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Newsroom
09-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsroom
Short story: Trina and Cat, by Breton Dukes (again)
Trina and Cat met for the first time on Ponsonby Road in the 1990s where they both worked at an Italian restaurant. Trina rolled a hundred pizza bases before each service, then in the cramped kitchen, where the fuckwit chefs threw hot pans at her – they glided in like stingrays – she did the dishes. Cat started as a waitress, then took over from Arnold as bartender. For a brief period, after she fucked Jack, she was the maître d'. Trina slept with Arnold the night of his leaving drinks and four years later, when Cat was living and working in Rotorua as a guide on a zipline canopy tour, she had Arnold and his young family as clients. The youngest of his kids, because of his lack of weight, got stuck on the longest of the seven zip lines and Cat had to rappel out to bring him in. And that night, at an Irish bar, she bumped into Arnold again – this time he was alone – and after two shots of ouzo she drove him down to the lake front, let him snuggle her neck and gave him a handjob. So, when Cat and Trina met again in the wine line at a concert at Dunedin's Regent Theatre in 2010 – Cat by then was married to Lachlan, Trina to Tim – they exchanged phone numbers, met for coffee at a café in St Clair and both fell apart laughing when they found that along with Dunedin and the restaurant, they also had Arnold and his dick stump between them. Also – incredible! – they were both pregnant, almost down to the week. It appeared inevitable they would become friends, but on their fourth catch-up – lunch this time, the first meal they'd ever seen each other eat – Cat told Trina Lachlan had been promoted, they were moving to Ōtautahi. 'What about your midwife?' said Trina, 'What about us?' Trina had never been good at making friends, and without telling Cat or Tim she'd put a lot of hope in the idea that the two of them were going to be mums together. Cat shrugged sadly. There was nothing she could do. Then she leaned the laminated menu card against the small bowl crowded with sugar and fake sugar sachets. The truth was that she and Lachlan were not moving to Christchurch. Cat, that night, was filling Lachlan's car with as much of his nice stuff as it would fit and driving north. Auckland – what had made him think she could ever live with him in shit-hole Dunedin? No one knew – the closest she came to telling anyone was that lie she told Trina. Trina, who ten years later was standing in line at the Westmere butcher when there was a knocking at the window behind her. Cat was there when she turned around, smiling, waving, standing with a boy who would have been exactly Steven's age. Over iced lattes – high summer, the heat was awful – at a nearby café, Trina told Cat all about Steven. How he'd died. Gone into hospital with one thing, developed another, suffered for weeks on end – while everyone told her he'd come right, that he was young and would bounce back – and then died. 'But from the start, I knew, I knew he would die,' went Trina. And in saying that, her body went way back in the seat, like it was a back flip she was about to do, and then all the way forward, and then covering her mouth, she sobbed, just once. The sound was terrible – loud as an old truck engine braking. Then, sitting back she smiled, looked at Edgar for a moment and then asked him to list the three things he liked most about the school holidays, which was when Cat excused herself and rang AJ – her bed mate and business partner, but not the man she lived with – who basically lived for the opportunity to sweep about the city saving the day, leaving Cat free to spend the day walking arm-in-arm around their old neighbourhoods with Trina, finishing up with a quick Chardonnay at a little restaurant in Grey Lynn which had both octopus and goat on the menu, neither of which Trina had ever tried before, and so it was agreed – my shout! said Cat – they'd meet back at the same place the next night at 7pm. But, though Trina waited for more than forty-five minutes, Cat didn't show up. They hadn't swapped phone numbers either, so Trina left the restaurant, walking back to her motel unfed and utterly alone, as the sun continued its terrible role as ball of fire in the cloudless sky. Six years later Cat got an email from Arnold. He'd left his wife after twenty-six years and was living alone in a renovated church in Eketahuna. He'd been thinking a lot about Cat, about how they'd 'connected' that night in Rotorua, also had she seen the news? Did she know about Trina, about the accident? Anyway, poor Trina, but if Cat was ever passing through the Wairarapa she should drop in. They could really finish what they'd started this time. Cat, by then, had serious money. So having contacted her lawyer, and telling him to shut Arnold down in the most strident terms, she went online. Trina, it turned out, with nowhere else to go, was being cared for in a rest home in Mosgiel. Later that same week, a late-model Volvo parked at the Sunny Ridge Rest home and a team of three got out, one of whom was the lawyer. A bearded man who loved weight training – his favourite exercise the now out of favour Military Press – who Cat had wrapped so thoroughly around her little finger, he actually pissed with fear/excitement when her name came up on his phone, who swiftly arranged for Trina's immediate transfer to Waiheke Island, where Cat kept a house that looked across Hauraki Gulf, where every morning for the rest of her life, Trina used a wooden pointer placed between her lips to choose the type of fruit she'd have juiced for her, where, every six months or so, Cat would appear, entering the room like a burglar, keenly aware of not waking her friend. But if Trina was awake, Cat would stay, sat there close, sharing key information about the different lives she'd led. A note from ReadingRoom literary editor Steve Braunias: I am not in the habit of republishing short stories and in fact this is the only time. 'Trina and Cat' appeared last Saturday. Not enough people read it. To condense a lifelong friendship between two women, set in Dunedin, Auckland, Rotorua, Eketauna, Mosgiel and Waiheke Island, in 1047 words without it reading like some kind of lame flash-fiction exercise but reading more like an epic drama of ordinary people with children and jobs and health problems, is a freakish achievement, something wonderful. Owen Marshall achieved something similar in his 2024 short story of the lifetimes of two South Island men who met each other five times, told in 1609 words, 'Broderick and Riley'.
Elle
05-08-2025
- General
- Elle
The Complexity of Home: What Alabama Taught Me About Life
It depends on who is doing the looking. Since the cementing of the American union, the story of Alabama has lain in its being the most visible stage for the best and worst results of our democratic experiment. But while outsiders have often glanced at the state—to draw a contrast, to make a point, to make an example of—its true nature has rarely been understood. Alabama is too racist, too religious, too backward. It either needs outside intervention or is a lost cause. If the Deep South is the essence of the nation—as Howard Zinn put it, a region that 'is a distillation of those traits which are the worst (and a few which are the best) in the national character'—that could be why, when I am outside the South, I can always predict the responses of people once I tell them I am from Alabama. I never really left the South until I graduated from high school; moving to college in New Jersey was the second time in my life I traveled by plane, the first being seven years earlier. Leaving hadn't been necessary. Every place that was important or desirable to me, from school to where we vacationed, was reachable by car, and everyone around me learned how to drive by, at the latest, the age of 15. My first car, which I raced from my high school parking lot to the mall to my house while blasting Three 6 Mafia, Trina, and OutKast on HOT 105.7, was my family's stop sign–red Plymouth Voyager minivan. It was so uncool my friends found it endearing. When I was growing up, my hometown of Montgomery was the source of what I knew about how people related to one another and what I could assume about a person from how they carried themselves, how they talked to me, and where they lived. The things I thought I knew—that there was always a geographic direction in which to aspire to move, that talking to everyone regardless of their schooling or money was vital to both your spiritual and your social standing, that it mattered that you let others know your educational and material statuses with grace and that you let them know what those statuses were—still felt essential when I looked back years later. As a child, most of my travel came about when my mom, my two younger brothers, and I followed my dad to academic conferences in cities around the region, like Baton Rouge and Biloxi and Raleigh, or when we went on weekend vacations to Atlanta, the Black southerner's version of New York City. We usually stayed in my parents' favorite hotel chain, Embassy Suites, on these trips; my parents rented a one-bedroom suite with two double beds and a pull-out couch, and we fell into a sleeping arrangement that allowed us all just enough space. Our tastes were modest, decent. We drove from Montgomery every trip, no matter how long it took. But I fantasized about indecency. After 18 years of imagining the world outside the South, I arrived on the baroquely lush campus of Princeton University in the fall of 2002. I remember walking over what felt like acres of clipped, vivid green with my family, looking up at Gothic arches. We were staying in an Embassy Suites–like hotel not quite in the town of Princeton, and we had driven onto campus in our rental car to move me into my dorm. Later, I was standing in a crowd of people from my freshman class, waiting to leave a lecture hall after orientation, in front of a boy who would become my editor at the campus alternative weekly; he was talking with his friend, who would become known as the campus coke dealer, about a girl who had brought a DVR to install in her dorm room because she couldn't miss her favorite television shows while she was in class. The boys sounded amused and impressed. They mentioned the girl's skiing