Small my footprint

I.

Not even the fringes will do, because - 
they are no longer safe or sane, unquiet
stalks me everywhere on earth, day and night,
upends the natural order, the laws
of compassion and civility. Pause
the diatribe, switch off that awful might,
the cameras, the cross-hairs of those rifle sights.
Hubris can't win unconditional applause.


But I'll escape deeper, further inward,
beyond the fringe, beyond the last desert
into forbidding terrain, but I'll cope.
I'll burrow with the antlions into hope
where the sharpness of neither steel nor word
can pin my silhouette within their scope.



II. 


But for now I'm here, and I'll stand my ground
however small my footprint, or how quick
the winds blur it. Unapologetic 
I stand here, and no-one will beat me down
with a mandate. They've been voted, not crowned.
The seasons, moons and success are cyclic
and that is that. There's no template, no trick
to avoid change forever, it will come around.


For now I am here, and I won't submit,
this is my patch. Here the sands don't permit
creeping flames, because there's nothing to feed
a fire, no undergrowth, no grass, not a reed.
Can't burn or stamp me out, can't try it -
a waste of matches for they can't succeed.

A few days ago, I shared a new Indian opposition MP's eloquent speech on my timeline with the tagline - the quality of your democracy is directly proportional to the space for dissent...well-said, lady! 

A couple of FB-friends who are avid supporters of the PM didn't like it, they thought the speech and the MP were anti-national, and by association I was too.  The assumption was illogical and they lapsed into rudeness and personal attacks when they couldn't win the argument. 

I generally stay away from politics on any social media, but...I do object strongly to incivility and shouting down. I don't approve of rudeness and rough language. And I totally don't approve of erosion of human rights and freedoms. I don't care a fig what size mandate you got. If you can't take care of your minority rights, if you can't take criticism, if you don't allow questioning or free thinking, you have no right to call yourself a democracy, largest my foot.

And today is Bastille Day which is a good reminder for all democratic people and their leaders. So I thought I'd share the verses here for the occasion. The universe's timing is always faultless, no? :) 

Countdown to College

A hodgepodge carton of books and soft toys -

a whale, a dolphin, teddies, the Gruffalo

tucked away in a higher shelf because

you stopped needing, reading them, years ago

when you were five or six. Children outgrow

all their stuff quicker than mothers. I pause

the decluttering, though I know, I know

everything must go, boys are only boys

for a finite time. Yet I cannot bring

myself to throw away a single thing.

Some childhood remains in these residues

in soft toys for which you’ve no further use,

old and matted, beaded eyes coming loose;

in well-thumbed pages you’ve finished reading.

Build me a home...somewhere on the fringes

There’s a peace in the fringes of the desert,
in untouched yellowed grasses of the earth,

sands marked with only antlions and birdprints,

in the cricket’s song and the pale moon’s rinse

on the unmarked path that’s barely a path.

It’s not that I have not loved the cities

the streets of bookshops, artworks, topiaries,

the tempests in the endless cups of tea

the bustle of trade, the quick repartee -

but they’re all smoke and change, nothing’s at peace.

In the capitals some or other tribe

jostles for power, takes a random swipe,

narrow minds and narrow rules deal hard blows

to ones they called neighbours just days ago

and peace is a stranger to urban life.

The sands are ever changing, ever still

the antlions likely still pockmark the Sahel,

the birds still sing, the trade wind brings and pours

a fine mist of dust wisped in from the north

only the grass trembles, the rest is tranquil.

But that Sahel’s a figment, just a dream;

the sands are churning, the grasses aren’t serene

some manic sickness has taken sudden hold -

and the innocent suffer all round the world

no antlions those, they’re something else it seems.

Build me a home where humans have forgotten

to aim and shoot, sharpen the war obsession,

where the Sahel and the green are both peaceful,

the olive shades the white dove and keeps her cool,

where ships are only transport and not weapons.

Two more

XIV.

The gallery halls of history are

crowded with the victory lists

now tell me about those who were

eliminated by its twists.

The unrecorded hoi polloi

who wove the carpet, served the bread,

cleaned the stables day after day,

sorted the mail, counted the heads,

the ones who had the silver spoons

only to polish and lay back,

their boards were sparse, their plates were crude -

not the type anyone would track.

Speak of the ninety nine percent

to whom history was indifferent.

