The centenary celebration of the Gujarati magazine “Kumar” was a significant event. Held in Mumbai, this event marked 100 years of the magazine’s journey, Shri Praful Raval will share the experience and highlights of its historical importance and contributions to Gujarati literature. His talk will include the discussions on the magazine’s diverse content, its high-quality reading material, and its impact on multiple generations.
Dalila Di Capri — Stabbed, Better
People remembered her for gentle, uncanny things: how she hummed to mend broken mornings, how she dialed the exact right song on the café radio so strangers’ heads turned in unison, how she could name a book by its scent. She kept an apartment above the shop with mismatched teacups and a single, stubborn ficus that leaned toward the light. Her laughter came in small, unexpected arpeggios; you heard it and felt safer, as if a storm had been rerouted.
Recovery made her meticulous. Where pain had been ragged, she cultivated rituals: morning walks along creaking piers, precise cups of tea brewed with lavender from a neighbor’s garden, afternoons spent teaching the bookstore’s kids to fold cranes out of damaged maps. The physical scars were quiet, pale threads across her ribs, but the work she did around them was loud and deliberate. She learned to press the parts that hurt into something useful—like a gardener grafting a tougher branch onto fragile stock. dalila di capri stabed better
Then, one dawn when gulls still argued above the harbor, someone stabbed Dalila in a gesture that scratched the town’s complacency. The wound should have been the end of her story. Instead, it was the beginning of a metamorphosis no one expected.
Years later, Dalila walked along the pier with her hands empty. The sea made patterns only she could name. She carried scars like bookmarks—reminders of a chapter she had survived and reworked into something stronger. She had been stabbed and, astonishingly, she was better—not in a way that erased the violence but in a way that deepened her care, sharpened her craft, and widened the circle of people she held. Dalila Di Capri — Stabbed, Better People remembered
Her town, once tender and complacent, shifted too. The attack forced conversations—about care, about watching for each other, about the thinness of comfort. Dalila’s bookstore became a small refuge where folks practiced listening. She organized nights when people read their near-misses aloud: near-misses of love, of work, of accidents avoided. The nights were simple but electric, as if the town were relearning how to say, "I was hurt; I am okay; I am continuing."
Romance, when it came, was patient and surprising. It arrived in gestures that were small, like a neighbor who returned the ficus’s pot after lending her his drill, or a woman who learned to tie Dalila’s shoelaces because her hands still remembered how to tremble in the cold. These intimacies taught Dalila that safety is not an absence of risk but the presence of trustworthy hands. Recovery made her meticulous
Her art changed too. She began collecting shards of broken things—ceramic splinters, torn pages, odd buttons—and assembling them into delicate mosaics that suggested repaired lives. A favored piece was a clock whose face she’d replaced with a ring of unpainted shells: time, she seemed to say, can be rebuilt with what remains. People came to her shows expecting wounded poetry and found instead craft, humor, and quiet ferocity. Critics called her work "healing without sentimentality."
"Stabbed, better" became her private slogan, not bitter, not boastful—an acceptance that violence had rewritten a page but not the whole book. Friends noticed differences: Dalila had fewer small talk conversations and more deliberate silences; she cut away obligations that frayed her. She forgave in ways that surprised others—sometimes a look, sometimes a returned loaf of bread to someone who needed it more than blame. Her compassion was no longer an unmeasured overflow but a shape she trimmed to fit real need.
Dalila Di Capri moved through life like a piece of silk: resilient, quietly luminous, and threaded with small, stubborn joys. She lived in a seaside town where the air tasted of salt and lemon; the town’s narrow streets kept secrets and the old harbor kept time. Dalila worked at a secondhand bookstore tucked under a faded awning, where she repaired torn spines, recommended unlikely pairings of poetry and mystery, and always slipped a pressed wildflower into the hands of someone who looked like they needed it.
"Better" for Dalila was not triumphalist. It was the slow architecture of someone who refuses to be reduced to injury. It was the way she learned to mend—herself, others, the small broken things of a town—so that the mended object became more beautiful, more useful, and more true than it had been before.
Was Gujarati teacher, poet, essayist and short story writer. Praful Raval is a co-editor of Kavilok and Kumar and worked as a general secretary of Gujarati Sahitya Parishad. He received Kumar Suvarna Chandrak in 1982.
Praful Raval completed his Bachelor of Arts from C. M Desai Arts and Commerce College, Viramgam in Gujarati and joined the School of Language, Gujarat University. He completed a Master of Arts, a Master of Philosophy and Ph.D.
Praful Raval taught at L. C Kanya Vidyalaya, Viramgam from 1970to 1983 and Sheth M. J High School, Viramgam from 1983 to 1984. In 1984, he founded Kruti Prakashan, a publishing company.
In 1992, he founded a primary school namely Shishu Niketan,later known as Setu Vidyalaya. In 1995,he founded another school, Sarjan Vidyamandir, and served there as principal till 2006.
In 2012, he became co-editor of Kumar. He works as general secretary of Gujarati Sahitya Parishad.