Canadian Writers Abroad

Take a moment away from the awful news of the world — the Spring Equinox brings us another poem, this from journalist and fiction writer turned poet, Barbara Sibbald. Her recently completed novel, Almost English, is about the lives of her maternal great-grandparents, Stephen and Lily Turner, during their time in the North West Frontier of India from 1885 to 1912. The poem below is an imagined scene involving their daughters on a hot day in Karachi.
While researching the novel, Barbara Sibbald visited India twice with her mother. The first time included a visit to a cemetery in Kolkata (Calcutta) where her great-great-grandfather was buried (see “Parsing a Tombstone“). The second visit included a visit to Dharmsala, when she hiked up the Indrahar Pass and visited her great uncle’s tea plantation in Sid Baree. Her great-grandfather Stephen eventually took over the plantation after he retired from the public service. In addition, Barbara took two, three-week long trips to the United Kingdom, devoted to research. She visited and interviewed numerous new-found relatives and spent four days at the British Library’s Asia and Africa Reading Room taking copious notes from documents, maps and books.
An excerpt from her novel, as well as the poem “At the Church,” were published in the Fall 2024 issue of TAR | The Aleph Review – a literary journal in Pakistan. Her collection of short stories, The Museum of Possibilities, won gold in the Foreword Indies 2017 Book Awards and silver in the e-Lit Book Awards. Earlier publications include the novels Regarding Wanda and The Book of Love: Guidance in Affairs of the Heart.

Heat in Karachi

Hot as flames beneath 
roiling jam, scalding tea 
fresh from its pot. Talk

as languid as damp air.
On the side verandah
behind the bougainvillea,
 
pitchers and bowls brim,
fingers dip and sprinkle
water over foreheads,

inside wrists, on dry lips
of boyfriends reposing 
in wrinkled white flannels,

on woven jute charpoys
strewn with silk pillows.
They sip purple-pink

pomegranate juice cut
with twice-boiled water,
cooled in clay pots.

Fans breathe a soft discordant
tune. Top buttons undone 
on sisters’ dresses. One, two.

No more, or mama would
frown. Cicadas scream in 
dust under Neem trees.

The sisters long for their 
papa to return home with 
news of the world. 

—	Barbara Sibbald

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Further

• Rhonda Douglas interviews Barbara Sibbald on Resilient Writers.
• “Monsoon Musicians: Songs of the Cicadas,” by Divya Candade, 2020/2023 on Roundglass Sustain.
• Adela Florence Nicolson, or Violet Nicolson, is an English poet who died in India in 1904.
• Friday, March 21, 2025, is World Poetry Day (UNESCO).

Author photo: Stuart Kinmond.