Sara Kay If I Should have a Daughter

 If I should have a daughter, instead of mom, she’s going to call me Point B,

because that way she knows that no matter what happens,
at least she can always find her way to me.

And I am going to paint the Solar Systems on the backs of her hands,
so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say ‘Oh, I know that like the back of my hand’

And she’s going to learn that nd she’s going to learn that this life will hit you,

hard,
in the face,
wait for you to get back up, just so it can kick you in the stomach
but getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like thhere is hurt, fear that cannot be fixed by band aids or poetry

so the first time she realizes that Wonder Woman isn’t coming
I’ll make sure she knows she does not have to wear the cape all by herself
because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers,
your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal.

Believe me, I’ve trnd baby, I’ll tell her, don’t keep your nose up in the air like that

I know that trick, I’ve done it a million times
You’re just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail
back to a burning house so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire
to see if you can save him.

The Revenue Stamp An Autobiography by Amrita Pritam

 About Author 

Amrita Pritam (1919 – 2005) was a poet, novelist, and essayist, with a huge body of work to her credit. So it’s surprising that her autobiography is just under two hundred pages, and it’s curious why she chose this particular title — The Revenue Stamp.

Behind the name is the exchange between Amrita and the famous author and journalist, Khushwant Singh, who told her that her life was of so little consequence that it could be written on the back of a revenue stamp (‘Raseedi Ticket’ in the original).

When choosing the name for her autobiography, Amrita recalled this banter and opted for this name. Credit must be given to the English translator, Krishna Gorowara, who seems to have picked up on all the nuances and depth of Amrita’s thoughts.

Pritam was born in an area that was then British India, now part of Pakistan. She wrote in Punjabi and Hindi, and her work has long been loved by readers in both India and Pakistan.

The autobiography (first published in 1977; published in English translation in 2015) doesn’t follow a linear style. Rather, it provides wonderful insights into the mind of a woman poet who was far ahead of her time, in both her thinking and how she conducted her life.

The book touches on her life with Imroz, a painter with whom she has a live-in-relationship at a time when such things were far from the norm. Her early marriage to Pritam Singh ends in a divorce. The reasons for their parting and how it affects their two children are covered. 

Parental influences

Amrita writes of her parents, Raj Bibi and Kartar Singh. The latter had chosen a life of renunciation as a child Sadhu, but one glance at Raj Bibi changes all that, and they are married. Amrita writes, “The most remarkable thing about father was that a life of riches or renunciation came alike to him.”

When Amrita loses her mother at the age of ten, this sense of renunciation comes to haunt her. She senses that her father is torn between his love for her and a complete withdrawal from life. She writes poignantly that she “used to cry out in anguish because I could not tell whether I was accepted or not. I was both accepted and rejected in turns.”

Amrita’s father dabbles in verse and teaches her about rhyme and rhythm hoping that she will find expression in poetry. Amrita writes, “It seems to me I wrote because I wanted to forget those moments of rejection I felt in him.”

Interestingly, half a century later, Amrita expresses the idea that she has inherited her father’s way of looking at the world, “I feel that both riches and renunciations have taken twin births in me as well.”

She also states the philosophy that stays with her throughout, “I am not in the least mindful of what others think of me. My only desire is to be at peace with my innermost self.”

After her mother’s death, Amrita loses her interest in religion, feeling that all her prayers didn’t serve to keep her mother alive. Still, spiritual experiences do come into her now and then in her later life and she gives expression to them.

Rebellious years and the Partition

Some tidbits from her formative years reveal Amrita’s questioning and rebellious streak. Her grandmother was the reigning matriarch of the kitchen. Amrita’s father aided her in her efforts to revolt against her grandmother’s regime.

One issue arose relating to three glass tumblers that were kept aside to serve buttermilk only to the Muslim visitors to the house. The tumblers became a “cause” for Amrita, who would insist on drinking only from those glasses, with her father’s aid.

She writes, “Thereafter not a single utensil in the house was labeled ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim.’ She continues, “Neither Grandmother nor I knew then that the man I was to fall in love with, would be of the same faith as the branded utensils were meant for.”

