Kevin Pittman, Editor's Greeting

We are Tessera

noun (plural: tesserae). A small block of stone, tile, glass, or other material used to compose images in mosaics.

Welcome to Tessera, where we celebrate the writings in English of people of diverse cultural, racial and first language backgrounds. These poems, stories and ruminations, or essays, each shine as tessera in the creative mosaic of this online writers magazine. 

Tessera is a digital extension of Mosaic, a high production print magazine launched in 2010 under the auspices of the College of the North Atlantic-Qatar and its Advanced Writing Centre. It was conceived and produced by Paula Hayden, then the AWC Coordinator, to feature the creative output of participants in CNA-Q's writing workshops. Paula oversaw the publication of four Mosaic issues before she left the AWC to take up other duties at the College. 

With the success of Mosaic's limited print runs,  the AWC team decided to exploit digital media and the internet to embrace writers world wide and to give them a world wide audience. Matt Stranach, a Writing Mentor and workshop presenter, set up Mosaic 2.0, a blog based magazine. Matt edited the first few issues until he also moved on. Since then, each of our workshop facilitators have taken turns as editor to keep it going.  

Tessera combines the missions of both Mosaic and Mosaic 2.0: it is reserved exclusively for writings by our workshop participants; and, through the global reach of the internet,  it offers contributors a potentially global audience.

Tessera completes our trio of writing venues, designed singly and collectively to affirm new and experienced writers of English and to validate their creative output. If you visit as contributors who share with other writers represented here, or as first time or regular visitors to Tessera, come simply for the reading, you are bound to be affected by the authenticity and expressiveness of these disparate voices.

As the CNA-Q writing workshops proceed, I hope that our participants will continue to submit their work to both Mosaic and Tessera (and perhaps to Mosaic 2.0, as well) for all readers who find their way here, as much as for themselves.

Kevin Pittman

Coordinator,

Advanced Writing Centre

College of the North Atlantic - Qatar

Editorial: Volume 1, Issue 1

Our Authors

Our inaugural issue captures a very nice range of subject matter, voices and sensibilities represented in stories, essays--or as I call them, ruminations--and poems.

Three of the writers seem to join chorus on the theme of repression/suppression vs. freedom, but each quite distinctively. Epifania Amoo-Adare, in her essay "Who am I? Notes of a Wanton Child", reflects on repression that many of us suffer of a particularly insidious kind--time and aging. And sadly, as Epifania reminds us, much of it is self-inflicted. But at the same time, she asserts hope in "the dreams that I need to resuscitate." Nadine Nader takes us into a different 'space', one that is less meditative and more visceral, in her poem "My Escape". Its repetition and iteration of statements and questions unfold like frantic syllogisms too urgent to restrain and, in the end, with a conclusion that she cannot, nor can we deny--her life affirming, perhaps life saving compulsion to write. To escape! Lilian M. Howell's brief story, "The Message", has the feel of a parable. It starts with ominous description of people in a French seaside village following a surprise invasion that leaves them cut off and unable to warn other villages further inland. With a few short paragraphs Lilian intimates at once the frailty and potentcy of hope for people overwhelmed by the malice of power, greed and war.

Family ascends as a vital theme in this first edition of Tessera, in essay, in poetry and in story. In "Lucy" Seema Sinha comes at the matter 'sideways', by focusing on childhood devotion and loss experienced when she 'adopts' a stray puppy. From this memory visited in her adulthood, Seema derives a very important message for people concerning the frailty of love and the selflessness it requires. Selflessness, as an attribute of love, is visited again in Samanthi Priyangika Gamage's reflective piece, "Making Time". The reader is asked to contemplate the heartbreaking irony of a father (Samanthi dedicates the essay to her father) who gave so much for his family, but who denied them opportunity to return their gratitude and love--possibly as a final act of selflessness. Jaya Majumber offers an ode in "Miss You, Ma", affirming how the nurture of mothers stays with us, even "from away and afar".

Another theme that emerges is Home, as it might be experienced by immigrants or expats--as a place embraced in memory and, on the other hand, as a place embraced in the present.  Asif Masood's story exquisitely evokes village life for a schoolboy in rural Pakistan as only the author could know it. "Sher Khan" is a celebration of home as memory and of memory as home. In contrast, Shushima Harish describes in "A Name to Honour" her actual experience of nervously arriving in Qatar to take up a new job, and gradually discovering a country and people that she recognizes as companionable, secure and suitable for making her new home.

And then there are the moments of our lives when our conversations with ourselves offer, when we need it most, revivifying revelation and--no less invigorating--humour. The inspiration and the object of 'the jokes' may be ourselves or those with whom we share a spec of space and instance of time while the cosmos rolls onward towards a destiny too large for us to comprehend. Poetry is a particularly pungent way to give such moments expression: Anu Mathew's "Somedays", Tatjana Martinoska's "If Your Birthday Goes Wrong", and Arti Jain's two quite different sentiments in "Freedom and Forgiveness" and "Writing Workshop".

