Vol. X | Issue 1 | June 2022 - The Bangalore Review

Specials

9 Years of The Bangalore Review

The anniversary editorial piece by our Managing Editor and some congratulatory notes from our wellwishers around the world.

Non-Fiction

An afternoon at the Little Magazine Archive, Kolkata

TBR’s Managing Editor, Maitreyee Chowdhury, takes a trip to the Kolkata Little Magazine Archive in Tamer Lane, in the college Street area. She returned with a treasure trove worth of stories and anecdotes.

Specials

TBR Recommends – June 2022

Every month, The Bangalore Review recommends a reading list, also mentioning in brief why each book must be read. This month’s list has been compiled by Urdu Novelist and Sahitya Akademi Award winner, Rahman Abbas.

Specials

3 Poems by Monibhushan Bhattacharya in Translation

Monibhushan Bhattacharya was a major poet who transformed the language of Bengali poetry in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His poems were published in famous literary journals including the Buddhadeb Basu edited Kabita, Porichoy, Chaturanga and Purbasha.

Featured Works

Fiction

Lockdown

I’m tempted to allow the whole bright clamor of them; after all, they survived this weather. But even the garden is on lockdown, and there are too many for one pod. There’s only so much water to go around. Wrong place, wrong time, summer’s children.

Poetry

Ketsia

I stare. Pinks, grays, blank canvas politely obscure below her neck, hint at her thumb resting on her collarbone. I raise my hand to touch trust, let it fall.

Fiction

The Sound of Running Water

At 1:30 in the morning, Morgan wakes, rises from the bed, and pads over to the master bath for his nightly pee. After his stiff legs and an aching back––both from handling the luggage back at the airport, no doubt––ferry him back to bed, he lies down and listens for the tank to fill up.

Fiction

Grab Bag

I remember how invigorated I felt during my first time reaching into that bag. Closing my eyes, I desperately swirled my hand around to try and feel its contents, pulling out a kaleidoscope. Peering into the hole, I shook it around some and looked back in. Colorful shards rearranged themselves into a new collage—magenta and royal blue. Lime green and canary yellow.

Poetry

Figurin’

Anyway, they form a scooby-doo-esque gang of lovable misfits And solve the mystery of why I keep waking up unsure of who I am And why its so hard to explain what that means Entering your life from the outside can be a jarring experience

Fiction

Horse Sense

Kate tells herself that today she is driving to find the quiet, to get out of town and let the houses and little feed shops and hardware stores thin and thin and thin until there are just the low-slung fences and the uncut grass, little farmhouses up on the sloping hills surrounded by leaning trees and rare shade.

Non-Fiction

Timbuktu

The author and her husband travel to Bamako, and from there, to Timbuktu They learn what Timbuktu stands for in reality compared to its popular meaning.

Fiction

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego

Her eyes traveled over to Ezra to see if would go check on her, but he only smiled, pleased again at his discovery of this place. They were only a few inches apart in height, though Ezra was a tall man, and his slenderness made her feel too big for any space they were in together, even one this large and otherwise unwieldy.

Poetry

Red Tail, an Epitaph

The yard you plotted then planted has come back wilder, the way seeming winterkill comes back wilder for its next life. So you think, pruning-time! — when, with a looming shadow and a gust of backwash, the ponderous bird alights, the porch rail trembles with its weight.

Poetry

Late Walk

a man must lean on his liquor getting through the prayer line walking fields with all colors flaring soft or fired with hard light the walnut shell his face is the tan smeared greasy eyes a mature man out of time

Non-Fiction

The Coleslaw is the Same

A group of thirty college students, studying comparative human rights across the globe, learn that human sufferings and identity are not as different as it would seem.

Poetry

Ode to Goibniu

Son of Esarg the axe-thrower, smelting and pin-lining coasts with bronze whirls, smoothed by Macha’s shawl. Forger of tools, lately found half-sunk in peat in a depthless bog, with his elbow crooked upward. The gases preserved his jacket, the raised sinew on his small finger, and the blazoned buckle he himself fashioned.