In her sixteenth year, the author starts questioning all the regimentation of her life, her school years, parental authority: “What I had so far learnt was like a straightjacket that gives way at the seams — as the body grows. I was thirsty for life. I wanted living contact with those stars I had been taught to worship from afar.”

Amrita compares this rebellious time of her life with the era of the Partition of Undivided India in 1947, “when all social, political and religious values came crashing down like glass smashed into smithereens from the feet of people in flight.”

For those of us born after the Partition into a free India, Amrita’s autobiography offers heartbreaking insights into what it did to people — families, who found themselves separated, friends who were suddenly expected to be sworn enemies, and saddest of all, women who were abducted and raped and faced untold horrors.

She writes, “The passion of those monstrous times have been with me since, like some consuming fire — when I wrote later of a beloved’s face; of the aggressors from neighboring countries; of the crime of the long Vietnamese night, or, at one stage, of the helpless Czechs … In the haunting image of beauty and in the anger at wrong and cruelty, my sixteenth year stretches on and on …” 

Unrequited love and friendships

Amrita writes of her (probably unrequited) love for the Hindi poet and lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi, which the man in her life, Imroz, understood and joked with her about. She says, “The curse of my lonesome state has been broken through — by Imroz.”

She is so candid in her description of how she picked up her habit of smoking. Sahir would visit her and smoke, leaving the cigarette butts behind. After his departure, Amrita would pick up the butts and smoke them, just to feel close to something that had touched Sahir’s lips. She also describes how the character of Sahir makes an appearance in some of her novels.

This is the kind of candidness and honesty that appear time and again in this autobiography, including the instances where she writes about fellow writers and poets.

She names those whose writings she enjoys and doesn’t mince words about the pettiness of others who leave her essays out of anthologies, bar her from organizations, or prevent her from being part of poetry delegations that are invited to travel abroad.

A section called ‘The Cycle of Hatred’ details all this. One also gets an idea of the trials and tribulations of a woman writer, in a world of men wishing to dominate the writing world.

Her friendship with a Pakistani poet, Sajjad, whom she has known before the Partition, results in her getting flak for mentioning his name publicly. Sajjad asks her to stop doing so, and she mourns the fact that the Partition left no space for recognition of a friendship.

Still, her heart-rending poem on the Partition where she invokes Waris Shah (writer of the romantic poem, Heer-Ranjha), touches many Pakistani poets. During a BBC interview in London, the poetess Sahab Kizilbash, exclaims, “Arre! So this is Amrita…the writer of those lines. I ought to be embracing her…

As the feted writer that she is, Amrita receives her share of invitations, where she forges bonds of friendship with poets across the world. After meeting Ho Chi Minh (President of Vietnam) in Delhi, Amrita writes a poem, ‘Aashma’, and later dedicates it to him when it’s published as part of an anthology. As a result he sends her a personal note of “admiration and kindest greetings.”

Conclusion

Often, The Revenue Stamp seems full of abstractions, and it almost seems as if the author strings together a bunch of random thoughts, including dreams from her past and present, in a hurry to get the book quickly completed for publication. Yet, they are full of the profundity that haunts Amrita’s other writings.

This reader flagged page after page to go back to and re-read. Despite being a slim book, it’s rich with glimpses into the brilliant mind of Amrita Pritam.

Sultanas Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

 Sultana’s Dream” is a short science fiction story by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, also known as Rokeya Begum, written in 1905. First published in Indian Ladies’ Magazine and later republished in book format in 1908, the story began as an exercise for Rokeya to show her husband her mastery of English. It details an unnamed narrator’s dream of an Indian feminist utopia. The story is the first known work of Indian science fiction. Hossain was an early feminist and the founder of Calcutta’s first Islamic school for girls, as well as the Muslim Women’s Organization.

The story begins with the narrator “thinking lazily of the condition of Indian womanhood.” The narrator is unnamed; “sultana” is a title, the female equivalent of “sultan,” and not a first name. She says she is not sure whether she fell asleep or not, but knows that she felt as if she were awake.

A friend, Sister Sara, enters the room and wishes her good morning, although it is nighttime. Sara asks her to come outside and walk in the garden, and the narrator discovers that it is indeed light outside, and the streets are filled with people. The narrator is ready to be embarrassed, afraid she will encounter a man while she is walking in the street in broad daylight, an action that is taboo for women at the time. But strangely, there are no men out.