vacations and her boarding school, the name of which seemed to be shorthand for a good pedigree. Her name, which was Tobin, also seemed to be shorthand for the kind of taste that preferred wealth to style. I had had no idea there were even kids who wanted to venture beyond the driving radius around their homes and go to a place like boarding school. Standing in that crowd was when I realized that many of the symbols of status I knew—summers spent at the lake, membership to the right church youth group—no longer applied and that I would soon have to learn what the new, relevant symbols were. I was sheltered by parents who had refused to let me date or go to late-night parties, but who had seen no problem in taking my brothers and me to weekend matinee showings of erotic thrillers like Single White Female or letting us read anything we wanted as vicarious experimentation. I needed to transition from consuming whatever adult novel I could find in the public library to expertly responding to the late-night drunken voicemails from the boy standing behind me at orientation, the lovely coke dealer. Modesty and decency were relative here. I knew very little about Princeton before going. I zoomed in on photos of its campus on Google, examined carefully chosen images on its website to see how students were dressed and which ones were grouped together, and spent time looking around to see what people did with their days besides going to class. I never visited the campus, despite Princeton having a 'Pre-Frosh Weekend.' Visiting seemed too expensive, would take up too much time, and no one suggested it. After receiving my acceptance email, I celebrated for a few minutes with my parents and then went back to the computer to email the admissions office. I needed to ask how many Black students were at the school, because it was impossible to tell from the photos. It was an email I never would have sent to a school south of Virginia—the farthest north I had ever been—where I could be sure to find enough people who looked like me. In the mid-2000s, and twenty years on, the South remained the Blackest part of the country; more than half its Black population lived there as of 2022. Despite the Great Migration having taken millions of Black southerners to the North during the first half of the twentieth century, to escape racism and terror, millions of Black people had returned to the South or come for the first time. The Princeton admissions office responded that African Americans made up about 9 percent of the student body; the office added that I should let them know if I needed any more information. The percentage would have to do. It didn't take long to realize I was an anomaly of sorts on campus: one of not many Black students, one of not many Black southern students, and one of not many southern students at all. Even at a university that, by reputation, was the most preppy-attired, conservative values–holding, and thus 'southern,' of all the colleges in the Northeast, there were few people who claimed to belong to the last two categories. Any comfort I took in Princeton's reputation as a southern-minded school was supposed to make me feel better that I was one of a handful of students in my high school class leaving Alabama; college would be something like home far from home. So when I met other students and professors, and we introduced ourselves, it took a while to get used to the routine. Their reactions, depending on how much time they had spent down South, would head down one of two distinct avenues. If they hadn't lived lower than the Carolinas, they'd say 'Alabama?!' with outright surprise or, if they were able to fix their expressions soon enough, a 'Whoa, Alabama' with careful wariness. As I confirmed they had heard me right, they seemed to be imagining the extremity of what being a Black girl from Alabama must entail. Fire hoses, lynchings. Then a 'What was that like?' with the dumbstruck look still on their faces, sometimes shaking their heads with pity for troubles assumed to have been endured. If they were from the South, there was usually an assumption that we would get along, an easiness that I returned in kind. It was difficult—is still difficult—to look head-on at Alabama; it was uncomfortable. It was also easier for most people to believe they were more sure about my home state than I was. Alabama was where I had learned how to think and decide what I valued. But their expectations about how I grew up pushed me to choose a side: either agree and play up the state's worst aspects or weakly defend it. So much so that, over time, I began to forget parts of how I had grown up, the nuances of how Alabamians lived and thought, and could recall only broad strokes about race and politics and religion. I began to forget that Alabama is, before anything else, home. Those people and I weren't ready for what lay in between: the worth of a place and why people choose to call it home. Why do people stay? And what happens to them? Alabama was the best place to find the answers. Adapted from BLESSINGS AND DISASTERS: A Story of Alabama by Alexis Okeowo, published by Henry Holt and Co. on August 5, 2025. Copyright © 2025 by Alexis Okeowo. Printed by permission.
