Announcing the Fall 2022 season of Two Lines!
“She slid sideways and leaned against the balustrade. I remained squatting in my assigned place. Looking at the distance between us, she said, “Come closer, not so far away.” I moved closer. “Places have great importance in life,” she said. “The world we see depends on where we are perched.” I smiled at this succinct, philosophical sort of statement, as she opened her lunch box. In it were two sandwiches, with a spangle of red cherry on top. She wrapped one in tissue paper and handed it to me. ‘Eat.’” —from “The Funeral” by Geet Chaturvedi, tr. Anita Gopalan
In this scene in “The Funeral,” the first piece of the Fall 2022 season of Two Lines, the narrator is perched on the ninth step at the entrance to the Asiatic Library in Mumbai. A young fourteen-year-old boy, he is accompanying his elderly neighbor, Rosa Aunty, to a funeral, stopping at various locations of special significance on their way. The significance of these digressions only becomes clear later on, when our narrator decides to begin again (“To return to the beginning, it had all started that morning after sunup…”), and by the story’s end, we can look back at these early moments and see them anew. Suddenly, the places we’ve visited—the library steps, a British-era lamppost, a flower shop—take on sparkling new layers of meaning.
The stories and poems we’ll be publishing this fall ask us (as Rosa Aunty does) to “Come closer, not so far away,” absorbing us into the ebb and flow of their words, causing us eventually to ask, “How did I get here?” One story locks us in a house with the victim of a robbery (“Room I” by Carlo Paulo Pacolor, tr. Soleil Davíd). Wago Ryoichi’s poem “Thoughts of the Abandoned” (tr. Judy Halebsky and Ayako Takahashi) takes us back to the particularly dark night of March 27, 2011, in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster. And the narrator in Almudena Sánchez’s “Ms. Smaig” (tr. Kit Maude) disorients us with ruminations on the psychic abilities of animals and the terrifying white walls of a hospital, reminding us: “All the great stories have two versions…” As though with a wink.
Rereading the stories and poems in this latest season of Two Lines, I’m reminded of the multitude of versions present in each one. With every poetic line, every description of a scene, the author is situating us on a step, uncovering meaning in a place we might otherwise overlook. This is how a lamppost becomes a symbol of unrequited love; a bridge, dwindling hope; a white wall, death. And, if only briefly, these images become part of the fabric of our own world, an amalgamation of the places we’ve visited, the places we’ve perched.
Read “The Funeral” and other recent pieces published in Two Lines here.