Passersby laugh at her in a language she cannot quite understand. Sister Sara says they are saying she looks “mannish,” that she is acting timid like men do. The narrator does not understand her, and suddenly realizes she is not walking with her friend at all—this woman is a stranger.

She tells the woman, still referred to as “Sister Sara,” that she is uncomfortable walking around without a veil on. Sister Sara tells her she need not worry about her veil: she is in Ladyland, and does not need to worry about encountering a man while unveiled.

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Sultana's Dream

Begum Rokeya

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“Sultana’s Dream” is a short science fiction story by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, also known as Rokeya Begum, written in 1905. First published in Indian Ladies’ Magazine and later republished in book format in 1908, the story began as an exercise for Rokeya to show her husband her mastery of English. It details an unnamed narrator’s dream of an Indian feminist utopia. The story is the first known work of Indian science fiction. Hossain was an early feminist and the founder of Calcutta’s first Islamic school for girls, as well as the Muslim Women’s Organization.

The story begins with the narrator “thinking lazily of the condition of Indian womanhood.” The narrator is unnamed; “sultana” is a title, the female equivalent of “sultan,” and not a first name. She says she is not sure whether she fell asleep or not, but knows that she felt as if she were awake.

A friend, Sister Sara, enters the room and wishes her good morning, although it is nighttime. Sara asks her to come outside and walk in the garden, and the narrator discovers that it is indeed light outside, and the streets are filled with people. The narrator is ready to be embarrassed, afraid she will encounter a man while she is walking in the street in broad daylight, an action that is taboo for women at the time. But strangely, there are no men out.

          

            

      

 

      

      

    

Passersby laugh at her in a language she cannot quite understand. Sister Sara says they are saying she looks “mannish,” that she is acting timid like men do. The narrator does not understand her, and suddenly realizes she is not walking with her friend at all—this woman is a stranger.

She tells the woman, still referred to as “Sister Sara,” that she is uncomfortable walking around without a veil on. Sister Sara tells her she need not worry about her veil: she is in Ladyland, and does not need to worry about encountering a man while unveiled.

The narrator looks around and sees that Ladyland is like a garden. The streets are filled with flowers. Sister Sara says that Calcutta could look like this too, if the men of that city wanted it to. The narrator asks where all the men are, and Sister Sara explains that in Ladyland, men are kept indoors, just as women are kept indoors in India. The narrator says it is not safe for women to come out of the zenanas, women’s quarters, because they are naturally weak, and Sister Sara replies that this is only true when men or wild animals are out in the streets. She compares the idea of keeping women indoors while men roam free to locking up the sane and letting the insane loose, because men are more capable of harm.

The narrator explains she has no choice in keeping to the zenanas; women have no voice in their own affairs in India. Everything is decided by men, whose strength makes them “lord and master.” Sister Sara argues that lions are stronger than men, but that does not mean lions rule the world. She says women in India have lost their rights by ignoring their best interests.

The narrator and Sister Sara sit together. Sister Sara begins to embroider, explaining that although this is all women have to do in the zenana, women in Ladyland still do this work, rather than giving it to men, who do not have the patience to thread a needle. She explains that she is able to do both the domestic work of women and the office work of men because women are more efficient. Men, on the other hand, can stretch two hours of work into seven, smoking and talking rather than getting down to business.

Sister Sara also tells the narrator that in Ladyland there are no epidemics, or even mosquito bites. It is rare for anyone there to die young. She shows the narrator their solar technologies as well: they use solar energy to cook their food. She says these new technologies were developed some years ago, after their country’s queen mandated that all women be educated, and barred them from marrying until they were at least 21. Women’s universities invented ways to draw water from the sky (which also put an end to excess rain and storms) and energy from the sun.

While women were inventing new technologies, the men of the country were focused on military strength, and laughed at the women’s inventions. The women sought revenge, though the “Lady Principals” of the two women’s universities advised them not to respond by words but by action.