Time of India
03-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
‘We are always just a phone call away from each other', say Darshana Banik and Trina Saha
Friendship in showbiz often comes with its share of competition, but for Tollywood actresses Darshana Banik and Trina Saha, it's been a decade of unwavering support, shared laughter, and mutual respect – both on and off the screen. From creative collaborations to personal milestones and countless cherished memories in between, their bond is as real as it can get. The duo speaks to Calcutta Times ahead of Friendship Day to talk about their bond, what they love most about each other, and much more. Darshana and Trina always make it a point to appreciate each other's work How would you define your bond? Darshana Banik (DB): To me, every day is Friendship Day when you have someone like Trina in your life. We've been going strong for a decade, and being in the same profession makes it special. The trust we share is something we're both proud of. Trina Saha (TS): What I value most about us is the honesty. We cheer each other on and keep it real. No jealousy, just two friends growing on their own paths. How has your friendship evolved over the years? DB: Trina and I don't talk all the time, but we're always just a call away. When we catch up, it's all about long chats and gossip, just like old times. TS: I sensed when Darshana and Saurav started dating but waited for her to share. Neel and I even organised their aiburobhaat. Saurav, a close friend, changed so much for the better after marrying her. I think she really anchored him. What are some of your favourite memories together? DB: I spent my first Holi after getting married at Neel and Trina's place. We had bhaang and the rest is history. I rarely let my guard down, but with them I can because there's no judgment. The four of us never miss Ashtami lunch together, or our Dashami sindoor khela and bhasan naach. TS: I think we have shared a lot of our bond today. Now it's time for a producer or director to cast us together in a film where our off-screen bond can translate on screen. And I bet it will be a smashing hit! (laughs) Loyalty above all Darshana recalls meeting Trina at a birthday party when she was a model and Trina had just started out. 'I'm usually an introvert, but we ended up talking more than I did with people I'd known for years,' she laughs. Though they didn't become friends instantly, the bond grew with time. What matters most to Darshana is Trina's loyalty. 'I know she''ll have my back in any situation, even when I'm not around.' 'We don't need constant updates to stay close' For Trina, the strength of their friendship lies in respecting each other's space. 'Just because Darshana is my friend doesn't mean I need to know everything about her life,' she says. 'She shares what she wants to when she's ready, and I respect that.' Trina believes this balance is key. 'Live and let live — that's what makes our bond easy and real. We give each other room to be ourselves.' Questions A song you want to dedicate to the other Darshana to Trina: Badtameez Dil Trina to Darshana : Piya Piya O Piya Film you want to dedicate to the other Darshana to Trina: Dil Chahta Hai Trina to Darshana : Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara One thing you like about her? Darshana to Trina: She has a 'never give up' attitude Trina to Darshana : She's always composed One thing you dislike about her? Darshana to Trina: Her silence when she is angry Trina to Darshana :She ghosts at times Quotes: Trina and Saurav (husband)share the same birthday, January 21, and they are so alike – Darshana Banik Darshana knows I go silent when angry, so she always fixes things before it gets serious– Trina Saha From coffee breaks and creative blocks to celebrating each other's wins, Trina has always been there for me and I hope I have been the same for her–Darshana Banik Darshana, an industry senior, once told me, 'Haal chero na bondhu.' And when she got married after I did, I said, 'Pick your battles if you want peace'– Trina Saha
Newsroom
02-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsroom
Short story: Trina and Cat, by Breton Dukes
