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  The State of The Fish – A Novel in Verse About Lucknow and Calcutta by Harish C. Mehta

  ₹599.00 Original price was: ₹599.00.₹549.00Current price is: ₹549.00.

  A Colonial Company arrives brashly to conquer the wealthy, peace-loving Kingdom of Awadh ruled by a learned, poetic Nawab. A soldier of the Colonial Company throws a javelin, smashing the marble Royal Crest of the Kingdom, and bringing to life two Mermaids and a Bird that formed a part of the emblem. More Company troops arrive carrying flags embroidered with Royal Sealions. A pair of Sealions leap off the flag to fall in love with the Mermaid twins. The Colonial Company exiles the Nawab from his Capital City of Nucklow to the City of Hooglee. The Royal Creatures tell the story in song, of their love lives, and the saga of a benign Nawab in exile, a tale of love, jealousy, colonial exploitation, and eventual freedom.

  Harish Mehta was born, fortuitously, in Lucknow, a city of Nawabs, where he attended university and soaked in Awadh’s rich history. In his early-twenties, he moved to Bombay to work, first as an advertising copywriter, then in journalism. At the time, the poet Imtiaz Dharker, the poetry editor of the magazine, Debonair, published his first poems. At Imprint magazine he worked alongside the poet Dom Moraes, and the duo travelled together to Punjab at the height of the Sikh militancy, and to the still-peaceful haven of Kashmir in 1987. In the evenings, Dom would talk poetry. Mehta would answer, but it could have been verse. Mehta lived overseas since then, spending seventeen years as a senior correspondent with the Business Times of Singapore, where he married the poet and author, Julie Banerjee. He did graduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and earned a doctorate in History at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and then taught at McMaster, University of Toronto, and Trent University. After almost four decades abroad, the Mehtas returned to Calcutta. This is his first novel in verse.

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