The opportunity came when refugees from another country sought political asylum in theirs. In response, the neighboring country’s king declared war. All the men of Ladyland went to fight the enemy, but were defeated. One of the Lady Principals came up with a plan to defeat the enemy, but said all the remaining men must be confined to the zenanas. The next day, the Lady Principal and her students marched to the battlefield and directed all the sun’s rays towards the advancing army. Scorched, the enemy retreated.

Since then, says Sister Sara, no one has dared try to invade Ladyland, and women have ruled while men remain in the zenanas. The Queen sent a letter out explaining that the men would be called out again if their services were required. So far, it has been ten years and they have not been needed. Sister Sara explains that the system is called mardana; marda is the Urdu word for “man.” Ever since the mardana system, there has been no crime and no need for the criminal justice system.

Sister Sara continues to explain how the women of Ladyland save labor: fields are tilled by machine. There are no railroads or paved streets, so there are no railroad or street accidents, either. A sprinkler system keeps everyone cool in summer, while stored solar energy keeps them warm in winter. Their religion is based on “Love and Truth.” No one is punished with death; any offenders are simply banished, though they are forgiven if they repent.

The narrator asks if she can meet the Queen, and Sister Sara obligingly assembles a hydrogen-powered air-car that takes them to her. The Queen greets them both and tells the narrator about their trade: Ladyland trades only with the women of other countries, not men. They prefer to seek knowledge, rather than wealth, and try to enjoy what nature provides them.

The narrator tours Ladyland, but wakes up to discover she is back in her chair in India. Ladyland was all a dream.

and her other works. The story is a significant work of early Indian feminism, as well as science fiction. Its idea of education for all women (and the innovations this would bring) were radical for the time period. Hossain revisited the importance of education for women in a later novel, Padmarag.

The women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor

 The Women of Brewster Place is a novel told in seven stories. Of the seven stories, six are centered on individual characters, while the final story is about the entire community. The primary characters and the title characters of each chapter are all women and residents of Brewster Place.

Brewster Place is a housing development in an unnamed city. It seems destined to be an unfortunate place since the people linked to its creation are all corrupt. Despite the secretive circumstances surrounding its development, Brewster Place survives for decades, offering a home to one new wave of migrants after another. The life history of Brewster Place comes to resemble the history of the country as the community changes with each new historical shift. Following the Civil Rights Era, Brewster Place inherits its last inhabitants, African-Americans, many of whom are migrants from the southern half of the United States. The stories within the novel are the stories of these residents.

The first and longest narrative within the novel is Mattie Michael’s. Mattie, along with several other characters, arrives in Brewster Place from her parents’ home in the South. Mattie leaves her parents’ home because she is pregnant by a disreputable man named Butch Fuller. Mattie decides to move to the North at approximately the same time in history as the Great Migration. Living away from home with a new baby, Mattie takes a job working in an assembly line. She works long hours and is forced to live in a dilapidated building. After a rat bites her child, Mattie decides to find a new home. While walking with her baby, she runs into Ms. Eva Turner, an old, kind, light-skinned African-American woman who takes her into her home and refuses to charge her rent. After Ms. Eva dies, Mattie purchases the house and remains there to raise her son, Basil.

Basil grows up to be a troubled young man who is unable to claim responsibility for his actions. One night, he kills a man in a bar fight and is arrested. Mattie uses her house for collateral, which Basil forfeits once he disappears. Mattie, after thirty years, is forced to give up her home and move to Brewster Place.

Mattie’s childhood friend, Etta Johnson, joins Mattie at Brewster Place. After a long life of running from one man to the next, she has arrived at Mattie’s, hoping to find some stability. Mattie takes her to church, where Etta meets Reverend Woods. She is taken by his looks, wealth, and status, but after sleeping with him, she realizes it was all just a fantasy and that he wanted only sex. Etta leaves feeling broken, but her spirit is restored once she finds out that Mattie has stayed up all night waiting for her.

Kiswana Browne is different from all of Brewster Place’s other residents in that she has chosen to live there voluntarily. Raised in the affluent community, Linden Hills, Kiswana dropped out of college to live in Brewster Place, where she believes she can effect real social change in the black community. Kiswana is nervously waiting her mother’s first visit to her rundown studio apartment. Once her mother arrives, the two women have several short arguments that culminate in Kiswana calling her mother a “white-man’s nigger.” Kiswana’s mother responds by explaining the origin of Kiswana’s real name, Melanie, and the pride she has in her heritage. Before leaving, she secretly gives Kiswana enough money to have a phone line installed.

