SEMINAR ON LINE -- English Morphology Online Seminars

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, [2] ]

Subject: SEMINAR ON LINE

Author:
ROBERTO WINTER (HERE IS MY TEXT)

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 08:16:56 10/01/09 Thu

THE SHELTER OF THE WORLD

STUDENT: ROBERTO WINTER

At dawn the haunting sandstone palaces of the new “victory city” of Akbar the Great looked as if they were made of red smoke. Most cities start giving the impression of being eternal almost as soon as they are born, but Sikri would always look like a mirage. As the sun rose to its zenith, the great bludgeon of the day’s heat pounded the flagstones, deafening human ears to all sounds, making the air quiver like a frightened blackbuck, and weakening the border between sanity and delirium, between what was fanciful and what was real.
Even the Emperor succumbed to fantasy. Queens floated within his palaces like ghosts, Rajput and Turkish sultanas playing catch-me-if-you-can. One of these royal personages did not really exist. She was an imaginary wife, dreamed up by Akbar in the way that lonely children dream up imaginary friends, and in spite of the presence of many living, if floating, consorts, the Emperor was of the opinion that it was the real queens who were the phantoms and the nonexistent beloved who was real. He gave her a name, Jodha, and no man dared gainsay him. Within the privacy of the women’s quarters, within the silken corridors of her palace, Jodha’s influence and power grew. The great musician Tansen wrote songs for her, and Master Abdus Samad the Persian portrayed her himself, painted her from the memory of a dream without ever looking upon her face, and when the Emperor saw his work he clapped his hands at the beauty shining up from the page. “You have captured her, to the life,” he cried, and Abdus Samad relaxed and stopped feeling as if his head were too loosely attached to his neck; and, after this visionary work by the master of the Emperor’s atelier had been exhibited, the whole court knew Jodha to be real, and the greatest courtiers, the Navratna, or Nine Jewels, all acknowledged not only her existence but also her beauty, her wisdom, the grace of her movements, and the softness of her voice. Akbar and Jodhabai! Ah, ah! It was the love story of the age.
The city was finished at last, in time for the Emperor’s fortieth birthday. It had been twelve long, hot years in the making, but for a while he had been given the impression that it rose up effortlessly, year by year, as if by sorcery.

SOURCE: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2008/02/25/080225fi_fiction_rushdie

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

Subject	Author	Date
Re: SEMINAR ON LINE	Diogo Domingues Carvalho	11:23:08 10/01/09 Thu