ISSUE 05 APRIL - JULY 2014

Team

Founder and Editor-in-Chief

Senior Editor

Art Editor

Associate Editor

Associate Editor

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Layout Design

Cover Photograph

KRITI BaJaJ

SONAL JHA

MEDHA KULKARNI

AARUSHI UBOWEJA

VARUN WARRIER

AKSHAY RAM

KRITI BAJAJ

LUCAS LOVEGREN

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edIToRIal

Dear Readers,

It is with mixed feelings that I present to you the final issue of Bricolage Magazine - a revelation that will come as a surprise to many. Since March 2013, when this project came into existence, we have grown so much, learned so much, and tried, with every issue, to raise the bar.

But, as with everything in life, we have come to a bend in the road; and for some of us, it is time to move on to newer pastures. I know that we’ll all carry the experience and everything we’ve learnt with us into our future endeavours.

I am deeply indebted to our wonderful team, who have volunteered their time over the last year and a half to make the magazine what it is today. I know I speak for them in thanking all our wonderful contributors from all over the world - not only for their inspiring art, but for their endless words of support and encouragement. For a fledgling magazine like ours, having their approval has meant a lot. At the end of this issue is a list of all those who have been published in Bricolage since 2013.

This issue features short fiction, poetry, non-fiction and art - each unique in its voice and moving in its message. As always, the written pieces are supplemented by visual content that is a mix of work drawn from public domain archives as well as contributors chosen by the Editor.

We hope that you enjoy reading this issue, and thank you once again for accompanying us on this wondrous journey.

Until our paths cross again...

Kriti BajajEditor-in-Chief

submissions@bricolagemagazine.comSubmission Guidelines - www.bricolagemagazine.com/p/submissions.html

editors@bricolagemagazine.com

All rights remain with respective authors/artists.Terms of service - www.bricolagemagazine.com/p/terms-of-service.html

ConTenTs

leTTeR fRom The edIToR --- 3

eveRyone weaRs flIp-flops --- 8Ardena Gonzalez

sTRay --- 11Shikhandi

angIna monologue --- 13Charles Levenstein

BanKsy: a sTudy of populaR ReCepTIon --- 18Paul Mathew

CITIes InvIsIBle --- 24Onaiza Drabu & Saswati Das

ThRee poems --- 37Steve Klepetar

The BooK you don’T geT To Keep --- 40Ewan C. Forbes

dIana KRall: The melody of gRaCe --- 42Judy Rae

Two poems --- 45Rini Barman

aRs vIvendI --- 49Shikha Chhabra

ConTRIBuToRs

The blue double-decker #9 bus putters into the rusty station and rattles to a stop. I wobble off. My shoes feel weird on my feet as soon as they hit the pavement. As I look at everyone shuffling around me, I hear Dad’s voice in my head: “It’s a flip-flop life.”

I pull my boots off and stuff them into the bottom of my backpack, preferring to feel the ground scratch my bare soles. I have returned to my childhood - to Secret Village, the place where I was my happiest self.

I take the main road and pass the local Thai place where we spent many sweaty evenings dunking chicken sticks into sweet peanut sauce and flinging fat noodles across the table at each other. I wander down the alley where we ran like crazy and played ‘Grandma’s Footsteps’. We knew every street, stairwell, roof, and tin shack as though a map were imprinted on our retinas. The whole village was our playground.

I follow my feet, over dew and damp cement, until I find myself in front of the rusted double gate that separates me from my old house - the only place that will always be home. Today, my shirt sticks to me from the humidity and I remember how our green, tiled living room floor always felt cool against our hot, steamy skin. We would lie on our bellies in front of a rattling box air conditioner, the faint murmur of cartoons in the background. I push the gates open, hear them creak the way they always did. Somebody else lives here now, but I walk through my old garden anyway, hoping nobody will see me as I criss-cross through potted plants and exit through the back gate.

The patio is vast and slopes downwards to a crumbling white veranda that overlooks Rocky Beach. We were explorers among the cliff-like rocks, playing hide-and-seek. When the tide was low, we collected the smooth glass that had been made safe to touch by the sea. Mostly it was of the ordinary bottle-green variety, but sometimes the tide washed in brilliant turquoise and jade. A lot of wood washed up on Rocky Beach too. We spent hours picking splinters out of our hands at the end of the day, but the rafts that came floating in with the waves were essential for the walls of our forts. Sometimes we borrowed a row boat that had been tilted on its side for the night for extra fortification, but as hard as we tried, our forts never made it through the night.

I hear a sudden flapping to my left and turn to see a garland of flags fluttering in the wind. They hang from the old Back Beach Bar, where the adults congregated on wooden stools over Tsingtao beers, soft funk tunes beating in the background, glittery fairy lights strung overhead. We gathered here too, with our rollerblades to race down the promenade, fearless and alive with the sea wind blasting against our faces.

I follow my childhood patterns and paths as though nothing has changed. I escape my adult body and let my infant feet guide me. I know where I’m going before I have chosen to walk that direction, and I visualize the routes to my friends’ houses as if they still live there. But they don’t anymore. Everyone’s grown up. The streets look smaller now that I am a tall adult. I laugh at the

by Ardena Gonzalez

8

eveRyone weaRs flIp-flops

BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE

9 ISSUE 05

memory of how the village had been my whole world: a maze of shacks that my gang and I governed as if ours. That was all we once needed – it had been enough and we were happy.

I stop in the middle of the village now and look around the small square that is a hodgepodge of metal doors, restaurant terraces, and drooping tarps. On Sundays we would walk to the food stand in front of the village temple, and sit on plastic stools with a face-sized bowl of pork ramen soup. The red lanterns hanging in the temple doorway swayed with the sea breeze, as fire roared beneath the woks and fervent chatter filled the air.

I keep walking and make my way to the main beach, the one the rest of the island invaded on sunny days. There is a single parking lot in the village, and on Saturday nights we used to run, arms flailing, across the vast empty space where all the city people had parked only hours earlier. They came fully loaded with inflatable crocodiles, straw mats, and collapsible chairs, only to leave plastic remnants of their barbecues behind. Village folk never went to the beach on Saturdays. It was hell.