Lucielia Louis Turner, also known as Ciel, is the granddaughter of Ms. Eva. Lucielia grew up with Mattie and her son, Basil. Now grown, Lucielia has a daughter, Serena, with a man named Eugene. Eugene, in addition to constantly leaving Lucielia, also treats her and their daughter terribly. After complaining about his lack of opportunities, Eugene indirectly gets Lucielia to abort what would have been their second child. Shortly afterward, however, he comes home to say that he’s found a new job in Maine and must leave right away. His lying is obvious; he’s simply determined to leave. While Lucielia and Eugene are fighting, Serena chases a roach into an electric socket with a fork. She is electrocuted and dies, leaving Lucielia nearly lifeless with grief. Following the funeral, Mattie is the one who begins to release Lucielia’s enormous grief by rocking and bathing her until she falls asleep crying.

As a child, Cora Lee was obsessed with babies, and this obsession continues when she is an adult. Beginning in her sophomore year of high school, she has one child after another, almost all with different men. She lives in a filthy apartment, and her children are terribly neglected, since she can only care for them while they’re infants. One day, Kiswana finds one of Cora Lee’s children eating out of a garbage can. She tries to help Cora Lee by inviting her to a production of a Shakespeare play being staged in the park. Cora Lee is so moved by Kiswana’s brief appearance that she takes interest in her children. She cleans them and the house in preparation for the play. At the play, the children and Cora Lee are all touched by the performance. By the end, Cora Lee begins to imagine a better future for her children. She kisses them all goodnight. However, when she goes to her own bed, there’s a nameless man waiting for her. She drops her clothes and goes to bed with him.

Lorraine and Theresa are the only lesbian residents of Brewster Place. The residents fear Lorraine and Theresa, even though they are a loving and considerate couple. One resident in particular, Sophie, watches their every move and spreads rumors about their behavior. Lorraine is hurt by the judgmental responses of her neighbors. Theresa, however, claims not to care what people think or say. Lorraine tries to incorporate herself into the community by attending Kiswana’s tenants’ association meeting, but there, Sophie attacks her for her sexuality. She leaves in tears, and Ben, the oldest resident and the janitor of the complex, consoles her by taking her to his apartment and telling her the story of his daughter and wife. Ben’s daughter was indirectly led into prostitution by her parents, who refused to do anything about the fact that she was being forced to sleep with their white landlord.

Lorraine gains confidence from her burgeoning relationship with Ben. After a fight with Theresa, Lorraine goes to a party on her own. Afterward, instead of coming straight home, she goes down a dark alley. She is confronted by a group of young men who had earlier insulted her because of her sexuality. They gang rape her and leave her for dead. Lorraine manages to get up just as the sun is rising. She stumbles down the alley and sees Ben. She grabs a brick and crushes his skull with it.

Following Ben’s death, Mattie has a dream that the rain that has drenched Brewster Place since Ben’s murder has suddenly stopped in time for the block party planned by the tenants’ association. The rain eventually returns during the party, and everyone except the women run for shelter. The women believe that the wall in front of which Ben died still has blood on it, so they begin to frantically tear it apart, brick by brick. Mattie wakes to a beautiful sunny day. In the end, all of the residents of Brewster Place are forced out, and the block is condemned. Brewster Place, abandoned, lives on only in the hopes and memories of the women who once lived there.

Harvest : Manjula Padmanabhan

 Introduction

Harvest is a play by Manjula Padmanabhan set in the near future that deals with organ selling in India. Aurora Metro Books published the play in 2003. It’s a critique on the commodification of the body in third-world countries.

Manjula Padmanabhan, a 21st-century woman, being a technocrat herself, uses the techniques and tools of the modern world in her most celebrated play, Harvest (1996). Though Harvest is not, as obvious, the first play Padmanabhan wrote, her fame as a playwright rests on it.

Padmanabhan drew the attention of the world when Harvest won the Onassis cash-rich award for the theatre at Athens (Greece) out of more than a hundred entries.