XVIII.

Speak of those who sang note perfect

raising the tunes in unison

off screen and on, across the stage

yet no glory was ever won.

Those who sang anthems, raised slogans,

matched their steps and marched for miles,

cared nothing for repercussions,

but never got to reach the aisles.

The stable hand who trained the colt,

the jockey who reined in the horse.

The race driver - not at the pole

but the last chap who stayed the course.

Speak of the ninety nine percent

who don’t win but are persistent.

This ended up as an out-of-control 21X14 matrix :) and it has been written as it came so here are two more from the same series. Hopefully it's out of my system now....

Have the most amazing summer/winter!

Write...Edit...Publish...+ IWSG : Caged Bird June 2019

In life nothing is constant but change, and I'm dealing with a whole slew of them. Some changes are expected, I'm okay with those - seasons, months, growth, the expected transitions...but not all. Especially discomfort-inducing are those changes which happen too fast and without reason, descend on me with a rush like a rockfall. But...thankfully, some changes are reversible. Storms in teacups, not much harm done to the cups or the tea. C'est la vie... the idea is to keep calm and carry on writing...at Write...Edit...Publish...  - where I’m continuing with my photo-essay spree, and it is strangely apt that someone who taught me the definitive lessons on navigating change, should be the subject of it. 

The original is way over word count, so my entry consists of a few sections only. To explain the title - the person was a posthumous child, his losses started even before birth and carried on from there.

Born into Loss

S.N. Maitra with two of his grandchildren at 18/68B Dover Lane in 1982.

Three things are indelibly associated with that time and place, and with him – the wall clock, the tobacco water-pipe, and the small radio with the wooden fascia. I asked about them years later, but they were gone by then. Sold off to the junk-dealers because the radio and clock had both stopped working. Not sure what happened to the water-pipe, maybe the scrap traders got it for the metal.

Unlike his wife, he left me nothing tangible. No childhood presents, no souvenirs, not even a book with his name signed on it. No photograph albums, fat chance! - no such luxury. There’s just one photo I have, with him, my little cousin and me together in one frame, the one above, I was nearly an adult then. But he did leave me three clearly enunciated names – Meghna, Machhpara, Faridpur. And he left me an example of how to calmly navigate change and carry immeasurable loss without disintegrating. Intangibles all. Nothing that I can quite close my fist around, but all worth holding on to.

He had a cigarette-holder too, small, jet-black with a filter incorporated, in which he occasionally smoked a brand called Capstan, one cigarette cut carefully into pieces, for reasons of economy rather than health. The family was hard up even then, even with his elder son working at a renowned architectural firm in the city. A decade back, the father had sold off his last valuable - his gold watch, in some vaguely grand, O’Henryesque gesture, to pay off the backlog of hostel fees of his adult child, without which the said child would not have been able to sit his final university exams. A whole cigarette in one sitting felt too extravagant still. 

  

Everything was eked out, cigarettes, coal, postcards. The last item he filled with XXS size handwriting, beautifully formed letters by a rocksteady hand, without a hint of a tremor, even when he was 90+. But again, I get ahead of myself, I was the recipient of those 15-p postcards in teenage, where an entire week’s worth of family news was written on less than 50 square inches. But then Bengali is a compact script, there are hardly any loops and flourishes below the line. There was a singular lack of loops and flourishes below the line in our lives then, his and mine.

  

The room had several windows, green louvred with straight, black, vertical wrought-iron rods - forbidding, cool to the touch. The ceiling was low, the floor was set a couple of steps down from the landing, the same polished red oxide as the rest of the house. The door frame was smaller, lower than the others in the regular rooms on the upper or ground floor. He was a tall man, very spare, very upright, he must have had to duck to get in. There is, of course, more to being caged than a cramped room and straight bars on a window. And one man’s cage can be his grandkid’s polestar.  

  

***

I once asked him why he didn’t show the papers of the village property and get due compensation that the uprooted from East Pakistan were given by the Indian government. His told me that there were other branches of the family still living in the property, the papers were with them, naturally. Besides, where was the chance? We didn’t really plan this move, we didn’t flee as refugees, we came here to work, to get our children educated. We just got trapped this side of the suddenly sprung-up border. There was no way to go back.