Every year, during the Lantern Festival, a giant hut-like opera house was set up in that same parking lot in front of the beach. Red and green silk banners hung from the bamboo structure, announcing the show in gold characters. The singers’ painted faces wailed and cymbals clanged as we village kids trampled up and down the bamboo aisles, a flip-flop sometimes getting left behind, wedged into one of the wooden steps. But the best part was escaping our parents, who fanned themselves in the sticky heat and pretended to enjoy the screeching. We would sneak off, down into the hollow bamboo forest beneath their feet, whizzing through the opera house stilts on a sugar-high of imported candy and ice popsicles.

I cross the parking lot, now barren save for a plastic bag gliding across the cement. Reaching the

The temple

shore, I dig my feet into the sand, swirling my toes into the grains and feeling their crunch under my skin. We dug similar holes with our hands when we were kids - huge holes we rushed to fill with sea water from buckets that tumbled and splattered with every useless trip. On the nights of the Lantern Festival we dug holes to put our lit-up lanterns in. We watched the colored paper, shaped like a dragon or a rabbit, glow in the pitch black, becoming one of the many other glimmering lights that speckled across the beach. We spun in circles, dangling our paper lamps with outstretched arms, and grew dizzy from the path of light seeping out. But eventually the bulbs would dim, and the lanterns trickled out to restore the beach to its blue, cool calm. After a long day of exploring, building, running, imagining, we would return home to crash in our beds between mildewed walls, hearing nothing but a distant bark and the sound of the sea.

I lie on the sand, warm from the sun, and feel as my childhood seeps back into me. I want to be this little girl again. The tanned, nourished, energetic body whose imagination created a world that knew no closed doors or forbidden places. We were free, and it was magical.

I know I have to put on my shoes again and go back to adult life. I know I have to get on a bus and a plane and go back to a city where money is made and success is everything. I can only take with me the memory of my child-self: the joy I felt in this place that will always be the same, but also different through my adult eyes.

Instead, I choose to just lie here for a while longer. Looking up at the bright, white sky, I lie in the sand and escape to a point in time, in a place, where everyone wears flip flops.

aBouT The auThoR

Ardena Gonzalez is a writer, blogger, and long-term traveler, currently living in London. She is working on a collection of short stories, and her more regular musings can be found on her blog. Photographs courtesy of the author.

The gang, circa 1996

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Here, every city has a colour. Bombay is blue, Delhi, yellow and Jaipur, red. Wait. Listen. They do. You can see it. On the tarpauline sheets that keep the huts from rain-wounds. Kameezes, shirts, sarees, sarongs, dhotis and the many the unstitched drapes that wrap people. Plastic pots that await water. Trucks painted to glory. Public buses. Private buses. Buses. Signboards. You can feel these colours as you slice your spoon into a chunk of dessert or sink your soul into a cup of tea.

Wayanad is olive green; Madurai, blue and gold; Agra is dirty brown-white; and Bangalore, cyan. You can smell it in the air as you walk through the aisles between shacks, between huts, between racks in a mall shelf. Run your fingers through the fabric of the new cloth you just bought or the slimy sheen of a plastic cover they serve it in. You will feel the colour.

Yesterday, I reached home. Ammaa urged me to take a shower. Bathroom mirror. I stared - an alien face to the walls behind me, quite like an edited image. Photoshopped. Colourshopped.

Cities have colours. Colours that run. Colours that dye you as you walk past, they stain you.

Beware.

I washed.I washed.

I scrubbed using soap, turpentine, water, sanitizer, dishwashing fluid,cloth, cotton, coconut fibres, metal strips.

The stains stayed. I was scared to face the house, my bookshelves and my mother’s plate of food.

I dipped, rather discretely, a cotton swab into the wall beside me and touched the stains up.

The bruises as well, those that were made as I scrubbed and scrapped. The patchy I. Not even a collage.

The mere patchy I had dinner.

aBouT The auThoR

Shikhandi is a fictitious character who occasionally leaks into reality through bits of writing, like this.

sTRayby Shikhandi

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M. Sieveking’s HandsDigital ID: (digital file from original neg.) ggbain 20998 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ggbain.20998Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-ggbain-20998 (digital file from original negative)Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.printGlass negative ca. 1915-1920Accessed via FlickrCommons

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Photograph by Sidharth Das

13

angIna monologuesby Charles Levenstein

ameRICan woRKeR

His hands were rough and callused,he’d try to clean them with Lava soap

or at times with a slippery solventthat looked like Vaseline but dissolvedany evidence of the day’s hard work.These hands spoke without words.

He held my hand with hisat Sunday tours of construction sites.

He checked the super’s cabin doorfor the union insignias

while I marveled at the rising skeletonsthat when finished would house New York.

He held my hand with hisas we walked from subway to Town Hall

where I played one of two pianosin a competition of duos.

He sat on the uncomfortable straight-backchairs, listened and waited.

Once we shared a glimpse of elegance:tea at the Boston Atheneum

after our tourist walk of the Revolution.We were Americans and made this pilgrimage

with all its contradictions. Rememberthe delicate tea cup in his worker’s hands.

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BRoadway haRRy’s on BeaCh 28Th sT.

Sun-burned Harrypeddler voice lusty and loud red and strong with sex

drew summer womenpale husbands working worried back in Brooklyn.

I learned to sweep the wooden floorwithout raising clouds of dust, a skill useful in later life

to dampen temper and impatience.Even more, he taught me to display oranges turned carefully in the box

so navels were concealed; to shave watermelonsso they were fresh to ladies’ eyes; to bounce a bag of peaches on the scale.

Special fruit – exotic mangos from distant Puerto Rico.Each day he’d open one, offer a sliver, special taste for dark eyes.

She who bought today returned tomorrow, dreaming.

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a weB of Blood vessels

He relies on them for sight and taste,for thinking about big things andexperiencing small ones. Smell,

touch, even muffled hearing.

When he was a youth he reachedfor heaven through song and chant,

frightened everyone includinghimself by this over-reaching –

Abandoned the religious commons,arrogant twerp he was, when he detected

hypocrisy, and indulged in pork andshell fish out of spite. Eating bad.

Became a devotee of ideas and ego,confused between prayer and desolation,

empathy gone berserk. Lost family,loyalties. Did good and did bad.