The play confronts us with a futuristic Bombay of the year 2010. Om Prakash, a jobless Indian agrees to sell unspecified organs through Inter Planta Services, Inc to a rich person in first-world for a small fortune. InterPlanta and the recipients are obsessed with maintaining Om’s health and invasively control the lives of Om, his mother Ma, and wife Jaya in their one-room apartment. The recipient, Ginni, periodically looks in on them via a videophone and treats them condescendingly. Om’s diseased brother Jeetu is taken to give organs instead of Om. Harvest won the 1997 Onassis Prize as the best new international play.

Main Attractions of The Play

In the screenplay Harvest, by Manjula Padmanabhan, many global borders arise in which organ selling occurs in India in the near future, 2010. This screenplay deals with the first and third world countries. In India, there are more developed places than others. With people still suffering and finding a way to support their families with food and shelter they will do almost anything to make a living.

The main character, Om Prakash loses his job while living in a one-bedroom apartment with his family and decides to sell unspecified organs through a company called, InterPlanta Services Inc. “I went because I lost my job in the company. And why did I lose it? Because I am a clerk and nobody needs clerks anymore! There are no new jobs now…there’s nothing left for people like us! Don’t you know that? There’s us and the street gangs and the rich.” (pg 62)

In scene 4 (pg 61) The Guards take Jeetu instead of Om to do the eye surgery. Once the procedure is over his eyes will be donated and he will be left wearing a pair of goggles that look like a pair of imitation eyes. Om expresses to Jaya that since they don’t care about Om and his family, the less fortunate that they are going to operate on Jeetu even though they made a mistake and took the wrong person. In this scene, Om acts very cold-hearted and seems to only care about the money he is going to be receiving.

On the other hand, Jaya is very anxious and upset about what is taking place. When the Guards bring Jeetu back, he comes in white silk pyjamas and his head all wrapped up in bandages. “I won’t listen! Because listening brings acceptace. And I will never accept, I will never live with this…”(64) Now that Jeetu is not able to see, he feels trapped and is built up with a lot of anger. “Why? Because I’m in a place beyond death. I’m in a place worse than death. ( 66). If Jeetu feels this way rightfully so, then why does Om say that he is selfish? Is Om only worried about the money he is going to be receiving from this procedure?

Even though the family received money and were able to live a much better life through organ donation, many problems were created between each other. This is a perfect example of how money doesn’t buy happiness.

Harvest is a play written by Manjula Padmanabhan focusing geographically on Mumbai, India. We see the character, Om, signing up as an organ donor for Ginni who is an American woman simply because there is no more jobs in India. Ginni pays him to lead and live a healthy life, so when it is time for doing an organ, there is no difficulty or problem in doing so. This play feels nice in the beginning because it seems as after signing up as organ donor, leading a happy and healthy life is guranteed and certained, but what lies underneath is when Om and his small family starts to enjoy their new lifestyles, they also start to deny the consequences.

This play reminds the reader about a Brothel mainly because it is takes place in India, although this time it is Mumbai and not Calcutta. This play also has a prostitute and revolves around poor financial situations resorting to doing very unfortunate jobs to keep their funds up. We see the family go through wonderful meals which can seem as space-age because the family is taking off at the beginning of the play with good promise. But as the play furthers itself, we see the promise becoming dark and uneasy.

By seeing the financial situations of Om and his wife Jaya, we can appreciate money as a necessity to life. In this play, we see Om pretty much selling his life in order to obtain the top dollar for this family, well at least in India it was considered top dollar. Jaya was evidently distressed about Om’s decision on signing himself to Ginni because the family is already on an off and on a troubled relationship because Jaya is having a secret relationship with Om’s younger brother Jeetu. Jeetu works as the prostitute mentioned earlier, Ma is Om’s mother who also lives in the house who favours Om more so than the others.

Work itself is not even hard either. For the family, Ginni operates their services by dictating to Interplanta, which is the company that supplies them with food and services such as a toilet and shower that Om and his family received as newly rich people. This obviously made a foreshadow of his death. Personally, I wanted to just skip right to the point where Om was going to die because it was so clear that if he wasn’t going to die…then this play would be more interesting. I believe that this simplicity had been effective because it relates to this week’s theme of ‘problem with food.’