  

I don’t really know how that feels, I was born years after the Partition. But I can take a good guess.  From the rambling, many-roomed, haphazard homestead with four courtyards, built over centuries a wing at a time - to a new built, two-storey, tiny, suburban house with a courtyard the size of a hanky. From being one of the first families in a small village where everyone knew him by name to the huge anonymity of a city of millions. From the collective memories of generations rooted in the same patch of land to one where there was no memory to draw upon. No templates for living life - the old ways rapidly disappeared, the new ways were not yet devised. 

  

Sapta purush jethae manush shey maati mayer baRa – where seven generations have been brought up that land is greater than the mother.*  How to negotiate a change of citizenship in which your own birthplace, the land of your ‘seven-generational’ ancestors becomes foreign and forbidden to you? He lived nearly half his life in Dover Lane, away from his home and birthplace, both forever out of his reach. It must have been excruciating. Trapped on this side of the border. We are all trapped by our respective borders and yet we can never know the exact nature of anyone else’s struggles, regardless of how close they are to us. 

***

  

One Wednesday afternoon in April 1986, my father called me at work. Come to Dover Lane. By then my parents had moved back to Calcutta, my mother was in remission from cancer, I lived with them in their hastily-acquired new home and worked not too far from Dover Lane. 

  

I found the house fuller than usual, my father’s cousins had come by, my eldest aunt, Boropishi was there sat by his bed. She told him I had come – he opened his eyes, looked at me for a long moment but said nothing; and then shut them back again. My grandfather lay perfectly still, his face calm, the eyes shut, the bones of his jaw and chin very prominent, his lips thinned as if some invisible internal force was sucking them in.

  

Shortly after, he sighed  - a long drawn out, rasping groan. The usual rituals were observed, a drop of Gangajal was touched to the mouth. My father checked for a heartbeat and could not find one. The neighbours, who happened to be doctors and had treated him for years, were called in and medically confirmed the death.

  

There was no last minute rushing in and out of hospitals, no last words, no mortal agony – just a peaceful departure. One minute he was there, the next he was not. My grandfather died with the same quiet dignity with which he had conducted himself all his life.  The cage had finally broken and the captive had gone free.



WC 1075
FCA

*A line from a famous Tagore poem called Dui Bigha Jomi (Two Bighas of Land)



Read the other entries here -

Fifty Percent

VIII.

Tell me about the skilled women

who dye the cloth and spin the yarn,

who raise the invoice and basins,

who love and break and mend and darn

and yet they tread so light footed,

their prints are easy to wipe off;

the jingle of their anklets fades -

it rings just once and then it stops

and when the book’s opened again

there is no trace left on the page -

the work they did, the yarns they spun

are rubbed out of the percentage.

Speak of the quiet fifty percent

who’re rubbed out, the erased segment.

Last week, I posted a sonnet from a series I am working on - Ninety Nine Percent, and Elephant's Child commented - 'And teach me about women, whose work is both imperative for our survival and so often ignored.' Which was super uncanny because....!! well, great minds and all that... :) 

So I thought I'd put it up. 

Ninety Nine Percent

Teach me instead about peacetime,

the chaps who did not go to war,

the peasant folk who stayed at home,

who tilled the land and manned the store.

Tell me about the millions who

toiled ceaselessly, but left no mark.

The doormen of old neighbourhoods.

The fishermen out in the dark.

Spell out the history of small men

whose footsteps wore out cobblestones -

the mason, the cook, occupations

that did not involve crowns and thrones.

Speak of the ninety nine percent,

and tell me how their lives were spent.

Unpin

I am stabbed by questions. Questions.

You’ll get a different set.

Will you remember to write home,

will you text, or forget?

Those who start with new beginnings

from moorings must unpin.

Will you pivot from everything?

shred the old like a worn skin?

Face forward, onward, be fearless,

never a shooting star.

Be steady and rise, step by step,

but don’t forget who you are -

forgetting the tap roots, and address,

doesn’t make for peace, or happiness.

Visit visa

Somewhere between the junk mail and the spam,

the old coffee ring and jingling doorbell,

between the clicks and cookies is where I am

and the form's a boiled bullfrog in a spell;

in the crumbs of breakfast rolls and plum jam,

the nervous laughter summed in a nutshell,

huge search portals and old blinking programmes,

algorithms that don't travel very well.