Now the vessels contract and close,an occlusion here, migraines and

remorseless brain-noise loud clankinglike radiators in need of plumbing

And these poems: what are they for?Last testament, late confessions,

a life lived fully enough to warrantregret. Fidelity, Hypocrisy, Song.

This is morning: a brisk sunilluminates the new day. He settles

for moments of grace. He sailson a web of vessels, a new wind.

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CheRnoByl: noT exaCTly

From Wikipedia: The Chernobyl disaster is widely considered to have been the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, and is one of only two classified as a level 7 event (the maximum classification) on the International Nuclear Event Scale (the other being the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011). The battle to contain the contamination and avert a greater catastrophe ultimately involved over 500,000 workers and cost an estimated 18 billion rubles. 31 people died during the accident itself, and long-term effects such as cancers and deformities are still being accounted for.

A few years after the Chernobyl disasterat a conference in Moscow and Kiev:

A polyglot group, simultaneous translation,the delegation of angry Polish doctors,

some Scandinavian and GDR representatives,many Ukrainians, scientists and workers.

Another American, an ex-Special Forces physicianfrom the joint Soviet-American Polar medicine collaboration

who when I was very drunk on the train from to Kievtried to recruit me for some nefarious purpose.

(Too much pepper vodka with little old Ukrainian scientistsearned scowls from the babushka guarding the corridor.)

In Kiev the delegates were invited to visit Chernobylbut I went to Babi Yar, the mass grave of Ukraine’s Jews

murdered by the Nazis, now grassed over, commemorated inYevtushenko’s poem. A taxi took me there, but I could

only bear to stay a few moments. When I returned, a guideasked me where I had gone and I told her.

I said that my mother was born in Kiev and she said,“Oh, so you are a Ukrainian!” Not exactly, I replied,

not exactly.

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aBouT The poeT

Charles (Chuck) Levenstein has been writing poems since he was 15 years old, though he burned them every ten years: some because he was shy about them, some because they were really awful. He began writing poetry again in 2000, largely because internet poetry forums were an easy vehicle for trying out new work and learning from other writers. In 2001, he published a collection of poems, Lost Baggage, with Loom Press in Lowell, Massachusetts (Paul Marion, czar of the Loom Press and promoter of cultural activity in the Merrimack Valley, was very supportive.)

Levenstein’s poetry has appeared in several e-zines including Poetry Bay, Red River Review, Dakota House Journal and Adagio Quarterly. Many of these poems were collected (along with others, primarily about aging) in a book he published with Lulu.com called Poems of World War III. As a contributing editor for PN, he has also edited a special supplement called “Poems of Work and Working Life,” and started a more or less regular feature called “Comment and Controversy” intended to provide an outlet for humanistic literary criticism. Most recently, he published another smaller collection with Lulu.com called Animal Vegetable.

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BanKsya sTudy of populaR ReCepTIon

by Paul Mathew

Graffiti, as it originated, was an underground art form and was appreciated or criticized by the people of the specific localities where it was present. In the 70s and the early 80s, urban gangs and individuals with countercultural tendencies gravitated towards this mode of art and started exploring the landscapes of their cities. During that period, graffiti artists were performing strictly beyond the boundaries of legality and were dealt with aggressively by the media, the bureaucracy and the police.

Walter Benjamin’s concept of “aura” is a point of departure in exploring how, since then, the art form has undergone a relatively traceable change: a change that transforms graffiti from its position as public art and places it among the ranks of high art or gallery art.

The Co-opTIon of The aRT foRm and peRsona of The aRTIsT

Banksy, originally a member of the urban subculture that thrived in Bristol, is now one of the most popular graffiti artists in the world. He is an anonymous artist who tours the world leaving behind street art in spaces both public and “private”. In recent years, his works have progressed from being labelled as vandalism to being exhibited at and collected by elite art galleries.

Once resisting the lure of high art, street art is now being museumized and co-opted in a narrative of art appreciation that is largely globalized in its forms and aspirations. Focusing on Banksy’s work centered in London and New York from the 80s to the present day, this article attempts to analyze how the form of the art, the persona of the artist and even its transgressive moments can be seen as points of struggle, where underground art is co-opted into mainstream art or gallery art.

Stuart Hall’s idea of the dialectic of containment/resistance offers more critical tools to study such instances of struggle as manifested in the news media. Three reported instances from different stages in Banksy’s career are used as case studies to demonstrate how this appropriation functions.

On pOpular culture and mechanical reprOductiOn

Stuart Hall argues that popular culture is a “constantly changing field” which has to be understood in terms of a “cultural dialectic” that is always already at play. The study of this limited period of Banksy’s career is based on Hall’s idea that

“what matters is not the intrinsic or historically fixed objects of culture, but the state of play in cultural relations: to put it bluntly and in an oversimplified form — what counts is the class struggle in and over culture.”

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“What are you looking at?” by Solipsest via Wikimedia Commons.

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Banksy the persona and his works are cultural artefacts, to claim which a class struggle seems to be at work. This class struggle goes through various instances of the dialectic of containment and resistance. In this context, Benjamin’s theory of mechanical reproduction becomes useful as a starting point for the redefinition of the concept of aura.

Walter Benjamin, in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” argues: “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art”. Street art, however, is a cultural phenomenon where it is not an art object that is invested with aura, instead it is the persona of the artist.

It needs to be noted that with street art, there can be no reliable, authentic art object preserved in time and space. The art object is unprotected and therefore transient, and the artist himself, is in this case, anonymous. How then can such an art object be invested with aura? Especially with an artist like Banksy, the “unique existence of the work of art” is not contingent on its physical uniqueness, but the idea of its uniqueness. It is the constructed persona of Banksy that endows each of his works with a quality that Benjamin calls aura. The responses his work elicit from the media, the state and the public are all sources of information on how this persona is imagined in the public sphere.