Summery

The play is set in the future, at a time when multinational companies have gone to the Third World not for software, minerals or fabric, but to harvest organs for their rich customers in America. It’s about India and the gritty Third World reality. Set in the imminent future, Harvest imagines a grisly pact between the first and third worlds, in which desperate people can sell their body parts to wealthy clients in return for food, water, shelter and riches for themselves and their families. As such, it is a play about how the “first” world cannibalizes the “third” world to fulfill its own desires.

The play confronts us with a futuristic Bombay of the year 2010. Om Prakash, a jobless Indian, agrees to sell unspecified organs through InterPlanta Services, Inc. [a multinational corporation] to a rich person in first-world for a small fortune. InterPlanta and the recipients are obsessed with maintaining Om’s health and invasively control the lives of Om, his mother Ma, and his wife Jaya in their one-room apartment. The recipient, Ginni, periodically looks in on them via videophone and treats them condescendingly. Om’s diseased brother Jeetu is taken to give organs instead of Om. 

In Harvest, Om, a just-laid-off breadwinner [(of an employer) To dismiss (workers) from employment, e.g. at a time of low business volume, often with a severance package.] for a struggling Indian family living in a cramped Bombay tenement, decides to sell his organs to a shadowy company called Interplanta in hopes of reversing his financial plight. Om’s family is monitored around the clock, receiving frequent video phone-type inquiries and directives from the supposed organ recipient, an icy young blonde named Ginni. Om’s mother falls into a stupor, constantly absorbed by programs on the TV provided by Interplanta. The family’s lives continue to go awry. The play may be set in the future, but it reflects contemporary conditions as well. India, one-third the size of the United States, has three times the population and almost 30 percent of its employable labor force is out of work, and the country’s biggest problems are overpopulation and inadequate education. 

READ ALSO: Themes of A Doll's House

The story, centers on Om who had recently become jobless. Joblessness, desperation, cynicism are the defining national sentiment. Om, a just-laid-off breadwinner for a struggling Indian family living in a cramped Bombay tenement, decides to sell his organs to a shadowy company called Interplanta in hopes of reversing his financial plight. The family portrait is an archetypal picture of dissolution and decay. It is into this world of disorder that Inter Planta Services brings apparent order and respectability when Om signs up to be an organ donor for an American woman named Ginni because there are no other jobs available for him in Mumbai. As the family’s life becomes more comfortable, their relationships become more strained than they ever were in their poverty, and eventually the whole family is at risk of losing not only body parts but their souls and identities as well. The corporation, personified as three anonymous, masked guards dressed all in white, gradually takes over every aspect of their lives.

Guards arrive to make his home into a germ-free zone. Om’s family is monitored around the clock, receiving frequent video phone-type inquiries and directives from the supposed organ recipient, an icy young blonde named Ginni. Ginni pays him to lead a “clean” and “healthy” life so she can harvest healthy organs whenever she needs them. Ginni begins to control every aspect of Om’s life, from when and what he eats to whom he sees and how he uses the bathroom. In fact, Ginni comes to control the entire family until the end of the play.

There occurs a radical change to their dingy room and it acquires an air of sophistication. The most important installation however, is the contact module placed at the centre of the room to facilitate communication between the receiver and the donor. The contact module and the apparent order brought in by Inter Planta seem to create turmoil in personal relationships. The donor and his family is kept under the constant gaze of the receiver as the module can rotate round to face each corner and can flicker to life at any moment. Ginny compares Om’s flat to a “human goldfish bowl” (Harvest 43) which she can observe and amuse herself with. The concept of the design is to allow a watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without their being able to tell whether they are being watched or not. Thus the inmates of the Third world are trapped under the unrelenting gaze of the First world. This total deprivation of privacy can be interpreted as the ultimate form of surveillance.

Om’s diseased brother, Jeetu, is taken to give organs instead of Om, and the recipient, Ginni, turns out to not be what she initially seemed. In a final act of defiance, the seeds of rebellion flower in a “checkmate” ploy by Om’s wife, Jaya.

