at someone. It began to dawn on me that we had all gone off-script; this wasn’t how crammed public spaces worked. I cast my eyes around hurriedly trying to catch at least one man looking my way, but it was as if I was a blurry detail, a thing to be cropped out. And–the truly new new–while my mind had needed to ascertain all this, my body had arrived at it much earlier. It hadn’t actually braced for anything at all even after I had instructed it to, not a muscle tensed in the knowledge that we were approaching male bodies in various states of frenzy and languor, not even with the awareness that nobody was bothering to create a “respectable” distance between us as we crossed. It was precisely because of this, because my body was a non-event, that our proximity was a perfectly neutral, luminously new sensation. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 RASTI FAROOQ is a writer, actor and producer from Lahore, who, having worked with Lahore's pioneering animation studio Puffball for 8 years, is now adrift as a freelance creative. You can find her in the film Joyland playing Mumtaz, or in one specific coffee shop around 11 a.m. playing Girl With Book. Essay Lahore 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:

Two years ago, short on money and hungry for something new, Rasti Farooq started pillion riding through Lahore. What began as a practical choice became an intimate, disorienting encounter with the city, and with herself. Here’s everything you would note about everything if you went around your city on a bike. Two years ago, short on money and hungry for something new, Rasti Farooq started pillion riding through Lahore. What began as a practical choice became an intimate, disorienting encounter with the city, and with herself. Here’s everything you would note about everything if you went around your city on a bike. "Ode To History" (2024), gouache on paper, 21 x 28 inches, courtesy of Khadijah Rehman. Artist · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION On Smelling Men’s Hair & Other Lessons in Impropriety LOCATION AUTHOR . AUTHOR . AUTHOR . 25 Mar 2026 th . Letter from our columnist . Since 2024, I’ve smelled more men’s hair than I ever signed up for. It would be untrue to say that I never signed up to smell anyone’s hair, because I certainly have. But only women’s hair and specifically silky hair. I have walked behind and past many a straight-haired girl, and been slapped in the face with that fruity post-shower waft. I wanted it. But I could never have it, because the usual department store shampoos that boast that signature scent are not designed for the likes of me, with my type 3C (very curly) hair. Having said that, I have never been even vaguely curious about men’s hair, mostly because men’s scalp hygiene is poorer than women’s on average. Shampooing just doesn’t seem to figure the same way in their lives. All this unfortunate oversharing to underscore that the smelling of men’s hair was entirely involuntary. I’m just: 1) seated very close to men, 2) seated very close behind them, 3) we are moving through space at about 30-40 kmph because we are on 4) a motorbike 5) which means a trusty bit of wind combined with 6) the fact that riders have to take off their helmets when passing through the smattering of military checkpoints around Lahore, (they also get taken off during the ride because most will only wear them to hoodwink traffic police officers and then proceed to dangle them off the bike handle the rest of the time). The physics of this dynamic means that the wind in their hair whips my pillion-riding face, and that’s how I know that most men’s hair smells sebum-y. But every 18th ride or so, that coveted fruity shampoo smell makes a surprise appearance. In those moments, I would take lung-fulls of that fragrant air because it calmed my nervous system (a need I had at that time, more on this in a bit). One day, I caught myself mid-exhale: how would this rider feel if he got wind (!) of this involuntary intimacy? It felt a bit like an Uno Reverse situation of the impropriety lesson I got from my mother growing up: she would spritz her perfume once on her palm, dab the tip of her forefinger into the droplets in her hand, and then press the tip lightly on a single point on either side of her neck. Your perfume was for you to smell, she would remind me, never unknown men. But here I was, an unknown woman, smelling men’s various bodily scents on the daily. In truth, I’ve spent a great deal of my commute on motorbikes considering impropriety. Pillion riding was new to my life in 2024. I was 31, used to waking up every morning, dressing to my heart's desire and, with tempered confidence, stepping out the door into what was a well-studied yet inscrutable world. But now , new contingencies demanded an updated protocol: I felt that my very conspicuously dressed “up” body may as well be a sharp knife slicing through public space in the early morning hours, cleaving the worlds of everyone it encountered into halves as I covered the 18 kilometers from home to work every day. It sounds overly dramatic now, but at the time, those misgivings felt reasonable. My Virgo temperament was keen to approach this problem systematically. I mapped out variables, cycled through undesirable scenarios, considered several tactical approaches, and eventually devised a near-perfect SOP. When the rider accepts your ride on the app and calls you to confirm your pick-up location, it is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate with your voice that you are female, a fact they may not necessarily pick up on by your profile name alone (not “Rasti” but “Jehan”, as in your friend whose name you borrowed for this app 3 years ago, after a government ban on a film you acted in turned things dicey, personal security wise). For extra measure, you turn up the girly in your voice. Some do a double take, others don't break a sweat. The next potentially tense moment arrives when you walk out of your building and your rider takes in the sight of Jehan: you’re usually in pants/jeans, rings on your fingers, bangles and distracting shoes, your helmet dangling from your hand. You avoid sleeveless tops entirely now because two attempts of riding with bare arms down Lahori streets have resulted in considerable vexation on the faces of fellow riders (and other pillion riding women), not evidenced with, say, a calf (sometimes you think maybe it is true what your friend’s mother once said in her case against the sleeveless: something potently sensual about the curve of the shoulder, entirely absent in a calf and unmatched by the curve of a knee). You’re approaching your rider now, and you make sure to put on your business-as-usual face because it is important to set the rider at ease: this is not a hapless girl attempting this for the first time and no, she most certainly will not fall off the bike and no sir, this is not her papa’s borrowed helmet. You say salam, throw your helmet on your head and your right leg over the seat. At this leg-throwing junction–confirming that you will indeed be riding astride and not modestly sidesaddle like most women do–you’re aware of some mild tensing, which is sometimes just curiosity, sometimes some caution. You let it pass and grab on tight to the U-shaped silver rail behind you that juts out over the rear light. This is a failsafe strategy to avoid contact and avoiding contact is absolutely imperative for everyone’s sake, nevermind that the repetitive gripping may have gifted you your new elbow joint dysfunction. By this point, some riders slide onto the petrol tank to widen the gap between their hips and your crotch. But sometimes they don’t, and that’s okay too because you’re pretty good at squeezing yourself between the rider and the U-rail. All in all, you’re a confident pillion rider except for when that silver rail is missing, which it is on some bikes, in which case you try and clutch on to the sides of the seat in front of you but the grip isn’t as secure and you can’t stop yourself from lurching forwards. The missing U-rail is not even how I ended up accidentally touching my rider for the first time. I was making what I thought was a small, harmless adjustment on the seat, but by the end of it I had poked my rider in his left buttock with my thumb. I held my breath. My first thought: how to not make him think that just because I'm in excessively flared, sort-of see-through pants with a linen button-down that won’t even cover my ass that I get up to this kind of behavior all the time? I said an audible “sorry”, he said nothing, and we carried on down Ferozepur road. The first time I flew onto a rider’s back with all my breasts, I didn't say anything. It felt like nothing would have sufficed for the moment; the line had been crossed so egregiously that the line just had to be treated like a construct. My breasts have bumped into 3 other riders since; nobody says anything and things carry on. The only kind of unremarkable physical contact is when I accidentally headbump my rider and our helmets go pop. *** My helmet is to me what I imagine a Garmin sportswatch is to a sando-wearing gymbro. I fawn over her, I’m always waiting for someone to notice her and ask me about her so I can show her off, and I'm never lax about wearing her which most riders will compliment in a mildly surprised tone as if a prudent female rider defies some expectation. Except for that one rider who seemed to be slightly bothered by it: ‘ Aap nay kyun helmet pehni hui hay?’ (‘why are you wearing a helmet?’), he asked as we rode out from my workplace. I paused. The inflection on you was provocative. He was waiting for my response. I’d had yet another brain-melting day at work, and was thinking about keeping my knees pressed into the sides of the bike for the duration that we would be zigzagging through post-work gridlocks; I wanted quiet, not whatever this question was. I shot back: why do you wear a helmet? And he went: but I asked you. We did maybe one more round of that and then I snapped at him with an unkind lesson on the physics of flying through the air after a car collision and becoming jam on the road. He didn’t respond and we rode in silence. That was one of only two cantankerous rides I’ve had in over 300+. I realised the helmet doesn't factor as a safeguard against death for most bikers; like the seatbelt, it’s an annoying imposition, yet another tool available to the state to squeeze fines out of ordinary citizens. I, on the other hand, am very serious about dodging death by drunk drivers / underage boys / underslept drivers of public transport / rich people in their SUV’s and pick-up trucks who think traffic lights are for pussies. In June 2024, I went looking for a death-defying helmet in Bohri Bazaar, Karachi, after consulting with my friend who rides his heavy bike (a cruiser) around Karachi (bold). It was a small store, shelves top to bottom packed with helmets and other riding gear. After some research, I decided that I wanted a full face (chin protection) flip-helmet (raiseable face shield) with a second, smaller visor inside, tinted to protect against the sun. It also absolutely had to look cool. The ones that were most popular (‘jo sab say ziada running main hain…’) according to the store owner all had snakes and skulls graffited on them in colours that gave ‘energy drink’. Ideally, I would have liked a helmet with something whimsical painted on it, like a rock nestled in a forest that hadn’t moved in three thousand years. But I settled for a matte grey-black with red streaks that curved around from the back, a faint skull at the very top, and some raptor-esque graffiti on the sides. She was a thick girl (useful for my bigger-than-average head size and even bigger hair), with detachable inner padding and a neat little flip switch above my right ear to flick the tinted visor down. I’ve stared many an MP (military police) in the eye as I flipped that switch and rode off away from their smug little checkposts and it has felt cool every time. In spite of my helmet, I’ve spent much of my commute time considering death and its cousin, paralysis, with only a brief respite in between. It was January 2025, and the city was launching a (sadly short-lived) pilot project: a designated “bike lane”. One day, there were laborers painting the left strip of Ferozepur Road green going down several kilometers. They did this for a couple weeks till a spell of light rain washed all the green away (along with allegedly 110 million rupees for the locally produced paint, supposedly a cost-effective substitute for the imported variety, as per a local news channel). A week later, some parts of the stretch got a fresh coat of paint and a barricade went up, cutting off the bike lane from the rest of the road. For a while, vehicles tried to navigate the nightmarish crisscross of entry and exit points to the lane. It was chaotic, but once inside the lane, my heart rate would be noticeably lower. It was on Ferozepur road going down this bike lane that I first noticed them. *** They were riding outside the barricade on the main road, 50 meters ahead. I noticed the pillion rider’s arms first: they were encircling the rider and…it wasn’t a loose grip. Then: her riding astride, black hair in a braid that came down to her shoulder blades, and finally: she was leaning into the hug, her whole body pressed up against the rider and her chin was resting on the rider’s right shoulder. There was something so immediately unfamiliar about this posture–it felt like it was maybe 3 moves shy from kissing in public. Luckily, a flyover was approaching; my rider slid onto the main lane to go up the bridge and suddenly I was riding parallel to the Chin and the Shoulder, and the Shoulder was attached to a head with cropped hair and pointy ends and the head was tilted sideways toward the Chin–eyes still pinned to the road in front–and Chin’s nose would periodically brush against the rider’s cheek. The rider had a loose zipper jacket on, sleeves pulled up to the elbows, 3 thin bands on her (gasp!) right wrist. She was saying something maybe wicked, maybe jovial, because both the heads were low and the mouths pulled up into smiles. Suddenly, she flicked her eyes from the road onto me riding to her right. She couldn’t have known I was also a woman because of my generously concealing helmet, and she didn’t pause to do the usual check I get subjected to by other riders on the road: hands, then breasts. And even if she did know, I had a feeling she would’ve still been annoyed at how keenly I was taking the two of them in. She revved her engine and rode off, her CD70 zigzagging between cars, leaving me feeling exhilarated because my secret hypothesis seemed to have had its first positive testing. It was April of 2025 and by that time, young girls on e-bikes had become–sorry, give me a second, it still feels unreal to say this–common around all parts of Lahore. It happened steadily: one month it was one girl on her e-bike jostling for her place on the road in early morning traffic. The next month there were 6. And somehow, it broke through whatever ceiling had stalled previous “women friendly” transportation initiatives: ”pink” rickshaws, “pink” buses, women-only ride-hailing apps. At first, it was just young girls headed to school or work; a few months later, the middle-aged women who work as house help in the gated community where I live, the ones who would make the morning walk to their respective houses every day, were now riding into the community on e-bikes. Picture it: thick-set women in their printed shalwar kameez riding astride in two’s, taking their own damn selves to work. I was afraid to point it out to anyone lest I jinxed it. Quietly, I placed a bet against, well, patriarchy: the excess of women on e-bikes was going to stir another kraken: the CD70, the reigning bike model in Pakistan for many decades, would betray its male overlords and turn out to, in fact, be quite maneuverable in the hands of women. Like Chin and Shoulder. In that way, 2025, which was otherwise miserly, gifted me a score of utterly new silhouettes to devour everyday: the girl riding down Sherpao into the setting sun with her billowing abaya making her look straight up Batmanesque; the mother taking her son for an evening ride on a pleasant April day, riding at a leisurely pace; two girls lounging on a bench in a small park, their e-bike parked next to them. Something fundamental seems to be shifting in the working and social lives of women in Lahore, and on many days I sit quaking with anticipation about all its possibilities. I imagine this is how our boomer parents felt about the arrival of the internet. *** As giant a stride as that is, I have to remind myself to be patient when it comes to what bike-riding women will be allowed to / will allow themselves to wear as they step out in this new, knife-like way. For anyone who has been disturbed by the sighting of all these newly “out” girls on their e-bikes, it must be reassuring to know that almost all of them are in abayas. And I suppose it has to be that way if we are to be collectively eased into this new age with minimal harm. I was stupidly dismissive of this when I started pillion riding, though not out of any principled defiance. It was May 2024, and we were hurtling toward a heat wave (hitting a record high of 44.5 degrees celsius that June). Not burning my skin off on the 40-minute 9:20 am ride would entail layering over my short-sleeved work clothes. A friend with moderately high survivalist tendencies gave me a windbreaker: a steal from Daraz, grey, light as a feather. Even so, the thought of double layering in Lahore’s May was unbearable. So May through June, I rode on the streets of my city with nothing but my bra under my kind-of-see-through windbreaker, rolling up my day shirt in my bag to wear when I got to the office. I figured my backpack would cover most of my back, along with any evidence of a bra-strap. The front was trickier, but there was always the slouchy shoulders trick, a tried and tested method to diminish the appearance and therefore possibility of breasts. The only problem was that I kept having visions of being thrown off my bike because of a drunk driver, followed by my flimsy wind-breaker ripping and me lying on a public street in my bra. Terrifying. By the time summer of 2025 rolled around, I was prepared: a series of black-as-night sleeveless chemises, waist-length, made of the thinnest cotton by the family tailor, Ramzan sahab, as light as the windbreaker that would go on top. *** Along the way, there have been the usual reminders that God dislikes a self-assured planner. There was that one (and only) time that I walked out of my building with my usual confidence and was told bluntly by the rider that he couldn’t take me (“sorry ma’am, main ladies ko nahi leta”) which, essentially, was him refusing me permission to get on his bike. Maybe his own personal discomfort, maybe a promise made to his wife–either way, fair. Only twice have I been prompted to consider fates worse than death and paralysis. Turns out that a healthy 40 percent of riders consider running out of petrol somewhere out on the road a low-stake problem needing attention only after the fact. One night, I had just finished dinner with a group of friends in DHA Phase 5, an upscale area by all standards. It was past midnight, so not ideal, but I calculated that the route back to my house would skirt through patrolled parts of the city, so not too bad either. About 4 minutes into the ride, the bike began sputtering with low fuel, and my rider veered to the left, parked, got off and started walking across the road to a petrol station 100m down, leaving me in a darkened spot of the street, sitting on a vehicle I had no knowledge of how to use. Peeved, I scampered after him and waited at the well-lit and peopled station while he went back across the road to his bike with a pitcher of fuel. When we got back on the road, I discreetly leaned over to see who and what he was messaging, and noticed that his wallpaper was him with a big grin and a rifle in his hand. When he asked me if I was studying in college, I made him drop me off at an approaching mall. The second time, we were travelling late afternoon on a service lane that runs parallel to the Ring Road highway around the outer part of the city. The bike sputtered, but this time, the closest pump was at least 1.5 kilometers away. These words were barely out of my mouth when my rider, a 50-something man with a bright orange beard, told me to hang tight and rode off and out of sight. I stood at the side of the highway – maroon suede shirt, top three buttons open, heeled boots, grey flared pants, bronze bangles and a helmet on my head – and waited in stunned silence. Every passing person on bike or rickshaw or car gawked at the sight of this strange helmeted creature who seemed to be standing beside a highway without much of a plan. I considered someone snatching my bag, snatching the whole of me, or getting frisky as they drove past. I waited with a mini blade tucked in my knuckle (thank you again, survivalist friend). It was a tense 10 minutes, but then I spotted my rider–big flashy mehndi beard–speeding back to get me. *** My first ever ride was probably the nicest one I’ve had in these two years. I approached it as an experiment to see if pillion riding was going to solve either one of the two pressing problems of my life at the time (more on this too, I promise). It was noon on a Sunday which meant fewer people on the roads. That increased my chances of getting a serious-minded uncle kind of