Trina and Cat met for the first time on Ponsonby Road in the 1990s where they both worked at an Italian restaurant. Trina rolled a hundred pizza bases before each service, then in the cramped kitchen, where the fuckwit chefs threw hot pans at her – they glided in like stingrays – she did the dishes. Cat started as a waitress, then took over from Arnold as bartender. For a brief period, after she fucked Jack, she was the maître d'. Trina slept with Arnold the night of his leaving drinks and four years later, when Cat was living and working in Rotorua as a guide on a zipline canopy tour, she had Arnold and his young family as clients. The youngest of his kids, because of his lack of weight, got stuck on the longest of the seven zip lines and Cat had to rappel out to bring him in. And that night, at an Irish bar, she bumped into Arnold again – this time he was alone – and after two shots of ouzo she drove him down to the lake front, let him snuggle her neck and gave him a handjob. So, when Cat and Trina met again in the wine line at a concert at Dunedin's Regent Theatre in 2010 – Cat by then was married to Lachlan, Trina to Tim – they exchanged phone numbers, met for coffee at a café in St Clair and both fell apart laughing when they found that along with Dunedin and the restaurant, they also had Arnold and his dick stump between them. Also – incredible! – they were both pregnant, almost down to the week. It appeared inevitable they would become friends, but on their fourth catch-up – lunch this time, the first meal they'd ever seen each other eat – Cat told Trina Lachlan had been promoted, they were moving to Ōtautahi. 'What about your midwife?' said Trina, 'What about us?' Trina had never been good at making friends, and without telling Cat or Tim she'd put a lot of hope in the idea that the two of them were going to be mums together. Cat shrugged sadly. There was nothing she could do. Then she leaned the laminated menu card against the small bowl crowded with sugar and fake sugar sachets. The truth was that she and Lachlan were not moving to Christchurch. Cat, that night, was filling Lachlan's car with as much of his nice stuff as it would fit and driving north. Auckland – what had made him think she could ever live with him in shit-hole Dunedin? No one knew – the closest she came to telling anyone was that lie she told Trina. Trina, who ten years later was standing in line at the Westmere butcher when there was a knocking at the window behind her. Cat was there when she turned around, smiling, waving, standing with a boy who would have been exactly Steven's age. Over iced lattes – high summer, the heat was awful – at a nearby café, Trina told Cat all about Steven. How he'd died. Gone into hospital with one thing, developed another, suffered for weeks on end – while everyone told her he'd come right, that he was young and would bounce back – and then died. 'But from the start, I knew, I knew he would die,' went Trina. And in saying that, her body went way back in the seat, like it was a back flip she was about to do, and then all the way forward, and then covering her mouth, she sobbed, just once. The sound was terrible – loud as an old truck engine braking. Then, sitting back she smiled, looked at Edgar for a moment and then asked him to list the three things he liked most about the school holidays, which was when Cat excused herself and rang AJ – her bed mate and business partner, but not the man she lived with – who basically lived for the opportunity to sweep about the city saving the day, leaving Cat free to spend the day walking arm-in-arm around their old neighbourhoods with Trina, finishing up with a quick Chardonnay at a little restaurant in Grey Lynn which had both octopus and goat on the menu, neither of which Trina had ever tried before, and so it was agreed – my shout! said Cat – they'd meet back at the same place the next night at 7pm. But, though Trina waited for more than forty-five minutes, Cat didn't show up. They hadn't swapped phone numbers either, so Trina left the restaurant, walking back to her motel unfed and utterly alone, as the sun continued its terrible role as ball of fire in the cloudless sky. Six years later Cat got an email from Arnold. He'd left his wife after twenty-six years and was living alone in a renovated church in Eketahuna. He'd been thinking a lot about Cat, about how they'd 'connected' that night in Rotorua, also had she seen the news? Did she know about Trina, about the accident? Anyway, poor Trina, but if Cat was ever passing through the Wairarapa she should drop in. They could really finish what they'd started this time. Cat, by then, had