BanKsy’s eaRly woRK

In order to study Banksy’s work in terms of the development of its aura and its co-option into high art, his career has to be separated into two periods. The first, and the early period of his work mostly appeared between 1990 and 1994. While working in Bristol as a member of a team of graffiti artists called the DryBreadZ Crew, his style was markedly in tune with street culture and tagging was always limited to various artistic imaginings of the word “KATO.” (UK Walls)

After 1994, Banksy moved to a different mode of graffiti, wherein he started using stencils extensively and moving to political themes that were anti-war and anti-capitalist. This is where Banksy, the name, started gaining currency and a notoriety of the kind that caught the interest of a wider audience. He broke away from the gang in later years, but these early years are possibly the only ones during which his work strictly adhered to local street traditions before being co-opted by mainstream artistic and political concerns.

Banksy and the media

To study the change in Banksy’s career and persona spanning from 2000 to the present, three instances are selected, among which two are from mainstream news media. The articles are analyzed to understand how each reveals his movement from graffiti art to street art and by the 2010s into high art.

Graffiti and street art are both cultural forms that belong to two clearly distinct classes in terms of the popularity it enjoys in them. Urban graffiti can be seen as a strictly underground art in that the tags are often gang signs or address specifically local concerns, which are meaningful only to the specific groups, active gang members or people who live within a few blocks. Urban Street art, however, shares elements of form with graffiti, but largely differs in the themes they explore and the section of the public that responds to it. The major audience for this art is the urban middle and upper class population.

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The first article to be analyzed was published by the BBC in 2001. In it, a clear difference in tone from how mainstream media talks about graffiti can be observed. This noticeable difference is based heavily on the fact that Banksy’s work subscribes to a class specific definition of art, where it has to be thought provoking, dispense a message and be entertaining in the process. Ian Youngs goes on to quote numerous lines from Banksy’s collection titled Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall. The columnist even goes to the extent of saying that “Banksy may use spray cans on walls - but graffiti’s ugly reputation should not cloud the view of his work.” (Youngs 2001) This seemingly innocuous statement sets a clear distinction between Banksy’s work and all other graffiti. The redeeming quality of his work, according to the columnist, is its message; yet in one instance, all the illegality of his work becomes secondary or insignificant.

The fact that Banksy is already publishing a book which is essentially a collection of his previous work along with their tag lines, is, in fact, building a mysterious persona. This is where Benjamin’s idea of mechanical reproduction needs to be amended to engage with the new form of art. Although the artist is engaged in print reproduction, his readers cannot seek an original. The original is almost always short-lived, so the idea of an artist, as earlier mentioned, becomes the repository of all values associated to the work. This is reinforced by the anonymity and the cult status associated with his image as a rebel dissatisfied with the world.

The outcome is not a “progressive reaction” as Benjamin predicts, but rather one where certain social classes prefer to invest that aura into an imagined persona. With regard to street art especially, Benjamin’s idea does not seem to take off. The interest of the public seems to be arrested more by abstract notions than concrete art-objects. Here the value of the concrete object lies in the fact that it refers back to the abstract and what it represents – in the case of Banksy, it is the idea of dissent and its appeal within the middle and upper class urban population.

“One Nation Under CCTV” by oogiboig via Wikimedia Commons.

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The second example is an article titled “Council Wants Banksy Mural Removed”, which was published by The Independent in 2008. The article refers to a 23-feet-high piece which Banksy had erected on Newman Street in London which read: “One Nation Under CCTV.”

The correspondent had allegedly received official responses, the most revealing of which was:

“Deputy council leader Robert Davis said: “We are not saying the owners need to paint over this mural as we can see it has value in the right location, such as an art gallery.””

The response refuses to acknowledge the work as vandalism or as an illegal activity. Instead, it even acknowledges that the piece could be considered as a work of art, even one of considerable value. Such moments of reticence from the law enforcement can be seen as a strategy of co-option because it is by dissolving the most heightened oppositions that a system survives, and in this case, the system is capitalism.

The article ends with an incident where Transport for London ordered for a Banksy to be painted over on the grounds that it created a “general atmosphere of neglect and social decay which in turn encourages crime”. The image was a subversion of the popular movie Pulp Fiction, which was seen as threatening. There are always moments like these that solidify the image of Banksy as a rebel and reinforce the aura of that persona.

The final example that this article analyzes is from 2005, when he sneaked in some of his works into galleries in New York City. It is interesting that this seemingly transgressive act began a trend where “a Banksy” became increasingly viable as a gallery art piece. This is co-option at its elementary best. A moment of transgression is seized and appropriated, or even made a tool of at times, in these struggles for a claim to a cultural form.

Since 2002, there has been an increase in the number of exhibitions and activities by Banksy that invariably seek to be subversive, but as already seen in the analyzed news reports, co-option has occurred to an extent where even subversive moments are woven into the mainstream narrative of art.

This is, however, a very fluid state and is open to change in any direction, contingent on the dialectic of cultural struggle - like any such phenomenon.

aBouT The auThoR

Paul Mathew is a PhD scholar at the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, IIT Kanpur. He is also a film enthusiast, with a specific interest in eastern European cinema and cultures of resistance in art and politics.

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woRKs CITed

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Nov. 2013.

“Council Wants Banksy Mural Removed”, The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, n.d. Web. 28 Nov. 2013.

Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular”, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. 2nd ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. 455-466. Print.

Reed, Martyn. Kato/Banksy. 1999. Nuart Festival’s Photostream, Bristol. Flickr. Web. 19 Nov. 2013.

Tcholakian, Danielle. “Not all NYC artists love Banksy”, MetroUS. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Nov. 2013.

“UK Walls” N-igma. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Nov. 2013.

Youngs, Ian. “Street Art’s New Design for Life”, BBC News. BBC, 9 July 2001. Web. 28 Nov. 2013.

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24

CITIes InvIsIBle

by Onaiza Drabu & Saswati Das

aRTIsT sTaTemenT

We have visualized Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities through a series of 6 artworks. Our common trope is Marco Polo - who you will find hidden in every painting - and a female figure. This is because while Polo narrates the story of different cities, which ultimately are all Venice, he calls each city by the name of a woman.

While Onaiza has painted her visualization of the cities (Diomira, Dorothea, Anastasia), Saswati has interpreted them through sketches (Isidora, Zaira, Tamara). Both are starkly different in their rendition and form but blend together one city after the other.

The BRonze goddess of dIomIRa

“Leaving there and proceeding for three days toward the east, you reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower. All these beauties will already be familiar to a visitor, who has seen them also in other cities. But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when days are growing shorter and the multi-coloured lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman’s voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.”

