by Associate Professor Kalpana Ram, anthropologist and Director of the India Research Centre at Macquarie University. Her most recent book, Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and its Provocation of Modernity, explores subordinated practices among poor women in Tamil Nadu, India.

Ian Bedford's book title The Last Candles of the Night quotes from the first line of a couplet written in the language Urdu – which, when I was a child, I assumed was the language of Muslims everywhere, but it is in fact a uniquely Indian synthesis of Persian, Arabic, the colloquial Hindustani of the time, as well as some south Indian languages. The couplet goes:

Hamen khabr hai ki ham hain chirage e aakir e shab

by Professor Ross Poole, lecturer in philosophy and political theory at the New School for Social Research, New York.*

The narrator for much of Ian Bedford's story The Last Candles of the Night is Philip, Philip Chalk. His surname tells us something. For most of his life Philip has been a school teacher, committed and professional, slightly old-fashioned, and happier with a blackboard than a white board, let alone with a computer screen and IT. We meet Philip in 2001. He is 76, and has just returned to Sydney after working for over fifty years in India, with only occasional visits to Australia. He is living in Kogarah, in a house he grew up in but which now belongs to his long estranged though tolerant wife, Jenny.

The house is full of memories of his childhood, and Philip often indulges himself with these. But the task he gives himself is the search for much more disturbing memories.