Issue 57

Chief Editor’s Note

As the issue was coming together, I began to think about the common elements in the 21 contributions. I knew this was a mistake because the main thing about noticing something in a text is that one has noticed it. The noticed fact shines a light into the person, not the text. Take for instance the strange and brilliant physicist Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac and his encounter with Dostoevsky. The Russian physicist Kapitza, whom Dirac tolerated as a friend, gave him a translation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Perhaps Kapitza gave Dirac the novel because he thought his friend, raised by a tyrannical father, would connect with an author whose stories are permeated by the absence of a loving father. Dirac dutifully read the novel. Kapitza prodded him for a review. “It is nice,” said Dirac, “but in one of the chapters the author made a mistake. He describes the Sun as rising twice on the same day.”

Were Dirac to read the stories, poems and other contributions in this issue, he would perhaps notice the odd recurrences of… fish.  There’s fish in summa iru’s poem ‘[pallbearers]’, and a kingfish in Charlotte Newbury’s ‘Name Something More Tender’, and a fisherman in Marica Bodrožić’s ‘Escape Across the Danube’ and “windows full of all kinds of dead fish” in Giovanni Lucchese story ‘The Supermarket’. Oh wait. There’s also a menu item ‘sliced raw fish’ in one of the images of Soumya Mukerji’s photo-essay about her time in Japan. It’s yours for 80 ¥ (the fish, that is). What’s with all the fish? There are two other (metaphorical) occurrences of fish (Alok Bhalla’s translation of Nirmal Verma’s story ‘A Separate Light’ and Manoj Rahul’s translation of Gurajada Appa Rao’s ‘Reformation’) but I can tell I’m testing your patience.

Welcome to Issue 57 of The Bombay Literary Magazine.