For the Stephanie Bailey-edited ‘Children of Empire’ section of Leap 37, I wrote about two ghosts of the bandung—VK Krishna Menon and Baba Harbhajan Singh—Sikkim, and an image that’s been haunting me:
For a while now, I’ve been obsessed with a mental
image of an egg being pulverized over plush oxblood
velvet. The egg isn’t raw per se, more very softly boiled
with the inside still runny and the albumen still queasily
transparent, yet to fully solidify into whiteness. Surface
tension keeps the yolk intact and quivering, slippery and
resistant, at once visceral and viscous, with all the sullenly
anticipated violence of the coming integration.I suspect this is how the sun really set on the British Empire.
EDIT: a PDF is now available here