Onaiza Drabu, The Bronze Goddess of Diomira, acrylic on canvas, 16.54 x 11.69 inches.

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polo’s map of doRoThea

“There are two ways of describing the city of Dorothea: you can say that four aluminum towers rise from its walls flanking seven gates with spring-operated drawbridges that span the moat whose water feeds four green canals which cross the city, dividing it into nine quarters, each with three hundred houses and seven hundred chimneys. And bearing in mind that the nubile girls of each quarter marry youths of other quarters and their parents exchange the goods that each family holds in monoply - bergamot, sturgeon roe, astrolabes, amethyst - you can then work from these facts until you learn everything you wish about the city in the past, present and future. Or else you can say, like the camel driver who took me there: ‘I arrived here in my first youth, one morning, many people were hurrying along the streets toward the market, the women had fine teeth and looked you straight in the eye, three soldiers on a platform played the trumpet, and all around wheels turned and colored banners fluttered in the wind. Before then I had known only the desert and the caravan routes. In the years that followed, my eyes returned to contemplate the desert expanses and the caravan routes; but now I know this path is only one of the many that opened before me on that morning in Dorothea.”

Onaiza Drabu, Polo’s Map of Dorothea, acrylic on canvas, 11.69 x 16.54 inches.

27 ISSUE 05

The CaRnIval of anasTasIa

“At the end of three days, moving southward, you come upon Anastasia, a city with concentric canals watering it and kites flying over it. I should now list the wares that can profitably be bought here: agate, onyx, chrysoprase, and other varieties of chalcedony; I should praise the flesh of the golden pheasant cooked here over fires of seasoned cherry wood and sprinkled with much sweet marjoram; and tell of the women I have seen bathing in the pool of a garden and who sometimes - it is said - invite the stranger to disrobe with them and chase them in the water. But with all this, I would not be telling you the city’s true essence; for while the description of Anastasia awakens desires one at a time only to force you to stifle them, when you are in the heart of Anastasia one morning your desires waken all at once and surround you. The city appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and be content. Such is the power, sometimes called malignant, sometimes benign, that Anastasia, the treacherous city, possesses; if for eight hours a day you work as a cutter of agate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave.”

Onaiza Drabu, The Carnival of Anastasia, acrylic on canvas, 11.69 x 16.54 inches.

BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE 28

29 ISSUE 05

BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE 30

The lady of IsIdoRa

“When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors. He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.”

Saswati Das, The Lady of Isidora, pencil on canvas, 11.69 x 16.54 inches.

31 ISSUE 05

by Jessica TynerThe lady of zaIRa

“In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past : the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock. As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”

Saswati Das, The Lady of Zaira, pencil on canvas, 11.69 x 16.54 inches.

BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE 32

33 ISSUE 05

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The lady of TamaRa

“Finally the journey leads to the city of Tamara. You penetrate it along streets thick with signboards jutting from the walls. The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things: pincers point out the tooth-drawer’s house; a tankard, the tavern; halberds, the barracks; scales, the grocer’s. Statues and shields depict lions, dolphins, towers, stars: a sign that something - who knows what? - has as its sign a lion or a dolphin or a tower or a star. Other signals warn of what is forbidden in a given place (to enter the alley with wagons, to urinate behind the kiosk, to fish with your pole from the bridge) and what is allowed (watering zebras, playing bowls, burning relatives’ corpses). From the doors of the temples the gods’ statues are seen, each portrayed with his attributes - the cornucopia, the hourglass, the medusa - so that the worshipper can recognize them and address his prayers correctly. If a building has no signboard or figure, its very form and the position it occupies in the city’s order suffice to indicate its function: the palace, the prison, the mint, the Pythagorean school, the brothel. The wares, too, which the vendors display on their stalls are valuable not in themselves but as signs of other things: the embroidered headband stands for elegance; the gilded palanquin, power; the volumes of Averroes, learning; the ankle bracelet, voluptuousness. Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts.”

Saswati Das, The Lady of Tamara, pencil on canvas, 11.69 x 16.54 inches.

aBouT The aRTIsTs

Onaiza Drabu is a business graduate who gave up a job with McKinsey to study for a year at the Young India Fellowship, while simultaneously trying to find something she could potentially enjoy doing for a living.

Saswati Das is a free spirited architect, a Hindustani classical vocalist and a Young India Fellow passionate about culture, art and all things music.

35 ISSUE 05

Ruth St. Denis at Yosemite Valley Denishawn Collection The New York Public Libraryvia FlickrCommons.

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ThRee poemsby Steve Klepetar

sTRIp away

Strip away those diamonds, those ragsof gold, tear all the ornaments from your

flowing hair. Toss your questions in the fire

you will not need them here. Leave ringsand bracelets in a pyramid of dust; in gloom

they will not shine nor sing sweet verses

of the sun. Step into this cold hall with nothingbut your skin and feel the breath of bats, red

eyes of creatures scurrying beneath roots

and rocks that know what soon you’ll know –that even your brilliant eyes, your mouth sensualwith song, your tongue tasting the tang of berries

and wine will melt before your sister’s awful kiss.

37 ISSUE 05

offeRIngs

Where were the listeners with their greenhands as I waited in the garden for sunrise

to tickle the tops of trees? Where had theyhidden their eyes, those black coins, those holes?

Everywhere ghosts of their breath, by beanrows and squash, and among the raucous weeds.

Offerings at each of the cardinal points:at the east, barley cakes soaked in milk;

at the north, bitterroot; at the south, goat cheese;and at the west, a small sprinkling of wine.

Let it be sufficient, let the seeds spring to lifein this indifferent soil. There, in dew-soaked

grass, mindful ones have dug their deep canals,and slipped like lovers inside the pillow talk of night.

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a QuesTIon

“What has the camel got to do with me?”you say, whose volumes have been stackedhigh in unsteady piles all along this waxed

and endless hall. No matter that thistwo-humped, Bactrian beast rises, an imagein some lonely child’s mind, or that it once

came when you clicked your tongueagainst the roof of your slightly open mouth.