A time slot please, for the biometrics,

the photo must be 2'' X 2",

take off the specs, not sure about the lipstick,

a clean background, spotless white is preferred.

Don't look for greys, don't say even a word,

look at the lens, there's no need to flinch.

Mother's Day : tips from a mother

I have, in my time, gone looking for advice -

sat at the knees of sage pundits,

sat with old women picking clean their rice;

wizened bodies housing wise souls, rheumy eyes,

stacks of life lessons, tips and tricks.

And each in their way, this is what they've said,

my child, don't label things too quick.

Be at home right inside your skin and head.

Every moment is its own watershed,

spot the shining silver in it.

Today I'd like to pass this on to you -

that everything has a nugget,

a core, a thread, and even scrap's got value;

you can't build with pure silver. It needs bamboo,

clay baked hard and hot into bricks.

Reflections A-Z: From Aghast to Agog via Zoned out

Firstly, this song. May is Tagore’s birthmonth, he was born on 7^th May, 1861. All through the A-Z I felt weirdly wrongfooted for not sharing more about his music and celebrity really, because he does impact Bengali culture in this overarching way.

It's been buzzing around in my head - the offspring reaches adulthood this month. Talk about a song summing up the current mood! The song has been sung by many stalwarts of Bengali music, a million others more accurate in their pronunciation, more polished in the technicalities of rendering, recording and production. But I found this rendition beyond moving – non-native speakers singing Tagore more than 1½ centuries since the songwriter’s birth. No fancypants visuals, no drama in the arrangement, just straightforward heartfelt emotions, voices raised unpretentious. The guy gives a translation at the beginning in Italian which I, sadly, don’t speak. Anyways, the gist is – as mine ends, yours begins, with you and me together, that’s how the stream goes on. 

Life, in other words, is a relay race. Enjoy!

Finally, my reflections on this landmark tenth A-Z Challenge. 

As usual, all yer who enters here, if yer gets this far, yer deserves and gets yo' choize -

The short version

I started this Challenge way less prepared than the other years. But no complaints, no regrets. In the end things fell into place, I survived and I had plenty of fun. A big, fat thank you to all those who read, and a big, fat thank you to the A-Z team for creating this space, for all the hard work to keep it going. Congrats! - on a super celebration of the decadal anniversary. See you next year same time, same place!

The lo-o-o-o-ng version

This blog is a duck. What a visitor sees from the lakefront is a bird gliding over water. More or less serene. Dipping her beak into the waves from time to time and bringing up a post. Poetry or fiction, or even creative non-fiction entries, either weekly or daily, go up here on a regular routine. The visitor gets no whiff of the mad-paddling that is going on underwater, out of sight. 

The blog is also the lake itself. Where I come to relax and detox, and I consciously write about things here disconnected from the fuss and fury going on elsewhere at that moment, keep it all separate and tidy. Madness below, sane above. Simple formula. Makes me feel I’m in control. Of course, that’s also an illusion, all a load of maya. But let’s not get into Vedantic philosophy here. Things are complicated enough without that.

For reasons various, life has been chaos since last December. As someone I know put it pithily – ‘hamster wheel tenterhooks combo.’  ‘Write it as it comes’ – hasn’t worked…what’s come to mind hasn’t always been worth writing down. But fortunately, I’ve been able to keep it from spilling over to the lake, or affect the duck, she’s had to mad-paddle extra-hard but she’s managed somehow to keep on swimming.

Why I’m saying this now is because every cloud is pure silver if turned inside out - my A-Z this year has been massively different because of this, underwater if not above. For a time, I considered not participating at all. But then it was the tenth year anni…fomo, I understand the youngsters call it…Then I toyed with the idea of the shortest possible posts – a photo and caption, a mini-essay, but short’s not really my thing, except for poetry. It felt half-hearted, low-involvement, and I don’t like doing half-hearted, I’m so not good at low-involvement, especially with writing. The upshot of all this stumbling around was that nothing much got decided, not much researched, even less got written.

So. I started this Challenge way less prepared than the other years, I forgot the sign-up date, I plunged in with a fairly complex theme without a drop of due diligence, I did not check for the ‘QX-test’ which is my gold standard for any theme. I had just about half the posts written on 31^st March, all the tougher letters were supremely unready, unresearched even, the music was all over the place, it was just anarchy exponential.