a rider instead of a flamboyant youngster because he would likely be sleeping in on a Sunday. Moreover, it was an intentionally short ride (8 km) into the cantonment area (hello military police everywhere). Sure enough, my rider was a mid-40’s uncle with a greying beard and he rode me uneventfully to my destination. It cost me RS 110. When I got off I felt compelled to tell him he’d made me feel very safe. He seemed slightly surprised at receiving this compliment at 12:17 pm on a Sunday, but accepted it nonetheless. He rode off and I stood there with a growing sense that riding around the city was going to save me from me. At the time, without any prior notice, I had embarked on my first pilgrimage to rage. Before, rage and I had been wary acquaintances; she would hang around my circle a lot but I knew better than to trust her. By 2024, I was beginning my mornings with her and taking her to bed every night. I was convinced she was funnier and cleverer than anyone else, and I let her regale me with tales about how obnoxious and insufferable and disappointing everyone truly was: women, men, children, siblings, mentors, friends, colleagues, neighbours, strangers, everyone . During rare moments of clarity, I wanted more than anything to be freed of her, freed of the pinball machine that was my mind and its most sulphuric thoughts, and it turns out that heat on the roads can do that for you, specifically heat that bounces off asphalt as you wait at a 30-second traffic light on a 39°C morning. Something else that can do that for you is touching treetops as you go down fly-overs, which I do every time I’m taking Jinnah toward Firdous Market or Sherpao toward Jail Road. Little clusters of trees spill over the parapet walls on both routes, and something about having a brief unscheduled encounter with the very top of a tree short-circuits my nervous system. These daily offerings of my rides back home–fleeting, mystifying, unexpected, primordial–peeled the rage off slowly. Like the sight of an uncle crying behind the wheel of his car as he drove down Kasur, a tissue pressed to his eyes; auburn February sunsets that cut me down to size; the masculine urge to shake the head at anything inconvenient: missing a green light, jumpy pedestrians, the petrol finishing, a surprise speedbreaker; leaning in to have shouty conversations over wind and horns with men you were probably only going to meet once in your life about living in this wondrous city and seeing it be asphyxiated by smog, by 100-legged billboards, rental prices, the military, housing societies and megaprojects. My other life-problem was a lot simpler in comparison: pillion riding kept me from going broke for the third time in 2 years. My life had experienced seismic shifts during Covid’s debut year of 2020. Before, I had had unobstructed access to someone else’s Honda City, and I had driven it all over Lahore at all kinds of hours. In 2021, I moved into a house where the cars (multiple) came with multiple conditions. I could drive the older manual Honda Civic Reborn (a glorious model) but not the newer Toyota Aqua even though it was smaller and automatic (so more “female-friendly” as per man-logic) but that too only during daylight hours and for certain stretches of time. By the end of 2023, I was living on my own, chest deep in bills and groceries and with the acute sense that the city I had been living in for 14 years had become unaffordable. I couldn’t even take myself to work on a hailed car everyday, let alone to restaurants or shops that I used to frequent. It took some time, but once I accepted that I was indeed poorer in my 30’s than I’d been in my 20’s—not the favoured trajectory—I found myself calling my first bike that Sunday afternoon. Another 20 or so uneventful rides later, somewhere on Canal Road, the heat like a whip cracking open the synapses in my brain is when suddenly: what if all these women riding behind these men on the Canal aren’t all wives and mothers and daughters and sisters? What if I’m not the only stranger-danger-woman impinging on this equilibrium of public order and decency? And sure enough, when I really looked, I saw that some of the women whizzing past me on the Canal also sat as far as possible on the other end of the seat with their arms folded away from the man transporting them. Then I noticed two women getting off around a commercial area and handing money over to the rider. In the end, rather embarrassingly, I had to admit to myself that of course I was not one in a handful of women in this sprawling city who were compelled by necessity to hail bikes for their commute and of course women did it every single day given how affordable and fast it was. Really the only oddity about me doing it was that I presented as somebody who would have some other means. Which makes for the usual confusion on the faces of the military police stalking the 10 or so checkposts that surround the cantonment area (‘cantt’) where I usually find myself. Their job in some ways is to complicate the entry of 1) non-rich looking people 2) non-Punjabi looking people 3) non-Pakistani looking people into Cantt. In that regard, I am a bit of a headache in that I am not 1) ( phew because critical security priority) but I am 2) and 3). In fact, popular opinion suggests that I can comfortably be confused for Turkish/Lebanese/Iranian/Greek. So as I approach the checkpost, riders ahead and behind taking off their helmets so their faces can be recorded by the Go-Pro’s hanging off the neck of every MP (I keep mine on, only pushing the face shield up), I see consternation tense the face of the MP. He clocks first the clothes, then the legs parted in a straddle, then the (always) painted lips. He can’t help but puff up as he steps toward me–he’s about to strike down the stealthy advance of a foreign woman into a securitized zone of the city. I disarm him a little by asking curtly, jee bhai, kia chahiye? (yes, what do you want?). He falters briefly at the comfortable Urdu and the tone, gathers himself up again, and demands my ID card. This is good because I have it ready in a zipper pocket and I get to pull it out, hand it over and watch his face fall as he realises today is not the day he gets to intercept a foreign conspiracy. What I hate is when they don’t ask for the ID card and instead order me to get my entry “logged”. Getting myself logged in the system means parking 50m ahead beside a cabin and coming face to face with the “Lady Searcher” (as advertised in big lettering on the outside of the cabin, which, if one considers the tradition of military parlance, is surprisingly lyrical, almost poetic: ~ lady searcher ~ ). She’s usually in an abaya, and has been sitting in that cramped cabin over, no doubt, a long shift with no view and no company and no Go-Pro or other fancy tech to deploy either; just an old register with lined columns in which she has to enter data by hand . I sympathise, I do. And I really would rather confront the villain than the stooge, especially since something about being expertly surveilled by a woman is extremely unsettling. The Lady Searcher always looks at me like I’m the whorish offspring of disreputable people. She’ll bark at me to take my helmet off and we’re off to a very bad start. I’ve tried different approaches—doubling down, impudence, shaming, humour—she does not back down. She is very bad for my rage, I’ve realised, so now I try and limit my exposure to her. I go into the cabin and promptly answer all her questions about where I’ve come from and where I was born and where I’m going and why I’m going where I’m going. *** I really thought that unless I pursued some bucket-list calibre things—requiring at the very least money and a new destination—I wouldn’t be unlocking any truly new experience in my 30’s; new like the unique thrill of the absolutely unfamiliar felt explosively at a cellular level. I certainly did not think it was going to happen on a narrow street in a cramped junction nestled under the Sherpao flyover. This street is the preferred alternative route for some riders because it snakes under busier parts of town. It is lined with motels and food joints—burger and shawarma, biryani and pulao, mithai and bakery, kebab and fish. We, two fools on a bike, were attempting to cross the 250m stretch five minutes before iftar. Crowds thronged food stalls on either side, buying snacks to break their fast, men hung about in two’s and three’s, listening for the azaan, hawkers shouted and flailed their arms trying to entrap customers, people scurried back home to break their fast. I instructed my body to brace for some swift dodging of stares and limbs as we approached the throng, forgetting that it was still winter and my body was hidden under layers of clothing including a puffer jacket, and my hair was still cropped and entirely hidden under my helmet. The first man that I passed by on that street must have stood not a foot away from me. He was holding a menu in his hand, and was looking over my head, his eyes fixed on customers across the road. The next was a man who was rushing across the street, his arm outstretched as he yelled something at someone. It began to dawn on me that we had all gone off-script; this wasn’t how crammed public spaces worked. I cast my eyes around hurriedly trying to catch at least one man looking my way, but it was as if I was a blurry detail, a thing to be cropped out. And–the truly new new–while my mind had needed to ascertain all this, my body had arrived at it much earlier. It hadn’t actually braced for anything at all even after I had instructed it to, not a muscle tensed in the knowledge that we were approaching male bodies in various states of frenzy and languor, not even with the awareness that nobody was bothering to create a “respectable” distance between us as we crossed. It was precisely because of this, because my body was a non-event, that our proximity was a perfectly neutral, luminously new sensation. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 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. Essay Lahore 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:

Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak created a devotional body of work that confronts alienation and Partition, while attending to humanity’s final asylum in the embrace of lifeforms between garden and forest. As his feminist protagonists withdraw, growing increasingly reclusive and almost arboreal amid narratives of class and betrayal, Sumana Roy reflects on Ghatak’s decisive critical creative and technical choices as embodiments of his ethos. Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak created a devotional body of work that confronts alienation and Partition, while attending to humanity’s final asylum in the embrace of lifeforms between garden and forest. As his feminist protagonists withdraw, growing increasingly reclusive and almost arboreal amid narratives of class and betrayal, Sumana Roy reflects on Ghatak’s decisive critical creative and technical choices as embodiments of his ethos. Ephemeral III (2025), watercolour on acid-free paper, courtesy of Sonali Sonam. Artist Kolkata AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 12 Mar 2026 th · THE VERTICAL REPORTAGE · LOCATION Ritwik's Trees I always put it down to coincidence, the easiest way to explain things. Ritwik Ghatak and I were born on the same day, though half a century apart, and plant life would come to frame the way we both experience the world. I am fifty years old now, exactly the age Ritwik died at. Writing this essay with that awareness—strange as it is confusing—takes my thoughts in directions they might not have otherwise. There’s a tree in Sahaj Path , the first tree I ever saw. That can’t be true, of course, because I would have been about three then, in my first year at school. It is in the generic nature of trees to not be remembered, but this is slightly different. It’s not a blob of green that I remember as a tree; it’s black, black as soot, like burnt tree trunks. The tree, though, is not burnt—it is alive; a human sits inside it, as dark as the tree and its foliage, as dark as its shade. Sounds a bit childish, I know, but no other living form had enchanted me like this. I say ‘living’ with caution and affection, for I would discover a living likeness of the soot-black tree soon. On a bus from Siliguri’s Court More to Bagdogra, where my father’s sister lived—a journey we made no more than twice a year, in spite of the short distance, for the lack of availability of transport and time—I would see it. The bus was moving slowly, its speed curtailed by the rush of workers emerging from the Chandmoni Tea Estate. There it was, outside the window to our left—it hadn’t moved since the last time I’d seen it. A tree exactly like Nandalal Bose’s. Ritwik would have seen that tree in Sahaj Path . It is with such a tree that Meghe Dhaka Tara begins, its branches spread wide, without shyness or self-consciousness, as if to expose its leaves to all the light it could get. It is to the right of the screen, Nita walks out of its shadow. I could also rephrase this: the tree releases Nita into the world after protecting it from the glare of the world, perhaps of life. It is tempting to see the tree as analogous to the protective womb, after which the human is left on its own. For the first forty seconds of the film, the camera looks at things that don’t move—the trees. The camera shows no interest in looking for a human, such is its initial indifference to the centrality of the human figure in art. A woman in white emerges out of the shade and shadow of the trees, a black-and-white contrast emphasised in a black-and-white film; so similar to Nandalal’s linocut. The canvas begins to move. A train passes by. A man is singing, aa aa aa aa . His back is to the audience. The camera isn’t interested in his face. It takes in the vegetation by the riverbank. Sharp, tall grass pierces the top half of the frame; it pokes the sky. From looking for punctures in the sky, we are dragged downwards to the earth, to a torn slipper on a human foot. The camera has become plant-like—it is moving like trees do, in the north–south axis; like plants, it has become indifferent to the human face. After the restoration of attention to human affairs, to the crises of poverty, particularly new poverty (surely there must be a term equivalent to nouveau riche for those suddenly rendered poor by catastrophic circumstances), the camera seems to long for a sighting of the plant world again. Only four minutes have passed. It’s enough to give us a sense of the family whose life we will be following; it’s also enough to tell us that human lives will be complemented and annotated by the histories of their changing neighbours, plant life. ‘Nabin Sangha’ enters the frame. Humans, tall and small, chew the foreground, but it’s only as much real estate as the mouth occupies on the face. Behind them is the sky, made jagged by the uneven height of trees. It is not just an assemblage of different species of trees that we see, but a more urgent history of settlement, of planting. Pollinators, mostly two-footed ones like those in the foreground, are responsible for their settlement on this land. Ritwik is giving us a history of dislocation, of people as much as of plants. The name of the neighbourhood club, common in Bengal and other spaces that came to accommodate Bengalis evicted by the forces of history, is telling—the plants are as ‘nabin’, new, as the humans here; they might soon be propagated to other places, near and far. In Ritwik’s films, we see a new kind of horticultural unit, one that emerged so naturally that it hasn’t been recorded in our architectural or ecological history. Neither garden nor forest, it is as domesticated as it is wild. In Rabindranath Tagore, for instance, we find both an admiration for the beauty of the garden and an instinctive rejection of it as a unit foreign to landscapes and geographical formations such as ours. In practice, both he and his son Rathindranath—who would adopt favourite characteristics of Japanese, Italian, French and Mughal gardens into Santiniketan’s Uttarayan, the cluster of four houses that Rabindranath would design and live in—were internationalists, welcoming of travelling flora from other continents. As a concept, though, Rabindranath seemed to be suspicious of the garden, the way the unit had come to be imported from outside the Indian subcontinent, particularly Europe. The controlling impulse necessary to design and execute gardens would have challenged his ethics and aesthetics. They would have been too neat, too premeditated. ‘Bon’ over ‘bagan’ for him, the forest over the garden, though he would have been thinking of the jungle more than the forest, a space then still outside human intentionality. Satyajit Ray, in his foreword to Ritwik’s book Cinema and I , writes about the latter’s lifelong preoccupation with the Partition, how it shaped his films, gave them their subject and energy. What hasn’t been noticed is how the post-Partition Bengali family is seen through the concomitant new ordering of plant life. Land had been divided; how could the creatures of land, humans and plants, live in older units anymore? ‘Unit’, after all, is the root word for ‘unity’, and, with that gone, how were we to find plants except in fragmented and foraged units? This is what Ritwik—like John Clare, who was disoriented by the Enclosure Act of 1809, the privatisation and fencing of shared land—records in these scenes: broken sentences, broken song, broken land, its broken vegetation. Orchards, forests, gardens, fields, they are units of unbrokenness, a way of looking at the world where looking becomes equivalent to owning. The ambition of the zamindar was to own as far as his eyes could see. The philosophical idea of the plantation must owe to this, the idea of unbroken rows of the same plant, as well as the ownership that comes from this manner of control and ordering. The people in Ritwik’s films do not have the luxury of such a ‘vision’; time limits their lives as much as space does. They live from day to day, and, in Meghe Dhaka Tara , from month to month, salary day to salary day. In this, they are like trees, they who live outside capitalism, outside mortgages and pensions and EMIs. In these films is the ‘bagan’, garden. But the architecture of Ritwik’s gardens is arbitrary, its scope and ambition limited by space and poverty. What can the gardens of a homeless people look like? Indifferent to expectations of geometry and species that had given form and beauty to gardens in Japan and Italy, for instance, these borrowed spaces became an archive of their ad hoc living. Grammatical gardens are a record of ambition and purpose, the gardens in Ritwik’s films are a record of foraging and found plants, found and functional art. The trees are not here to add beauty, just as human faces and bodies do not exist to draw attention to the beauty of their anatomical form. They are just there—like the sky is, or like shadows are, because they are. Our eyes meet them like they do relatives of our own species, without formality or introductions. Yes, they are relatives, for they live alongside humans in residential spaces, by the well and by a stream, bringing shade to a tin-roofed house, fruit to a half-starved family, outliving the human who brought them here. My heart bustles in recognition when I see them, for I grew up in such a neighbourhood myself. In Siliguri’s Ashrampara, my neighbours, families whose memories and eating and living habits were formed by the agricultural produce and rivers of Bangladesh before they, like seeds, were flung into spaces unfamiliar to their ancestors, created such gardens. Chilli plants by a streetside water drain, pumpkin and bottle gourd vines climbing on to tin roofs of kachcha toilets, unseasonal marigold flowers from a leftover garland used to worship a goddess, fresh coriander from seeds scattered near the well, where they grew beside ghritakumari, and there, often, a banana plant offering fruit, flower or stem, and always, always, an assembly of kochu leaves, waiting to be devoured. Roses became fences, valued more for their thorns than their flowers, to keep strangers away more than to attract; the tulsi that would, every Saturday, bring together a congregation hungry for the airy sweetness of batasha, thrown up into the air, Hari-r loot, then gathered from the earth and put urgently inside mouths; shandhya malati and nayantara, that flowered better when neglected; and greens, so many kinds of shak that it seemed the Bengali had evolved from the cow. Every morning, flower thieves, with a lanky bamboo pole in their hands, collecting flowers for their gods, never missing an opportunity to break a branch from a tree to plant in their garden—finding and foraging, planting and pollinating. From the ‘sangha’ to ‘sansar’, the club to the room, Ritwik makes this migration through song: ‘ Ghorete bhromor elo gunguniye ’. The bee’s come singing into the room. Where there is bee, there must be flower? What we have instead of the glamour of flowers—and I’m struggling to remember whether the camera ever pays attention to flowers at all—is bamboo. The strips of bamboo and the stripes of the saree that the women wear mirror each other all through his films until he’s established, almost naturally, that the refugees of his world are like bamboo: this is their habitat, they will stick to each other to form clusters, they will be chopped off from time to time, used, repurposed, taken away from their family, but the roots will allow