That’s forgotten now among shell casingsand targets scattered on dirt. What a patternyour near-misses create, that cluster of holesa bit too high and wide. Better sit on the curb

tonight, renew your pledge.Someone flicked the street lights on while

two boys smoke furiously beyond scraggly trees.

aBouT The poeT

Steve Klepetar’s work has appeared widely, in journals such as Glass, Stirring, Red River Review, Snakeskin, Black Market Lit and many others. Several of his poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His most recent collections include Speaking to the Field Mice (Sweatshoppe Publications, 2013), My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto (Flutter Press, 2013) and Return of the Bride of Frankenstein (forthcoming from Kind of a Hurricane Press).

39 ISSUE 05

The BooK you don’T geT To Keep

by Ewan C. Forbes

An old man once told me a story about a book he’d found. It had his entire life in it. He found it in a bookshop in Germany. He was a German.

“A book,” the old man explained, “is a journey you get to keep. The characters do not grow up, the streets, shops and houses do not change names.” He had travelled widely, and he said that all he had to show for it were dog-eared photos and herpes. “Showing isn’t everything,” he was quick to add.

He told me that all books, all stories, are really just brief trips away from the prime story: the story written unconsciously as we live it, the journey that we don’t get to keep in its entirety, unlike a book.

“But you found that book, the exception to the rule?” I asked. I didn’t believe him, not then, but he was dying. I’ll talk about whatever a dying person wants to talk about.

He told me that he had started reading the book in the shop, and the eagerness in his eyes as he’d approached the desk had cost him the entire contents of his wallet.

“What had you just read?” I asked.

I’ll always remember what he said next.

“I’d just seen through the pages, like a window to my youth in paper and ink.”

He told me that he’d read the book over the next few days, reliving his early years through it in stolen moments. All there, he said, warts and all.

“Did you flick ahead?” I asked. I remember his frosted blue eyes glazing with the memory.

“Too scared.”.

I told him that it might just have been a description of him reading the last page of some book he’d found, and I was glad later that he didn’t hear the sarcasm in my words.

“So what happened to the book?” I asked. He told me he’d lost it, still five years from the end. That had been thirty years ago, when he was still a young man.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

He looked me in the eyes, gazing up from the bed. He looked crumpled and small, but he did not blink as he spoke: “I spent the last thirty years looking for a book that, bar the five years I hadn’t

BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE 40

read up to, was about nothing more than a man losing his wife and daughter in the futile search for a book.”

I said that it must be a hard thing to realise so late, and he told me that he’d been fully aware of what he was doing the whole time, and likewise the consequences.

“Why,’ I asked, “why did you do it then?”

He gestured that I should lean in close, and I complied.

“Because it was so exquisitely written,” he said.

aBouT The auThoR

Ewan C. Forbes lives and writes in Aberdeen, Scotland. His work has previously appeared in Gutter: The Magazine of New Scottish Writing, Daily Science Fiction, and SAND Journal (as Ewan Forbes). Most recently, his work has been featured in the Ominous Realities anthology from Grey Matter Press.

41 ISSUE 05

dIana KRallThe melody of gRaCe

by Judy Rae

Sitting under the stars of Ghent was a woman far from home. She spoke fondly of traveling with her two children and husband across the ocean. Her black attire was practical, and highlighted her golden shoulder-length hair. Her flawless porcelain complexion didn’t compete with color-stained lips or overdone shades of eye shadow. The understated diamond band, adorning the one closest to her heart, and the sapphire locket around her neck were the only hint of sparkle other than the night sky. Within moments, this mother traveling abroad would illuminate the crowds that looked on. Some people need accessories to enhance what they lack; in the case of Diana Krall, her voice and dancing fingers added a sparkle far greater than anything found over a make-up counter or within a jewelry box.

My first introduction to this Canadian jazz performer was 12 years ago in New Orleans. She strutted out in denim jeans, high heels, and a fitted black tuxedo jacket. She immediately claimed her seat in front of a sleek, black grand piano. With a natural grace she crossed her legs, and in one seamless motion her fingers began to tickle the piano keys. This memory has stayed with me for over a decade. When my 40th birthday rolled around recently, my husband surprised me with tickets to the Ghent Jazz Festival. The night reserved would offer a glimpse into the performer I had remembered so vividly from years past.

BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE 42

I questioned whether she still had “it”. In 12 years, she’s added a husband and five year old twins to her schedule. In addition she’s, well, older. I don’t claim to have been a rock star, but I can appreciate the grueling schedule. How would the mixture of age and a family affect what I witnessed in New Orleans all those years ago?

As her lean, black clad figure made it on to the stage, she bee-lined for the comfort of her companion: a wood grained piano. Shuffling around numerous sheets of music scattered across the piano, she joked about finding the perfect song to begin the night. Her choice: “Just Like a Butterfly Caught in the Rain”.

Melodies fluttered and transcended over the crowd. Her voice was sultry, her fingers playful. Like a chameleon, the music determined the artist’s emotions. Mrs. Krall flirted and teased with her slow calculated rendition of Tom Waits’ “Temptation”. She nearly had me in a dream state singing Bob Dillon’s “Simple Twist of Fate”. The trailing word, “fate”, seemed to reluctantly leave her lips; in one breath it was beautiful, heart breaking, and fading, amazing. With a flip of a switch, this artist could seduce the crowd with her lyrics, and then, between breaths, summon the casual listener to melancholy.

Mrs. Krall took what I questioned to be limitations and transformed them into another gift. Marriage and kids, combined with the passage of time, have created an artist who knows who she is and where she belongs. Her confidence becomes a tangible element within her performance. While I may never possess the ability to carry a melody or play an instrument that draws the masses, Diana Krall and I do have a few things in common. We’ve both added two heart beats to our families since New Orleans. I, too, anxiously take my seat at a keyboard. Her keys turn out tunes, while mine, words.

Mrs. Krall took what I questioned to be limitations and transformed them into another gift. Marriage and kids, combined with the passage of time, have created an artist who knows who she is and where she belongs. Her confidence becomes a tangible element within her performance. While I may never possess the ability to carry a melody or play an instrument that draws the masses, Diana Krall and I do have a few things in common. We’ve both added two heart beats to our families since New Orleans. I, too, anxiously take my seat at a keyboard. Her keys turn out tunes, while mine, words.