But no complaints, no regrets. My A-Z was more spontaneous because of the mess, though I had moments of blind panic as I flailed around for letters which I'd have thought wouldn’t be so hard to write to – U and Z, for instance. But…once you’ve set your mind on something, the universe conspires to arrange it for you. It miraculously conspired for those letters too, I found my topics, I posted in time on the day, even if it was by the skin of my teeth. I scraped through, I survived. The sixth time for me. The tenth anniversary of the event. 

In the end things fell into place and I had plenty of fun. Possibly more fun than if my posts had been scheduled to the gills, because I’m really a pantzer at heart. The final takeaway?  – scheduled is great, but unscheduled is not always as hopeless as I’ve allowed myself to believe. Why have I lured myself into this belief anyway? Why get into a mindset where only one way of doing things, of surviving challenges, is the valid way? Not a good habit to fall into. The brain knows it, there’s no right or wrong way of being on the lake and/or the lakeside, yet the heart panics and flaps around, such a waste of energy and emotion. Take it easy and be bindaas boss, it will pan out if only you jump in. A thing half-done can also be well begun.  Bas lagi raho Munnibai!

A big, fat thank you to all those who read my overlong posts (including this one! You’d have thought not being scheduled would mean less of the megarambles, but no, it didn’t work that way, not quite sure how it does work, but there it is. Less time for the ruthless big chop, I guess.)

And an equally big, fat thank you to the A-Z team for creating this space and for all the hard work to keep it going. Congrats! - on a super celebration of the decadal anniversary. Here’s to many more.

I shall be, as in all the other years, reverting back to my bloghopless self forthwith, to my weekly poetry/fic business as usual. Except WEP/IWSG of course. See you next year same time, same place! As the Bengalis say – aschhe bochhor abar hobe! (Lit. will happen again in the coming year). And who knows? - maybe I’ll learn to chop and edit better meanwhile.

Posted for the A-Z Reflections

Z is for Zat's all, folks!

Well, hasn't the month just zipped past? Always a mixed feeling to get to the last post...   

Zinga Goshty was Bangladesh’s pioneering pop band, formed a decade before Bangladesh was independent. Here is one of their hit tracks from 1982 – Dhaka, sung by Nazma Zaman on Bangladesh TV. 

The following track is from an album called Beche Thakar Mane (The Meaning of Survival) sung by Nachiketa from West Bengal. The lyrics are by Zulfiqar Russell, a Bangladeshi lyricist, poet and journalist.

Mitthe is from Ekla Prothom, the first album by Zooel Morshed, known simply as Zooel. He is a sound engineer and artiste from Bangladesh. 

And the final track for this A-Z series on Bengaliana - is from Miftah Zaman, a Bangladeshi singer-songwriter and musician with a title called Dujon Dupothe (Two people on two paths) about drifting apart, about divergence. 

Zamindari...under the Mughals and the British...

Zamindar, from the Persian zamin=earth/land, dar=suffix indicative of possession, means a landlord. The zamindari system was first set up by the Mughal emperor Akbar (1542-1605). In those times, the zamindars were tax collectors in charge of the land cultivated by peasants. They belonged to the nobility and were mansabdars (mansab= position in Arabic - commanders in the military with a fixed number of troops, varying from ten to over 10,000. Higher mansabs were granted to the princes of royal blood and to the non-Muslim kings who accepted Mughal suzerainty). The collection rights given to these collectors were not necessarily hereditary, the Emperor always had the final say and could allocate the office to another more favoured nobleman, all land belonged to the Empire. The zamindars were also responsible for certain policing, judicial and administrative duties in their domains.

Akbar put in place a taxation system which was thorough and generally fair to the farmer. Though it was not that abuses on the ground did not happen. But by and large the system was based on the fertility of the land, and actual yield potentials. The tax amount varied from 1/3^rd on top grade fertile land to 1/26^th of the yield on poor quality land. Extortion and abuses, if complaints were brought, were dealt with very severely. Seeds were made available to the farmers by the state, wells were dug, loans were given also. In the case of droughts or famines, taxes were remitted on a case to case basis. Not necessarily a cushy life for the farmer, but it wasn’t a total write off either, crushed by taxes and the state. This system served the Mughal Empire very well. Consider this, the land revenue at Akbar’s time was Rs 175 million; it rose to Rs 211 million under his grandson Shah Jahan, and finally to nearly Rs 300 million during Aurangzeb’s reign. Things kind of fell apart for the Mughals after Aurangzeb and that is when the EIC made its move on Bengal/India, as we have seen earlier in this series.

