Adviser to the Partitionist Cartographer

This short story was first published in Copperfield Review and can be read at http://www.copperfieldreview.com/fiction/Adviser%20to%20the%20Partitionist%20Cartographer.htm

Adviser to the Partitionist Cartographer

By Mukesh Williams

I have seen the cartographer’s hand quiver,

As his ivory pen sliced through wheat fields and factories,

I have seen his nostrils twitch

At the faint fragrance of quilt-wrapped faces,

I have seen him befuddled

While partitioning the inscrutable Punjab.

—From The Cartographer’s Confessions, Chartis Siyahi

Chartis Siyahi was a cartographer who studied with Cyril John Radcliffe at the All Souls College, Oxford and occasionally played croquet with him. Since Cyril’s eyesight was poor he helped him put the ball through the hoops. Afterwards they drank gin and fantasized about black lingerie. This was the bold and mysterious element in their relationship that remained hidden from the public eye. If the planetary geography was a woman and a game, then both lingerie and croquet were a bricolage of symbols creating a make-believe world of desire. It masked a flaw in the symbolic order of the twentieth century that became translated into the imperfection of the cartographic project itself.

Both Chartis and Cyril imagined themselves as cultural icons in a Koj è vian sense, organized around an inner emptiness or hunger that forever escaped fulfillment as it got linked to other emptiness and hunger. Their desire surged with the surging desire of others, but it was forever ungraspable, unattainable. For them the sensuous impulse was a web of insatiable cravings, an inscrutable passion creating an impasse, an illusion and helplessness. Within this impenetrable enigma it was hard to find the pathological kernel except trace its pattern with the cartographer’s pen. An article by Chartis in the College magazine, “Fantasizing Croquet and Cartography,” may throw some light on their friendship and passion, but now the article is hard to find.

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http://www.copperfieldreview.com/fiction/Adviser%20to%20the%20Partitionist%20Cartographer.htm 

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