growth again, life and height, length and the seeking of light, until they are dismembered again. The stripes in the women’s sarees run parallel to each other, like the strips of bamboo in the walls of the room do—the ends of both, saree and fence, have to be cut abruptly. Sometimes they continue on to men’s bodies, to the stripes of their lungi. Perhaps no other filmmaker has documented the culture of everyday bamboo design in eastern India with such an artist’s homely attention as Ritwik. These moments of distraction from the thoroughfare of human traffic are almost akin to a tendril looking for support, for something to hold. The varying rhombuses of bamboo fences give the eye this hold, this pause. The ninth minute of Meghe Dhaka Tara is long, the eye spans and embalms the frame, it takes in details of the weave of the bamboo before it moves to something that Ritwik’s camera turns into its relative: hair, hair on the heads of women, Nita’s in a bun, Gita’s left open, the craft and compulsion of human hands on bamboo visible, as it is in the bun; the freedom of the bamboo groves, alive and loose, as in Gita’s open hair. Nita’s name bears the etymological impress of ethics and morality, a human-brokered life; Gita’s name derives from song, it is freer, as much as music is free, or freer than morality. Ritwik’s eyes look for echoes, they find it—echoes of bamboo in the sarees, particularly those that Gita wears, where the shadow-and-light serve-and-volley dims and glows. About a quarter of an hour has passed. Ritwik returns the trees of the first scene to us, we now see more of them, more of their bodies; we see more of the river, too, which pushes the trees out of the frame slightly, gently. What takes up space are the shadows of these large-bodied trees, their girth a visible birth certificate, a mark of fixity, perhaps even of constancy, who can tell, in contrast to the river whose water moves, like the people in the film. The brother—played by Anil Chatterjee, in one of the most unforgettable characters in cinematic history—sings, his accompanists are birds, they cry, though I don’t know why the English language calls their tongue ‘bird cries’. Like a musician uses caesura, Ritwik uses music: for a break between stanzas. In the film’s first scene, Nita emerges from the trees, not exactly like Venus from the sea in Botticelli, but the shared lineage of human and the elements, plant and person, is established right away. A little more than a quarter of an hour later, she walks from the right to the left of the screen. Her brother sits under a tree, rehearsing. Ritwik ensures that we see him as part of the tree trunk, the bodies of humans assimilated by the camera’s angle as once was possible in mythology; Nita, too, is part of this gift of the gaze: she, her brother’s lone audience, melds with the aerial branches of the tree. She, provider, sister, daughter, girlfriend, has to become more than one species. This is why Nita moves out of her Krishnachura- and Radhachura-like body to become bamboo soon after, the transition happening as soon as she gives some money to her brother. It’s Nita’s birthday. A Jagaddhatri Pujo will take place. Ritwik has decided to abandon subtlety. Jagaddhatri, as her name indicates, is a goddess of the earth; according to the Kena Upanishad, she asks the elements, Agni and Varuna and Vayu, to move a blade of grass. Ritwik takes Nita, her father and brother to something like grass. Coconut and betelnut trees, tall, and taller than the hills in the background. They walk on the unlaid road, through marshland and paddy fields, the stalks ankle-deep in water. Other species crop up on the screen: boatman, shaluk, lotus. ‘Poetry of the earth is never dead,’ one of the characters says. Jagaddhatri; the plants. Ritwik doesn’t leave it there—like Bibhutibhushan in Pather Panchali , he emphasises the beauty that can be had by those without money, like Apu’s sister Durga in the novel, like Nita’s singer-brother in this film. ‘Dhanyo khetra’, the blessed land, the land of such agricultural bounty is a phrase central to Ritwik’s vision. For the Bengali audience, there would also be the cultural conditioning of ‘ Dhono dhanye pushpe bhora ’ of D.L. Roy’s song, the celebration, in spite of Partition, of the plentiful plant life that made Jibanananda’s ‘Rupashi Bangla’. Children run out of a small school a few scenes later. As if to frame this freedom, Ghatak allows a branch to graze the frame from the left. To him, the plant world is a metaphor that emphasises, by contrast, the unfreedom of social life. ‘How do you all stay indoors in the evening? I find it difficult to breathe,’ says Gita, to which Sanat, still undecided between the two women, ‘music’ and ‘morality’, offers to take Nita out for a walk. Their house is framed by trees, their father by an umbrella, the heads of both mirroring each other, as it is possible only in a drawing book. Sanat complains about Nita being chained down by responsibilities, to which she offers a stronger metaphor for the loss of freedom: ‘Besh toh, make a glass frame and put me inside it, like a wax doll.’ And, almost immediately, two opposites are offered: marshland and meadow, there is freedom in both, even if there is stickiness. For when Nita stands up to go, leaves stick to her saree. Over and over again, Ritwik turns her into a tree, a giving tree. A job has been found, she requests her brother to drop her off at Sealdah. The landscape changes; it’s thornier, wilder. The tree is different—it is no longer on the right side of the screen but the left; it has more branches than leaves, it is less spread out, some of its branches even amputated. Soon, the camera is on the brother. He’s singing, entering the world of plants, whose bodies are flecked by light and shade; wild grass waits nearby in every frame. Nita, though, was doing the opposite, emerging from the trees. The camera refuses to move; it has become the tree. Nita passes by, he asks her for twenty-five paise, to shave, and the camera begins moving. The brother runs after her, his shadow slightly thinner than the older, time-fed trees. The branches offer shade, they also stand rooted while humans are rendered homeless. The camera, momentarily happy to be a tree, now begins running—it, too, is scared of becoming homeless. Catching up with her, he realises that it is not his sister, only someone in the same generic white saree with a slim border. The unknown woman smiles. Her eyes are downcast, instead of the goddess’ halo, her bust-sized image: the white saree with the border running like a train line whose other track has been eaten by time or water; the echo of that thin horizontal line in the vertical strap of her handbag, a marker of her working woman status, a new self in a new land. Not halo but branches of trees crowd the frame. She is of the trees, even if she has a face, even if she is human. The woman smiles. The brother laughs. He begins singing. Another tree appears. Now it’s to the right of the screen. He is standing under it and singing. The camera moves with him as he walks. His shadow moves. The shadows of the branches remain still. He moves from right to left, a bit like the Urdu script at first, and then like musical notation, the arohan and abarohan, travelling to and fro, to and fro, the return to the ‘sama’, the home. But where is home? Do shadows return to the trees at night? Ritwik changes the composition of the halo that announces a goddess’ status. The branches of trees a little while ago, now it’s smoke from the mother’s cooking that frames her face, so that the halo is diffused, a blur, in spite of the branches of the trees right behind, as distant as cloud. Another woman enters—her hair is open, her saree is striped, the bamboo seems to be emerging out of her body, she goes out for a walk by the lake. It is Gita, with Sanat. Nita is walking back home. Irregular dots of darkness fill the screen—blobs of tree heads, their fraternal twins lying as shadows on the ground, more restful. Nita’s face is dark, light falls on a portion of her hips. Books clutched to her chest, she walks; her sister and boyfriend are sitting by the water, singing. Nita looks, then looks away, and walks past the scene. The camera moves to the sister and her new audience. Her shoulder-length hair has been left open. For a moment, they look like branches of the tree behind her—both move. The camera moves too. Gita is laughing after her flirtatious sermon to Sanat about staring at her with his mouth open. Nandalal’s tree, from Sahaj Path , is behind her. Its many branches make her look like a many-armed Durga; the man is made to look like Mahishasur. She jumps, he follows. We are inside stripes again: bamboo walls, fences, light and darkness. The composition is of an afterlife of the plant world—wooden windows with sticks inside them that keep animals away and divide the sky and the view. The sister in the striped saree enters through the gate; all is bamboo and wood, even the sister. Ritwik takes care to emphasise their form and texture, a continuation of their life, a life made possible by a new host and a new environment, like the refugees of Partition have had to adapt to. Bamboo and smoke, different as they are in behaviour, move in various patterns and orientations, making the walls of the house look like a happy museum of the afterlife of trees themselves. From inside the house, various kinds of plant life emerge, among them, paisleys trapped inside diamond-shaped cages on Gita’s blouse. Things change, Sanat and Gita are married, living in a flat in the city: the bamboo patterns, Nita’s saree, now in a dark colour. Instead of a house scavenged and salvaged from bodies of plants, we see a skylight in iron frames. The soft stripes of bamboo and clotheslines and sarees have given way to the stern lines of glass and steel, staircases and doorframes, ventilators and windows. Nita’s bag is now a pattern of checks. The door curtain, in all likelihood a Manipuri weave not uncommon at that time, has diamond-shaped rhombuses. As soon as the door opens, the camera moves to the solid lines of the threshold. These lines are bureaucratic, they keep apartments sturdy, they want to serve ambitions of permanence; how different they are from bamboo, in whose DNA it is to be ad hoc. Smoke cruises up here, too, but it’s not the smoke of Nita’s mother’s kitchen; not clay oven but ashtray. Ritwik is showing us the props of culture: a Bankura clay elephant stands beside truncated shadows of window bars, tuberoses in a vase on the table, puppets on the wooden cupboard, nature is being diminished here, everywhere. But the camera is restless for the lines in Nita’s home, its stripes: clothes, clotheslines, serrated tin roofs, bamboo nailed together, diagonally falling shadows. These are informal lines and rhombuses that derive from the grace of the natural world. It is the freedom of this informality that allows shadows to enter frames before human figures, shadows picking clothes from ropes and wires, slightly ghost-like, more like trees. Ritwik relies on the light-and-shadow opera to highlight the human drama through the eaters of light, the trees. After the light and night of ‘ Je raate mor duwarguli bhanglo jhore ’, of ‘ shob je hoye gyalo kalo ’, of everything turned dark, the camera moves like a plant, like the eye, searching for light. And then it moves like writing in the Devanagari script: trees and houses, conical tops, roofs, tin, concrete, all of these in a rush, so that it seems like the camera wants to escape from homes and the homeless for now, till it rests and waits, on foliage, on plants, to the ad hoc gardens that connect inside our eyes to indulge the sense of what is now called ‘social forestry’. The father, leaning against a tree for support, speaks to a doctor about Nita. One displacement happens after another—Nita, first rendered homeless by history, now moves out of the house to a bamboo room nearby, her equivalent of a temporary tent, her ‘nirbandhobpuri’, a town without friends; then she has to leave home for Reid Chest Hospital, another instalment of displacement. Ritwik begins making her more tree-like with greater urgency, as if that could protect her. After the audience’s discovery of her tuberculosis, we meet the trees—they take over the screen, Nita’s head now a blob emerging from the lower bottom of the screen. She’s being displaced from the screen too, history repeating itself over and over again. In a darker saree now, she’s the colour of tree trunks and branches, until she merges with the tree trunk in a scene. Ritwik is cutting out something else simultaneously—shade and shadow. By the ninetieth minute, the shade of trees is gone. There’s just bare land, the shadows of the trees far away are like birds whose shadows don’t reach the earth. A train cuts the screen. She, like the trees, doesn’t move. A couple of minutes later, she opens her umbrella standing under a tree, a double umbrella as it were. Every now and then, Ritwik’s camera surveys the land: palms of various kinds, a leafless plumeria, after the news of Gita’s pregnancy. In the foreboding of both birth and death, Ritwik turns to plants. After the camera shows us Nita’s blood-stained handkerchief, we see trees moving wildly in a storm, and her curly hair, as if they were relatives. The vegetation around Reid Chest Hospital is different—a coniferous-looking tree stands to the left of the frame, it offers no shade, only the fur of fog and the skin of the sky. Nita is sitting, her brother comes with news about Gita’s son, their two-storeyed house, until she breaks into one of the most famous dialogues in Bangla cinema: ‘ Dada, aami kintu bachte cheyechhilam ’, Dada, I did want to live … The camera loses balance as it were and surveys the trees. That’s how the film ends—with tree and tree and tree, almost like how it began, except for the woman who has gone missing from life, from the screen. Fifteen seconds into Subarnarekha , no image has been given to us, nothing except the auditory, ‘Vande Mataram’. The first visual: trees, slim, unrevealing of age, a bamboo in the middle, another an arc; the cohabitation of various sizes, even shapes. The Indian flag goes up on the bamboo pole; another bamboo, bent, serves as trellis over a gate. In bamboo as flag pole, Ritwik is hoping for the new Indian nation to have the tensile strength of bamboo, to be flexible, supportive and all-purpose, for all its citizens to make whatever they can of it. For the moment, though, there’s chaos and uncertainty, differences more than unity—a teacher in a new school teaches English and history, another Bengali and Sanskrit, history and historiography available only to those living in English; Dhaka versus Pabna; caste divisions. A child’s mother is lost. The word ‘udbastu’, refugee, floats around. Gandhi’s assassination emerges as newsprint in a newspaper office. Nabajibon Colony, the new settlement for those without homes, is constructed almost entirely of bamboo, as if the new (‘naba’) life (‘jibon’) must have the plant’s resilience. Ritwik draws the opposition between the old and new through metaphor. Both the sarod and the ektara are musical instruments that derive from plant life, but he gives us classical music before a Baul’s song. Hence bamboo—for the people, like the people; the roofs, doors, windows and walls of the houses in Nabajibon Colony, the Baul’s musical instrument. In the first ten minutes of the film named after a river, we see bamboo being split and cut everywhere. Partition, people, plants. A bamboo republic. Ghatshila’s plants enter the census of our imagination: bamboo, banana, papaya, species that grow easily, often on their own, without care, like these people must. When the little girl Sita asks her brother whether Abhiram, the boy who has lost his mother, will come with them to the new place, we are given no answer, only a sign, almost Buddha-like—she plucks a flower and leaves. The mill, where her brother has found work, is beside a sal forest. After reaching Ghatshila, the first thing Sita says is, ‘Dadamoni, come and see how beautiful the garden is …’. The little boy Abhi is still crying. An oleander—poisonous oleander—stands behind him. Rabindranath’s song sprouts: ‘ Aaj dhaner khete roudrochhayay lukochuri khyala re bhai, lukochuri khyala ’. Sunlight and shade are playing hide-and-seek on the paddy fields … What grass was to Jibanananda Das, paddy is to Ritwik. It’s to the paddy fields that his homeless want to return. Paddy and bamboo, related sub-families. We see a barren landscape from time to time, stony, bare-branched trees, but in their forms is still the intimation of being alive—unlike the ruins of the aircraft from World War II, with its exposed steel rods, weeds around it, the camera making it look like a foreigner, a UFO, the runway unfriendly, trees pushed to its corners, like eyelashes in the eyes. Sita and Abhi run through a place with different kinds of plant life: the bare and low, spiky and tender leaves. Some of these are inside the ruins of the airfield’s buildings; no roof or inhabitants, no windows, no doors, only frames, like the leafless trees. Ritwik is intentional. The little girl is called Sita for a reason, the story of her name from the Ramayana is abridged for us in a dialogue—how the Sita of the epic was found in an agricultural field, her link with ploughing cultures, and, though we are not told this yet, how Sita returns to the earth after her test by fire, a premonition of what is to happen to the Sita of this film. ‘Sita is the daughter of the earth …’ We are shown that earth: of rocks, river, bark, stone and trees with tiny heads, and tiny human heads half-hidden among large rocks. Outside their house are lonely species: a few palms, shrubs, skinny young trees, standing without discipline or order. They are at home. Abhi returns from the city, educated and eager to finish writing his novel based in Ghatshila, for which he has found a ‘big publisher’. Both he and Sita are surprised to find each other grown up, their bodies longer, their hearts in longing, they walk through the sal forest. The trees are tall, very tall—the camera, so long habituated to a sparser population of trees, goes a bit mad, it begins moving from left to right, taking in the trees one by one, until it is overwhelmed. This is Ritwik’s interpretation of Wordsworth’s ‘Ten thousand saw I at a glance’—the uncountability of this unit of plant life, its impress, its freedom and rush, its nurturing and caging. The sense of time—and space—in the forest, where one can’t tell when the first tree was planted, that this is a history very different from those that have been written about human lives, allows Abhi to begin talking about his novel. It might have been classified as autofiction today. He begins narrating the story of his life, third person to himself. Walking towards the trees, he raises his arms—they become branches, and he a tree for a moment. The camera then moves to the back of his head, so that he, like the other citizens of the forest, becomes part of this republic of faceless beings, the trees. He asks her a question, to which she says ‘no’. Light and its opposite fall on her face, and the camera integrates her into the blur of trees behind. How long has she felt like this, this ‘love’, Abhi asks Sita, without using the word. ‘A long time,’ she replies. The camera goes berserk in trying to capture this sense of Time—Ritwik does a few 360 degrees, all we see are the trees of this forest, long trunks, and then the river. Abhi and Sita return to bamboo, to home, to the vines that are growing on bamboo trellises, to the houseplants. Occasionally, we spot oleander, a palm or two, overgrown green in the pilot’s clubhouse, or a flower vase on a table when someone says ‘caste is everything’. When Abhi’s mother dies and he recognizes her from memory, Ritwik takes us to the child Abhi and where is he? Swinging from a tree, like only a little boy can. Twenty seconds later, after the graceful undulations of the roots from which the little boy was hanging, and the shade of the banyan, both unquantifiable and amorphous, we see the sternness of electric poles in a railway station. Their relationship is shown through plant metaphors: trees skirt the agricultural fields as they talk, while the tanpura, made from a gourd, is strung; when the wedding is fixed against her wishes, a dry palm leaf scratches the frame; when Abhi leaves and Sita asks whom she should share her sorrow with, the camera shows treetops far away. The wedding day arrives. The alpana of paddy stalks, grain and leaves sit on the floor, leading our eyes to Sita, whose face is painted with stylised designs from the agricultural world. And suddenly she’s gone. A woman says that she was scribbling something. The camera focuses on the alpana, its details, leaf and leaf and stalk and leaf, and the plant alpana grows and glows towards light. Years pass, trees and peace have disappeared from their lives in the cramped city. Listening to her sing, the little son asks, ‘Ma, what do the dhaaner khet, the paddy fields, look like?’ The song will return at the end of the film, but, before that, there are other plants. Haraprasad, having lost everything that he valued, returns to Iswar and tells him that he’s a ‘baajey-pora taal gaachh’, a blasted palm tree. The landscape turns barren gradually. In the end, though, the little boy Binu, orphaned, stands with Iswar, his newly found maternal uncle, under a tree. They have just got off the train, Iswar has been asked to vacate his residential quarters. Homeless once again, the camera turns to a tree. And then to song and soil, to the wave on the paddy fields—the literal and the figurative find a home: ‘ Dhaaner khete dheu …’ The film ends as it had begun—by resting on plants. Water in instalments, river, rain, ripple, inside boat, on plant, on tree. Water and sand, mother and child, river and bank. Trees by the river, like ripples of heads. Three minutes of this survey of life by the river Titas, and our eyes rest on an old tree at last—we meet its relatives, not on land, but their reflections on water. Soon more, not alive but their afterlife: boats, trees now travelling on water, unimaginable during their life on land; bamboo, fence, wall, house, basket, where grain is being winnowed, thatched homes. They come alive again, rounded trees and dancing papaya plants. They return to water, to boat, its wood, but mostly its bamboo, arcs and shelter, fish caught and put in baskets, covered with a flat woven bamboo piece. To land again, where the tree’s roots are, where they provide the shade necessary for dance and home, for celebration under trees. The canopy—tree branches become Ritwik’s sky; two tree branches connect two corners of the screen, like a ceiling connects walls; men fight with them too, with bamboo. Ritwik begins to make us see, again, the optical osmosis between plant and person ... ... an unconscious woman in a man’s arms, horizontal, is like the tree branches in the following scene; the floral patterns on the bride’s forehead, the wedding garlands, the eating and rejection of light, darkness and luminosity, how Ritwik’s camera catches light falling on the flowers in the garden and those on the wedding saree, the shola kadam flower on the topor, the groom’s crown. These are echoed visually by the houses of bamboo and straw, as if they too were topor-like, and the palm tree behind the small temple. At the moment of leaving her parents’, the bride weeps holding a plant—the holy basil in the tulsi mancha—and her butterfly tiara makes her plant-like. There is no getting away from this way of seeing. Ritwik shows us the boatman’s katha, its stylised botanical patterns; he warns the husband about his wife’s beauty gathering attention with a proverb borrowed from—what else?—the plant world: ‘ Lau er opor najar lagau na kintu ’, be careful that the bottle gourd doesn’t catch attention. A close-up of the woman’s middle-parted hair is turned into a relative of the sugarcane leaf’s long midrib; shadows of leaves dance on the bodies of women so that their bodies and limbs become branches. Ram’s aged, scraggly beard is not very different from the straw hanging from the roof. There’s the stamp of the botanical everywhere: flowers on dhaak, diamond patterns of bamboo designs in kitchens, straight lines of jute sticks, bow and arrow; a galaxy of water hyacinth amidst which sit planets of boats, boats of potatoes. Tree shadows lick the water everywhere, old trees snuggle up to their shortened noon shadows, the dheki moves up and down and up and down, avoiding the hand that feeds it grain, crushing grain. Men and women erupt in anger, the violence of the plant idiom: ‘ Tomarey kauwa ja, oi dhaan khete giye kauwao ta ’, telling you something is like telling the paddy field … The little boy’s name is Ananta. Infinite. He runs through the paddy fields blowing a paper horn. Nabajibon, paddy, bamboo, it is to this that Ritwik returns, this is how history is reborn. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 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. Column Kolkata Ritwik Ghatak East India West Bengal Arboreal Cinema 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:

Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak created a devotional body of work that confronts alienation and Partition, while attending to humanity’s final asylum in the embrace of lifeforms between garden and forest. As his feminist protagonists withdraw, growing increasingly reclusive and almost arboreal amid narratives of class and betrayal, Sumana Roy reflects on Ghatak’s decisive critical creative and technical choices as embodiments of his ethos. Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak created a devotional body of work that confronts alienation and Partition, while attending to humanity’s final asylum in the embrace of lifeforms between garden and forest. As his feminist protagonists withdraw, growing increasingly reclusive and almost arboreal amid narratives of class and betrayal, Sumana Roy reflects on Ghatak’s decisive critical creative and technical choices as embodiments of his ethos. Ephemeral III (2025), watercolour on acid-free paper, courtesy of Sonali Sonam. Artist · THE VERTICAL REPORTAGE · LOCATION Ritwik's Trees LOCATION Sumana Roy . 12 Mar 2026 th . Letter from our columnist . I always put it down to coincidence, the easiest way to explain things. Ritwik Ghatak and I were born on the same day, though half a century apart, and plant life would come to frame the way we both experience the world. I am fifty years old now, exactly the age Ritwik died at. Writing this essay with that awareness—strange as it is confusing—takes my thoughts in directions they might not have otherwise. There’s a tree in Sahaj Path , the first tree I ever saw. That can’t be true, of course, because I would have been about three then, in my first year at school. It is in the generic nature of trees to not be remembered, but this is slightly different. It’s not a blob of green that I remember as a tree; it’s black, black as soot, like burnt tree trunks. The tree, though, is not burnt—it is alive; a human sits inside it, as dark as the tree and its foliage, as dark as its shade. Sounds a bit childish, I know, but no other living form had enchanted me like this. I say ‘living’ with caution and affection, for I would discover a living likeness of the soot-black tree soon. On a bus from Siliguri’s Court More to Bagdogra, where my father’s sister lived—a journey we made no more than twice a year, in spite of the short distance, for the lack of availability of transport and time—I would see it. The bus was moving slowly, its speed curtailed by the rush of workers emerging from the Chandmoni Tea Estate. There it was, outside the window to our left—it hadn’t moved since the last time I’d seen it. A tree exactly like Nandalal Bose’s. Ritwik would have seen that tree in Sahaj Path . It is with such a tree that Meghe Dhaka Tara begins, its branches spread wide, without shyness or self-consciousness, as if to expose its leaves to all the light it could get. It is to the right of the screen, Nita walks out of its shadow. I could also rephrase this: the tree releases Nita into the world after protecting it from the glare of the world, perhaps of life. It is tempting to see the tree as analogous to the protective womb, after which the human is left on its own. For the first forty seconds of the film, the camera looks at things that don’t move—the trees. The camera shows no interest in looking for a human, such is its initial indifference to the centrality of the human figure in art. A woman in white emerges out of the shade and shadow of the trees, a black-and-white contrast emphasised in a black-and-white film; so similar to Nandalal’s linocut. The canvas begins to move. A train passes by. A man is singing, aa aa aa aa . His back is to the audience. The camera isn’t interested in his face. It takes in the vegetation by the riverbank. Sharp, tall grass pierces the top half of the frame; it pokes the sky. From looking for punctures in the sky, we are dragged downwards to the earth, to a torn slipper on a human foot. The camera has become plant-like—it is moving like trees do, in the north–south axis; like plants, it has become indifferent to the human face. After the restoration of attention to human affairs, to the crises of poverty, particularly new poverty (surely there must be a term equivalent to nouveau riche for those suddenly rendered poor by catastrophic circumstances), the camera seems to long for a sighting of the plant world again. Only four minutes have passed. It’s enough to give us a sense of the family whose life we will be following; it’s also enough to tell us that human lives will be complemented and annotated by the histories of their changing neighbours, plant life. ‘Nabin Sangha’ enters the frame. Humans, tall and small, chew the foreground, but it’s only as much real estate as the mouth occupies on the face. Behind them is the sky, made jagged by the uneven height of trees. It is not just an assemblage of different species of trees that we see, but a more urgent history of settlement, of planting. Pollinators, mostly two-footed ones like those in the foreground, are responsible for their settlement on this land. Ritwik is giving us a history of dislocation, of people as much as of plants. The name of the neighbourhood club, common in Bengal and other spaces that came to accommodate Bengalis evicted by the forces of history, is telling—the plants are as ‘nabin’, new, as the humans here; they might soon be propagated to other places, near and far. In Ritwik’s films, we see a new kind of horticultural unit, one that emerged so naturally that it hasn’t been recorded in our architectural or ecological history. Neither garden nor forest, it is as domesticated as it is wild. In Rabindranath Tagore, for instance, we find both an admiration for the beauty of the garden and an instinctive rejection of it as a unit foreign to landscapes and geographical formations such as ours. In practice, both he and his son Rathindranath—who would adopt favourite characteristics of Japanese, Italian, French and Mughal gardens into Santiniketan’s Uttarayan, the cluster of four houses that Rabindranath would design and live in—were internationalists, welcoming of travelling flora from other continents. As a concept, though, Rabindranath seemed to be suspicious of the garden, the way the unit had come to be imported from outside the Indian subcontinent, particularly Europe. The controlling impulse necessary to design and execute gardens would have challenged his ethics and aesthetics. They would have been too neat, too premeditated. ‘Bon’ over ‘bagan’ for him, the forest over the garden, though he would have been thinking of the jungle more than the forest, a space then still outside human intentionality. Satyajit Ray, in his foreword to Ritwik’s book Cinema and I , writes about the latter’s lifelong preoccupation with the Partition, how it shaped his films, gave them their subject and energy. What hasn’t been noticed is how the post-Partition Bengali family is seen through the concomitant new ordering of plant life. Land had been divided; how could the creatures of land, humans and plants, live in older units anymore? ‘Unit’, after all, is the root word for ‘unity’, and, with that gone, how were we to find plants except in fragmented and foraged units? This is what Ritwik—like John Clare, who was disoriented by the Enclosure Act of 1809, the privatisation and fencing of shared land—records in these scenes: broken sentences, broken song, broken land, its broken vegetation. Orchards, forests, gardens, fields, they are units of unbrokenness, a way of looking at the world where looking becomes equivalent to owning. The ambition of the zamindar was to own as far as his eyes could see. The philosophical idea of the plantation must owe to this, the idea of unbroken rows of the same plant, as well as the ownership that comes from this manner of control and ordering. The people in Ritwik’s films do not have the luxury of such a ‘vision’; time limits their lives as much as space does. They live from day to day, and, in Meghe Dhaka Tara , from month to month, salary day to salary day. In this, they are like trees, they who live outside capitalism, outside mortgages and pensions and EMIs. In these films is the ‘bagan’, garden. But the architecture of Ritwik’s gardens is arbitrary, its scope and ambition limited by space and poverty. What can the gardens of a homeless people look like? Indifferent to expectations of geometry and species that had given form and beauty to gardens in Japan and Italy, for instance, these borrowed spaces became an archive of their ad hoc living. Grammatical gardens are a record of ambition and purpose, the gardens in Ritwik’s films are a record of foraging and found plants, found and functional art. The trees are not here to add beauty, just as human faces and bodies do not exist to draw attention to the beauty of their anatomical form. They are just there—like the sky is, or like shadows are, because they are. Our eyes meet them like they do relatives of our own species, without formality or introductions. Yes, they are relatives, for they live alongside humans in residential spaces, by the well and by a stream, bringing shade to a tin-roofed house, fruit to a half-starved family, outliving the human who brought them here. My heart bustles in recognition when I see them, for I grew up in such a neighbourhood myself. In Siliguri’s Ashrampara, my neighbours, families whose memories and eating and living habits were formed by the agricultural produce and rivers of Bangladesh before they, like seeds, were flung into spaces unfamiliar to their ancestors, created such gardens. Chilli plants by a streetside water drain, pumpkin and bottle gourd vines climbing on to tin roofs of kachcha toilets, unseasonal marigold flowers from a leftover garland used to worship a goddess, fresh coriander from seeds scattered near the well, where they grew beside ghritakumari, and there, often, a banana plant offering fruit, flower or stem, and always, always, an assembly of kochu leaves, waiting to be devoured. Roses became fences, valued more for their thorns than their flowers, to keep strangers away more than to attract; the tulsi that would, every Saturday, bring together a congregation hungry for the airy sweetness of batasha, thrown up into the air, Hari-r loot, then gathered from the earth and put urgently inside mouths; shandhya malati and nayantara, that flowered better when neglected; and greens, so many kinds of shak that it seemed the Bengali had evolved from the cow. Every morning, flower thieves, with a lanky bamboo pole in their hands, collecting flowers for their gods, never missing an opportunity to break a branch from a tree to plant in their garden—finding and foraging, planting and pollinating. From the ‘sangha’ to ‘sansar’, the club to the room, Ritwik makes this migration through song: ‘ Ghorete bhromor elo gunguniye ’. The bee’s come singing into the room. Where there is bee, there must be flower? What we have instead of the glamour of flowers—and I’m struggling to remember whether the camera ever pays attention to flowers at all—is bamboo. The strips of bamboo and the stripes of the saree that the women wear mirror each other all through his films until he’s established, almost naturally, that the refugees of his world are like bamboo: this is their habitat, they will stick to each other to form clusters, they will be chopped off from time to time, used, repurposed, taken away from their family, but the roots will allow growth again, life and height, length and the seeking of light, until they are dismembered again. The stripes in the women’s sarees run parallel to each other, like the strips of bamboo in the walls of the room do—the ends of both, saree and fence, have to be cut abruptly. Sometimes they continue on to men’s bodies, to the stripes of their lungi. Perhaps no other filmmaker has documented the culture of everyday bamboo design in eastern India with such an artist’s homely attention as Ritwik. These moments of distraction from the thoroughfare of human traffic are almost akin to a tendril looking for support, for something to hold. The varying rhombuses of bamboo fences give the eye this hold, this pause. The ninth minute of Meghe Dhaka Tara is long, the eye spans and embalms the frame, it takes in details of the weave of the bamboo before it moves to something that Ritwik’s camera turns into its relative: hair, hair on the heads of women, Nita’s in a bun, Gita’s left open, the craft and compulsion of human hands on bamboo visible, as it is in the bun; the freedom of the bamboo groves, alive and loose, as in Gita’s open hair. Nita’s name bears the etymological impress of ethics and morality, a human-brokered life; Gita’s name derives from song, it is freer, as much as music is free, or freer than morality. Ritwik’s eyes look for echoes, they find it—echoes of bamboo in the sarees, particularly those that Gita wears, where the shadow-and-light serve-and-volley dims and glows. About a quarter of an hour has passed. Ritwik returns the trees of the first scene to us, we now see more of them, more of their bodies; we see more of the river, too, which pushes the trees out of the frame slightly, gently. What takes up space are the shadows of these large-bodied trees, their girth a visible birth certificate, a mark of fixity, perhaps even of constancy, who can tell, in contrast to the river whose water moves, like the people in the film. The brother—played by Anil Chatterjee, in one of the most unforgettable characters in cinematic history—sings, his accompanists are birds, they cry, though I don’t know why the English language calls their tongue ‘bird cries’. Like a musician uses caesura, Ritwik uses music: for a break between stanzas. In the film’s first scene, Nita emerges from the trees, not exactly like Venus from the sea in Botticelli, but the shared lineage of human and the elements, plant and person, is established right away. A little more than a quarter of an hour later, she walks from the right to the left of the screen. Her brother sits under a tree, rehearsing. Ritwik ensures that we see him as part of the tree trunk, the bodies of humans assimilated by the camera’s angle as once was possible in mythology; Nita, too, is part of this gift of the gaze: she, her brother’s lone audience, melds with the aerial branches of the tree. She, provider, sister, daughter, girlfriend, has to become more than one species. This is why Nita moves out of her Krishnachura- and Radhachura-like body to become bamboo soon after, the transition happening as soon as she gives some money to her brother. It’s Nita’s birthday. A Jagaddhatri Pujo will take place. Ritwik has decided to abandon subtlety. Jagaddhatri, as her name indicates, is a goddess of the earth; according to the Kena Upanishad, she asks the elements, Agni and Varuna and Vayu, to move a blade of grass. Ritwik takes Nita, her father and brother to something like grass. Coconut and betelnut trees, tall, and taller than the hills in the background. They walk on the unlaid road, through marshland and paddy fields, the stalks ankle-deep in water. Other species crop up on the screen: boatman, shaluk, lotus. ‘Poetry of the earth is never dead,’ one of the characters says. Jagaddhatri; the plants. Ritwik doesn’t leave it there—like Bibhutibhushan in Pather Panchali , he emphasises the beauty that can be had by those without money, like Apu’s sister Durga in the novel, like Nita’s singer-brother in this film. ‘Dhanyo khetra’, the blessed land, the land of such agricultural bounty is a phrase central to Ritwik’s vision. For the Bengali audience, there would also be the cultural conditioning of ‘ Dhono dhanye pushpe bhora ’ of D.L. Roy’s song, the celebration, in spite of Partition, of the plentiful plant life that made Jibanananda’s ‘Rupashi Bangla’. Children run out of a small school a few scenes later. As if to frame this freedom, Ghatak allows a branch to graze the frame from the left. To him, the plant world is a metaphor that emphasises, by contrast, the unfreedom of social life. ‘How do you all stay indoors in the evening? I find it difficult to breathe,’ says Gita, to which Sanat, still undecided between the two women, ‘music’ and ‘morality’, offers to take Nita out for a walk. Their house is framed by trees, their father by an umbrella, the heads of both mirroring each other, as it is possible only in a drawing book. Sanat complains about Nita being chained down by responsibilities, to which she offers a stronger metaphor for the loss of freedom: ‘Besh toh, make a glass frame and put me inside it, like a wax doll.’ And, almost immediately, two opposites are offered: marshland and meadow, there is freedom in both, even if there is stickiness. For when Nita stands up to go, leaves stick to her saree. Over and over again, Ritwik turns her into a tree, a giving tree. A job has been found, she requests her brother to drop her off at Sealdah. The landscape changes; it’s thornier, wilder. The tree is different—it is no longer on the right side of the screen but the left; it has more branches than leaves, it is less spread out, some of its branches even amputated. Soon, the camera is on the brother. He’s singing, entering the world of plants, whose bodies are flecked by light and shade; wild grass waits nearby in every frame. Nita, though, was doing the opposite, emerging from the trees. The camera refuses to move; it has become the tree. Nita passes by, he asks her for twenty-five paise, to shave, and the camera begins moving. The brother runs after her, his shadow slightly thinner than the older, time-fed trees. The branches offer shade, they also stand rooted while humans are rendered homeless. The camera, momentarily happy to be a tree, now begins running—it, too, is scared of becoming homeless. Catching up with her, he realises that it is not his sister, only someone in the same generic white saree with a slim border. The unknown woman smiles. Her eyes are downcast, instead of the goddess’ halo, her bust-sized image: the white saree with the border running like a train line whose other track has been eaten by time or water; the echo of that thin horizontal line in the vertical strap of her handbag, a marker of her working woman status, a new self in a new land. Not halo but branches of trees crowd the frame. She is of the trees, even if she has a face, even if she is human. The woman smiles. The brother laughs. He begins singing. Another tree appears. Now it’s to the right of the screen. He is standing under it and singing. The camera moves with him as he walks. His shadow moves. The shadows of the branches remain still. He moves from right to left, a bit like the Urdu script at first, and then like musical notation, the arohan and abarohan, travelling to and fro, to and fro, the return to the ‘sama’, the home. But where is home? Do shadows return to the trees at night? Ritwik changes the composition of the halo that announces a goddess’ status. The branches of trees a little while ago, now it’s smoke from the mother’s cooking that frames her face, so that the halo is diffused, a blur, in spite of the branches of the trees right behind, as distant as cloud. Another woman enters—her hair is open, her saree is striped, the bamboo seems to be emerging out of her body, she goes out for a walk by the lake. It is Gita, with Sanat. Nita is walking back home. Irregular dots of darkness fill the screen—blobs of tree heads, their fraternal twins lying as shadows on the ground, more restful. Nita’s face is dark, light falls on a portion of her hips. Books clutched to her chest, she walks; her sister and boyfriend are sitting by the water, singing. Nita looks, then looks away, and walks past the scene. The camera moves to the sister and her new audience. Her shoulder-length hair has been left open. For a moment, they look like branches of the tree behind her—both move. The camera moves too. Gita is laughing after her flirtatious sermon to Sanat about staring at her with his mouth open. Nandalal’s tree, from Sahaj Path , is behind her. Its many branches make her look like a many-armed Durga; the man is made to look like Mahishasur. She jumps, he follows. We are inside stripes again: bamboo walls, fences, light and darkness. The composition is of an afterlife of the plant world—wooden windows with sticks inside them that keep animals away and divide the sky and the view. The sister in the striped saree enters through the gate; all is bamboo and wood, even the sister. Ritwik takes care to emphasise their form and texture, a continuation of their life, a life made possible by a new host and a new environment, like the refugees of Partition have had to adapt to. Bamboo and smoke, different as they are in behaviour, move in various patterns and orientations, making the walls of the house look like a happy museum of the afterlife of trees themselves. From inside the house, various kinds of plant life emerge, among them, paisleys trapped inside diamond-shaped cages on Gita’s blouse. Things change, Sanat and Gita are married, living in a flat in the city: the bamboo patterns, Nita’s saree, now in a dark colour. Instead of a house scavenged and salvaged from bodies of plants, we see a skylight in iron frames. The soft stripes of bamboo and clotheslines and sarees have given way to the stern lines of glass and steel, staircases and doorframes, ventilators and windows. Nita’s bag is now a pattern of checks. The door curtain, in all likelihood a Manipuri weave not uncommon at that time, has diamond-shaped rhombuses. As soon as the door opens, the camera moves to the solid lines of the threshold. These lines are bureaucratic, they keep apartments sturdy, they want to serve ambitions of permanence; how different they are from bamboo, in whose DNA it is to be ad hoc. Smoke cruises up here, too, but it’s not the smoke of Nita’s mother’s kitchen; not clay oven but ashtray. Ritwik is showing us the props of culture: a Bankura clay elephant stands beside truncated shadows of window bars, tuberoses in a vase on the table, puppets on the wooden cupboard, nature is being diminished here, everywhere. But the camera is restless for the lines in Nita’s home, its stripes: clothes, clotheslines, serrated tin roofs, bamboo nailed together, diagonally falling shadows. These are informal lines and rhombuses that derive from the grace of the natural world. It is the freedom of this informality that allows shadows to enter frames before human figures, shadows picking clothes from ropes and wires, slightly ghost-like, more like trees. Ritwik relies on the light-and-shadow opera to highlight the human drama through the eaters of light, the trees. After the light and night of ‘ Je raate mor duwarguli bhanglo jhore ’, of ‘ shob je hoye gyalo kalo ’, of everything turned dark, the camera moves like a plant, like the eye, searching for light. And then it moves like writing in the Devanagari script: trees and houses, conical tops, roofs, tin, concrete, all of these in a rush, so that it seems like the camera wants to escape from homes and the homeless for now, till it rests and waits, on foliage, on plants, to the ad hoc gardens that connect inside our eyes to indulge the sense of what is now called ‘social forestry’. The father, leaning against a tree for support, speaks to a doctor about Nita. One displacement happens after another—Nita, first rendered homeless by history, now moves out of the house to a bamboo room nearby, her equivalent of a temporary tent, her ‘nirbandhobpuri’, a town without friends; then she has to leave home for Reid Chest Hospital, another instalment of displacement. Ritwik begins making her more tree-like with greater urgency, as if that could protect her. After the audience’s discovery of her tuberculosis, we meet the trees—they take over the screen, Nita’s head now a blob emerging from the lower bottom of the screen. She’s being displaced from the screen too, history repeating itself over and over again. In a darker saree now, she’s the colour of tree trunks and branches, until she merges with the tree trunk in a scene. Ritwik is cutting out something else simultaneously—shade and shadow. By the ninetieth minute, the shade of trees is gone. There’s just bare land, the shadows of the trees far away are like birds whose shadows don’t reach the earth. A train cuts the screen. She, like the trees, doesn’t move. A couple of minutes later, she opens her umbrella standing under a tree, a double umbrella as it were. Every now and then, Ritwik’s camera surveys the land: palms of various kinds, a leafless plumeria, after the news of Gita’s pregnancy. In the foreboding of both birth and death, Ritwik turns to plants. After the camera shows us Nita’s blood-stained handkerchief, we see trees moving wildly in a storm, and her curly hair, as if they were relatives. The vegetation around Reid Chest Hospital is different—a coniferous-looking tree stands to the left of the frame, it offers no shade, only the fur of fog and the skin of the sky. Nita is sitting, her brother comes with news about Gita’s son, their two-storeyed house, until she breaks into one of the most famous dialogues in Bangla cinema: ‘ Dada, aami kintu bachte cheyechhilam ’, Dada, I did want to live … The camera loses balance as it were and surveys the trees. That’s how the film ends—with tree and tree and tree, almost like how it began, except for the woman who has gone missing from life, from the screen. Fifteen seconds into Subarnarekha , no image has been given to us, nothing except the auditory, ‘Vande Mataram’. The first visual: trees, slim, unrevealing of age, a bamboo in the middle, another an arc; the cohabitation of various sizes, even shapes. The Indian flag goes up on the bamboo pole; another bamboo, bent, serves as trellis over a gate. In bamboo as flag pole, Ritwik is hoping for the new Indian nation to have the tensile strength of bamboo, to be flexible, supportive and all-purpose, for all its citizens to make whatever they can of it. For the moment, though, there’s chaos and uncertainty, differences more than unity—a teacher in a new school teaches English and history, another Bengali and Sanskrit, history and historiography available only to those living in English; Dhaka versus Pabna; caste divisions. A child’s mother is lost. The word ‘udbastu’, refugee, floats around. Gandhi’s assassination emerges as newsprint in a newspaper office. Nabajibon Colony, the new settlement for those without homes, is constructed almost entirely of bamboo, as if the new (‘naba’) life (‘jibon’) must have the plant’s resilience. Ritwik draws the opposition between the old and new through metaphor. Both the sarod and the ektara are musical instruments that derive from plant life, but he gives us classical music before a Baul’s song. Hence bamboo—for the people, like the people; the roofs, doors, windows and walls of the houses in Nabajibon Colony, the Baul’s musical instrument. In the first ten minutes of the film named after a river, we see bamboo being split and cut everywhere. Partition, people, plants. A bamboo republic. Ghatshila’s plants enter the census of our imagination: bamboo, banana, papaya, species that grow easily, often on their own, without care, like these people must. When the little girl Sita asks her brother whether Abhiram, the boy who has lost his mother, will come with them to the new place, we are given no answer, only a sign, almost Buddha-like—she plucks a flower and leaves. The mill, where her brother has found work, is beside a sal forest. After reaching Ghatshila, the first thing Sita says is, ‘Dadamoni, come and see how beautiful the garden is …’. The little boy Abhi is still crying. An oleander—poisonous oleander—stands behind him. Rabindranath’s song sprouts: ‘ Aaj dhaner khete roudrochhayay lukochuri khyala re bhai, lukochuri khyala ’. Sunlight and shade are playing hide-and-seek on the paddy fields … What grass was to Jibanananda Das, paddy is to Ritwik. It’s to the paddy fields that his homeless want to return. Paddy and bamboo, related sub-families. We see a barren landscape from time to time, stony, bare-branched trees, but in their forms is still the intimation of being alive—unlike the ruins of the aircraft from World War II, with its exposed steel rods, weeds around it, the camera making it look like a foreigner, a UFO, the runway unfriendly, trees pushed to its corners, like eyelashes in the eyes. Sita and Abhi run through a place with different kinds of plant life: the bare and low, spiky and tender leaves. Some of these are inside the ruins of the airfield’s buildings; no roof or inhabitants, no windows, no doors, only frames, like the leafless trees. Ritwik is intentional. The little girl is called Sita for a reason, the story of her name from the Ramayana is abridged for us in a dialogue—how the Sita of the epic was found in an agricultural field, her link with ploughing cultures, and, though we are not told this yet, how Sita returns to the earth after her test by fire, a premonition of what is to happen to the Sita of this film. ‘Sita is the daughter of the earth …’ We are shown that earth: of rocks, river, bark, stone and trees with tiny heads, and tiny human heads half-hidden among large rocks. Outside their house are lonely species: a few palms, shrubs, skinny young trees, standing without discipline or order. They are at home. Abhi returns from the city, educated and eager to finish writing his novel based in Ghatshila, for which he has found a ‘big publisher’. Both he and Sita are surprised to find each other grown up, their bodies longer, their hearts in longing, they walk through the sal forest. The trees are tall, very tall—the camera, so long habituated to a sparser population of trees, goes a bit mad, it begins moving from left to right, taking in the trees one by one, until it is overwhelmed. This is Ritwik’s interpretation of Wordsworth’s ‘Ten thousand saw I at a glance’—the uncountability of this unit of plant life, its impress, its freedom and rush, its nurturing and caging. The sense of time—and space—in the forest, where one can’t tell when the first tree was planted, that this is a history very different from those that have been written about human lives, allows Abhi to begin talking about his novel. It might have been classified as autofiction today. He begins narrating the story of his life, third person to himself. Walking towards the trees, he raises his arms—they become branches, and he a tree for a moment. The camera then moves to the back of his head, so that he, like the other citizens of the forest, becomes part of this republic of faceless beings, the trees. He asks her a question, to which she says ‘no’. Light and its opposite fall on her face, and the camera integrates her into the blur of trees behind. How long has she felt like this, this ‘love’, Abhi asks Sita, without using the word. ‘A long time,’ she replies. The camera goes berserk in trying to capture this sense of Time—Ritwik does a few 360 degrees, all we see are the trees of this forest, long trunks, and then the river. Abhi and Sita return to bamboo, to home, to the vines that are growing on bamboo trellises, to the houseplants. Occasionally, we spot oleander, a palm or two, overgrown green in the pilot’s clubhouse, or a flower vase on a table when someone says ‘caste is everything’. When Abhi’s mother dies and he recognizes her from memory, Ritwik takes us to the child Abhi and where is he? Swinging from a tree, like only a little boy can. Twenty seconds later, after the graceful undulations of the roots from which the little boy was hanging, and the shade of the banyan, both unquantifiable and amorphous, we see the sternness of electric poles in a railway station. Their relationship is shown through plant metaphors: trees skirt the agricultural fields as they talk, while the tanpura, made from a gourd, is strung; when the wedding is fixed against her wishes, a dry palm leaf scratches the frame; when Abhi leaves and Sita asks whom she should share her sorrow with, the camera shows treetops far away. The wedding day arrives. The alpana of paddy stalks, grain and leaves sit on the floor, leading our eyes to Sita, whose face is painted with stylised designs from the agricultural world. And suddenly she’s gone. A woman says that she was scribbling something. The camera focuses on the alpana, its details, leaf and leaf and stalk and leaf, and the plant alpana grows and glows towards light. Years pass, trees and peace have disappeared from their lives in the cramped city. Listening to her sing, the little son asks, ‘Ma, what do the dhaaner khet, the paddy fields, look like?’ The song will return at the end of the film, but, before that, there are other plants. Haraprasad, having lost everything that he valued, returns to Iswar and tells him that he’s a ‘baajey-pora taal gaachh’, a blasted palm tree. The landscape turns barren gradually. In the end, though, the little boy Binu, orphaned, stands with Iswar, his newly found maternal uncle, under a tree. They have just got off the train, Iswar has been asked to vacate his residential quarters. Homeless once again, the camera turns to a tree. And then to song and soil, to the wave on the paddy fields—the literal and the figurative find a home: ‘ Dhaaner khete dheu …’ The film ends as it had begun—by resting on plants. Water in instalments, river, rain, ripple, inside boat, on plant, on tree. Water and sand, mother and child, river and bank. Trees by the river, like ripples of heads. Three minutes of this survey of life by the river Titas, and our eyes rest on an old tree at last—we meet its relatives, not on land, but their reflections on water. Soon more, not alive but their afterlife: boats, trees now travelling on water, unimaginable during their life on land; bamboo, fence, wall, house, basket, where grain is being winnowed, thatched homes. They come alive again, rounded trees and dancing papaya plants. They return to water, to boat, its wood, but mostly its bamboo, arcs and shelter, fish caught and put in baskets, covered with a flat woven bamboo piece. To land again, where the tree’s roots are, where they provide the shade necessary for dance and home, for celebration under trees. The canopy—tree branches become Ritwik’s sky; two tree branches connect two corners of the screen, like a ceiling connects walls; men fight with them too, with bamboo. Ritwik begins to make us see, again, the optical osmosis between plant and person ... ... an unconscious woman in a man’s arms, horizontal, is like the tree branches in the following scene; the floral patterns on the bride’s forehead, the wedding garlands, the eating and rejection of light, darkness and luminosity, how Ritwik’s camera catches light falling on the flowers in the garden and those on the wedding saree, the shola kadam flower on the topor, the groom’s crown. These are echoed visually by the houses of bamboo and straw, as if they too were topor-like, and the palm tree behind the small temple. At the moment of leaving her parents’, the bride weeps holding a plant—the holy basil in the tulsi mancha—and her butterfly tiara makes her plant-like. There is no getting away from this way of seeing. Ritwik shows us the boatman’s katha, its stylised botanical patterns; he warns the husband about his wife’s beauty gathering attention with a proverb borrowed from—what else?—the plant world: ‘ Lau er opor najar lagau na kintu ’, be careful that the bottle gourd doesn’t catch attention. A close-up of the woman’s middle-parted hair is turned into a relative of the sugarcane leaf’s long midrib; shadows of leaves dance on the bodies of women so that their bodies and limbs become branches. Ram’s aged, scraggly beard is not very different from the straw hanging from the roof. There’s the stamp of the botanical everywhere: flowers on dhaak, diamond patterns of bamboo designs in kitchens, straight lines of jute sticks, bow and arrow; a galaxy of water hyacinth amidst which sit planets of boats, boats of potatoes. Tree shadows lick the water everywhere, old trees snuggle up to their shortened noon shadows, the dheki moves up and down and up and down, avoiding the hand that feeds it grain, crushing grain. Men and women erupt in anger, the violence of the plant idiom: ‘ Tomarey kauwa ja, oi dhaan khete giye kauwao ta ’, telling you something is like telling the paddy field … The little boy’s name is Ananta. Infinite. He runs through the paddy fields blowing a paper horn. Nabajibon, paddy, bamboo, it is to this that Ritwik returns, this is how history is reborn. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Sumana Roy is the author of How I became a Tree , Missing: A Novel , Out of Syllabus: Poems , My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories , among others. Her newest book is entitled Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. SONALI SONAM (b. 1995, Bihar) is a visual artist whose practice draws from the discipline and visual language of miniature painting while engaging with contemporary experiences of space, memory, and perception. She studied Painting at Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, and later completed her Master’s degree at the College of Art, New Delhi. Column Kolkata Ritwik Ghatak East India West Bengal Arboreal Cinema A Man's World Nidhil Vohra 2nd Mar Sinking the Body Politic Dipanjan Sinha 24th Aug Saffronizing Bollywood Kaashif Hajee 15th Apr On That Note:

Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak created a devotional body of work that confronts alienation and Partition, while attending to humanity’s final asylum in the embrace of lifeforms between garden and forest. As his feminist protagonists withdraw, growing increasingly reclusive and almost arboreal amid narratives of class and betrayal, Sumana Roy reflects on Ghatak’s decisive critical creative and technical choices as embodiments of his ethos. · THE VERTICAL Column · Kolkata Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak created a devotional body of work that confronts alienation and Partition, while attending to humanity’s final asylum in the embrace of lifeforms between garden and forest. As his feminist protagonists withdraw, growing increasingly reclusive and almost arboreal amid narratives of class and betrayal, Sumana Roy reflects on Ghatak’s decisive critical creative and technical choices as embodiments of his ethos. Ephemeral III (2025), watercolour on acid-free paper, courtesy of Sonali Sonam. Ritwik's Trees I always put it down to coincidence, the easiest way to explain things. Ritwik Ghatak and I were born on the same day, though half a century apart, and plant life would come to frame the way we both experience the world. I am fifty years old now, exactly the age Ritwik died at. Writing this essay with that awareness—strange as it is confusing—takes my thoughts in directions they might not have otherwise. There’s a tree in Sahaj Path , the first tree I ever saw. That can’t be true, of course, because I would have been about three then, in my first year at school. It is in the generic nature of trees to not be remembered, but this is slightly different. It’s not a blob of green that I remember as a tree; it’s black, black as soot, like burnt tree trunks. The tree, though, is not burnt—it is alive; a human sits inside it, as dark as the tree and its foliage, as dark as its shade. Sounds a bit childish, I know, but no other living form had enchanted me like this. I say ‘living’ with caution and affection, for I would discover a living likeness of the soot-black tree soon. On a bus from Siliguri’s Court More to Bagdogra, where my father’s sister lived—a journey we made no more than twice a year, in spite of the short distance, for the lack of availability of transport and time—I would see it. The bus was moving slowly, its speed curtailed by the rush of workers emerging from the Chandmoni Tea Estate. There it was, outside the window to our left—it hadn’t moved since the last time I’d seen it. A tree exactly like Nandalal Bose’s. Ritwik would have seen that tree in Sahaj Path . It is with such a tree that Meghe Dhaka Tara begins, its branches spread wide, without shyness or self-consciousness, as if to expose its leaves to all the light it could get. It is to the right of the screen, Nita walks out of its shadow. I could also rephrase this: the tree releases Nita into the world after protecting it from the glare of the world, perhaps of life. It is tempting to see the tree as analogous to the protective womb, after which the human is left on its own. For the first forty seconds of the film, the camera looks at things that don’t move—the trees. The camera shows no interest in looking for a human, such is its initial indifference to the centrality of the human figure in art. A woman in white emerges out of the shade and shadow of the trees, a black-and-white contrast emphasised in a black-and-white film; so similar to Nandalal’s linocut. The canvas begins to move. A train passes by. A man is singing, aa aa aa aa . His back is to the audience. The camera isn’t interested in his face. It takes in the vegetation by the riverbank. Sharp, tall grass pierces the top half of the frame; it pokes the sky. From looking for punctures in the sky, we are dragged downwards to the earth, to a torn slipper on a human foot. The camera has become plant-like—it is moving like trees do, in the north–south axis; like plants, it has become indifferent to the human face. After the restoration of attention to human affairs, to the crises of poverty, particularly new poverty (surely there must be a term equivalent to nouveau riche for those suddenly rendered poor by catastrophic circumstances), the camera seems to long for a sighting of the plant world again. Only four minutes have passed. It’s enough to give us a sense of the family whose life we will be following; it’s also enough to tell us that human lives will be complemented and annotated by the histories of their changing neighbours, plant life. ‘Nabin Sangha’ enters the frame. Humans, tall and small, chew the foreground, but it’s only as much real estate as the mouth occupies on the face. Behind them is the sky, made jagged by the uneven height of trees. It is not just an assemblage of different species of trees that we see, but a more urgent history of settlement, of planting. Pollinators, mostly two-footed ones like those in the foreground, are responsible for their settlement on this land. Ritwik is giving us a history of dislocation, of people as much as of plants. The name of the neighbourhood club, common in Bengal and other spaces that came to accommodate Bengalis evicted by the forces of history, is telling—the plants are as ‘nabin’, new, as the humans here; they might soon be propagated to other places, near and far. In Ritwik’s films, we see a new kind of horticultural unit, one that emerged so naturally that it hasn’t been recorded in our architectural or ecological history. Neither garden nor forest, it is as domesticated as it is wild. In Rabindranath Tagore, for instance, we find both an admiration for the beauty of the garden and an instinctive rejection of it as a unit foreign to landscapes and geographical formations such as ours. In practice, both he and his son Rathindranath—who would adopt favourite characteristics of Japanese, Italian, French and Mughal gardens into Santiniketan’s Uttarayan, the cluster of four houses that Rabindranath would design and live in—were internationalists, welcoming of travelling flora from other continents. As a concept, though, Rabindranath seemed to be suspicious of the garden, the way the unit had come to be imported from outside the Indian subcontinent, particularly Europe. The controlling impulse necessary to design and execute gardens would have challenged his ethics and aesthetics. They would have been too neat, too premeditated. ‘Bon’ over ‘bagan’ for him, the forest over the garden, though he would have been thinking of the jungle more than the forest, a space then still outside human intentionality. Satyajit Ray, in his foreword to Ritwik’s book Cinema and I , writes about the latter’s lifelong preoccupation with the Partition, how it shaped his films, gave them their subject and energy. What hasn’t been noticed is how the post-Partition Bengali family is seen through the concomitant new ordering of plant life. Land had been divided; how could the creatures of land, humans and plants, live in older units anymore? ‘Unit’, after all, is the root word for ‘unity’, and, with that gone, how were we to find plants except in fragmented and foraged units? This is what Ritwik—like John Clare, who was disoriented by the Enclosure Act of 1809, the privatisation and fencing of shared land—records in these scenes: broken sentences, broken song, broken land, its broken vegetation. Orchards, forests, gardens, fields, they are units of unbrokenness, a way of looking at the world where looking becomes equivalent to owning. The ambition of the zamindar was to own as far as his eyes could see. The philosophical idea of the plantation must owe to this, the idea of unbroken rows of the same plant, as well as the ownership that comes from this manner of control and ordering. The people in Ritwik’s films do not have the luxury of such a ‘vision’; time limits their lives as much as space does. They live from day to day, and, in Meghe Dhaka Tara , from month to month, salary day to salary day. In this, they are like trees, they who live outside capitalism, outside mortgages and pensions and EMIs. In these films is the ‘bagan’, garden. But the architecture of Ritwik’s gardens is arbitrary, its scope and ambition limited by space and poverty. What can the gardens of a homeless people look like? Indifferent to expectations of geometry and species that had given form and beauty to gardens in Japan and Italy, for instance, these borrowed spaces became an archive of their ad hoc living. Grammatical gardens are a record of ambition and purpose, the gardens in Ritwik’s films are a record of foraging and found plants, found and functional art. The trees are not here to add beauty, just as human faces and bodies do not exist to draw attention to the beauty of their anatomical form. They are just there—like the sky is, or like shadows are, because they are. Our eyes meet them like they do relatives of our own species, without formality or introductions. Yes, they are relatives, for they live alongside humans in residential spaces, by the well and by a stream, bringing shade to a tin-roofed house, fruit to a half-starved family, outliving the human who brought them here. My heart bustles in recognition when I see them, for I grew up in such a neighbourhood myself. In Siliguri’s Ashrampara, my neighbours, families whose memories and eating and living habits were formed by the agricultural produce and rivers of Bangladesh before they, like seeds, were flung into spaces unfamiliar to their ancestors, created such gardens. Chilli plants by a streetside water drain, pumpkin and bottle gourd vines climbing on to tin roofs of kachcha toilets, unseasonal marigold flowers from a leftover garland used to worship a goddess, fresh coriander from seeds scattered near the well, where they grew beside ghritakumari, and there, often, a banana plant offering fruit, flower or stem, and always, always, an assembly of kochu leaves, waiting to be devoured. Roses became fences, valued more for their thorns than their flowers, to keep strangers away more than to attract; the tulsi that would, every Saturday, bring together a congregation hungry for the airy sweetness of batasha, thrown up into the air, Hari-r loot, then gathered from the earth and put urgently inside mouths; shandhya malati and nayantara, that flowered better when neglected; and greens, so many kinds of shak that it seemed the Bengali had evolved from the cow. Every morning, flower thieves, with a lanky bamboo pole in their hands, collecting flowers for their gods, never missing an opportunity to break a branch from a tree to plant in their garden—finding and foraging, planting and pollinating. From the ‘sangha’ to ‘sansar’, the club to the room, Ritwik makes this migration through song: ‘ Ghorete bhromor elo gunguniye ’. The bee’s come singing into the room. Where there is bee, there must be flower? What we have instead of the glamour of flowers—and I’m struggling to remember whether the camera ever pays attention to flowers at all—is bamboo. The strips of bamboo and the stripes of the saree that the women wear mirror each other all through his films until he’s established, almost naturally, that the refugees of his world are like bamboo: this is their habitat, they will stick to each other to form clusters, they will be chopped off from time to time, used, repurposed, taken away from their family, but the roots will allow growth again, life and height, length and the seeking of light, until they are dismembered again. The stripes in the women’s sarees run parallel to each other, like the strips of bamboo in the walls of the room do—the ends of both, saree and fence, have to be cut abruptly. Sometimes they continue on to men’s bodies, to the stripes of their lungi. Perhaps no other filmmaker has documented the culture of everyday bamboo design in eastern India with such an artist’s homely attention as Ritwik. These moments of distraction from the thoroughfare of human traffic are almost akin to a tendril looking for support, for something to hold. The varying rhombuses of bamboo fences give the eye this hold, this pause. The ninth minute of Meghe Dhaka Tara is long, the eye spans and embalms the frame, it takes in details of the weave of the bamboo before it moves to something that Ritwik’s camera turns into its relative: hair, hair on the heads of women, Nita’s in a bun, Gita’s left open, the craft and compulsion of human hands on bamboo visible, as it is in the bun; the freedom of the bamboo groves, alive and loose, as in Gita’s open hair. Nita’s name bears the etymological impress of ethics and morality, a human-brokered life; Gita’s name derives from song, it is freer, as much as music is free, or freer than morality. Ritwik’s eyes look for echoes, they find it—echoes of bamboo in the sarees, particularly those that Gita wears, where the shadow-and-light serve-and-volley dims and glows. About a quarter of an hour has passed. Ritwik returns the trees of the first scene to us, we now see more of them, more of their bodies; we see more of the river, too, which pushes the trees out of the frame slightly, gently. What takes up space are the shadows of these large-bodied trees, their girth a visible birth certificate, a mark of fixity, perhaps even of constancy, who can tell, in contrast to the river whose water moves, like the people in the film. The brother—played by Anil Chatterjee, in one of the most unforgettable characters in cinematic history—sings, his accompanists are birds, they cry, though I don’t know why the English language calls their tongue ‘bird cries’. Like a musician uses caesura, Ritwik uses music: for a break between stanzas. In the film’s first scene, Nita emerges from the trees, not exactly like Venus from the sea in Botticelli, but the shared lineage of human and the elements, plant and person, is established right away. A little more than a quarter of an hour later, she walks from the right to the left of the screen. Her brother sits under a tree, rehearsing. Ritwik ensures that we see him as part of the tree trunk, the bodies of humans assimilated by the camera’s angle as once was possible in mythology; Nita, too, is part of this gift of the gaze: she, her brother’s lone audience, melds with the aerial branches of the tree. She, provider, sister, daughter, girlfriend, has to become more than one species. This is why Nita moves out of her Krishnachura- and Radhachura-like body to become bamboo soon after, the transition happening as soon as she gives some money to her brother. It’s Nita’s birthday. A Jagaddhatri Pujo will take place. Ritwik has decided to abandon subtlety. Jagaddhatri, as her name indicates, is a goddess of the earth; according to the Kena Upanishad, she asks the elements, Agni and Varuna and Vayu, to move a blade of grass. Ritwik takes Nita, her father and brother to something like grass. Coconut and betelnut trees, tall, and taller than the hills in the background. They walk on the unlaid road, through marshland and paddy fields, the stalks ankle-deep in water. Other species crop up on the screen: boatman, shaluk, lotus. ‘Poetry of the earth is never dead,’ one of the characters says. Jagaddhatri; the plants. Ritwik doesn’t leave it there—like Bibhutibhushan in Pather Panchali , he emphasises the beauty that can be had by those without money, like Apu’s sister Durga in the novel, like Nita’s singer-brother in this film. ‘Dhanyo khetra’, the blessed land, the land of such agricultural bounty is a phrase central to Ritwik’s vision. For the Bengali audience, there would also be the cultural conditioning of ‘ Dhono dhanye pushpe bhora ’ of D.L. Roy’s song, the celebration, in spite of Partition, of the plentiful plant life that made Jibanananda’s ‘Rupashi Bangla’. Children run out of a small school a few scenes later. As if to frame this freedom, Ghatak allows a branch to graze the frame from the left. To him, the plant world is a metaphor that emphasises, by contrast, the unfreedom of social life. ‘How do you all stay indoors in the evening? I find it difficult to breathe,’ says Gita, to which Sanat, still undecided between the two women, ‘music’ and ‘morality’, offers to take Nita out for a walk. Their house is framed by trees, their father by an umbrella, the heads of both mirroring each other, as it is possible only in a drawing book. Sanat complains about Nita being chained down by responsibilities, to which she offers a stronger metaphor for the loss of freedom: ‘Besh toh, make a glass frame and put me inside it, like a wax doll.’ And, almost immediately, two opposites are offered: marshland and meadow, there is freedom in both, even if there is stickiness. For when Nita stands up to go, leaves stick to her saree. Over and over again, Ritwik turns her into a tree, a giving tree. A job has been found, she requests her brother to drop her off at Sealdah. The landscape changes; it’s thornier, wilder. The tree is different—it is no longer on the right side of the screen but the left; it has more branches than leaves, it is less spread out, some of its branches even amputated. Soon, the camera is on the brother. He’s singing, entering the world of plants, whose bodies are flecked by light and shade; wild grass waits nearby in every frame. Nita, though, was doing the opposite, emerging from the trees. The camera refuses to move; it has become the tree. Nita passes by, he asks her for twenty-five paise, to shave, and the camera begins moving. The brother runs after her, his shadow slightly thinner than the older, time-fed trees. The branches offer shade, they also stand rooted while humans are rendered homeless. The camera, momentarily happy to be a tree, now begins running—it, too, is scared of becoming homeless. Catching up with her, he realises that it is not his sister, only someone in the same generic white saree with a slim border. The unknown woman smiles. Her eyes are downcast, instead of the goddess’ halo, her bust-sized image: the white saree with the border running like a train line whose other track has been eaten by time or water; the echo of that thin horizontal line in the vertical strap of her handbag, a marker of her working woman status, a new self in a new land. Not halo but branches of trees crowd the frame. She is of the trees, even if she has a face, even if she is human. The woman smiles. The brother laughs. He begins singing. Another tree appears. Now it’s to the right of the screen. He is standing under it and singing. The camera moves with him as he walks. His shadow moves. The shadows of the branches remain still. He moves from right to left, a bit like the Urdu script at first, and then like musical notation, the arohan and abarohan, travelling to and fro, to and fro, the return to the ‘sama’, the home. But where is home? Do shadows return to the trees at night? Ritwik changes the composition of the halo that announces a goddess’ status. The branches of trees a little while ago, now it’s smoke from the mother’s cooking that frames her face, so that the halo is diffused, a blur, in spite of the branches of the trees right behind, as distant as cloud. Another woman enters—her hair is open, her saree is striped, the bamboo seems to be emerging out of her body, she goes out for a walk by the lake. It is Gita, with Sanat. Nita is walking back home. Irregular dots of darkness fill the screen—blobs of tree heads, their fraternal twins lying as shadows on the ground, more restful. Nita’s face is dark, light falls on a portion of her hips. Books clutched to her chest, she walks; her sister and boyfriend are sitting by the water, singing. Nita looks, then looks away, and walks past the scene. The camera moves to the sister and her new audience. Her shoulder-length hair has been left open. For a moment, they look like branches of the tree behind her—both move. The camera moves too. Gita is laughing after her flirtatious sermon to Sanat about staring at her with his mouth open. Nandalal’s tree, from Sahaj Path , is behind her. Its many branches make her look like a many-armed Durga; the man is made to look like Mahishasur. She jumps, he follows. We are inside stripes again: bamboo walls, fences, light and darkness. The composition is of an afterlife of the plant world—wooden windows with sticks inside them that keep animals away and divide the sky and the view. The sister in the striped saree enters through the gate; all is bamboo and wood, even the sister. Ritwik takes care to emphasise their form and texture, a continuation of their life, a life made possible by a new host and a new environment, like the refugees of Partition have had to adapt to. Bamboo and smoke, different as they are in behaviour, move in various patterns and orientations, making the walls of the house look like a happy museum of the afterlife of trees themselves. From inside the house, various kinds of plant life emerge, among them, paisleys trapped inside diamond-shaped cages on Gita’s blouse. Things change, Sanat and Gita are married, living in a flat in the city: the bamboo patterns, Nita’s saree, now in a dark colour. Instead of a house scavenged and salvaged from bodies of plants, we see a skylight in iron frames. The soft stripes of bamboo and clotheslines and sarees have given way to the stern lines of glass and steel, staircases and doorframes, ventilators and windows. Nita’s bag is now a pattern of checks. The door curtain, in all likelihood a Manipuri weave not uncommon at that time, has diamond-shaped rhombuses. As soon as the door opens, the camera moves to the solid lines of the threshold. These lines are bureaucratic, they keep apartments sturdy, they want to serve ambitions of permanence; how different they are from bamboo, in whose DNA it is to be ad hoc. Smoke cruises up here, too, but it’s not the smoke of Nita’s mother’s kitchen; not clay oven but ashtray. Ritwik is showing us the props of culture: a Bankura clay elephant stands beside truncated shadows of window bars, tuberoses in a vase on the table, puppets on the wooden cupboard, nature is being diminished here, everywhere. But the camera is restless for the lines in Nita’s home, its stripes: clothes, clotheslines, serrated tin roofs, bamboo nailed together, diagonally falling shadows. These are informal lines and rhombuses that derive from the grace of the natural world. It is the freedom of this informality that allows shadows to enter frames before human figures, shadows picking clothes from ropes and wires, slightly ghost-like, more like trees. Ritwik relies on the light-and-shadow opera to highlight the human drama through the eaters of light, the trees. After the light and night of ‘ Je raate mor duwarguli bhanglo jhore ’, of ‘ shob je hoye gyalo kalo ’, of everything turned dark, the camera moves like a plant, like the eye, searching for light. And then it moves like writing in the Devanagari script: trees and houses, conical tops, roofs, tin, concrete, all of these in a rush, so that it seems like the camera wants to escape from homes and the homeless for now, till it rests and waits, on foliage, on plants, to the ad hoc gardens that connect inside our eyes to indulge the sense of what is now called ‘social forestry’. The father, leaning against a tree for support, speaks to a doctor about Nita. One displacement happens after another—Nita, first rendered homeless by history, now moves out of the house to a bamboo room nearby, her equivalent of a temporary tent, her ‘nirbandhobpuri’, a town without friends; then she has to leave home for Reid Chest Hospital, another instalment of displacement. Ritwik begins making her more tree-like with greater urgency, as if that could protect her. After the audience’s discovery of her tuberculosis, we meet the trees—they take over the screen, Nita’s head now a blob emerging from the lower bottom of the screen. She’s