3/8/24

New | Poetry | Sudhendu Chattopadhyaya

Fantastisch by Artmadeus, Wikimedia Commons

 

                 

 

Neemrana

 

Past the tangled lanes and by-lanes

Of cities meshed with life and loneliness,

Across the dust and dunes,

Past the havelis of old

That shimmered in the noon sun,

And stood with a quiet abandonment

Of a voided grandeur,

 

Our roads finally met.

 

We smiled at each other

Like parched pilgrims looking at a mirage.

The Neemrana, and the setting sun embraced us...

The roses, the luscious greens and villas of bougainvillea

Sheltered us under its canopy

The chasms too,

with their eons of promises

settled around our lips

as if to be invoked

and be remitted.

 

Yet when the Azaan called,

The dervishes smiled too;

And the chirpings hushed down.

The desert had its bliss,

As the sand soaked in the ephemeral rain

And went dry again...

 

 

 

 

 

The Nightingale

 

 

You crept into my dreams,
wearing a white sari,
with shy eyes, singing around the garden.
I was unprepared.
You took me by a start.
As I opened the studio door,
I became the voice I had always wanted to be.

It had to be in a single take they said.
The director and the crew were in action
behind the hazed glass panes.
I just knew the design as I stepped in.
They had laughed and scorned at me.
They had said that I sang in a female voice,
I copied Lata Mangeshkar.
I denied, defended and changed.
I mimicked the men.

One couldn't sing in a dream...some say,
one couldn't follow the words.
In my dream, defenses were broken.
The fake, female merged in you.
I didn't have to prepare.
I was You.

 

 

 

Alta (The Red Dye) (Bengali: আলতা, Hindi: अलता)

 

 

The sharp outline of your Adam’s apple,

The thick baritone, the small dip of your chin,

I wanted them to look at my breasts

through my eyes, down into the pit of my lust.

But they looked away when you spoke to me.

I clutched at your kindness.

In a hope that someday you will relent,

I fashioned love.

You played the friend,

I, the beloved.

In this deception, only coercion stayed.

On the stranger's bed, glistened in rage, grief and sweat,

I celebrated impropriety.

I winked with a smile when he said, "Keep in touch, Slut-man!"

Walking down the empty streets, I mused at my karmic cycles

And said to my shadows, “How long?"

In the dream, I saw myself decked in fresh gajra,

the red bindi and the red alta,

Adorning the entrance of your house with words.

When I looked at you,

You were smiling admiringly, standing on the verandah.

When I turned back to look at the alpana,

The mogras lay shredded and scattered

along with the litter of letters and papers from my diary...

 

 

 

 

Septicaemia

 

I had tried to think of you

Wrapped in thick blankets,

Reduced to a yellowish pulp

Of wet wrinkled skin and bones,

Waiting with soft breaths...

I was said to come,

And witness the final drones

Of the ventilator.

 

Ticket in hand,

Anxious and nerved up,

I waited, to respond to your call,

To alleviate the lethargy of wait,

To see those pupils talk,

To soak in all the moments in one embrace,

To finally travel to you all by myself,

Praying and praying

and the train whistled in.

 

The independence was sensual,

And quietness arousing.

I slumbered into my polar thoughts,

Till the hijras clapped me awake.

I sat ensconced between hope and acceptance.

Till the wheels finally screeched into Howrah.

No one had come to receive me.

I drifted amid the crowd to catch the local.

 

It wasn’t so difficult to get it right.

As, it commenced sluggishly, I braced myself

To announce my bravery.

The bogey was packed with bodies.

A guy standing opposite,

Moved up close to me.

He had sharp bones and a kink about his eyes.

He pressed against me with a carefree confidence.

His hands grazed my body and felt my virgin shyness.

His breath on me, I was benumbed.

He moved sleekly away through the crowd, leaving me undone.

 

My landing came. I stepped into my accomplishment.

I was surprised to see Baba walking up to me in the crowd.

Dusk had fallen over Bally.

Baba said that the cremation just got over,

That you were bedecked beautifully,

And many had come to see you off.

 

 


10/14/23

New | Poetry | Lina Krishnan

Painting by Emile Bernard (Wikimedia Commons)

My MIL’s Address Book

Archana heads the list. 

Her number doesn’t though

It finds a place, under S - her nickname


Her Doctors - Murlidhar and Gauri

Are mentioned under their respective capitals

Being decades older than them

She feels she owes them no appellative


I look in vain for my name among the Ls

I find it elsewhere, below her son’s name


And then, there’s Bhag Diwan

Her late husband’s late sister

Less than a year ago, she was at the other end of the phone


Now a barbed wire crosses out her name in the book

Replaced tidily, by the name of the son 

Who lives at that address now


Portraits


On the Metro’s Purple Line

Tired even on a Sunday 

Faces from an Eisenstein deck

Van Gogh’s farm workers

Now driven from the Land


One in particular, a figure all in white dust

Two days worth of paint in a day

Dead tired, half dazed. 

I look. And look away, too late

He has seen, that I have seen


Safedi walla, house painter in white

Like Michelangelo in marble dust

Brothers under the skin


Or rather, above it. 



Showstopper


The lone shiuli wonders

Why it’s been singled out

Not in the little basket 

With the rest of its kin


Not cognisant at all

With the perils of the spotlight

Of how loneliness colours that terrain


Even if the photograph

That is being taken

Is only for a friend

Homesick for the shiuli season

And much else, unsaid



Anda Bhurji


JNU on a rainy evening
We look about us
When last, did we students from DU

See a forest glisten?

Against a conversable twilight
We unfurl shyly
In a sizzling pan, random kindness
Meets surprised enjoyment

Not so, do you expect
A Menshevik tutorial
After hours, to go



Bandicoot Tunnels


The garden is a warren

Each morning shows newer dugouts

Strategic bunkers for rodent war

Or is it just a nightly commute?


Put in a beer bottle or two

I’m advised. Glass keeps them out

Oh a teetotaler rat, I think

My mind off-kilter as usual


It’s a neat, punctuated row

Along the garden wall


I navigate, in mind's eye

The hundred-plus tunnels

On the Kalka Shimla line

That too, is narrow gauge


Bio: Lina Krishnan has worked two decades in communications. She has phases of immersion in art, then poetry. She also writes notes on cinema. She lives in Auroville, India.