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.