A Country Without Borders

Here's What People Are Saying

“In grieving poetry and eloquent prose, Lalita Pandit Hogan explores the mind of Hindu Kashmiri exile in A COUNTRY WITHOUT BORDERS. Her lines have the specificity of a place and time exactly registered. Her issues and questions throb with vital reference to present global issues and challenges. Every now and then in this marvelous narrative of a Hindu Kashmiri American life, Lalita Pandit Hogan reminds us she is a citizen of southwestern Wisconsin. Her river is no longer the Indus. It is the Mississippi.” ~Neil Schmitz, professor of English, University at Buffalo

“In the stories and poems in A COUNTRY WITHOUT BORDERS, the author enlists dreams, myths, family stories, and her own memories to resurrect the lush Kashmir of her youth, a place of saffron flowers and fruit trees, wedding parties and mountain shrines, pink tea and “salt bread with fennel and sesame seeds. . . . A COUNTRY WITHOUT BORDERS is a remarkable testament, not only to one people’s experience, but to all who walk with ghosts.” ~Dr. John Roche, associate professor of English, Rochester Institute of Technology, author of Road Ghost (2010) and Topicalities (2008)

Top review from AMAZON
5.0 out of 5 stars

Kelly Sultzbach, November 1, 2018
This is an author to watch for–Lalita Pandit Hogan is on par with literary GREATS.

These poems and short stories record the memory of Kashmir–as it existed before violence and war scarred its landscapes, as its mundane rituals of daily life were increasingly altered by distrust, and as it survives in the imagination now. With images of cedar trees, visions of Hindu goddesses, and vignettes of a community that shared bread and weddings, the poetry asks us to walk through dreams and dark uncertain streets to realize that the specific violence done to Kashmir is part of a shared story—one of how trauma dislocates identity, and how home is defined by time as well as geography.

Like the expatriate reminiscences of James Joyce’s “Dubliners” or Salman Rushdie’s “East, West” each piece builds upon the others, so the metaphors and patterns begin to emerge from the individual poems and stories to create a rich sense of not just one woman’s Kashmir, but a community of spirits who call to us and ask us to understand their lives as both vibrant and dark, joyous and rueful. The specific yields the universal.

One of the concluding prose pieces recollects a child’s visit to the house of a woman who will be wed to the young girl’s brother the next day. After not complaining about long walks, and being allowed to peek at secret letters of the bride-to-be kept in a peacock box, the child is finally carried back to her brother’s home. In the final paragraph, we are all brought back to the hollowed spaces time creates. And the tender shadows of things we love and long for that shape the glow of memory.

“My grandmother told me once that when we look at something—say a wall, a tree, a rock, a body of water, a sick dog—if we have a well formed thought, or feeling about it, it casts a shadow that clings forever to that object. So there are secrets locked forever within the shadows that fall between trees, closed doors, half open windows, buttresses, bridges, cow sheds, and tree stumps. I was about to think of something to lock it up forever I the shadows of Hangalund, when my father greeted us. He had come searching for us, using a kerosene lamp like a searchlight to find me. I h ad become so quiet and invisible. Father picked me up in his arms, handing the lamp to my cousin who led the way. Perhaps I fell asleep right away.” from “In Search of Lost Time,” pages 119-24

This is a beautiful book of poetry and prose. Get it!