Some zamindars came to wield enormous power at the grassroots level and sometimes ran their zamindari almost independent of the Empire. Notable examples of such zamindars were the Baro Bhuiya (Baro=Twelve/Several; Bhu=Land, Bhuiya=One with land) of Bengal, around the Bhati or the Delta region in the late 16^th century. The Baro Bhuiya included both Hindu zamindars such as Raja Pratapaditya of Jessore, and also Muslims such as Isa Khan. These formed a confederacy that repulsed attacks by the Mughal Empire itself, through superior use of naval power and strategies. The Mughals were pathetic at naval warfare and the navy was the weakest branch of their defence forces. While any ruler of lower Bengal clearly had to be conversant with a riverine warfare regime – the Bhati/Delta region of Bengal is really more water than land. It was only in the reign of Jahangir, Akbar’s son, that Bengal was finally and properly brought under Mughal control. And incidentally it was during his reign also that the first firman granting the British the right to trade was issued.

Getting back to the Bengal zamindars,  they were great patrons of the arts, built many monuments, promoted cultural, educational, and economic developments, played key roles in the Bengal Renaissance and the First War of Independence/Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. However, they were also known for developing the urban centres at the cost of the rural masses and exploitation of the peasant farmers. Both Raja Ram Mohan Roy  and Rabindranath Tagore, two monumental figures  of the Renaissance, were connected to zamindaris, the Raja was himself a zamindar and Tagore was the youngest son of one. Both were vocal in condemning social evils of their time and advocated for social reform.

After the British gained control, Lord Cornwallis put through the Permanent Settlement of Bengal in 1790's, as part of the Cornwallis Code. This affected life in Bengal on many levels and created a powerful landowning class that initially supported the British. In the Mughal era, the zamindars were functionaries of the Empire reporting to the imperial Diwan, whose responsibility it was to make sure that the system did not tax farmers so as to jeopardise future tax collections.

When the EIC took over the Diwani of Bengal in 1764, it found itself short of trained manpower well-versed in the local customs and laws and agricultural practices. (The setting up of educational institutions to train local Bengalis to serve in the British administration, and also the interest in local languages and systems so that Britishers could run the province, were direct by-products of these.) As a result of this gap, zamindars remained unsupervised and/or reported to unscrupulous/clueless/corrupt officials – farmers were taxed without any thought for local welfare or future income.

Once the British took India, many zamindars were granted/assumed the titles of Raja, Maharaja, Rana, Rai and Nawab, all meaning ruler, king or viceroy. While the British retained the zamindari and its associated systems, they changed the land revenue calculations, withdrew the facility of loans without any thought for the future or farmer. The landlords were given lifelong tenure, the zamindari became hereditary, effectively the zamindar became the landowner. However, they were no longer allowed to maintain their own troops anymore. Under this system, the zamindars were liable to pay a fixed sum to the British, pegged at 10/11 parts of the amount realised from the land, and retain one part for themselves. They were free to set the taxes due from farmers to the zamindari. The zamindars thus brought in a certain amount for the British irrespective of weather conditions, fertility of land or any other considerations. Absentee landlords who bore no burdens of the cultivation but claimed the lion’s share of produce appeared as a consequence of this policy. A switch to cash crops like sugarcane, jute, cotton was forced through at the expense of food crops, ultimately resulting in food insufficiency and famines. No-one, neither the British nor the zamindars did anything for the peasants during famines. Not exactly a great system - what had survived under the Mughals for 200 years, did not complete even a century under the new rulers.

Though the British had sought to create a class of native Indians loyal to the Company/Crown through this system, the zamindars ultimately formed a separate, powerful, elite interest group, caring nothing for the cultivators and often at loggerheads with their British masters. The zamindari system was abolished after independence in the early 1950’s in both Bengals in major agrarian reforms. 

~~~~~~

So. Zat complete’s my A-Z Challenge 2019… Heartfelt thank yous to those of you who came along on this heady trip home, I hope you enjoyed yourselves as much as I did. Off for some much needed zzzzzz now...see you next month! 

Posted for the A-Z Challenge 2019