Letters to My Mother

BASHABI FRASER is a critic, poet, editor, children’s writer and translator. She was born in West Bengal in India. Bashabi divides her life between the two countries she loves most – India and Britain. Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh Napier University, she is the winner of Rabindra Bharati Society Honour 2014, Women Empowered: Art and Culture Award 2010 and IAS Prize for Literary Services in Scotland 2009. She has written for many publications, has three other collections of poems in print and has been included in a number of anthologies. Bashabi has also written children’s stories as well as a shadow puppet play and a book on the Bengal Partition and is also a classical Indian dancer and choreographer. She now lives in Edinburgh with her husband and has one daughter.

• Contents Acknowledgements 8 Introduction 9 Letters to My Mother I saw you last night 17 The things you did for us 18 I will remember you 19 If I could bring you back 20 The boy from Chittagong 21 Thundering hooves 22 The flower thieves 23 The hesitant flowers 24 In London where you were 25 St George’s Hospital 26 The speeding car 27 The planned journey 28 A confluence 29 A presence in absence 30Frozen frolic 31 An Icelandic Saga: i 32 An Icelandic Saga: ii 33 Climate refugees 34 As Europe debates Turkey’s entry 36 Japan’s triple jeopardy 37 The British barricade of snow 38 Nero’s Guests 39 Camp Hope 40 Liu Xiaobo 42 Arab Spring 44 Arab Women 45 St Augustine’s Church 47 Medical Aid for Palestine 48 Women vote in Jalalabad 50 Darkling I listen 51 Anoushka in Usher Hall 53 Your granddaughter in London 54Interlude She was my mother 56 Letters to Other MothersMothers All 59Brazenly – in cafes 60 You cannot silence me 61 Abandoned: i 62 Restored: ii 63 Urban Gothic: London during World War II 64 Eve: the liberator 65 She 66 My Aunt Marge 72 My Monimashi 74 Shamsad Rahim 78 A breaker 79 The Song of a Gypsy 80 Living Joy 82 Laure 85 Who was the boy? 86 Will you remember me? 88 Awakening 91Light where the sun sets 93Light a candle for me 95 I am your daughter 98Rupsha 101 For Nisha and Ben on your wedding day 103 To Tithi on your wedding day 106 Mariam 108 Bhopal now 110 I am that child 111

There is a wonderful conversational ease in the writing, with mother and child sharing their feelings about music, art, love and politics, but the poems are always delicately and lyrically crafted. STEPHEN REGAN, Professor of Poetry at the University of Durham