A collection of writings of this sort would not be complete without at least one expression of romance. Kiran Ramachandran doesn't hold out on us. But his story's title, "A Knight in Grimy Armour", suggests a less than happy ending when a boy's moment of chivalry lasts only as long as a stain when a shirt is dropped in a tub of bleach.

Epifania Amoo-Adare, Essay

Who Am I? Notes of a Wanton Child

by Epifania Amoo-Adare, Doha

1. I am still in the process of evolving, even though I could say that a certain core part of me is more or less set in stone. But if asked to say what that aspect of me is, I will be hard pressed. All I know is that I am often not what people see me as and I sometimes surprise even myself. I also find that as I have gotten older, certain parts of me have either died off or gone so deep out of sight that I am not quite sure how to excavate them. And one such piece of mine is the daring adventurer, alongside the abject fun-lover.

2. I believe I can fly. You know, soar above my current existence, which of late has very much felt like someone else's life, that ironically I have constructed. This is not right, especially for the woman who every night in her childhood dreamed of flying. Where is that free spirit? What has this staid imposter done with her? That is exactly what I very much would like to know.

3. I want to be me. Surely by now this fact is very clear to you. Most certainly, it is for me. I want to be the unruly child that I was, the one who aspired to models like Beryl the Peril. Not so much to be naughty, but rather to be free: free from unwanted burdens of good social behavior, free from prescriptions for appropriate female demeanour, free of the limitations of becoming a good student, free from the harsh boundaries of reality. You see, that is why I always flew at night, in my dreams,where no one could stop me. And it is those dreams that I need to resuscitate - giving them mouth to mouth in my mind's eye. After all, now that I know that thoughts form cells, just think of what I could manifest with the power of my own lucid dreaming.

4. I know what it is to not be quite me, but what I have yet to know is how I can achieve the fullness of being - the artless art of an existence that is free and wanton--not in the egotistical nature of that word but rather in the intangible form of the integral way: where my life energy cannot distinguish itself from that of other life forms, and where intellect is overwritten by the indescribable lightness of being. And now even I do not make any sense, because non-sense is what we truly are: the complete fullness of being nothing and no-body.

5. I think too much. Therefore I am not capable of being in this present without a weighted anxiety: anxious to be more than what I am, while recognising that I do not exist in reality. A conundrum one might say, but is that not what all life is? A puzzle of energy, manifesting in various forms and dimensions, and often cancelling itself out in a Big Bang of coming-into-being.

6. I wish--a loaded term, filled with so much potency and regret: this has been my current state of existence; fortunately, sans regret.

7. I hope...

Seema Sinha, Essay

Lucy

by Seema Sinha, India

Being a latch-key child, I could hardly afford a pet. My mother tried to make amends by buying me a bowl of fish. But I wanted something that would sniff me, lick me, and love me! I wanted a dog!

But that was ruled out as all of us left early in the morning and the house was locked and barred for the day. My little sister went to a day care centre. If only there were day care centres for little pups! I thought I’d have to grow up without a pup till the day one literally barged into my life.

In the absence of a pet, all stray animals in the neighbourhood had become my pets. And one day I found Scooby, my favourite she-dog, in great agony. She was giving birth! Though in no mood to accept assistance from us, she was not unduly aggressive either. And how I loved playing midwife to my birthing dog! The pups had to be cleaned, the mom fed. Scooby did not mind my attempts to feed her, but she would not allow even one of the pups to be touched. She would snarl and bare her teeth the moment we’d even look at her blind pups, no beauty in their present form. In any case she had taken the job of cleaning the pups upon herself. A lick here and a lick there, and the pups were as good as new.

We had opted for our favourites. The one with a white nose and black splotches on a brown coat was definitely mine. I called it Lucy. She was a female pup, and I was already imagining the day when I would become a grandmom.

Lucy grew up fast. In no time she was a regular bundle of joy – a ball of fat rolling in gay abandon. The other pups, though not mine, were equally delightful. And thus it thrived, this little family of mine, in the far end of the common backyard. Of course we had cleaned the area, and even provided Scooby with a rag bed for her pups. I couldn’t have carried one home - in any case my mom wouldn’t have allowed, and even Scooby wouldn’t have permitted.

The conversation of the kids of the entire neighbourhood was dominated by the latest about Scooby and family. Feed time was special. Scooby would just roll over, and the pups would latch on to one of the numerous tits. A lot of pulling, pushing and nudging would take place before everyone had had its fill. The contented look on their faces was little short of angelic.

The pups were changing with time. The scraps that we saved for them from our tiffin boxes did not satisfy them. My heart broke when I saw Lucy scrounging around the garbage bin. When I tried to smuggle food out of the house I got a big lecture on the rising cases of rabies in the city.