Om’s younger brother has abandoned the family homestead [The dwelling house and its adjoining land] and earns his upkeep as a bi-sexual sex worker, Om’s mother has been frayed [(of a person’s nerves or temper) showing the effects of strain] by years of want and penniless living. So much so, she sees nothing amiss with her son’s trade-off, [an exchange where you give up one thing in order to get something else that you also desire.] as long as she gets her long-desired television set, her fridge, her microwave and all the other things that money can buy.

Om, on his part, is too smitten by the beautiful blonde — his buyer from across the seven seas — that keeps staring down at him from the television screen and drives him queasy [sick/unsettled] with her tantalizingly delivered sermons 

When Jeetu, his brother returns unexpectedly, he is taken as the donor. Om can’t accept this. He leaves to get back his position as the donor. Jaya, his wife is left alone. She was seduced into selling her body parts, for use by the rich westerners. Jaya, the sensitive young wife seems to have somehow managed to retain her not-for-sale soul despite the overarching gloom.

The Diary of Young Girl Anne Frank

 What is The Diary of a Young Girl about?

The Diary of a Young Girl (first published 1952; this edition 1977) tells the story of Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who went into hiding with her family during the Second World War. It offers a remarkable portrait of a maturing young woman forced into an unbelievable situation but rising to the occasion. In her diary, Anne shares her thoughts and dreams, revealing a remarkable talent that was tragically taken from the world, along with millions of other lives during the Holocaust.

About the Author

Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on June 12, 1929. She moved with her family to the Netherlands in 1933, after her father was offered a generous business opportunity. The move was also a tactical one for a Jewish family, as Germany, under the rule of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, was becoming more hostile toward Jewish people by the day. Unable to find passage out of the Netherlands, Anne and her family went into hiding in 1942. The Diary of a Young Girl is her parting gift to the world.

From Schoolgirl to Girl in Hiding.

The first entry in Anne Frank’s diary is from June 12, 1942 – her thirteenth birthday. It reads: “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone . . .” The diary was a gift she’d just received. In it, she noted the day’s other gifts: a new blouse, flowers, a puzzle, a voucher for two books.

There were other small birthday presents and humble tokens of love. Anne admits that she felt a bit spoiled by her parents in those days before the family went into hiding. That summer, in 1942, the family – Anne, her parents, and her older sister, Margot – were living in Amsterdam, where her father worked as a director for the Dutch Opekta Company, a manufacturer of spices and other food-related products.

The early private thoughts that Anne devoted to her diary were primarily concerned with school, friends, and classmates. But, from the start, it was clear that Anne has a sharp mind and that her concerns run deep. 

On June 20, 1942, she wrote down a saying: “Paper has more patience than people.” In the same entry, she writes about false appearances. Outwardly, it might look like she has it all, but, deep down, she feels lonely. She doesn’t have a true friend to open up to. 

She also writes about the stress that Hitler’s recent anti-Jewish laws have put on the family. As she explains, the pogroms of 1938 had forced Jewish people to wear yellow stars and made it illegal to ride bicycles, use cars or trams, or engage in any sport or athletics in public. They were only allowed to shop between the hours of 3:00 and 5:00 p.m. They couldn’t go to the movies or see plays. The rules were so numerous that it was hard to keep track of them all.

But, in June, Anne wrote most about less weighty matters: her battles with teachers who thought she was a chatterbox, her impending grades in class, her budding relationship with a suitor named Hello Silberberg (Hello being short for Helmuth), and her love for a boy named Peter Schiff.

That all changed on the first Sunday of July. The Frank family received what was known as a call-up notice from the SS. Everyone knew the meaning of these notices: the person being called up would likely be headed to a cell, or worse, a concentration camp. At first, Anne thought the notice was for her father. But she soon found out the truth – it was for Margot, her sister.

A rapid sequence of events unfolded, which found the Frank family quickly packing all the belongings they could and giving other items to friends for safekeeping. They were going into hiding.

The secret location was at the back of the top two floors in the Opekta building where her father worked, at 263 Prinsengracht. An unassuming door on the second floor of the offices unexpectedly led to what is now known as the Secret Annex.

Translation study Unit 4

 2 ) E.V. Ramakrishnan, “ Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of the Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry”, in Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Region, Modernity.