Issue 59

Chief Editor’s Note

Issue 59 is ready to make its way into the world. While thinking about its stories and poems, I was struck by my persistent desire to extract some commonality, some pattern, which could characterise the whole. This urge is probably not very different from the one that led our sky-gazing ancestors to arrange collections of stars, only separated by billions of light years, into hunters and bears and harps. It’s probably not very different from the urge that’ll tempt you, while reading any particular set of poems or a story, to conclude: this is what it must mean. It’s no use being told such patterns, such conclusions, are illusions. We are species of the imagination; our realities aren’t confined to actualities. So I can state without any sense of guilt or shame that I did detect a common thread linking all the 30+ contributions that make up this issue.

Which is? Well, at this point, I may regale you with a story of how Edgar Wallace —who only wrote 175 novels— ended the first instalment of a serialised story in a British magazine by dropping his hero into a deep well. Danger on all sides. No possibility of escape. Colonial fears lurking everywhere. It was over. All over, old chap. Send the telegram to the missus and get it over with. Millions of British readers had held their breath and waited for the next instalment. Which began: Once out of the well, ….

Once I had detected the pattern, I could set it aside and enjoy the illusion that this magazine grew out of a seed of possibilities. Whether it is a story of a man unmoored at the start of the great derangement; or that of a trapeze artist working her way towards a mysterious penetralium; or poems dealing with a father’s loss; or one that uses birds to make the mind visible; or yet, a poem that mourns a dead bird found on a walk to Le Celle; or a translated story of the divine play of cats and mice; or one about the tendency of young dead women to inconvenience decent people; or rock pounders from Raika and Ramoli, who are set free through work, as promised; or what one sees when one really looks out windows— yes, of course there is a pattern. This is what they do, the story-makers, poets, photographers, eyes, ears, mouths, the senses of the world. There is no night dark enough to still their weaving of patterns, O Shahrazad.

Welcome to Issue 59 of The Bombay Literary Magazine.