The worst was yet to come. Lucy was gone! I was sure I’d find her plastered on the road, her entrails the feast for crows. Instead I found her cowering in a drain, drenched to the skin. It took quite some ingenuity on my part to clean her, as taking her home was out of question.

I was getting tired of Lucy. No longer was she my cute little pup. She was a sturdy female who could defend herself against the neighbourhood bullies. The proprietorship that I felt for Lucy was gradually waning with time. But there was no lack of love or loyalty on poor Lucy’s side. She would still come bounding the moment she’d see me, which was more of  an irritant now that she was a  large smelly dog .I too had become bigger. I knew I could not keep a stray as a pet, but the love that she had for me was like a cord round my feet. I felt guilty for not being able to look after her. I thought I would see recrimination in her eyes. But all I ever saw was boundless love.

And then came the final blow. Lucy was gone for good. Some say she was picked up by a dog squad. Some say she left for a better locality. I’d never get to know……..

But one thing I know and I want you to know - Never love someone if you can’t be consistent.

Sushma Harish, Essay

A Name to Honour

by Sushma Harish

Dear readers: This writing referrers to the year 2006 as we bid adieu to India and flew to Qatar finding our bread after the oil here. A comparative presentation of the life in Bangalore and in Doha is what you find here. But with pinch of humour.

It was that red winged Gulf Airlines that I flew on from the Garden City of India to this Desert called Doha, my home for past 7 years. For those who don't know, the Garden City of India is Bangalore. To this day I can’t stop abusing the airlines that delayed my take off by more than an hour, in turn pushed me in a mess as I missed my transit flight to Doha. After travelling like crazy around two Gulf States in 24 hours, with my infant, feeding her whatsoever was available in the airports, I reached Doha almost like 18 hours late. The new me in this new place began in black and white.

After a hustle bustle of so called journey, the arrival in Doha International Airport even today sends in that very air in me. I can stand there blinking at the very sight that went blur to my sight that day, with same propensity even now. People weren't running, everyone to everything seemed calm, no noise. Huge built Arabs with utmost respect to women like me with child in hand, greeted. Most attire around me was either full white [men] or full exotic black [women]. Some hardly showed their eyes only. My heart fainted with respect shown to ladies, in the airport. Waiver of long queues was big relief. Remember unlike in Bangalore not one apart from porter bothered to notice I was managing 12kg handbag with 12kg baby with me.

Once out of airport, and into the fancy grey SUV, I smiled to myself. Welcome to Doha reverberated in my ears. As we pulled off, felt an urge to use the seat belt in the rear seat too. Nevertheless eyes stuck on broad, good roads that seemed like neatly laid car showroom, just that cars were moving. Hardly signs of two wheeler, auto rickshaws, or honking over filled buses or speeding trucks. A short ride took us to grand villa in midst of city.

Operating from Qatar officially. Life was getting normal. New routines volunteered. Mornings were beautiful, be it Bangalore or Doha. But sun was shining more here. I did not like it though. There weren't those crows too. Also, I had started missing the morning milk man who rang the shrill bell at 5am, I had once hated.

Few days before settling with a job routine, it was uneasy not to find a cockroach or a fly or a lizard to chase and neither was that strolling street vendor selling fresh veggies. The bonus was a brand new car all for me. I had to proudly show it off to my people in India. Yes. All for myself, remember.

Shades of life had changed. From colorful India to black and white, from busy streets to calm ones.

It took us few months getting acquainted to their accent and tone. At times when I occasionally found a car coming to screeching halt on a main road, making way for the walker, I would realize, bliss this was. On Bangalore roads the constant fear of a local bus almost run over me haunted, while here a walker received super respect. I liked this, though not the absence of cockroaches in the house! Phew.

There were no easy signs of a "maid", so I played the role of one initially. That meant, every night when I had to do away the trash in the exterior of the compound, there were huge pairs of eyes staring me. Never in my life had some huge built cats stared, after all for throwing trash. There were no street dogs out in Arab country; hence the cats apparently grew too naughty. I had to assume. Or perhaps I did not have non vegetarian stuff for them may be. However the cats did not bother me much. Lesser greenery did. I payed heaven and hell to actually purchase even grass and soil. Good heavens. Welcome to desert, I told myself. Closed air conditioned homes and bottled water at times choked me. Forcing me to flee to the peace of the temple environment, but alas, no luck. The monotonous Mosque prayers had started pleasing me. I liked the melody and rhythm with which people prayed punctually 5 times a day. I got used to it to the extent, of omiting usage of morning alarm of 4am.

At times my heart leaps to Bangalore, but returns promptly at the very thought of the noisy streets or crowded buses. Life moves on now in black and white. Now, I could put on a badge myself, a name to honour, pat my back and say "I am an Gulfi".