Leaving the concert left me on a musical high. But more importantly, I discovered that future decades will bear gifts that don’t come with a price tag. It appears that if you surround yourself with love and a love for what you do, your natural glow doesn’t have an expiration date.

aBouT The auThoR

Judy Rae lives and works in southern Belgium with her husband and four daughters. She currently writes a monthly column for a publication serving the local NATO community. Her situation provides plenty of opportunities to pursue her passions, travel writing and the French language. Her sense of wonder and curiosity keep life interesting wherever she lands.

43 ISSUE 05

Meet by Priya Prakash

BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE 44

Two poemsby Rini Barman

BRoKen nesT

Every Friday pigeon’s eggs sheltered near her deadly brown balcony encircled, safe between bushes and tulips,

none of them are born. Call her a brute rejoicing in a lake of bloodshed,

or a heart’s conflict with earthquakes, a total of hundred did she break.

The grey glad pigeon visits them she thinks of the den,

a lioness with her suckling cubs in the bleak of a sultry night,

she recalled her moments in the waters of the womb,

as a nascent infant coiled in the umbilical cord cynic smiling upon the feigned travels of life,

with an obscured image of her mother’s corpse the drunkenness of city roads,

when she was barely five; murky memories and torn kites.

That forthcoming fearful Friday cloaked with the zeal of a fanatic

cruel eagle seeking paregoric pain: closed her Scyllan eyes, ferocious ruthless hands, she broke the eggs again.

45 ISSUE 05

ThRee TICKeTs To The exam hall

December is always a mute prose concealed inside

two little embryos, two little lips,

ornated by papers of ultramild cigarettes;

but tonight Tonight, they are very hungry, they have to breathe in poetry;

Roosters will scream again tomorrow early morning,

the sunrise semester is theirs; their dreams did not conceive ducklings yet;

This ethanol-drenched life is a grandly narrated gothic fiction,

vampires here do not suck blood, they suck nostalgia;

every teary page of horror is set to fire by knights,

Words are a gamble in the countryside castle, Jewels can only topple these tests of memory;

Memory is a lethargic thief Before you are trapped in oblivion,

you better become a parrot rider, Trust the tale,

parrot tricks are not difficult to master; For those who have pets from Lethe

Descendants of the quiet, extinct quail, You can now rhyme with the teller,

(“so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost, that their loss is no disaster...” )

under such pufftrays of charcoal,

cinders, relics,

suicides, you may someday find

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many cumbersome parcels quails couldn’t carry,

or extinguish. Caresses of serenity sometimes

fall short of acquaintances, dying is a sojourn,

perhaps; perhaps

with every salad of Godot and Sisyphus, the shrewd will taste, the slothful will wait,

the muses will meet Septimus.

Some will roll the nests, but parrots named jewels never die;

Who amongst us will kill the rooster?

noTes

1. Lethe - a Greek myth: river of oblivion 2. “so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost, that their loss is no disaster.” -- From Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” 3. Godot - A character from Samuel Beckett ‘s play Waiting for Godot, who never arrives. 4. Sisyphus - Greek myth: a king of Corinth, punished in Hades for his misdeeds by eternally having to roll a heavy stone up a hill; every time he approached the top, the stone escaped his grasp and rolled to the bottom. 5. Septimus - a character in Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf who suffers traumatic stress after fighting in World War I; who cannot cope with the harsh callousness of various modern structures, and eventually commits suicide.

aBouT The poeT

Rini Barman is currently pursuing her Masters in English literature from Jamia Milia Islamia and has graduated from Lady Shri Ram College in the same field. Her work has been published in Muse India, The Four Quarters Magazine, Seven Sisters’ Post, The Spark Magazine online, the Eclectic and several other dailies of Northeast India. Her poems also appeared in the anthology Fancy Realm which was launched during the international poetry festival held at Guntur, India in 2011.

47 ISSUE 05

BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE

aRs vIvendI

by Shikha Chhabra

“Cancer sucks, but life is great.” – Stephen Sutton, Stephen’s Story

“Life is bearable even when it’s unbearable: that is what’s so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it.” – Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage

What do you do when you are a young person and find out that your cancer is incurable? If you’re me, you mope around for a bit and then try to lead as normal and uneventful a life as you can in between treatments by retreating into the comfort of doing the things you always liked to do (which in my case involves a lot of reading, although it is now somewhat weighted towards books and articles on cancer and death. Knowledge is power, after all).

If you’re Stephen Sutton, you decide to use your remaining time on this planet to help other people by drawing up a bucket list containing several things you’d like to do to raise money for a cancer charity, and then proceed to raise millions through sheer doggedness of will and a seemingly boundless zest for life.

My own attitude while dealing with cancer treatment and its fallout has been one of unwavering self-centredness: I’m the one who needs the most help from me now, and other people can bloody well help themselves. No prizes for guessing which one of us is going to receive a warm welcome at the pearly gates.

Stephen’s story captivated the general public in the UK and around the world, and it captivated me too, since I felt I had a more personal stake in it than most. Firstly, I knew exactly how harrowing the treatment he was undergoing was, having been through a lot of the same myself; and to accomplish everything he did and broadcast a message of relentless positivity while also facing down the daily horrors of that particular chemotherapy regimen is actually a thousand times more admirable than it appears on paper.

Secondly, the chronicle of his final weeks served as a preview of what I can expect from my own: the slow collapse of vital organs, the minor yet painful surgeries to try and salvage them to buy a little more time, the admissions and re-admissions to hospital and discussions with doctors about what, if anything, can be done further. Throughout this elaborate two-step with the inevitable, he continued to downplay the uncomfortable reality of his condition in cheerful, upbeat messages on his Facebook page:

After being at a point where it seemed like I’d never make it out it feels so awesome to be able to put that…It has been difficult, there is an emotional trauma attached to nearly dying (a few times) that will take a while to get used to, but ultimately I now feel even more fortunate to just be here and the experience serves as a potent reminder to go out there and live life as freely and as positively as possible.

“There is an emotional trauma attached to nearly dying that will take a while to get used to.”

