The white stuff on the cover isn’t snow. It is salt. Sodium Chloride, NaCl. A kind of truth, one could say.
As writers, we could say many things, so how are we to choose? “All you have to do,” Hemingway famously advised in his memoir The Moveable Feast, “is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” Nothing is more necessary. Nothing is more difficult to achieve. But these honest sentences enable the force of truth to find its way to the readied ground, take hold, flower, and endow literature with moral value. To the extent there are enough writers who practice this belief is the extent to which literature is able to set a people free. Mahatma Gandhi was one such writer.
Mahatma Gandhi, who thought more deeply than most about truth as an empirical pursuit, used the word “satyagraha” to refer to the “force of truth”. The portmanteau word refers to a certain type of nonviolent action, one guided by civility, noncooperation, freedom from hatred, and imperturbably opposed to the injustice it seeks to correct.
Gandhi illustrated his radical ideas —even his closest associates were skeptical of their effectiveness— by using them to organise a protest against the salt tax. The 1882 Salt Act had given the British Raj a monopoly on salt production; it was illegal for anyone other than British government to engage in the manufacture of salt. On April 6, 1930, accompanied by thousand of fellow satyagrahis and after a 400-kilometer (~250 mile) walk to the beaches of Dandi village by the Arabian sea, Gandhi waded into the water, stooped, lifted a handful of salt-laden mud and declared: “With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire.” He then proceeded to make salt.
One can say he spoke truly. Seventeen years later, his country achieved independence on August 15, 1947. India’s Goods and Services tax, which collars anything that occupies a non-zero volume in time, space or Being, levies no salt on tax.
August 15th also marks the publication of Issue 58. The cover was inspired both by the man and the material that made visible the force of truth: salt. But Motoi Yamamoto, the Japanese artist who constructs the most exquisite works from salt, enabled us to realise our inspiration. He gifted us photos of his salt-staircase installation, A Path of Memories.
The staircase points towards an uncertain destination. It is crumbling. It may well be the stairs not taken. We have also become wary of only one staircase towards anything. All we can do, as writers, is to pan for the salt in all things. Each and every one of the stories and poems in Issue 58 can be found somewhere on such staircase of endeavour. We have Baudelaire from Nineteenth-century France and a still-in-college poet from Twenty-first century Nigeria. We have a story about an impossibly virtuous salt inspector, written in the days of the Raj and poems about eigenvalues and Cantor sets. We have poor dead Arthur Hallam lost in the land of
the living and a chef chasing down the truth about chicken manchurian. We have planes bombing a defenseless people in Manto’s story and an Israeli poet mourning “the house of a mother// Fearful over a child’s cradle.” We have works inspired by the Song of Songs and tigers; ghazals and unruly women; bananas and family breakups. And I have not even mentioned the last potter from Kashmir! We have mined salt, one could say, and made it available for all. Here, you will find writers who sought their own words, lifted that clump of honest mud, and made truth, once more, visible.
Welcome to Issue 58 of The Bombay Literary Magazine.