being displaced from the screen too, history repeating itself over and over again. In a darker saree now, she’s the colour of tree trunks and branches, until she merges with the tree trunk in a scene. Ritwik is cutting out something else simultaneously—shade and shadow. By the ninetieth minute, the shade of trees is gone. There’s just bare land, the shadows of the trees far away are like birds whose shadows don’t reach the earth. A train cuts the screen. She, like the trees, doesn’t move. A couple of minutes later, she opens her umbrella standing under a tree, a double umbrella as it were. Every now and then, Ritwik’s camera surveys the land: palms of various kinds, a leafless plumeria, after the news of Gita’s pregnancy. In the foreboding of both birth and death, Ritwik turns to plants. After the camera shows us Nita’s blood-stained handkerchief, we see trees moving wildly in a storm, and her curly hair, as if they were relatives. The vegetation around Reid Chest Hospital is different—a coniferous-looking tree stands to the left of the frame, it offers no shade, only the fur of fog and the skin of the sky. Nita is sitting, her brother comes with news about Gita’s son, their two-storeyed house, until she breaks into one of the most famous dialogues in Bangla cinema: ‘ Dada, aami kintu bachte cheyechhilam ’, Dada, I did want to live … The camera loses balance as it were and surveys the trees. That’s how the film ends—with tree and tree and tree, almost like how it began, except for the woman who has gone missing from life, from the screen. Fifteen seconds into Subarnarekha , no image has been given to us, nothing except the auditory, ‘Vande Mataram’. The first visual: trees, slim, unrevealing of age, a bamboo in the middle, another an arc; the cohabitation of various sizes, even shapes. The Indian flag goes up on the bamboo pole; another bamboo, bent, serves as trellis over a gate. In bamboo as flag pole, Ritwik is hoping for the new Indian nation to have the tensile strength of bamboo, to be flexible, supportive and all-purpose, for all its citizens to make whatever they can of it. For the moment, though, there’s chaos and uncertainty, differences more than unity—a teacher in a new school teaches English and history, another Bengali and Sanskrit, history and historiography available only to those living in English; Dhaka versus Pabna; caste divisions. A child’s mother is lost. The word ‘udbastu’, refugee, floats around. Gandhi’s assassination emerges as newsprint in a newspaper office. Nabajibon Colony, the new settlement for those without homes, is constructed almost entirely of bamboo, as if the new (‘naba’) life (‘jibon’) must have the plant’s resilience. Ritwik draws the opposition between the old and new through metaphor. Both the sarod and the ektara are musical instruments that derive from plant life, but he gives us classical music before a Baul’s song. Hence bamboo—for the people, like the people; the roofs, doors, windows and walls of the houses in Nabajibon Colony, the Baul’s musical instrument. In the first ten minutes of the film named after a river, we see bamboo being split and cut everywhere. Partition, people, plants. A bamboo republic. Ghatshila’s plants enter the census of our imagination: bamboo, banana, papaya, species that grow easily, often on their own, without care, like these people must. When the little girl Sita asks her brother whether Abhiram, the boy who has lost his mother, will come with them to the new place, we are given no answer, only a sign, almost Buddha-like—she plucks a flower and leaves. The mill, where her brother has found work, is beside a sal forest. After reaching Ghatshila, the first thing Sita says is, ‘Dadamoni, come and see how beautiful the garden is …’. The little boy Abhi is still crying. An oleander—poisonous oleander—stands behind him. Rabindranath’s song sprouts: ‘ Aaj dhaner khete roudrochhayay lukochuri khyala re bhai, lukochuri khyala ’. Sunlight and shade are playing hide-and-seek on the paddy fields … What grass was to Jibanananda Das, paddy is to Ritwik. It’s to the paddy fields that his homeless want to return. Paddy and bamboo, related sub-families. We see a barren landscape from time to time, stony, bare-branched trees, but in their forms is still the intimation of being alive—unlike the ruins of the aircraft from World War II, with its exposed steel rods, weeds around it, the camera making it look like a foreigner, a UFO, the runway unfriendly, trees pushed to its corners, like eyelashes in the eyes. Sita and Abhi run through a place with different kinds of plant life: the bare and low, spiky and tender leaves. Some of these are inside the ruins of the airfield’s buildings; no roof or inhabitants, no windows, no doors, only frames, like the leafless trees. Ritwik is intentional. The little girl is called Sita for a reason, the story of her name from the Ramayana is abridged for us in a dialogue—how the Sita of the epic was found in an agricultural field, her link with ploughing cultures, and, though we are not told this yet, how Sita returns to the earth after her test by fire, a premonition of what is to happen to the Sita of this film. ‘Sita is the daughter of the earth …’ We are shown that earth: of rocks, river, bark, stone and trees with tiny heads, and tiny human heads half-hidden among large rocks. Outside their house are lonely species: a few palms, shrubs, skinny young trees, standing without discipline or order. They are at home. Abhi returns from the city, educated and eager to finish writing his novel based in Ghatshila, for which he has found a ‘big publisher’. Both he and Sita are surprised to find each other grown up, their bodies longer, their hearts in longing, they walk through the sal forest. The trees are tall, very tall—the camera, so long habituated to a sparser population of trees, goes a bit mad, it begins moving from left to right, taking in the trees one by one, until it is overwhelmed. This is Ritwik’s interpretation of Wordsworth’s ‘Ten thousand saw I at a glance’—the uncountability of this unit of plant life, its impress, its freedom and rush, its nurturing and caging. The sense of time—and space—in the forest, where one can’t tell when the first tree was planted, that this is a history very different from those that have been written about human lives, allows Abhi to begin talking about his novel. It might have been classified as autofiction today. He begins narrating the story of his life, third person to himself. Walking towards the trees, he raises his arms—they become branches, and he a tree for a moment. The camera then moves to the back of his head, so that he, like the other citizens of the forest, becomes part of this republic of faceless beings, the trees. He asks her a question, to which she says ‘no’. Light and its opposite fall on her face, and the camera integrates her into the blur of trees behind. How long has she felt like this, this ‘love’, Abhi asks Sita, without using the word. ‘A long time,’ she replies. The camera goes berserk in trying to capture this sense of Time—Ritwik does a few 360 degrees, all we see are the trees of this forest, long trunks, and then the river. Abhi and Sita return to bamboo, to home, to the vines that are growing on bamboo trellises, to the houseplants. Occasionally, we spot oleander, a palm or two, overgrown green in the pilot’s clubhouse, or a flower vase on a table when someone says ‘caste is everything’. When Abhi’s mother dies and he recognizes her from memory, Ritwik takes us to the child Abhi and where is he? Swinging from a tree, like only a little boy can. Twenty seconds later, after the graceful undulations of the roots from which the little boy was hanging, and the shade of the banyan, both unquantifiable and amorphous, we see the sternness of electric poles in a railway station. Their relationship is shown through plant metaphors: trees skirt the agricultural fields as they talk, while the tanpura, made from a gourd, is strung; when the wedding is fixed against her wishes, a dry palm leaf scratches the frame; when Abhi leaves and Sita asks whom she should share her sorrow with, the camera shows treetops far away. The wedding day arrives. The alpana of paddy stalks, grain and leaves sit on the floor, leading our eyes to Sita, whose face is painted with stylised designs from the agricultural world. And suddenly she’s gone. A woman says that she was scribbling something. The camera focuses on the alpana, its details, leaf and leaf and stalk and leaf, and the plant alpana grows and glows towards light. Years pass, trees and peace have disappeared from their lives in the cramped city. Listening to her sing, the little son asks, ‘Ma, what do the dhaaner khet, the paddy fields, look like?’ The song will return at the end of the film, but, before that, there are other plants. Haraprasad, having lost everything that he valued, returns to Iswar and tells him that he’s a ‘baajey-pora taal gaachh’, a blasted palm tree. The landscape turns barren gradually. In the end, though, the little boy Binu, orphaned, stands with Iswar, his newly found maternal uncle, under a tree. They have just got off the train, Iswar has been asked to vacate his residential quarters. Homeless once again, the camera turns to a tree. And then to song and soil, to the wave on the paddy fields—the literal and the figurative find a home: ‘ Dhaaner khete dheu …’ The film ends as it had begun—by resting on plants. Water in instalments, river, rain, ripple, inside boat, on plant, on tree. Water and sand, mother and child, river and bank. Trees by the river, like ripples of heads. Three minutes of this survey of life by the river Titas, and our eyes rest on an old tree at last—we meet its relatives, not on land, but their reflections on water. Soon more, not alive but their afterlife: boats, trees now travelling on water, unimaginable during their life on land; bamboo, fence, wall, house, basket, where grain is being winnowed, thatched homes. They come alive again, rounded trees and dancing papaya plants. They return to water, to boat, its wood, but mostly its bamboo, arcs and shelter, fish caught and put in baskets, covered with a flat woven bamboo piece. To land again, where the tree’s roots are, where they provide the shade necessary for dance and home, for celebration under trees. The canopy—tree branches become Ritwik’s sky; two tree branches connect two corners of the screen, like a ceiling connects walls; men fight with them too, with bamboo. Ritwik begins to make us see, again, the optical osmosis between plant and person ... ... an unconscious woman in a man’s arms, horizontal, is like the tree branches in the following scene; the floral patterns on the bride’s forehead, the wedding garlands, the eating and rejection of light, darkness and luminosity, how Ritwik’s camera catches light falling on the flowers in the garden and those on the wedding saree, the shola kadam flower on the topor, the groom’s crown. These are echoed visually by the houses of bamboo and straw, as if they too were topor-like, and the palm tree behind the small temple. At the moment of leaving her parents’, the bride weeps holding a plant—the holy basil in the tulsi mancha—and her butterfly tiara makes her plant-like. There is no getting away from this way of seeing. Ritwik shows us the boatman’s katha, its stylised botanical patterns; he warns the husband about his wife’s beauty gathering attention with a proverb borrowed from—what else?—the plant world: ‘ Lau er opor najar lagau na kintu ’, be careful that the bottle gourd doesn’t catch attention. A close-up of the woman’s middle-parted hair is turned into a relative of the sugarcane leaf’s long midrib; shadows of leaves dance on the bodies of women so that their bodies and limbs become branches. Ram’s aged, scraggly beard is not very different from the straw hanging from the roof. There’s the stamp of the botanical everywhere: flowers on dhaak, diamond patterns of bamboo designs in kitchens, straight lines of jute sticks, bow and arrow; a galaxy of water hyacinth amidst which sit planets of boats, boats of potatoes. Tree shadows lick the water everywhere, old trees snuggle up to their shortened noon shadows, the dheki moves up and down and up and down, avoiding the hand that feeds it grain, crushing grain. Men and women erupt in anger, the violence of the plant idiom: ‘ Tomarey kauwa ja, oi dhaan khete giye kauwao ta ’, telling you something is like telling the paddy field … The little boy’s name is Ananta. Infinite. He runs through the paddy fields blowing a paper horn. Nabajibon, paddy, bamboo, it is to this that Ritwik returns, this is how history is reborn. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Column Kolkata Ritwik Ghatak East India West Bengal Arboreal Cinema 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. 12th Mar 2026 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:

"There can be no apolitical ahistorical love story—the sentience of love and the stimulus of lust is always shaped by political reality, by blood, by gender, by caste, by religion, by genocide, by fascism, by struggle, by revolution." "There can be no apolitical ahistorical love story—the sentience of love and the stimulus of lust is always shaped by political reality, by blood, by gender, by caste, by religion, by genocide, by fascism, by struggle, by revolution." Artist Essay Miriyam Ilavenil 5 Feb 2026 th · REPORTAGE · LOCATION A Poetics of Banality: Karen Chase’s Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and Zundel State Karen Chase’s Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and ZundelState is a mediocre, counter-revolutionary poetic text on historicism, or rather, anti-historicism, veiled through the subjectivised genre of love. The book contains two stories: the first is Jamali Kamali , a homoerotic narrative poem about the 16th-century Sufi court poet and saint, Jamali, and his speculated lover, Kamali, now published for the first time in the USA. The second, titled ZundelState , is a novella in verse about Joe and Marianna, two lovers from a dystopian future where both history and dreaming have been outlawed. In both works, the inertia of American liberal poetics weakens against the rhizome of love, history, and imagination. Oscillating within orthodoxy, her unimaginative writing guts historicism from political reality, bleeding the soul out of these love stories. Jamali is resurrected from history, in selective memory, disfigured from his legacies of poetry, mysticism, autonomy, all for Chase to bury him within the hollowness of her subjectivity. The genre of homoeroticism bears the sexual dialectics of spirit and matter , neither of which is meaningfully expressed in Chase’s Jamali Kamali , in an aesthetic nor analytic sense. Jamali and Kamali’s bodies, interpreted in their most shallow, spineless, and severed forms, are the only aspect that concerns Chase’s poetics. The theology of Sufism, the politics of feudal Delhi and the theoretical limitations of “queerness” (the constraints of imperial socio-lingualistics against the cosmology of sexualities) are absent in her text, and in her subtext. The material world that both Jamali and Kamali exist in, and its umbilical cord with the present, is ruptured by Chase’s own one-dimensional narrative consciousness, intruding on this bloodline of history. Exiled from the dialectics of time, Chase insulates their memory into her imperial imagination. She desolates not only Jamali’s personhood, through his poetry and mysticism, from feudal Delhi, but along with it, his living memory, the reconstructions of it by “queer” Indians, from neocolonial Delhi. Her self-serving and stylistically superficial poetics messily drags Jamali and Kamali from the womb of history into her neocolonial text, as stillborns. There is no viable sexual desire between Chase’s Jamali and Kamali because they are described without bodies, nor minds, to think, to feel, to carnalise. Their erotics is castrated from the sexual materiality of Delhi. Their intimacy is made impotent by Chase’s voyeuristic gaze. Her poetic consciousness fails to actualise itself, outside of herself. Ironically, it is only towards the end of the poem, when Kamali mourns the death of Jamali, and the narrative subsumes Jamali’s materiality (what little of it), that her poem gains a form of life. In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s genre-rupturing Dictee , a more poetically critical expression of historicism is shared. Where Chase’s Jamali Kamali is an ahistorical homoerotic imagination of speculated history from feudal Delhi, Cha’s Dictee is a reconstruction of the dialectical sentience of Korea that has been (and continues to be) silenced, severed and made seditious by counter-revolutionaries, through the memories of multiple generations of subjugated Korean women. The conflict of Korean consciousness is poeticised not just through abstractions but through the anchored historicism. She does not incarcerate Korea in a single moment of history, like Chase does with Delhi, but expresses lyrically and liturgically, Korean consciousness through the chasm of time and space, through exiles and emancipations, through Japanese imperialism, American imperialism, and the South Korean puppet regime. Although Cha's poetry too, at moments, is stunted by subjectivity, it is still ultimately rooted in materiality, unlike Chase’s work which mystifies materiality through neocolonial abstractions. Cha’s Americaness, a product of imperialist forced migration, is implicated in her narrative. She complicates her place in her poetics, even when Korean history belongs to her. Her personal consciousness is never interruptive of her poeticism; rather, her presence bleeds into the collective bloodshed of Korea, as one ocean of violence and resistance. Chase’s Americaness, on the other hand, is made ambiguous in her first-person narrative, which speaks through the corpse of Jamali, violently embedding herself into this history. Liberal escapism is the thesis Chase constructs against the reactionary dictatorship of the ZundelState. Her fictional ZundelState feels far more material compared to the immateriality of Jamali Kamali . Her ZundelState is authoritarian; it has annihilated dreaming, history, and self-expression. While Chase’s narrative expresses the ZundelState as a form of fascist anti-historicism, her poetry is the embodiment of liberal anti-historicism. She too, like the ZundelState , is seemingly uninterested in the truth:where fascism denies thought, her liberalism is full of thoughts, regardless of the truth. The liberal consciousness placed against the fascist structure of the ZundelState does not contradict it but instead becomes complacent with it. The lovers in the narrative are Joe, who hates the ZundelState and scavenges for remnants of state-destroyed histories, and Marianna, an artist and an agent of the ZundelState who is conflicted by her complicity to the regime. In Joe’s scavenging, and through his and Mariana’s dreamings, fragments of history resurface. The narrative is particularly fixated on exploring the nuclear devastation of Nagasaki , Einstein's theory of relativity, and the history of World War II. Evading the violent imperial politics of the war, Chase’s apolitical poetics mutates Nagasaki into a detached spectacle, Einstein’s theory into an immaterial phantasm and the entire war into uncritical absurdism. Warfare is objectified as an empty eclectic ambience all for Chase’s imaginary liberal romance. A compelling love story should contend with the complexity of reality. There can be no apolitical ahistorical love story—the sentience of love and the stimulus of lust is always shaped by political reality, by blood, by gender, by caste, by religion, by genocide, by fascism, by struggle, by revolution. Where Chase’s Jamali and Kamali are stillborn because she annihilates them from the womb of Delhi, Joe and Marianna’s love decomposes the very flesh of historicism into a mere rhetorical backdrop for their romance. ZundelState , even in its attempt at being a distant dystopia, is framed through American politics, Americanised characters and American liberalism. The narrative is ambivalent of its own Americanness, even referencing the American Dream, an ahistorical ideology, negated by any political criticism or even narrative consciousness of its savagery. There can be no reckoning with historicism in this text without contending with Americanism. Poetically perpetuating Americanism is counter-insurgency against historicism, poeticism, and creativity itself. Chase’s poetics, explained in the ‘A Note’ section of this book, is rooted in, as she states, what is unknown to her . She theorises that writing about what one does not know leads to infinite exploration as opposed to the confined space of writing about what one knows. Yet, her poetry negates her theory, for her ignorant imagination regresses literary evolution. All the “boundlessness” she poetises, through abstract dreams, subjective subconsciousness and bourgeois fictionalism, only ever regurgitates the monotony of American liberalism. Through her writing, her imperialist liberalism, against the goliath of historicism, exists without criticisms and without consciousness. While Chase uses the excuse of Joe’s ignorance (inflicted upon him by Chase’s ZundelState ) to explore known (Western) histories superficially, she is seemingly unequipped to contend with the unknown (Subcontinental) history in Jamali Kamali . Her writing reveals a neocolonial primitiveness that prevents her from weaponising creative and intellectual dialectics to confront the complex historical politics of the unknown. Her poetry emulates the figure of the European observer described by Glauber Rocha in his critical essay The Aesthetics of Hunger; where he articulates that Europeans are only ever artistically interested in the third world so far as it satisfies their nostalgia for primitivism. Chase’s poetry, as poetry, as literature, is made vapid, useless, and boring because of her own reluctance to know . Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's experimental film, The Hour of the Furnaces alarms us of how neocolonial cultural production decapitates history. Chase’s poeticism in these texts is part of this beheading. She is of this neocolonial class yet she evades responsibility for it. Her poetry postures as if neocolonial Delhi is not shackled by American imperialism, as if the horrors of Nagasaki have passed us, as if the heirloom of history isn't reaped from its oppressed descendants. Other than curiosity and ambiguous liberation, Chase’s Joe and her narrative have no other necessity for historicism. In contrast, Cha’s Dictee is resolute on scavenging history so as to not repeat it into oblivion, to not annihilate Korea in another imperialist war. Where Cha writes of history with an objective, Chase objectifies history itself. She is not interested in understanding the difference between fiction and history because she bears no political urgency to do so. Unsurprisingly, her class position inspires within her some political compulsion to obstruct historicism and propagate anti-historicism as poetics. Chase’s poetry blunts the weapon of history, negating the revolutionary function of art, rendering historicism useless in the war of politics, and fashioning both art and history as passive neocolonised ornaments. In times when fascism continues to rise and the imperial enslaved world teeters on the brink of annihilating wars, literature must not poetically apathise itself from political struggle. Books like Chase’s are a vital reminder that literature must not give precedence to self-involved imaginations over the collective struggle for material truth and emancipation. Literature, poeticism, and creative dialecticism are the nerves of humanity’s marrow. They must not allow the mind to be drowned by apolitical dreamings but instead catalyse the consciousness to revolt.∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Miriyam Ilavenil is a journalist and a descendant of displaced Tamil Dalit indentured labourers who is interested in understanding the politics and histories of South and Southeast Asia. Column Essay 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:

"There can be no apolitical ahistorical love story—the sentience of love and the stimulus of lust is always shaped by political reality, by blood, by gender, by caste, by religion, by genocide, by fascism, by struggle, by revolution." · Column · Essay "There can be no apolitical ahistorical love story—the sentience of love and the stimulus of lust is always shaped by political reality, by blood, by gender, by caste, by religion, by genocide, by fascism, by struggle, by revolution." A Poetics of Banality: Karen Chase’s Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and Zundel State Karen Chase’s Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and ZundelState is a mediocre, counter-revolutionary poetic text on historicism, or rather, anti-historicism, veiled through the subjectivised genre of love. The book contains two stories: the first is Jamali Kamali , a homoerotic narrative poem about the 16th-century Sufi court poet and saint, Jamali, and his speculated lover, Kamali, now published for the first time in the USA. The second, titled ZundelState , is a novella in verse about Joe and Marianna, two lovers from a dystopian future where both history and dreaming have been outlawed. In both works, the inertia of American liberal poetics weakens against the rhizome of love, history, and imagination. Oscillating within orthodoxy, her unimaginative writing guts historicism from political reality, bleeding the soul out of these love stories. Jamali is resurrected from history, in selective memory, disfigured from his legacies of poetry, mysticism, autonomy, all for Chase to bury him within the hollowness of her subjectivity. The genre of homoeroticism bears the sexual dialectics of spirit and matter , neither of which is meaningfully expressed in Chase’s Jamali Kamali , in an aesthetic nor analytic sense. Jamali and Kamali’s bodies, interpreted in their most shallow, spineless, and severed forms, are the only aspect that concerns Chase’s poetics. The theology of Sufism, the politics of feudal Delhi and the theoretical limitations of “queerness” (the constraints of imperial socio-lingualistics against the cosmology of sexualities) are absent in her text, and in her subtext. The material world that both Jamali and Kamali exist in, and its umbilical cord with the present, is ruptured by Chase’s own one-dimensional narrative consciousness, intruding on this bloodline of history. Exiled from the dialectics of time, Chase insulates their memory into her imperial imagination. She desolates not only Jamali’s personhood, through his poetry and mysticism, from feudal Delhi, but along with it, his living memory, the reconstructions of it by “queer” Indians, from neocolonial Delhi. Her self-serving and stylistically superficial poetics messily drags Jamali and Kamali from the womb of history into her neocolonial text, as stillborns. There is no viable sexual desire between Chase’s Jamali and Kamali because they are described without bodies, nor minds, to think, to feel, to carnalise. Their erotics is castrated from the sexual materiality of Delhi. Their intimacy is made impotent by Chase’s voyeuristic gaze. Her poetic consciousness fails to actualise itself, outside of herself. Ironically, it is only towards the end of the poem, when Kamali mourns the death of Jamali, and the narrative subsumes Jamali’s materiality (what little of it), that her poem gains a form of life. In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s genre-rupturing Dictee , a more poetically critical expression of historicism is shared. Where Chase’s Jamali Kamali is an ahistorical homoerotic imagination of speculated history from feudal Delhi, Cha’s Dictee is a reconstruction of the dialectical sentience of Korea that has been (and continues to be) silenced, severed and made seditious by counter-revolutionaries, through the memories of multiple generations of subjugated Korean women. The conflict of Korean consciousness is poeticised not just through abstractions but through the anchored historicism. She does not incarcerate Korea in a single moment of history, like Chase does with Delhi, but expresses lyrically and liturgically, Korean consciousness through the chasm of time and space, through exiles and emancipations, through Japanese imperialism, American imperialism, and the South Korean puppet regime. Although Cha's poetry too, at moments, is stunted by subjectivity, it is still ultimately rooted in materiality, unlike Chase’s work which mystifies materiality through neocolonial abstractions. Cha’s Americaness, a product of imperialist forced migration, is implicated in her narrative. She complicates her place in her poetics, even when Korean history belongs to her. Her personal consciousness is never interruptive of her poeticism; rather, her presence bleeds into the collective bloodshed of Korea, as one ocean of violence and resistance. Chase’s Americaness, on the other hand, is made ambiguous in her first-person narrative, which speaks through the corpse of Jamali, violently embedding herself into this history. Liberal escapism is the thesis Chase constructs against the reactionary dictatorship of the ZundelState. Her fictional ZundelState feels far more material compared to the immateriality of Jamali Kamali . Her ZundelState is authoritarian; it has annihilated dreaming, history, and self-expression. While Chase’s narrative expresses the ZundelState as a form of fascist anti-historicism, her poetry is the embodiment of liberal anti-historicism. She too, like the ZundelState , is seemingly uninterested in the truth:where fascism denies thought, her liberalism is full of thoughts, regardless of the truth. The liberal consciousness placed against the fascist structure of the ZundelState does not contradict it but instead becomes complacent with it. The lovers in the narrative are Joe, who hates the ZundelState and scavenges for remnants of state-destroyed histories, and Marianna, an artist and an agent of the ZundelState who is conflicted by her complicity to the regime. In Joe’s scavenging, and through his and Mariana’s dreamings, fragments of history resurface. The narrative is particularly fixated on exploring the nuclear devastation of Nagasaki , Einstein's theory of relativity, and the history of World War II. Evading the violent imperial politics of the war, Chase’s apolitical poetics mutates Nagasaki into a detached spectacle, Einstein’s theory into an immaterial phantasm and the entire war into uncritical absurdism. Warfare is objectified as an empty eclectic ambience all for Chase’s imaginary liberal romance. A compelling love story should contend with the complexity of reality. There can be no apolitical ahistorical love story—the sentience of love and the stimulus of lust is always shaped by political reality, by blood, by gender, by caste, by religion, by genocide, by fascism, by struggle, by revolution. Where Chase’s Jamali and Kamali are stillborn because she annihilates them from the womb of Delhi, Joe and Marianna’s love decomposes the very flesh of historicism into a mere rhetorical backdrop for their romance. ZundelState , even in its attempt at being a distant dystopia, is framed through American politics, Americanised characters and American liberalism. The narrative is ambivalent of its own Americanness, even referencing the American Dream, an ahistorical ideology, negated by any political criticism or even narrative consciousness of its savagery. There can be no reckoning with historicism in this text without contending with Americanism. Poetically perpetuating Americanism is counter-insurgency against historicism, poeticism, and creativity itself. Chase’s poetics, explained in the ‘A Note’ section of this book, is rooted in, as she states, what is unknown to her . She theorises that writing about what one does not know leads to infinite exploration as opposed to the confined space of writing about what one knows. Yet, her poetry negates her theory, for her ignorant imagination regresses literary evolution. All the “boundlessness” she poetises, through abstract dreams, subjective subconsciousness and bourgeois fictionalism, only ever regurgitates the monotony of American liberalism. Through her writing, her imperialist liberalism, against the goliath of historicism, exists without criticisms and without consciousness. While Chase uses the excuse of Joe’s ignorance (inflicted upon him by Chase’s ZundelState ) to explore known (Western) histories superficially, she is seemingly unequipped to contend with the unknown (Subcontinental) history in Jamali Kamali . Her writing reveals a neocolonial primitiveness that prevents her from weaponising creative and intellectual dialectics to confront the complex historical politics of the unknown. Her poetry emulates the figure of the European observer described by Glauber Rocha in his critical essay The Aesthetics of Hunger; where he articulates that Europeans are only ever artistically interested in the third world so far as it satisfies their nostalgia for primitivism. Chase’s poetry, as poetry, as literature, is made vapid, useless, and boring because of her own reluctance to know . Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's experimental film, The Hour of the Furnaces alarms us of how neocolonial cultural production decapitates history. Chase’s poeticism in these texts is part of this beheading. She is of this neocolonial class yet she evades responsibility for it. Her poetry postures as if neocolonial Delhi is not shackled by American imperialism, as if the horrors of Nagasaki have passed us, as if the heirloom of history isn't reaped from its oppressed descendants. Other than curiosity and ambiguous liberation, Chase’s Joe and her narrative have no other necessity for historicism. In contrast, Cha’s Dictee is resolute on scavenging history so as to not repeat it into oblivion, to not annihilate Korea in another imperialist war. Where Cha writes of history with an objective, Chase objectifies history itself. She is not interested in understanding the difference between fiction and history because she bears no political urgency to do so. Unsurprisingly, her class position inspires within her some political compulsion to obstruct historicism and propagate anti-historicism as poetics. Chase’s poetry blunts the weapon of history, negating the revolutionary function of art, rendering historicism useless in the war of politics, and fashioning both art and history as passive neocolonised ornaments. In times when fascism continues to rise and the imperial enslaved world teeters on the brink of annihilating wars, literature must not poetically apathise itself from political struggle. Books like Chase’s are a vital reminder that literature must not give precedence to self-involved imaginations over the collective struggle for material truth and emancipation. Literature, poeticism, and creative dialecticism are the nerves of humanity’s marrow. They must not allow the mind to be drowned by apolitical dreamings but instead catalyse the consciousness to revolt.∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Column Essay 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. 5th Feb 2026 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:

“The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” BOOKS & ARTS Into the Sea Mai Ishizawa · Polly Barton “The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” It isn’t just images that become memories. Different parts of my body stored up memories, which they silently retained. Those afterimages carried that way in the body would most likely never be erased. Skin cells regenerate periodically, becoming new, but the time that passed after the earthquake and sensations from that period seemed to linger on, as a transparent layer on my skin. And yet, when I tried to pass beyond my memories, all I could see was a two-dimensional whiteness. Connecting together all my physical memories only left me with a dense accumulation of fragments—I never managed to summon up a complete picture of that day. The attributes of the memories held by each part of my body may have been a part of me, but I couldn’t combine them into any self-identifying symbols, like those of the saints. Being in a place so far away from the sea and nuclear power plants had loosened my grip on my memories of that day, obscuring my connection to them. Eventually, this sea inside me was overlayed by images of numerous paintings, which yielded new impressions. My connotations with the sea came to include those folds of pale green out of which Botticelli’s Venus rose; Caspar David Friedrich’s desolate icy sea, with the blue-black shape of the wanderer gazing out mutely at it; the sea as rendered by the impressionists, with its musical depiction of the particles of light and color dancing there; Canaletto’s sea inextricably bound to his crisp renditions of Venice; and then the peaceful blue gaze of the sea meeting the sky in Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus. This final version merged with the sea as Nomiya had described it. The peaceful times before dawn, or after sunset. The dialogues in blue that one witnessed there. Even as it served as a giant mirror reflecting the sky through which the colors flowed and passed, the powerful force of its current eddied and whirled around beneath. Yet the impressions making up this stratum had been swallowed up by the sea that March, and had vanished. None of my own memories of water were violent. I was one of those who’d watched those video clips of the sea as it destroyed everything—those scenes of destruction shown repeatedly on TV and online. That weighty gray, white and black mass surging through the town, growing heavier with the things it acquired along the way, forming new masses, encroaching still further. Watching these videos, my eyes superimposed on Nomiya’s final moments, which they’d never actually seen. Those scenes of agony that my eyes took in, the spatial and temporal holes gaping wide open in a way that could never be depicted in a painting, covering over all my other connotations. What I saw in those photos and videos hadn’t integrated with the impressions of the sea that lived inside me. Now, there wasn’t so much as a trace remaining of the pool I’d visited as a child. The pine forest, too, had been irrevocably damaged by the sea’s violence. Since seeing the destruction, the places that I’d visited had been ripped apart into tiny fragments, which returned my gaze in inert silence. This was the silence of words that had been stewing for too long. The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories. As I looked at the city, the place I’d once lived would quietly flicker past, a pale shadow. There, memories of the sea’s violence assumed particular shapes: monuments attesting to the dangers of tsunamis, the remains of a school where many people had lost their lives. How should we carry with us the memories of those who had disappeared to the other side of time? Was it a case of endlessly tracing their contours in our memories, until their names were eventually rubbed away, forgotten? The sea, which contained so many like Nomiya who’d never returned, didn’t bear their names—it was always people’s memories that did so. Nine years later, they continued searching, quietly yet unceasingly, to bring home the dead who had vanished into the sea. Even knowing that the city of Göttingen contained dark, bitter elements to its memories, like the rings of a tree, I was still enticed by the impression it left on me—the twisting alleys and dead-ends that my feet traced, the lush greenery spilling forth, the movement of all kinds of shadow patterns woven by the sun. Wandering around someplace, without any particular focal point, letting my eyes roam across the scenery in front of me, I would find a portrait of the city, of that particular location rising up before me. When I saw a new face of this kind that I couldn’t comprehend except through my feet, my eyes would do their best to understand how it had shifted over time. The multiple faces buried within the strata comprising numerous eras and memories would merge, then peel apart. The city reflected those different faces in flashes, like the blinking of an eye—including the face from that time when it had been known by those three characters, 月沈原. Tracing the portraits from various times with my eyes, my feet kept on pushing forward, until I reached a white plastered building with a red wooden frame creating a geometric pattern. This was the Junkernschänke—squires’ tavern—which dated back to the fifteenth century. The building had changed expression through the decades depending on its owner: from private accommodation to a vacant house, from a hardware business to a wine dealership. Its traditional wooden structure had sustained considerable damage in the March 1945 air raid, but over time, repairs had restored it to its original form. The walls were decorated with pictures rendered in multicolored wood, a number of faces peering out from small circular portraits. The sets of eyes peering out from those portholes onto a distant time belonged to seven astrological gods: those for the planets from Mercury through to Saturn—excluding Earth—plus those of the Sun and the Moon. Coincidentally enough, the seven planets as they were classified at the time of the geocentric system were preserved here, right inside the old town. The swords, scepters, bows, and other objects that the gods bore so carefully were drawn according to traditional symbolism. Here, too, their attributes protected them from anonymity, bringing their names into relief.∎ Excerpted from The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, translated by Polly Barton (New Directions, March 2025). ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa (New Directions, March 2025). Cover design and illustration by Janet Hansen. Image Courtesy StudioM1. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Essay Japan Japanese Literature Translation Debut Novel Mai Ishizawa Polly Barton Survivors Earthquakes Memory Trauma Sensory Identity Seascapes Seam Contemporary Literature Melancholy Tender Imagery Fiction Ecology Environmental Disaster Gottingen's Scale Solar System Iconography Time & Space Magical Realism Literary Fiction Poetry Akutagawa Prize MAI ISHIZAWA a was born in 1980 in Sendai City, Japan, and currently lives in Germany. Her debut novel, The Place of Shells , won the Akutagawa Prize. POLLY BARTON is a writer and Japanese translator based in Bristol. Her translations include Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are , Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job , and Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden . In 2019, she won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for her debut book Fifty Sounds . Her second book, Porn: An Oral History , is forthcoming. 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