49 ISSUE 05

Several commenters chose to ignore this small, vital nugget of information, and continued to urge him to “keep fighting” - even once it became abundantly clear, in the following days, that he wasn’t going to make it out. I found myself getting extremely annoyed with these well-meaning and yet completely thoughtless strangers. What more did they want from him? Hadn’t he “fought” enough for these people?

I was thinking of Stephen, but by this point I was thinking more of myself. I will not countenance people telling me to “fight” once the time comes when that word has lost all meaning. My response to such inanities, should I be forced to encounter them, is going to be modelled on that of one of my long-time heroes, the editor Katharine White (and the wife of E.B. “Andy” White) when she had a difficult time during the birth of their only child:

Following the birth, Katharine bled uncontrollably and became increasingly weak. Then, Andy proudly related, a nurse whispered to his wife, ‘Do you want to say a little prayer, dearie?’ ‘Certainly not!’ Katharine replied in her clear Boston voice, and promptly recovered.

The circumstances may be different, but the principle remains the same. A firm “certainly not!” to anyone who tells me to go against what I feel, in those last months or weeks or days, to be the right thing to do.

Stephen died in May 2014, in his sleep. He was an extraordinary person, in the truest sense of the word. He perfected ars vivendi. Rest in peace.

***

Stephen’s world collided with mine in other ways, too. Here is a BBC video report that starts with his story and ends with an interview of another young cancer sufferer. This is what she tells the interviewer in full:

It’s kind of changed me as a person, you know…you appreciate, you start to appreciate your friends, your family, just life a lot more…everything in a weird way becomes more beautiful…and um, I think that puts me at an advantage, I think…

And then her face crumples and she starts to cry. “Sorry,” she says, wiping her eyes, “sorry.”

That video was shot on my ward. I often see that girl, and I once overheard her talking on the phone and learned that she has the same cancer that I do, in some of the same awkward places as mine. I must have sat in the same room, in a chair identical to the one she’s sitting in, hundreds of times by now. What she said is what I would have said if put on the spot like that, because that is the message of resilience that everyone wants to hear from cancer patients.

It isn’t entirely untrue, but the truth is more nuanced. I’m not surprised she choked up just after using the word “advantage”, because the utter grimness of having to say that must have struck her right then. An advantage? Are there not other, infinitely less miserable situations in which one can gain that advantage? Can the beauty of life only be fully recognised and savoured while it’s being snatched away from you? Surely not. It’s just that life is bearable - and sometimes much more than that, in moments that you lock away in your mind to return to again and again - even when it’s unbearable.

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I experience such moments whenever I take a walk in my local park, Regent’s Park, which happens to be one of the prettiest green spaces in London. From where I enter, the walking path forks out, and the left arm of the fork takes me down a short, shaded, generally deserted lane lined with bushes and trees on either side. On a warm day, the air here always smells of dank, overripe greenery.

And then the lane suddenly opens out onto a vast, sunny field, and the air becomes lighter and fresher and is full of the noise and smell of people. In the David Bowie song “Space Oddity”, which is probably about drug use or heartbreak (the former, in all likelihood), but to me is one of the deftest descriptions of what being permanently exiled from the world of the non-sick and non-dying feels like (how did Bowie know?), he sings:

…I’m stepping through the door And I’m floating in a most peculiar way And the stars look very different today For here am I sitting in a tin can Far above the world Planet Earth is blue And there’s nothing I can do…

And there is nothing I can do in that endless, sunny field full of life and laughter except soak it all in for one summer evening. And bask in the hope that, for a while longer at least, there will be another one like this. And another. And another.

aBouT The auThoR

Shikha Chhabra is a 24-year-old living in London. This post originally appeared on her blog, Oblomov’s Sofa. All photographs of Regent’s Park, London, courtesy the author.

51 ISSUE 05

C o n T R I B u T o R s

2014

wRITeRs

ShikhandiRini Barman

Shikha ChhabraEwan C. ForbesOnaiza DrabuSudevi Geary

Ardena GonzalezSara Halas

Campbell C. HoffmanSonal Jha

Steve KlepetarCharles Levenstein

Paul MathewJudy Rae

Gary RobinsonNdaba Sibanda

Harsh SnehanshuVarun Warrier

phoTogRapheRs

Kriti BajajShikha Chhabra

Alexandra JonsonLucas Lovegren

Siddharth PanditPriya Prakash

Talha Masood SiddiquiSiddharth SinghNidhi SrivastavaSerena Thangjam

Ashwati Vipin

aRTIsTs

Saswati DasOnaiza DrabuIra Joel Haber

BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE 52

C o n T R I B u T o R s

2013

wRITeRs

Gale AcuffKriti Bajaj

Rini BarmanMartin Bemberg

Lakshmi BharadwajPeter CantelonKelly Chapeskie

Bedatri D. ChoudhurySudevi GearySneha GururajLinda Hegland

Sonal JhaDesiree Jung

Shraddha KingerMedha Kulkarni

Shweta Ganesh KumarKoyel Lahiri

Phillip LarreaNeil LeadbeaterAlessia Maiolo

Judy RaeShaleen Rakesh

Samar SaeedAdreyo SenRamit Singal

Pavithra SrinivasanUma Sriram Shruti Sud

Nandini SwaminathanJessica Tyner

Aarushi UbowejaAchala UpendranVasudha Wadhera

Varun Warrier

phoTogRapheRs

Alessandro AnemonaKriti Bajaj

53 ISSUE 05

phoTogRapheRs (ConTd.)

Vishnupriya BhandaramSara Boccacci

Giridhar ChandrasekarBedatri D. Choudhury

Sidharth DasAvigyan Dutta

Carmen GonzalezAgnes Hartman

Siddharth PanditGautam Sarma

Talha Masood SiddiquiNidhi Srivastava

Nanya SudhirRashmi SwamySukaran Thakur

Serena ThangjamAshwati Vipin

Vasudha Wadhera

aRTIsTs

Ratnadeep Gopal AdivrekarMattia Ammirati

Swati DaftuarBrian Forrest

Venessa KelleyMedha KulkarniAnunay RanjanTammy Ruggles

BRICOLAGE MAGAZINE 54

55 ISSUE 05

Photograph by Nidhi Srivastava

www.bricolagemagazine.com