serious money. So having contacted her lawyer, and telling him to shut Arnold down in the most strident terms, she went online. Trina, it turned out, with nowhere else to go, was being cared for in a rest home in Mosgiel. Later that same week, a late-model Volvo parked at the Sunny Ridge Rest home and a team of three got out, one of whom was the lawyer. A bearded man who loved weight training – his favourite exercise the now out of favour Military Press – who Cat had wrapped so thoroughly around her little finger, he actually pissed with fear/excitement when her name came up on his phone, who swiftly arranged for Trina's immediate transfer to Waiheke Island, where Cat kept a house that looked across Hauraki Gulf, where every morning for the rest of her life, Trina used a wooden pointer placed between her lips to choose the type of fruit she'd have juiced for her, where, every six months or so, Cat would appear, entering the room like a burglar, keenly aware of not waking her friend. But if Trina was awake, Cat would stay, sat there close, sharing key information about the different lives she'd led. Asked what was on his mind when he wrote the story, Breton Dukes replied, 'I was trying to shake loose from a novel I have been working on for three or more years. This story is an exercise in getting away from the central character – a male – in that novel. And rather than taking 300 pages to capture something, trying to really condense. Also, writing something to get published. I like seeing my name in print.'
Western Telegraph
28-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Western Telegraph
Bakers@70 gallery and event space opens in Fishguard
Bakers in Fishguard will open its doors today, Saturday, July 26, with an exhibition of work by local artist Marilyn Collins. This is the first show in the new galley space at 70 West Street. (Image: Western Telegraph) Marilyn's exhibition Tree conversation is an exhibition of sculpture, film and text, 'opening up a dialogue with the non-human beings who share our planet, examining our common ground'. It is open from midday to 6pm from Saturday, July 26 to Sunday, August 3. During the exhibition there will be a series of walks and events including storytelling by Sonia Sophia at 3pm on Saturday 26, an evening walk starting from the gallery at 7.30pm on Sunday, July 27, and a 75 minute storytelling meditation walk with Sonia Sophia starting at 6.15pm on Tuesday, July 29. (Image: Western Telegraph) There will also be an artist talk with artist with Marilyn Collins at 7pm on Thursday, July 31 and an evening walk with the artist starting at 7.30pm on August 2. After Marylin's exhibition the gallery will then be available to other artists and creatives to use for exhibitions, at a weekly rate, or to hold small events. The idea from the new venue came from artist Trina Pittman-Hayes and husband Martin. They moved into 70 West Street last November. (Image: Western Telegraph) 'We wanted somewhere with studio space for me,' said Trina. 'But it is such a good space we though t it would be better used for everybody as a gallery space.' The ground floor of the building had formerly used as a clothes shop, a music shop and a shop selling antiques and bric a brac. The previous owner had renovated with the view to making it into a café when lockdown struck. When Trina and Martin moved back to Fishguard, they had lived in the town during the 90s, they could see that it was perfect studio or gallery space. (Image: Western Telegraph) 'It was almost set up to be a self-contained galley space,' said Trina, a retired art teacher who began he career at Ysgol Bro Gwaun. 'We though it seemed a shame in way not to use it more widely and get people to have exhibitions here as well. I had done similar in Cheltenham and thought it was a good idea.' Artists can also rent accommodation at Bakers with a view to putting on an exhibition at the end of their stay. (Image: Western Telegraph) The new gallery is the latest addition to Fishguard's thriving cultural scene. 'People are discovering Fishguard and realising it is a nice place to come to,' said Martin. 'We have a quality cinema, good bars and cafes and it is great for culture and music. 'If you se something up here everybody wants to know and get involved. Its nice, it's a supportive community.' To hold your own exhibition or event at Bakers, visit email bakers70@ or ring07833110779.
