Kangchenjunga and Other Stories

About the Book

Halsey is an active member of a creative writing group called “Tapestry” that operates out of the Cockburnshire Library in Spearwood, Western Australia. “Kangchenjunga and Other Stories” is a collection of insights derived mainly from the troubled world in which he lives in, but some have been inspired from real personal experiences and some from history. “Kangchenjunga” is his imprimatur derived from a real spiritual experience that was born out of talking to young German backpackers in Darjeeling and immersing their experiences in cultural and folkloric material of the tribal people from Nepal and Bhutan. Out of the rich amalgam comes a searing tragedy that will haunt the reader for a long time to come. Man is mortal. We live a short time and then pass on. The world we leave behind remains as cold and indifferent. We leave our stories as testaments to our miserable achievements or lack of achievements, We should be grateful if the stories we leave behind in the insubstantial pages of literature, or history, can offer someone somewhere an insight or some moments of satisfaction having decoded the messages held in stories, poems, and dramas. Such are the delights offered in stories like “Adam,” “Send for Eliab,” “Through Fire and Brimstone,” “Cleansing the Land,” “Lamp Shades and Cushion Covers,” and “When the God of Death Is the Death of God.” Some readers may find some stories distressing, but the poetry that emanates from them tries to compensate for the harsh reality of a heartless and cold world that is indifferent to the stories that derive from our lives we are driven to leading. These stories are like the metaphors of life we leave narrated in and left to time. It is you, the reader, that will give them a measure of immortality as you keep reading, making the stories of these sad victims your own. Live again, but in another dimension—your own and these others.

About the Author

Robert Halsey, aged eighty-two years, has an MA in Literature from Aligarh University, India, and is an Anglo-Indian writer who taught in Australian schools. He has previously published two books of poetry, “Voices from the Void” and “Echoes from the Void.” Both books are explorations into the nature of ultimate reality.